Strunk & White, illustrated

Why didn't anybody do it before? is what Maria Kalman wanted to know. And if an illustrated Elements of Style is not enough, it's been set to music: opening tonight at the New York Public Library.

I hope they touch upon the "however" rule (one of my favorites).

UPDATE: How bloggy! Reader Terri-Lynn Sykes saw this info and urged a friend in NYC to go see the performance. That person did go and blogged a beautiful report, calling it "one of the most magical, hysterical, sincere, ironic, silly, glorious, hip, nerdy and just plain cool concerts ever performed."

West House: new lease on life

West House will not be demolished in Fall 2006 after all. The planned parking deck that it was standing in the way of has been taken off the drawing board. Surely the West House Coalition, headed by the indefatigable Jeffrey Beam with strategic assists from Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, deserves some of the credit.

University officials caution that it would be "premature" to assume West House will never fall to new development. But this news is certainly good news. At the least, it buys time for some creative thinking about alternatives (including relocation to another campus site).

Please consider adding your name to the Coalition's petition in support of West House's continued existence as part of UNC's future Arts Common.

One man's trash . . .

In a straightforward opinion rehearsing the law of search and seizure and that of abandonment, the Montana Supreme Court decides that a man who had thrown out evidence of the manufacture of methamphetamines had no reasonable expectation of privacy when the police came along and did a "trash dive."

Concurring justice James C. Nelson agrees that the law is in the state's favor. But he doesn't like it one little bit:

I don't like living in Orwell's 1984; but I do. And, absent the next extinction event or civil libertarians taking charge of the government (the former being more likely than the latter), the best we can do is try to keep [Uncle] Sam and the sub-Sams on a short leash.

And he holds open the possibility of reconsidering next time, "even if I have to think outside the garbage can to get there."

Speaker ban film wins award

Gorham "Hap" Kindem, professor in the communication studies department at UNC, will receive an award at a Berkeley film festival for his film on the UNC speaker ban. The late and beloved Joe Straley is interviewed for his part in it. Amazingly, Kindem found footage of the offending speeches in a London TV archive.

I do hope it'll come to Chapel Hill audiences soon.

Harper's Ferry, 1859

On October 16, 1959, John Brown launched a rebellion to free the slaves in Harper's Ferry. It didn't succeed. But neither did he die in the effort. Rather, he lived to be tried and sentenced to death, all the while writing himself into American history as a romantic martyr to the abolitionist cause.

In Robert Ferguson's analysis, John Brown

roused visions in the American psyche of both cultural fulfillment and purification. These visions in turn competed with nightmares of armed invasion and racial warfare in simultaneous and compelled narratives that made Brown both hero and villain. None of these narratives had much to do with the facts of Harper's Ferry. The narratives conflated political, religious, legal, and racial perceptions in formulaic patterns that, in turn, exaggerated every possibility--and especially exaggerated the character of Brown. This strategy of exaggeration transfigured Brown from lifelong bungler, bankrupt, narrow extremist, murderer, and border fugitive into a cultural icon.

Marines storming the engine-house. (Historic photo collection, Harper's Ferry NHP.)

Such was the staying power of the romantic narrative of John Brown's life that the true origin of the famous song about him has been lost. It was actually written as a joke on a Union soldier who happened to share Brown's name.

"Lost entirely is the low humor and comic incongruity, hero against anti-hero, that gave birth to the jingle," writes Ferguson. "[This John Brown] would, in fact, die pathetically rather than in pathos, drowning by accident while crossing the Rappahannock River with his regiment on June 6, 1862."

Meanwhile in December 1861, Julia Ward Howe took history by the hands: she grabbed hold of this undignified ditty and turned it into "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Brought to you by the letter l.

A blog obsessed with a typographical topic that had, frankly, escaped me.

In a different voice

I'm blogging live from rehearsal of the North Carolina Boys Choir. The sopranos are lovely, but something is missing: my son's voice. Over the summer, Tucker shifted to a lower register. It was bound to happen, but it's a strange and unexpected thing to mourn.

The house of the Lord

The concept of "thin space" was imported into Christianity from the Celts:

The early Celts believed in "thin places": geographical locations scattered throughout Ireland where a person experiences only a very thin divide between past, present, and future times; places where a person is somehow able, possibly only for a moment, to encounter a more ancient reality within present time; or places where perhaps only in a glance we are somehow transported into the future.

After September 11, St. Paul's Chapel functioned for many as a "thin space" of refuge and hope--as memorialized in Peter Ostroushko's "Meditation of the Thin Space from St. Paul's Chapel." In the Celtic tradition these spaces where the line between heaven and earth seemed close to vanishing were, as I imagine it, quite distinctly set apart from the spaces of ordinary life.

The point of the megachurch seems to be quite the opposite, the object of the architecture being to make the worshippers feel as if they're in some larger version of their living room, or rather their media center. From the outside they look like a corporate headquarters. The cavernous insides seem more like sports arenas, with the broadcast technology to match.

They'd love to turn you on.

Meet new friends in New York.

1st Ave Machine "creates high end design work by employing 3D in ways that blur the line between what we perceive as real and impossible."

Lawyers: traffickers in greed

Jacob Stein's columns in the Washington Lawyer magazine are not to be missed. The latest, which I shared with my class because it hits very close to the mark when you're studying law and rhetoric, discloses a great secret. If law, like literature, is really based on a limited set of plots, what are the key plots in the genre of trial practice?

To get the answer I called a friend who spent the last 30 years trying high-intensity cases of all kinds. He took a detached and, I would say, amusing cynical stance. He came up with this evaluation of the basic legal plots, the reasons why people involve themselves in lawsuits: greed, 60 percent; vindictiveness, 15 percent; irrationality, 10 percent; desperation, 10 percent; and an honest misunderstanding, 5 percent.

Greed, said this expert, even "lurks in the subjects taught in law school." It's why it takes 30 volumes to spell out the law of contracts. The greed of their clients is why so many lawyers tend to have a distorted view of the world. They tend to think it's about money.

Handy maps

Leaf-taking.

Leave-taking. (Via Paul.)

Thelonious Monk birthday fest

Today is the 88th anniversary of Theolonious Monk's birth. WNCU was playing him all day long. You can still catch him on WKCR (via wood s lot). Well, they needn't--but it's nice they did.

Check the new release of Monk and Coltrane at Carenegie Hall.

Southerners know a civil war when they see one.

From the Anniston Star:

We are seeing another civil war under way right now, without fully realizing it. This one is in Iraq. What started as a low-level fight against the American occupation, with roadside bombs every few days, has mushroomed into a full-scale conflict against not only the Americans and their allies but also Iraqis. And as usual, the Bush administration and the Pentagon are behaving as if this was unexpected.

Katrina wrecks Camille memorial

In her memoir Elizabeth Spencer wrote, "If I could have one part of the world back the way it used to be . . . I want the Mississippi Gulf Coast back as it was before Hurricane Camille, that wretched killer which struck in August 1969."

No one on the Mississippi Gulf thought they'd ever see worse than Camille. It "destroyed 100 years of growth in progress in just three hours," writes the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. But Katrina wouldn't settle for second place. She destroyed Jefferson Davis' home, which had stood since 1854. She gutted historic districts from Mobile to New Orleans. As far inland as Jackson, she tore the roof off of the state Department of Archives and History, damaging the building and valuable artifacts.

She even left her calling card on the black granite memorial to Camille.

Tyson/Helms book review update

The Independent Weekly investigates the News & Observer's decision to overrule book editor Peder Zane and print two "reviews" (for one, the word must be used advisedly) of Jesse Helms' memoir. Apparently it was a Mr. or Ms. Paperwide who actually made the decision.

Sculpture in the Garden

"It's Like This." By Steve Cote.

The North Carolina Botanical Garden's annual sculpture show is on until November 18. Despite my pledge to go early this year (it started on September 17), by the time we made it, the one or two that I might not have been able to resist had already been sold. (Delivered from temptation.) Many are still looking for homes, though they seem quite happy where they are.




Any excuse to go to the Garden will do. Above is a fragrant white ginger flower, also admired by Mister Sugar. You can see one in the lovely garden in front of Crook's Corner as well (past peak now).

Hamilton to Bush: For shame!

I see that Todd Morman has turned, as Justice O'Connor does, to Alexander Hamilton for some back-to-basics guidance. From The Federalist #76:

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.

It will readily be comprehended, that a man who had himself the sole disposition of offices, would be governed much more by his private inclinations and interests, than when he was bound to submit the propriety of his choice to the discussion and determination of a different and independent body, and that body an entier branch of the legislature. The possibility of rejection would be a strong motive to care in proposing. The danger to his own reputation, and, in the case of an elective magistrate, to his political existence, from betraying a spirit of favoritism, or an unbecoming pursuit of popularity, to the observation of a body whose opinion would have great weight in forming that of the public, could not fail to operate as a barrier to the one and to the other. He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

So in Hamilton's mind, the Senate confirmation process exists precisely to stop a Harriet Miers. Bush should be "ashamed and afraid"! But let's think about it. Shame doesn't seem to register with the Bush crowd. Fear might, but only if there were real reason to fear. Hamilton goes on to say that he's counting on the presence of "independent and public-spirited" senators to stand against such a brazen power play. Was he too hopeful?

Once upon of time there were three branches.

It is appalling to think about Harriet Miers, presidential puppet, crony of the highest order, taking the place of anyone on the Supreme Court. But the thought of her replacing O'Connor is particularly galling. Whether you thought she was right on the issues or not, O'Connor has consistently been a passionate advocate for an independent judiciary. She believes in its importance for the way our government works--and for what it says to the rest of the world about how we govern ourselves. She spoke on the subject in 2003 at the Arab Judicial Forum in Bahrain.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON, one of the Framers of the United States Constitution, wrote in The Federalist No. 78 to defend the role of the judiciary in the constitutional structure. He emphasized that "'there is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.' … [L]iberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have every thing to fear from its union with either of the other departments." Hamilton's insight transcends the differences between nations' judicial systems. For only with independence can the reality and the appearance of zealous adherence to the Rule of Law be guaranteed to the people.

More recently she has said, "The concept of retaliation against the courts for past federal court decisions is very troublesome."

If you're not outraged . . .

There is no way the nomination of Harriet Miers should stand following the disclosure of a recording of yesterday's conference call, sponsored by the White House, among party loyaltists nationwide. This is true for all the reasons Eric Muller has begun to articulate and more. But you don't really need to get beyond RNC chair Ken Mehlman's opening statement, a part of which went something like this:

Harriet Miers has served with distinction at a time when she was the top legal adviser to the president on some critically important issues, whether the issue was whether to renominate Janice Rogers brown, Priscilla Owen, Bill Pryor, whether the question was where the administration ought to come out on key policy matters that affect the judiciary, that affect family, that affect other issues. The president’s positions have been very strong, and we know his top adviser has been Harriet Miers. So when people say, well, we know the president’s got the right approach but how do we know Harriet Miers does, it’s like someone saying the president has the right position on the war on terror but we don’t know if Donald Rumsfeld does. The fact is she is his key adviser on these issues.

One of the most important and I think troubling areas where we’ve seen judicial activism recently is in the ability of any administration in the future to carry out its leaderhip in the global war on terror. I think having someone who has real world experience when future issues come up who will be able to say here are the real world practical implications of when, for instance, the courts hamstring the ability of the administration, the defense department, or somebody else to deal with the terrorist threat we face, I think that’s an important and unique perspective that someone who has spent her whole life on the courts doesn’t have, but someone who has served in the White House particularly this White House does have.

So much for the independent judiciary. "Crony" is far too weak a word for this relationship. And if it's "judicial activism" to refuse to grant a president powers that he has never had, the arguments for which stretch the outer limits of the conceivable meaning of the Constitution, then so much for the hope of a court that tries in good faith to discern what that Contitution means.

UPDATE: Complete transcript of the call (via Crooks and Liars).

MORE: O'Connor and Hamilton weigh in.

A peek at peak performance

Twice in the last week I've seen "peak" used where the user meant "peek." That's right, you "take a peek" at something, you don't "take a peak." I thought it might be because the usage of "peak" is at its peak now (or at least is peaking). So I googled peek and peak and found the theory supported.

Habits of thought: when we think the sound that's made by the word "peek" or "peak" we first think pitch and pinnacle, the top of the game. "Peak" is part of the vocabulary of the technologized corporate workplace: "peak performance," for example, is a precise term of art with a powerful analogical afterlife.

"Peek," on the other hand, is modest and unassuming, sometimes clandestine, usually timid. At best, it is not a thorough inquiry. You don't make your numbers by taking a peek at the competition.

Teacher, what did you say that assignment was about?

At Currituck County High School, a lesson in "freedom" taught a student about irony and probably scared him to death in the process.

The assignment was "to take photographs to illustrate [your] rights in the Bill of Rights." A student, who for reasons soon apparent remains unnamed, found a photo of George Bush, tacked it up with a thumb tack through the head, and put his own "thumbs down" beside it.

He took his own picture of this and then took the film to Wal-Mart for processing. Bad move. A direct line runs from Wal-Mart to the Secret Service. Wham, bam, no more picture.

In Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court said, "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Mary Beth Tinker herself is still on the stump with this message.

How pretty to think so.

Roy Moore on the run running for governor

In an entirely expected move, Alabama's outlaw judge Roy Moore has filed to challenge Gov. Bob Riley in the Republican primary. Last heard from on tour with his handsome running mate, Moore faces certain questions from voters. For example these from the Anniston Star:

You have indicated that you feel the state’s budget problems can be eased by cutting waste and fraud, but if that isn’t enough, what else do you propose to cut from the budget so that we can live within our means? As we re-call, when you were chief justice and you found your department short of funds, rather than eliminate waste and root out fraud, you ordered an end to civil jury trials to force the Legislature and the governor to give you more money. What will you do if you are governor?

But in other quarters, his righteous contempt for authority has earned him favorable comparison with another successful Alabama populist: George Wallace.

Eye wide open

The new and improved Open Eye Cafe in Carrboro.

But something's missing: Kimberli Matin's wonderful "Java man" metal sculpture. Despite what you might think, he hasn't taken a hike. We're told he just hasn't made the move from nextdoor yet.

What a cool photo blog.

slower.net

via kottke.org

The confirmation gamble

Everybody's freaked about Harriet Miers. The hard right feels especially betrayed (via Eric Muller). My brother has a Texas take:

She is from a big Dallas law firm. Dallas is a city with no soul. It is nothing but glass and steel towers erected on a bleak prairie and dedicated to the worship of Mammon in spite of the presence of quite a few megachurches . . .

But how history consoles! Consider John J. Parker, who sat on the 4th Circuit from 1925 till his death in 1958. In 1930 Hoover nominated him to the Supreme Court, but the nomination faltered. He became the only nominee to fail in the Senate since 1894, and he stood alone until 1968 when Abe Fortas' own troubles did him in.

With Parker it was the AFL who lashed out at him--for being anti-union generally and, more particularly, for a decision denying the UMW the right to organize--and if that were not enough, the NAACP, which had never opposed a nominee before, joined the chorus. They pointed out that Parker had run for governor of North Carolina in 1920 promising to restrict the voting rights of blacks.

So he never got out of Richmond. Just as well, right? Not exactly. After Brown, which had seemed to want to undo all of Jim Crow but on its face hewed narrowly to "the field of public education," there was great uncertainty in the courts below. It was up to judges like Parker to deal with the consequences.

When District Judge Rives of Alabama ruled in Browder v. Gayle (1956), the Montgomery bus boycott case, that Plessy v. Ferguson had been "impliedly, if not explicitly" overruled, he glanced over to the 4th circuit opinions of the "distinguished" and "learned" John J. Parker. In a 1955 opinion declaring South Carolina's segregated bus system unconstitutional (Flemming v. South Carolina Electric & Gas), Judge Parker had written that Brown "[left] no doubt that that the separate but equal doctrine approved in Plessy v. Ferguson has been repudiated," a conclusion the Supreme Court did not disturb.

Another, more philosophical opinion was also helpful to Judge Rives. In Barnette v. West Virginia State Board of Education (1942), Judge Parker had to deal with a Supreme Court precedent that seemed to stand in the way: "Ordinarily we would feel constrained to follow an unreversed decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, whether we agreed with it or not," he wrote, but given that most members of the Court itself had since questioned their own decision, he plunged right ahead.

Barnette vindicated the religious rights of Jehovah's Witness students to refuse to salute the flag. Judge Parker's opinion was upheld in an opinion written by Justice Jackson that still stands as one of the great expressions of First Amendment rights. Judge Rives' opinion vindicating the Montgomery bus boycott was upheld too.

So the lesson is, you never know.

UPDATE: Never mind. The NAACP had the right instincts. Judge Parker, the one and the same, was responsible for language in a post-Brown proceeding in which he declared that Brown "does not require integration. It merely forbids discrimination" (Briggs v. Elliott, Eastern Dist. of S.C. 1955). That pernicious misreading is something John Wisdom of the 5th Circuit, for one, had to expend a lot of time and energy refuting.

Apparent suicide in Chapel Hill

While many of us were enjoying a street fair yesterday afternoon, a beautiful day on West Franklin Street, police were investigating the discovery of a body of a young woman hanging from a play structure in Jones Park. "A woman in her early 20s," not so long out of the playground herself. According to the announcement by Kathryn Spatz, Chapel Hill Parks & Recreation director,

About 5:00 p.m. yesterday while I was in the Command operation for Festifall, I was notified that Police were responding to reports of a body found in Jones Park. It is currently classified as a death investigation but the Police state that it appears to be suicide. A woman in her early 20s was found by a park user hanging from the deck of the playground structure. No names have been released but the family has been notified. Police have given us the okay to remove several words etched into the play structure by her body. We will work with Public Works to have this done immediately. The park is currently open for use.

Spatz said the words that the police were to be removing were "freedom," "terror," "rape," "goodbye," "peace."

Big Sweep 2005

As Paul reported, yesterday he and Tucker and I participated in the "Big Sweep" on Morgan Creek. This is the fifth year in a row that the Morgan Creek Valley Alliance has sponsored the event as part of the North Carolina Big Sweep. It was an opportunity for nine Chapel Hill high school students to earn credits for community service.



We did indeed pull some interesting things out of the creek. More pictures here. (Sorry, no pic of the baffling buoy.)

Here's what I wrote about my experience dredging Morgan Creek two years ago.

Ye gods!

"The Destruction, Modification, and Transformation of London, as Depicted by Various Eminent Authors and Learned Men in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries."

What if London were like Venice?

What if London were like New York?

Plan your exit strategy.

No really, I have to get off the phone NOW.

Tim Tyson to speak at Greensboro hearing

Via Ed Cone: Tim Tyson will be one of the speakers tomorrow at Greensboro's final Truth and Reconciliation Commission meeting.

Constance Baker Motley

As my civil rights seminar was watching "The Road to Brown" on Tuesday, I had to interrupt to point out Constance Baker Motley. She gets too little time in the documentary, considering the key role she had in writing the briefs in the case, and I wanted her to be noted. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson appointed her the first female African American federal judge. She was a distinguished alumna of Columbia Law School. She was still officially working--on senior status--as judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York when she died yesterday at the age of 84.

Obits in the Post and the Times outline her distinguished career with the NAACP. These stories offer a window, if a small one, into the treacherous southern landscape against which she, along with Thurgood Marshall and other dedicated civil rights lawyers, worked for justice.

The thing I wanted to point out to my class was a small, kind of oddball point. It comes out in a quote that, interestingly, shows up in the Post obit.

In 1962, she represented James H. Meredith in his arduous but ultimately successful battle to gain admission to the University of Mississippi. Marshall gave her the case, she said, because she was a woman. "Thurgood's theory was, in the South, they don't bother black women because they all have mammies," she once said.

As a young woman Motley was not fat--she did not fit the most exaggerated stereotype of the black mammy--but she was "full-bodied," which is how Lorraine Hansberry describes the character of Mama Lena Younger in her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). That's the work we had read the week before. It's based on a case her father was involved in that challenged a race-based restrictive covenant, Hansberry v. Lee (1940). The play, as you might expect, doesn't sound at all like the legal opinion. One crucial difference is that in the play, it's the mother of the head of the family who carries the weight, in every sense.

Using Trudier Harris' reading of the play in Saints, Sinners, Saviors, I suggested that we consider Mama Lena as one of a long line of strong black female characters--written by black women--who both conform to and play against the stereotype of the old black mammy. Hansberry's choice seems to have been calculated as a way to turn a radical argument for racial equality into a palatable story about a figure every white person knows ("they all have mammies").

Mama Lena Younger is what she is: a strong but stereotyped figure for whom Hansberry was largely forgiven because of the contribution she made to the fantastic success of the play as a whole. It would certainly be wrong to confine Judge Motley to such an image. I'd rather remember her the way Jack Greenberg does:

"She was indomitable," said Jack Greenberg, who succeeded Marshall as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal and Education Fund and is now a professor at Columbia University School of Law. "She would take on a project like opening up the University of Mississippi and just keep coming back again and again and again. She was like Grant at Vicksburg. She just dug in there and stayed there until they rolled over."

She may have been calm and comforting like a mythical mammy, but what carried the day was stateliness and dignity, steadiness and smarts.

UPDATE: Kim Pearson, who comments below, finds it telling that the President made no mention of Motley's passing; he was too busy congratulating Chief Justice Roberts.

Happy birthday, OP

Congratulations to Ruby and Orange Politics on its second anniversary. Hey, from the looks of things you'd think there was an election coming up.

So not a shoe-in

Paul urges me to enter the essay contest at Manolo's Shoe Blog. I tell him I haven't bought a new pair of shoes in years. He says it doesn't matter, pointing out that I did win the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow award in high school (an essay contest). I'm just delighted to see some shoes on this site designed by Steve Madden. I think my Steve Madden black huggy sandals, not entirely dissimilar to these, is the last pair I bought, and they came from the PTA Thrift Shop. I feel an inspiration coming on.

I'm going to have to give Steve Madden more thought. Anybody who can propose this as a wedding shoe has more going on than meets the eye.

Don Adams was Smart.

We mourn the passing of Don Adams, a/k/a Maxwell Smart, a favorite anti-hero of the Cold War. Here's how smart he was: he took his wife's last name (his first wife's last name that is) because he noticed that auditions were often called in alphabetical order.

Tales out of (charm) school

Merck employees sure know how to party.

UPDATE: It's fun and games working for Merck!

It must have been Janis Joplin's fault.

If Katrina was God's wrath on New Orleans, my brother has a good question: why was the French Quarter spared? And this time, what's the deal with Port Arthur?

Rita: Cousin of Floyd?

The reports today are that Rita will be a powerful but slow-moving storm once it makes landfall, generating heavy rains far inland. Sounds a lot like what we experienced in N.C. with Floyd: "[T]he costliest damage came not from the storm itself—it came from the swiftly rising rivers and creeks that course through eastern North Carolina like a dense cluster of capillaries connecting the Piedmont Region to the Atlantic Ocean."


Clogged estuaries, Sept. 23, 1999.

My family is in East Texas right in Rita's path, possibly far enough north to avoid the worst of it. Still I hope they have plenty of flashlights and batteries.

This just in: Cheese does not cause nightmares.

So concludes the British Cheese Board. Further notes from their study:

85% of females who ate Stilton had some of the most unusual dreams of the whole study. 65% of people eating Cheddar dreamt about celebrities, over 65% of participants eating Red Leicester revisited their schooldays, all female participants who ate British Brie had nice relaxing dreams whereas male participants had cryptic dreams, two thirds of all those who ate Lancashire had a dream about work and over half of Cheshire eaters had a dreamless sleep.

This good news sounds like more bad news for Charles Martell, who stands on the unwelcome brink of fame for reasons not of his cheesemaking.

Passings

Not long after attending the funeral of our neighbor Bob Miller, a fine fellow and writer of, among other things, a biography of Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the leaders of the progressive Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century, we learn of the death of Joe Straley. Two great Chapel Hill men who will be missed.

I'll bet you've needed one of these from time to time.

I know I have.

A not-to-do list.

Keeping the world safe for the book

Terry Belanger, founder of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, is one of this year's recipients of a MacArthur fellowship. "With thousands of former students currently at work in the field and offshoots of his programs in California, France, Australia, and New Zealand, Belanger is making the world a more secure place for the irreplaceable legacy of the book."

Impress your mateys today.

In case you're scrambling for resources on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, see Paul for tips.

"Rebirth of a Nation" in Chapel Hill

This Friday night, Sept. 23, Dj Spooky brings his "Rebirth of a Nation" to UNC's Memorial Hall. It's a postmodern remix of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation."

How to describe it? Words fail me. I saw it at Spoleto in 2004. It'd be cool to see it again.

Spirits abroad, shifting shoals

After a deadly flirtation with Florida, on August 28 Katrina whipped herself up into a Category 5 storm heading for the Louisiana barrier islands.

In Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening (which I just reread online courtesy Documenting the American South), August 28 is the date on which, on one of those islands, Grand Isle, Edna Pelletier begins her journey down the road of self-discovery that will become both her salvation and her undoing. Madame Ratignolle's piano-playing stirs her to a frenzy; she can't sleep; the whole night becomes "like a night in a dream." To her admirer and possible lover Robert she says, "There must be spirits abroad tonight."

Indeed, he responds: "On the twenty-eighth of August, at the hour of midnight, and if the moon is shining - the moon must be shining - a spirit that has haunted these shores for ages rises up from the Gulf. With its own penetrating vision the spirit seeks some one mortal worthy to hold him company, worthy of being exalted for a few hours into realms of the semi-celestials. His search has always hitherto been fruitless, and he has sunk back, disheartened, into the sea. But to-night he found Mrs. Pontellier."

Mrs. Pontellier is not, in the end, strong enough for the prevailing winds. But her decision to end her life by walking out into the majestic sea has to be read, on its own terms, as an affirmation. "The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace."

Southern writers and readers often talk about a "sense of place"--a notion that, while it can seem trite, has certain meaning. It has to do with the concrete and intimate relationship of geography to time and narrative. Among other and surely greater losses generated by Katrina, we should not forget the permanent destruction of so much of the physical environment.

An essay published earlier this summer, before the storm, explores the sense of place in Grand Isle, Louisiana.

Residents of Grand Isle are similar to many other Americans; however, Grand Islanders believe that they have a unique culture specific to the region that makes them different from many other Americans.

Residents’ landscapes convey ideas of uniqueness and fragility. Even those respondents who do not live permanently on the island talk about how the island is fragile. Respondents’ narratives of place are framed in terms of the island being unique socially and environmentally. The island’s unique quality is not separate from its fragility. As the land erodes and changes so do the cultural aspects of the island. Traditional forms of work change and it is unknown exactly what will replace it. Neither fishing nor the oil industry can be counted on to sustain life. Development and an influx of upper middle class outsiders also change landscapes. There is a sense of cultural fragility as well as fragility of the natural environment.

While the landscapes of these residents are shaped by the certainty of erosion and the prospect of the ‘big’ hurricane, the framing of their environment in terms of fragility also contains elements of faith that go hand in hand with the land - they will hold on and sustain community while never abandoning the idea of moving ‘up the bayou’. The fragility of place appears to accentuate the unique qualities conferred upon place.

Grand Isle appears to have fared relatively well in Katrina, better than the Chandeleur Islands to the east. The before-and-after photos there are astonishing.

Constitution Day: enduring lessons

On this day in 1787, the 39 delegates to the Constitutional Convention put their signatures to the document they had created.

In something of an oxymoron, President Bush signed a law that, effective this year, makes a formal celebration of Constitution Day mandatory for schools receiving federal funds. With the 17th being a Saturday this year, it was observed yesterday.

Mary Beth Tinker, child of a Methodist preacher with Quaker leanings, was an eighth-grader in Des Moines, Iowa, when she decided to become an activist against the Vietnam War. She, her brother, and others wore black armbands to class. They were suspended. For their trouble they ended up with a landmark free speech verdict from the Supreme Court, Tinker v. Des Moines (1969).

She grew up to became a pediatric nurse. She doesn't seem like a rabble-rouser. But yesterday, on Constitution Day, she was sharing her story with high school students in Washington, D.C. And she was wearing a black armband.

Muted homecoming

Abram Himelstein is back home.

Fact-checker wanted found

In thinking about what it means to lose New Orleans, I'm reminded that as a schoolgirl I "learned" that there were four "unique cities" in the nation: New Orleans, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Boston. Thanks to Google, I "learn" that it was Will Rogers who told us so. The trouble, though, is that it's only in the context of San Antonio. San Antonio's tourist industry has done a remarkable job in spreading the word that this is something Will Rogers said. But it never says where he said it (can't find it here), and besides, none of the other three cities seem to be making the claim.

A Texas tall tale?

Santa Fe apparently wants a bit of the action, substituting itself for Boston.

UPDATE: I gave up too soon. The answer is on the "Stumpers" listserv: Will Rogers did indeed call San Antonio "unique," but along with only two other cities: San Francisco and New Orleans. "They each got something that even the most persistent chamber of commerce can't standardize."

Windy City news

Chicago, hog butcher to the world, threatens to ban foie gras.

How is John Roberts like Daniel Libeskind?

They both like "North by Northwest." The difference is that Libeskind tells us why.

Cornel West on Katrina

It takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we saw among the poor black people of New Orleans to get America to focus on race and poverty. It happens about once every 30 or 40 years.

What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: 'You are on your own'. Well, they really were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and it was Darwinism in action - the survival of the fittest. People said: 'It looks like something out of the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was Third World long before the hurricane.

It's not just Katrina, it's povertina. People were quick to call them refugees because they looked as if they were from another country. They are. Exiles in America. Their humanity had been rendered invisible so they were never given high priority when the well-to-do got out and the helicopters came for the few. Almost everyone stuck on rooftops, in the shelters, and dying by the side of the road was poor black.

More . . .

Hamlet's sister

News from the hamlet of Ocracoke.

SC college official lets guard down, loses job

In Greenville, S.C., an administrator of a technical college resigned after twice referring to school-age hurricane evacuees as "yard apes."

This news comes to me from the H-Net Afro-Am listserv, which more and more is an indispensable source for Katrina news and opinion. It's going to be an invaluable archive of what you aren't necessarily getting in the MSM.

Homing in

Yesterday's homelessness forum was a success. It was well attended, the speakers were inspiring, and the notion of "housing first" got a good airing. Since the first of these forums last fall when the idea of creating our own 10-year plan was initially raised, I think there's been an increase our collective awareness of the seriousness of the problem and the many levels on which it needs to be addressed. All the talks were compelling, but I want to share Mayor Foy's remarks, because they were exceptional.

To talk about ending homelessness is ambitious. What we’re really looking at is jobs. We live in a capitalist society, and we’re probably not changing that any time soon. We need jobs available to create adequate income--jobs that pay wages that can support some kind of healthy lifestyle, which leads to the issue of health care. Health care is unaffordable for virtually everyone in our society. And then education. So there are at least four things that are really undergirding the effort to end homelessness.

Hurricane Katrina really shows us some things about us, some ugly things, but also that the American people have great heart and great love for our fellow human beings. And that’s represented in this outpouring of help and humanity that we have all participated in as well as witnessed. And it also shows the vastness of resources that we have in our society--and we’re very, very stingy. We’re very, very, very selfish as a society.

I heard on the radio this morning an economist say that 200,000 people being absorbed into the Texas economy is minuscule, it means nothing, it’s easy. It is? I mean, that’s news to me. People in North Carolina don’t have jobs. People that live in Texas don’t have jobs. There’s a big disconnect between what we accept and what could be. Because the economist was really just talking in terms of numbers, not making any kind of moral judgment; he was just saying our economy is so huge, sure, 200,000 new jobs is a blip on the screen. But that’s not how we conduct our lives. We say people are always going to be living on the margins.

So our challenge is to make an enduring difference. That’s another thing the hurricane helps us put into perspective. We have witnessed extraordinary generosity, we have felt extraordinarily generous, but how long is that going to last? We’re talking about a 10-year plan, we have to work to make sure it’s a difference that matters in the long term. And so what I think we are all saying by being here, by being interested, is that we don’t expect that the federal government is going to handle homelessness, or the state; we expect that we are going to have to do something about it. We take it as a personal challenge and make a personal commitment. Those of us who live in this community together make the commitment.

We have beacons of hope, the IFC, the land trust, and so I think it’s true that we are able to make a difference in this local community, that it is an ambitious goal, but that we can achieve it. There has been a lot of chatter and analysis about moral values. It seems to me that the basic moral value is, it’s not us and them, not us and homeless people, it’s all of us. The fundamental moral value is that we are all brothers and sisters and we have a responsibility to our brothers and sisters.

And so that leads me to what I’m supposed to talk about: where are we now? I sort of think that is where we are, but here’s the data. We expect to complete the development of the 10-year plan over the next 12 months and that we’re going to have a project administrator to coordinate the efforts, a steering committee of elected people, service providers, business people, homeless people. The development process of the plan is that we’re not creating something new from whole cloth. There are a lot of examples of what we can or can’t do from other parts of the country and state. Over the next several months that’s what we’re going to be doing. I urge all of you to participate to the extent that you can, but also to keep in mind and to believe that it is possible to have a society as rich as ours based on moral values that does not accept that some people just will be homeless.

Homelessness symposium today

I'm off to the 17th annual Orange County Human Services Advisory Commission Forum. Co-sponsored by the Partnership to End Homelessness in Orange County, it's titled "Welcome Home: A Bold Proposal to End Homelessness."

For a second time this year, Philip Mangano, head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, will be with us. I'm especially happy that we'll be discussing an idea that was introduced into our Orange county discussions in May: the Housing First program.

The saga at Ground Zero

Four years later, I hope it is not a disservice to the memory of the victims to say we ought to be able to do better than this.

In Dixieland Helms takes his stand

Pick up the book review section of any major newspaper on a Sunday morning and you'll find a variety of books essayed, some reviewed interestingly and some not, according to your taste or the reviewer's talent; some reviewed favorably and some not. You don't, typically, find two reviews of the same book. If a review takes issue with the book, you don't, typically, see a positive review of the same book right beside it.

Yet that's exactly what you do see in today's Raleigh News and Observer. When Tim Tyson, in reviewing Jesse Helms' memoir, saw fit to gore an ox, the editors saw a sacred cow, wounded. And so, in the interest of "fair and balanced" criticism, they recruited a second review: reprinted from the American Spectator.

Helms titles his memoir Here's Where I Stand. Considering what, as Tyson shows, he leaves out of the story--the decades of race-baiting, beginning with his WRAL-TV commentaries--there's a certain irony to it. Or at least a Melvillian "subtilizing," as when Helms distances himself from his work on the 1950 campaign of Willis Smith, who opposed Frank Porter Graham in the Democratic primary for senate. (See other versions of his role in "one of the meanest and most racially divisive [primary elections] in the country's history" here, here, and here.)

Though he might, as Tyson suggests, have been "tempted to steal Eleanor Roosevelt's old book title, 'Some of my Best Friends Are Negro,'" the modest title he did choose brilliantly invokes that masterpiece of Southern subtlety, I'll Take My Stand, the 1930 "manifesto" by "Twelve Southerners" whose ostensible concern was the creeping corrosion, through industrialization, of religion, the arts, and other core values of the good southern life. Wendell Berry comes out of this deeply Jeffersonian thinking. But the book is more than it pretends. Try as they might, critics cannot ultimately rescue I'll Take My Stand from its roots in southern racism.

One of the Agrarians repented. Robert Penn Warren wrote the following in 1965 in Who Speaks for the Negro?

Back in the winter of 1929-30, when I was living in England, I had written an essay on the Negro in the South. I never read that essay after it was published, and the reason was, I presume, that reading it would, I dimly sensed, make me uncomfortable. In fact, while writing it, I had experienced some vague discomfort, like the discomfort you feel when your poem doesn't quite come off, when you've had to fake, or twist, or pad it, when you haven't really explored the impulse.

The essay was a cogent and human defense of segregation--segregation conceived of with full legal protection for the Negro, equal educational facilities, equal economic opportunities, equal pay for equal work.

As Fred Hobson points out, the essay he was referring to is "The Briar Patch," his contribution to I'll Take My Stand. Forty years ago, as Hobson writes, "Warren felt he had some long-overdue explaining to do." Tim Tyson is right: It's too bad the same impulse hasn't come to Jesse Helms.

UPDATE from Tyson:

Dear N&O folks:

Eager to see my name in the paper again, happy, as I always am, to remind my mother and all her friends that I am gainfully employed, I opened my Sunday N&O this morning to see just how that darned Peder Zane messed up my latest review. (Just kidding, he's actually the best editor I've ever worked with.) And I have to say I was surprised and disappointed to see that the N&O was running two reviews of Jesse Helms' pathetic new memoir, HERE'S WHERE I STAND, the one I was asked to write and another one a reprint of an article in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR by a right-wing ideologue who knows nothing about North Carolina.

The silver lining here, of course, it that we can all look forward to an expansion of the N&O's fine book page. This will buck the national trend of closing or shrinking the book page, and demonstrate courage and adherence to principle. We'll need a bigger book page, to run all those second reviews of books whose initial reviewer did not admire them. Surely y'all have not created a special policy just for a former US senator who made no effort to write a decent book, and thus whose only claim to special treatment is his power, money, and fame. And so I assume that I will be getting some extra book assignments out of this, and my mama can look forward to seeing my byline in the paper more often. Otherwise, of course, this would be a craven abdication of principle and the creation of a special policy for one book that the N&O has no plans to apply to other books.

I once labored on a book for nine years. It was a book about North Carolina and the civil rights movement, and it focused upon events in 1959-1961 that one could read about on the front pages of the NEW YORK TIMES, LONDON TIMES, PRAVDA and many other papers around the world, even though these events occurred in a small town in North Carolina. Though it was a homegrown story, it had much larger implications, the reviewers thought. And all of them agreed, too, that the book was exceptionally well written. The Organization of American Historians, which does not care that much about literary merit, actually, but focuses on scholarly importance, gave it two of the four major book awards that OAH hands out each year. The literature of the civil rights movement changed a good deal because of this book. But it did not get a review in the NEWS AND OBSERVER.

Meanwhile, Jesse Helms brays into a tape recorder in between naps and gets not one but two reviews from the N&O, one of them handpicked to present a favorable review of the book. And it was a deeply dishonest review, too, because anyone with any intellectual integrity, even if Jesse Helms was their hero, could not deny that this is a pretty bad book. I am a professional historian, able to read tax records and city directories without falling asleep. And a book by Jesse Helms is inherently interesting to me. But this one, well, the level of craft and candor here is so low that I fell asleep reading it over and over again.

Well-rested from all these naps, and happy to see my name in the paper again, I return to my Sunday rituals and leave you to yours. But I wanted to thank you for expanding the book page to accommodate two reviews of every book, unless the first reviewer likes it. It's more work for Peder, of course, but he's a talented and hard-working editor, and perhaps you can hire him an assistant.

All best,

Tim Tyson

Timothy B. Tyson, Professor of Afro-American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture, Duke Divinity School, Senior Scholar of Documentary Studies, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

The Cuban model

Cuba is ready to send 1,500 doctors to the Gulf Coast, putting humanitarianism ahead of politics.

So far, the word from Washington has been thanks, but no thanks. The White House snubbed Cuba's offer and said Castro would do better "freeing" his Communist-run country.

One thing the White House can't say is that Castro ought to do better when it comes to Cuba's own hurricane victims. According to an Oxfam study from last year,

Cuba is a case study in successful disaster risk reduction. At the national level, Cuba's disaster legislation, public education on disasters, meteorological research, early warning system, effective communication system for emergencies, comprehensive emergency plan, and Civil Defense structure are important resources in avoiding disaster. At the local level, high levels of literacy, developed infrastructure in rural areas and access to reliable health care are crucial for national efforts in disaster mitigation, preparation and response.

Between 1996 and 2002, six major hurricanes have hit Cuba, including Michelle (2001), Ivan (2004), and Charley (2004), out of all of which only 16 people died. Seems like we could learn a few things.

Art imitates life

I was not myself last night, and neither was Paul. At Tyndall Galleries, on the Second Friday Art Walk, we were art, walking. "It's so great to see my creations come alive," said Jane Filer, the artist who made the masks. It's kind of great also, and liberating, to be so completely disguised that no one, not even people you know, knows you. Children, naturally, are the most responsive. Believe it or not, there are ordinary adults walking the mall of a Friday night who on seeing creatures such as us really don't see us at all. It's like they get in an "I'm in the mall" space in their heads and nothing touches them. But then, as someone in the gallery said, unkindly I thought in a way, "This is Chapel Hill."

Memorial Hall takes the cake.

UNC's Memorial Hall reopens to delicious fanfare.

"Definitive" Middle Passage account may not be.

Here's a fascinating bit of scholarly news with major implications for African American studies. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself may be a fabrication. This is news because it has been relied upon as the definitive first-person account of the journey through the Middle Passage. The discovery was made by Vincent Carretta, an English professor. His biography of Equiano is just out from the University of Georgia.

Today at 1:00 there will be a live chat with Professor Carretta. Since his claim is not being met with 100 percent acceptance, I expect it'll be interesting.

Shut out

I don't really want to see these pictures, but I do want them to exist.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall elaborates (via IsThatLegal?).

Dead on

A stunningly accurate weather forecast is found in the October 2004 National Geographic.

More blogging from Houston

I've become a real fan of Abram Himelstein's, who has written, among other things,

It's true that I am delirious, but I'm pretty sure that George Bush made nature the enemy in one of his speeches. [Referring perhaps to this?] Not everything is either ally or enemy. Lying in bed this morning, not sleeping, I worried that George Bush might get wind of the butterfly effect -- the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can create a hurricane in the Gulf. His response would be to invade China to kill all the enemy butterflies.

I think Abram would appreciate Ed Cone.

Vanishing city

NASA animation of a storm surge in New Orleans.

Separate, not equal

It's an interesting week to be teaching Plessy v. Ferguson. Just as I'm trying to imagine Homer Plessy's New Orleans world, I'm struggling to imagine every trace of it washed away. Before the sea changed everything, it was at least possible to argue that there had been a sea change on issues like the one he brought to court in 1896. Now, it is a national embarrassment to admit that we aren't so much farther along after all.

Freelancer and New Orleans native Keith Weldon Medley, who has written a book about Plessy (see Quicktime video), wrote in 2000,

Those who explore the city without seeking its African and African-American roots will surely miss what it means to know New Orleans. People of African descent - enslaved and free - have been there since its earliest days. Between 1718 and 1722, boatloads of Africans from the Senegambia region of Western Africa arrived in New Orleans for forced toil in the Louisiana marshes. They hacked and drained swamps, constructed buildings and levees, and dug canals. For most Africans, it was a life sentence of slavery. Their sweat is in the city's architecture, their rhythms move its music, their creativity and flair spice its cuisine's. New Orleans was home to a large number of "free people of color"; defined as those who possessed property rights even while lacking political and civil rights. They gained their freedom in a number of ways: through manumission (sometimes by a white parent), by purchasing themselves, by being bought by a loved one, or by arriving as a free person from elsewhere. They defended the city in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans when two battalions consisting of five hundred blacks from Louisiana, serving under Gen. Andrew Jackson, stood in the line of British fire. Jackson later credited a shot fired from a black sharpshooter's musket for felling the British commander, Gen. Edward Pakenham, effectively routing the enemy. As of 1820 the city's population contained approximately twenty thousand whites, fifteen thousand slaves, and seven thousand free people of color.

After the Civil War, consistent with what happened in the rest of the reactionary South, segregation was forced upon New Orleans. Homer Plessy, born during the war, saw the limits of his world shrink as the new reality of Jim Crow took shape. He could usually pass when he wanted to, though, being only one-eighth black. In fact, his arrest on June 7, 1892, on the East Louisiana Railroad had to be staged: otherwise he might have escaped notice among the white first-class passengers. (The railroad cooperated, for it too disliked a law that required of it so much trouble.)

The Plessy opinion is a piece of work. A pretense of even-handedness combines with an appeal to "the nature of things" to conjure up a world that, even at the time, must have been unrecognizable to honest souls. The world the opinion describes does not impose any prejudice on one race or the other, at least not in matters that the law is capable of addressing:

A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races--a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color--has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races.

It is noted, for example, that "nothing in [the law] shall be construed as applying to nurses attending children of the other race." That is, if you are a black woman with a white nanny, it would be fine for the white nanny to ride in the black car. And if you question the logic of that image and you are black, you need to adjust your attitude. If you sense that you are stamped "with a badge of inferiority," it is your own fault: "it is not by reason of anything founded in [the law], but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it."

Much of course has been written about Plessy, but what strikes me most now is just this: the court's ability to ignore reality and damn the consequences. Kind of like Condoleezza Rice saying race had nothing to do with Katrina's death toll. "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race."

Catch as catch can

If you have your own blog, you know that many of your hits come from Google searches. It's funny to see what topics you inadvertently become the expert on.

On this Labor Day I'm proud to say that if you do a search on "Labor Day poem," you'll find the second entry to be a GreeneSpace posting from last year citing Philip Levine's "What Work Is." The first entry is a PBS NewsHour piece by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky recommending the same poem. It's a great poem, worth revisiting at least each Labor Day.

It seems I've also become one of the go-to sites for "bare breasts"--because of this disappointing entry. (As Paul points out, these people should be doing image searches.)

Rehnquist: the rough draft

In Mark Tushnet's analysis, dramatic changes in constitutional law happened while Chief Justice Rehnquist sat on the court, not because he did. "Like Peter Sellers' character Chance in 'Being There,' Rehnquist was on the Supreme Court when things happened around him."

For Jack Balkin, Rehnquist's legacy will be in the eye of the beholder.

Blogs from Houston

Abram Himelstein, who runs a neighborhood story project at an inner-city New Orleans high school, blogs from Houston. He desperately wants to hear from his students and friends. "With each text message that comes through, I feel less underwater."

He says most people in the Astrodome as of now are from the Seventh Ward, not many from the Sixth.

It would be nice to tell you that in exile, we are one big ward, and the divisions are gone. But in truth there are many of us who are setting up laptops and and checking lists on-line, while others are writing names on pieces of cardboard, trying to span hundreds of miles with hand-held signs.

He vows to return. "True, some of the old crumbly charm will be replaced by the eerily functional. More sheetrock, less plaster. But maybe we will know each other better and look after each other better."

The Houston Chronicle has its own blog at the Astrodome.

The perfect storm

Take nature's customary bad habits. Add overdevelopment of the buffering wetlands, and the war in Iraq, and throw in a little global warming.

It still adds up to a work of nature made worse by benignly misguided human beings. But to the President, "It's as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine." He's a man of few metaphors. We knew that.

Homeland insecurity

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. . . .

An emergency management official in Jefferson Parish said in 2004, "It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Yet FEMA says they had no idea. In fact, President Bush says he had no idea:

In an interview Thursday on "Good Morning America," President Bush said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

Simply incredible.

UPDATE: In 2001, the Houston Chronicle predicted it all with great accuracy, including the "thousands of refugees" who "could land in Houston."

Beyond the gunshots, the questions

The color of misery in New Orleans is inescapable. On the H-NET Afro-Am listserv (web pages temporarily unavailable), a member asks,

Are we silent about the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina on the thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of poor and largely black people who are struggling to survive and dying in the midst of this because we're stunned, because we don't know what to say and/or have nothing to bring to bear on this, or because it's off-topic for the list?

Another raises the issue of the two very different captions for similar pictures, similar except that the actor in one is black and in the other they are white. Another says,

Years ago, Audre Lorde wrote that, in a society that defines its good based on profit rather than human need, there will always be people defined as "surplus," people who are marginalized and treated without regard for their basic human rights. Isn't that what we're seeing right now in New Orleans? How can one justify the obscene focus on property crimes when human beings are in dire need of life-saving assistance? And how might the portrayals of these desperate folks, even people committing crimes against property, people the governor of Mississippi characterized as "animals," be used to rationalize slow, inadequate, and, in some cases, non-existent rescue and assistance efforts?

And finally: Fats Domino and his family are missing. He told his manager he would ride it out in his Ninth Ward home. He hasn't been seen since Monday afternoon.

UPDATE: Joan Walsh in Salon, "Flushing out the ugly truth" of race and poverty:

Personally, with all the destruction in view on Tuesday and Wednesday, I couldn't be horrified by people stealing food; I didn't even care much about people running off with sneakers and beer and TVs. Looting Wal-Mart? I don't defend it, but what do we expect? These are desperately poor people who've been deliberately left behind, in so many senses of the word -- left behind by society, shut up in housing projects and hideous poverty, and now truly left behind by local and federal officials who failed to come up with an evacuation plan for people too poor and isolated to leave on their own.

UPDATE 2: Fats Domino reportedly rescued.

New Orleans: looking forward, looking inward

Talking about New Orleans today, our town manager Cal Horton, who knows a thing or two about the workings of cities, speculated that it might just never come back. I don't know, though. I'm betting on the Big Easy. Cities are resilient. "Although cities have been destroyed throughout history--sacked, shaken, burned, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated, and poisoned--they have, in almost every case, risen again like mythic phoenix," write Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella. Curiously, "the rate of resilience seems to have increased since 1800 even though the mechanisms for destruction have multiplied."

But that will take time. Now is another story. Yesterday's story was that martial law had been declared in and around the city. Today's correction is that martial law is not, technically, possible under Louisiana law, though it is certainly possible to declare a state of emergency.

Ah, the phrases that come so easily, the metaphors we live by. I wonder why?

Intelligent design

Shakespeare, a Catholic in an oppressively Protestant culture, wrote in code, claims scholar Clare Asquith.

Radicalism in nice clothing

In the first of a number of events planned to go along with UNC's summer reading program featuring Blood Done Sign My Name, Tim Tyson gave a moving speech last night to a large and receptive crowd. Paul took good notes. His central point, here as throughout his work, is that the difference between Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokley Carmichael was one of degree, not kind. "King's strategies," Tyson said, "were rooted in a realistic assessment of political power in the United States and around the world. He knew where the levers of power lay and had a plan that addressed itself to that situation." King's brand of coercive nonviolent direct action laid the groundwork for the Black Power movement (whether the movement would credit his influence or not). Another point Tyson stressed is that King's roots were distinctly southern, that the way he combined Gandhian strategic nonviolence with the central message of the major institution uniting blacks in the South--the church--was a master stroke.

Tyson is smart and clear; he is also engaging and endearing, in the best southern way. Readers of the book, and perhaps many others by now, know that the story of the murder of Henry Marrow is deeply personal: Tyson was in Oxford and he was very young, the ideologically confused son of a liberal white Methodist preacher. A chance, galvanizing event became the story that motivated his scholarship and his career.

Someone last night asked him why he decided to write the book as part "coming of age" memoir, part straight-up history. Now, other than the very good reason that it could not have been any other way (as he realized after he wrote it in the other way for his master's thesis), I think that Tyson's rhetorical strategy was his master stroke. A southerner speaking to and of his own, he is able to tell the complicated, painful story of race from the inside out. As we learn about his family, generations of liberal white preachers, curiously but interestingly out of step with their own time, we begin to listen to his voice as that of our very conscience:

We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here. Our failure to confront the historical truth about how African Americans finally won their freedom presents a major obstacle to genuine racial reconciliation. . . .

The work we face is to transcend our history and move toward higher ground. To find that higher ground, we must recognize, as Dr. King tried to teach us, that we are "caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny."

All of that is true and powerfully expressed, and if we can manage to live up to this challenge, it will be a grand achievement. But now I'm brought finally to my point: why isn't there controversy about this UNC book choice? Is it because we are charmed by the conspiratorial voice of a master southern storyteller, our brother confessor? Is it because we are much closer now to being that multicultural society that King longed to see? Is it because our college students, thank goodness, are too young to really imagine the reality of Jim Crow? (Tyson remarked that this generation is completely beyond the taboo of interracial relationships that marked his own generation so deeply.) Is the focus so much on skin color that we're ignoring the other issues that Tyson wants to raise?

Another question last night was, Now what do we do to achieve a more just society? Tyson's ready answer focused on the public schools. He said that every time he visits a school that is in bad repair, the ceiling and the walls falling apart, he can count on looking at "a sea of brown and black faces." And vice versa. He called for equal funding, not just the minimal funding that the state of North Carolina can't even figure out under Leandro. "These children did not choose where they were born, and they're all our children, and if we don't do right by them we'll all suffer." Make no mistake: that is a radical position.

Two years ago, the choice of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting By in America as UNC's summer reading sparked angry charges of "liberal bias." In hardly a rousing defense, "University officials maintained that choosing the book does not mean they advocate the opinions voiced by the author but that they are trying to encourage students to examine the subject critically and draw their own conclusions." Ehrenreich was left pretty much on her own to defend charges of "anti-Christian bigotry."

W.E.B. DuBois famously said, in 1903, that "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." In the twenty-first century, it is class. Tim Tyson wants us to understand this, but he's such a good southern interlocutor, with such a good story to tell, that I fear he's not being heard.

Not the worst

I was relieved to learn that my aunt and uncle, who have ridden out many a hurricane, departed New Orleans for Fort Worth yesterday morning.

"The worst is not/So long as we can say 'This is the worst,'" says Edgar in the last moments of King Lear.

It's plenty bad in New Orleans and environs. But wasn't a Category 5 direct hit.

West House web site

Contrary to popular belief, the campaign to save West House on UNC's campus is not dead. The West House Coalition's discussions with the university administration are ongoing. Please take a look at the coalition's web site and consider signing the petition to lend your support.

A long way, baby

Eighty-five years and one day after the franchise, I get this invitation:

American Women's Conference

At this once in a life conference you will learn how to:

1. Use the 7 keys to build lasting relationships at home and on the job.
2. Apply the 21 secrets of self-discipline to always look and feel young.
3. Be recognized and rewarded for your efforts.
4. Buy Real Estate for 31%-48% below market value.
5. Rapidly expand your circle of influence.
6. Develop opportunities for networking.
7. Use the top money-making secrets millionaires are using.
8. Improve the quality of your life and the lives of your loved ones.
9. Use the essential principles of highly successful women.

A hard-won right

From Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Yesterday was the 85th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. The Library of Congress has photos of dozens of women who were arrested and imprisoned to gain the right to vote.

Going home again and again

Thomas Wolfe grew up in Asheville in a boarding house run by his mother called the "Old Kentucky Home." In Look Homeward Angel he described it as a "big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty, high-ceilinged rooms." His mother added electricity and plumbing and more rooms. She was said to be a "driver of hard bargains."

Like mother, like son.