Lewis Lapham and Chorus of Actors: What Happened After Katrina

Lewis Lapham reports: Cheney and Bush outlined the "order of priority" of power restoration to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Rats and dogs overrun the city.

News hadn't reached the director of Homeland Security; he waited 36 hours to declare the city a disaster. He denied that people were starving in the convention center, wet and ignored.

God finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. "I think we have a clean sheet to start again."

The Act of God trope is explored, also the appeal of the DIY-get-away-from-hurricane-ethos: Homeland Security (and other holds of prudent conservatives) didn't want to help people who didn't want to help themselves, who aren't "mature..."

The president compared the scene to a disaster movie. "Devastating. It's got to be doubly devastating... on the ground."

Big boats in trees. (I've also seen cars through second-story windows in the Lower Ninth Wards.)

Lapham points out that a slightly more adventurous president might have hit the ground then, not waited for the army to come in.

Government worker are excused from affirmative action. Minimum wage is abolished by the government to speed up the clean up.

FEMA Director tells Wolf Blitzter things are going "relatively well."

Barbara Bush notes that since many victims were poor and thus couldn't have been so upset by losing their houses...

Laura Bush encourages children to stay in school. (There are no schools.)

The education system is a point of major public debate. Public to private (charter). 123 public schools, down to 4. All union teachers fired.

"Disaster capitalism:" Glass half-full: How can we take this ruined city and make a buck?

(I'd love for my family in B.R. to respond to these posts; my uncle works in land conservation, my cousin in construction law. They have stories to tell.)

Judith Browne-Dianis takes the stage...

Unorthodox And Unafraid

Consider the case of the young atheist:

He loans a friend a book. Then the boys' school administrators freak out because, in loaning another student a book about religion, the atheist somehow violated the "establishment clause."

Funny.

The kid has a great blog, and he tells his story much better than I could.

(His reading list is very good, by the by, if heavy on the R. Dawkins and Nietzche. But give him a break, he's young.)

I'm quite glad there are others in the world who support free thought. Actually, I just wrote a Sir Salman Rushdie tribute for Wishtank which veers off into a discussion about why we should never limit language/thought/questioning.

Basically, telling kids they can't question their faith is as ineffective as it is immoral. The kids--all of them, bible-thumpers, young Saudis bound for the Madrasah, or even little Dawkinses who think themselves Brights but have never really asked the Hard Questions about existence, consciousness, etc.--are going to find out that others don't necessarily agree with them.

And then they will probably blog about their findings. O Internet...

Three Snippets Of Life On May 4, 2007

1. Ms. Rice gets a cookie for doing her fucking job, wtf. (Thanks, Nancy P.; you still my boo.)

From "U.S. and Syria Discuss Iraq in Rare Meeting," By HELENE COOPER and MICHAEL SLACKMAN, NYTimes:

The White House in April sharply criticized the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for visiting Syria’s capital, Damascus, and meeting with President Bashar al-Assad, even going so far as calling the trip “bad behavior,” in the words of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Less than a month later, Ms. Rice walked through the cavernous hallways of a conference center in this desert resort town and into the “Sun” room to sit down with Mr. Moallem.

2. For those of you who imagined that America had miraculously transcended racism, there are better examples of its persistent existence than Don Imus's use of the word "ho." Case in point is the treatment of yesterday's rioters by police in California. Welcome to the new slave-empire: We pay you silly "Illegals" (sort of), so how can you blame us?

From "Action by Police at Rally Troubles Los Angeles Chief," By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and JULIA PRESTON, NYTimes:

LOS ANGELES, May 3 — Chief William J. Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department said Thursday that the episode here in which police officers clashed with demonstrators and journalists on Tuesday at an immigration rally was the “worst incident of this type I have ever encountered in 37 years” in law enforcement.

3. Khalil Gibran--like Hafiz, Rumi, Augustine of Hippo, Basho, and many, many other poets who address spirituality in their works--is much worthier of a school's name than, say, the slave-owning George Washington et al.

And of all the none-American (i.e., non-English, non-Spanish) languages we should be teaching our youth, I can think of none better than Chinese, and, after Chinese, Arabic. These are major world tongues, and Arabs constitute a significant and growing minority in New York City and America at large.

What then is the problem with opening a new middle school in order to facilitate a better understanding of Arabic culture and language in New York? Well, let the New York Post explain! Of course the Post has a solid grasp on the logic behind its Frankenstein-inspired flame-adulation...

From "Plan for Arabic School in Brooklyn Spurs Protests," By JULIE BOSMAN, NYTimes:

Alicia Colon, a columnist for The New York Sun, wrote that Osama bin Laden must have been “delighted” to hear the news of the school. “New York City, the site of the worst terrorist attack in our history, is bowing down in homage to accommodate and perhaps groom future radicals,” she said. “I say break out the torches and surround City Hall to stop this monstrosity.”

Yick, how disturbing...

more schoolkids in the news!

so a handful of kids from the Beacon School, here in NYC, head to Cuba for spring break with a teacher and a couple of parents.

no one knows how they got there, no one will own up to having sanctioned the trip to a leftist country!

The NY Times writes:

Former Councilwoman Eva S. Moskowitz said she had tried to help parents after rumors that the trip would not be allowed. “I can’t imagine why this is a bad thing,” she said. “I think you would want kids to travel, even to leftist countries, and have them understand their social and economic systems, their human rights violations.”

um, leftist countries? what does that mean exactly?

These kids today

Students at Wilton High School create an original play about the war in Iraq for a class, and are kept from performing it by their school principal who seems to have felt it would be too inflammatory.

Three girls at John Jay High School are suspended for saying the word “vagina,” while performing an excerpt of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues.

And they say kids today are apathetic.

I say, hell no.

We live in a world where the line between child and adult is irrevocably blurred. Twelve year olds can be tried as adults in the criminal court system; eighteen year olds are dying in Iraq and other war-torn countries; fifteen year old girls in Africa are raising their siblings and their own children after losing their parents to AIDS; the former governor of New York suggested that an eighth grade education should be considered sufficient for most (read: working class) Americans.

And young people are stepping up. They are demanding that their voices be heard, demanding that they and their peers be properly cared for and educated, demanding that we pay attention.

If you want to get to know them better, here are some places to start:
Global Action Project
Sista II Sista
We Got Issues
Youth Speaks