The Brunch Table

Well, it’s official—we’re moving to San Fran, and I’m taking a new job. Why?

• Lots of friends and acquaintances in the area
• I hate the feeling that my day-to-day life has gotten so samey that it no longer sticks in my memory
• Trading in Everett LNG explosion and Canary Island tsunami disaster scenarios for The Big One and Pacific tsunamis
• More crunk (OK, not really)
• We figured we weren’t paying enough rent here in Boston
• The artistic temperament of the area is a good match for Justina’s work

We’ll definitely miss our wonderful friends, neighborhood, and apartment in Somerville, though.

In a sequel to USA Today’s 2 shortage story from March, the New York Times reports on pricing problems that gas stations are facing. Some stations now have “3″ shortages, and many older pumps can’t deal with prices above $2.99 or totals above $99.99. I wonder whether we’ll keep moving through the digits at this rate?

This Harper’s article by Rebecca Solnit may be overexposed already, but it connects in precise language the laissez-faire conception of government and its wretched inability to deal with the aftermath of the hurricane. How, she asks, does this “limited government”–in which the citizen has a correspondingly limited voice–deal with its constituents?

We were told of “riots” and babies being murdered, of instances of cannibalism. And we were provided an image of authority, of control—of power as a necessary counter not to threats to human life but to unauthorized shopping, as though free TVs were the core of the crisis…

The most hellish image in New Orleans was not the battering waves of Lake Pontchartrain or even the homeless children wandering on raised highways. It was the forgotten thousands crammed into the fetid depths of the Superdome. And what most news outlets failed to report was that those infernos were not designed by the people within, nor did they represent the spontaneous eruption of nature red in tooth and claw. They were created by the authorities.”

I just found an amazing article, an English translation from Le Monde Diplomatique. It’s called “What’s the Matter with West Virginia?”, dated October 2004. The perspective of French journalist Serge Halimi, following Bush on a tour through my hometown of Huntington–it’s remarkable, if only because the place hasn’t been written about much since the days of Mother Jones and the Redneck Rebellion.

…the natural beauty of the area concealed its poverty. Summer visitors to the Appalachians saw mountains, rivers and forests, but not the poor. The same is true now. You have to leave the freeway and venture along narrower roads (well surfaced, thanks to the influence of one of the two senators in Washington)…

(That would be Robert Byrd, the reformed ex-Klansman who for years has been tirelessly luring the odd governmental office or heavy industry to town, and plying them with incentives to try and keep them. He’s indirectly responsible for creating both my parents’ jobs.)

It’s been really amazing to see so many writers making the connection between our return to 19th-century laissez-faire economics and the present disaster. A pure market can’t reliably set policy goals for the future, even when a relatively small public investment could generate great private wealth. Nothing illustrates this better than our failure to spend $50 million on dam repairs to save New Orleans from destruction.

The more complex industrial society gets, the less we can afford to rely on antique theories that’ve been preserved not because of their usefulness, but because they flatter certain powerful people.

I’ve said it before…Communism and laissez-faire were contemporaries, and they both share a peculiar 19th-century faith that people can build and maintain perfect systems. One has a fantasy government that magically obtains its own prices; the other has a fantasy market that magically makes its own laws. These ideas were new and challenging in the days when both were posed as viable alternatives to feudalism. But one busy and bloody laboratory of a century later, though, I think we can say that anyone pursuing these notions in their original form is either ignorant or self-serving.

The Great Depression and its accompanying war shocked us out of our previous romance with perfect markets. Today, Louisiana’s Governor Blanco–instead of displaying appropriate humility over the shockingly late and disorganized deployment of the National Guard–threatened her own rioting constituents with “battle-tested” troops “fresh back from Iraq.” From a world perspective, the situation is far smaller in scale, but the evidence of systemic flaws is no less damning.

I really recommend Robert Kuttner’s book Everything for Sale, an excellent industry-by-industry account of laissez-faire’s rise, fall, and rise in the United States. I’ve started re-reading it since I first got word that the dam broke.

I’ve been engrossed in work this week, so I’m only now realizing how badly things are going in the aftermath of Katrina. Like many others, apparently, I saw the reports that New Orleans hadn’t been completely leveled, breathed a premature sigh of relief, and went back to what I was doing.

And then the flooding began in earnest.

What surprises me most is how disorganized the official response seems to have been so far—JWZ has a good roundup. I hope there are serious political repercussions from this—this is what governments are supposed to be good for, after all.

I used to think that J. G. Ballard’s High Rise was merely a vicious satire, but then I read “Trapped in the Superdome”. (Fortunately, it does sound like they’re working on getting people out of there now.)

And once again, we see struggles over ice.

It’s unnerving to watch the fabric of civilization unravel at the edge of our country.