Ню Орлеанс, август-септември 2005
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| Две много хубави мнения от чуждестранния печат Сп. Ню Йоркър от тази седмица The New Yorker The Talk of the Town IN THE RUINS by Nicholas Lemann Issue of 2005-09-12 New Orleans is an affront to nature, and nature isn’t shy about reminding New Orleans of it. Lots of other places are affronts to nature, too, but, if they are in the United States, they usually have the hermetically sealed feeling of high-rise beachfront condominiums and desert suburbs and houses perched on mountaintops. New Orleans is too scruffy ever to achieve that. Tendrils of vines poke up through the floorboards. Paint flakes, wood rots, stamps self-adhere, and chunks of concrete must fly out of the roadbeds in the middle of the night (how else could they have disappeared?). The air is wet and heavy enough to slice into chunks and carry out of town in shopping bags. Streams lose their coherence and turn into swamps. Rats and roaches and snakes sashay through the gutters. Southern Louisiana is the site of many environmental depredations, but one of them will never be a feeling of locked-down sterility as an appurtenance of human habitation. Nature has the upper hand. Natural disasters are always lurking somewhere close to the front of the New Orleans mind—especially aquatic disasters, and most especially hurricanes. Hurricanes are an eternal theme in the literature of New Orleans, for reasons having more to do with New Orleans than with literature. Lafcadio Hearn’s story “Chita,” about the famous hurricane of 1856, before hurricanes had official names, got down the rhythm that never changes: the palpable gathering of the storm, the largely unheeded advice to flee, the howling climax, the debris and the looting afterward. His description of the storm itself still works, too: “So the hurricane passed,—tearing off the heads of the prodigious waves, to hurl them a hundred feet in the air,—heaping up the ocean against the land,—upturning the woods. Bays and passes were swollen to abysses; rivers regorged; the sea-marshes were changed to raging wastes of water.” “Chita” was first published in 1888. Five years later, there was another devastating hurricane, which returned the barrier island next to the one described in “Chita” to the possession of the Gulf of Mexico. In the twentieth century, the highest-impact aquatic disaster was the Mississippi River flood of 1927 (the subject of a lovely 1939 novella,“Old Man,” by William Faulkner), but New Orleans also got a direct hit from Hurricane Betsy, in 1965, and had many near-misses. The late-summer hurricane season entails an annual alteration of consciousness and a distinct set of rituals: laying in supplies, taping windows, deciding how much to trust official admonitions. It feels almost like a sacramental activity, consecrating the vulnerability that defines the place. But there’s a peril in that, as is now obvious, when one year it’s the farthest thing from just a ritual. I like to tease my father, a New Orleanian, and a man whose idea of a good time would not include “dealing with his issues,” that he has never fully explored the implications of having been sent away from his parents for six months, at the age of one, to live with relatives in Chicago in the pestilential aftermath of the 1927 flood. Maybe that explains why he prefers to spend hurricane season hunkered down at home. In 1965, I cowered happily in my parents’ bed while Betsy beat against our windows. Three seasons ago, my stepmother persuaded my father to evacuate—unnecessarily, it turned out. This year, the two of them actually flew back to New Orleans from a vacation the night before Katrina hit, just when you were supposed to be getting out. On Monday afternoon, they were gloating; on Tuesday, they formed a small caravan of neighbors, bearing arms, and managed to escape by car. So for my father evacuations—the first at the age of one, the other at a few months short of eighty—form a set of bookends for his life, which, like many New Orleanians, he has lived entirely in one neighborhood. When, after Katrina passed, the levees broke and the pumps failed, another essential part of at least this New Orleanian’s mind was activated: the part devoted to doubt about our competence to operate the purely human aspects of our society. New Orleans is, and for a long time has been, the opposite of a city that works. It perennially ranks near the bottom on practically every basic measure of civic health. It’s true that the Bush Administration has repeatedly proposed cutting the budget of the Army Corps of Engineers, and that for years there has been a list of widely agreed-upon hurricane-protection measures that the federal government has chosen not to fund, with now horrific consequences. But it’s also true that, after the levees broke, we watched every single system associated with the life of a city fail: the electric grid, the water system, the sewer system, the transportation system, the telephone system, the police force, the fire department, the hospitals, even the system for disposing of corpses. Perhaps it is all the fault of the force of the storm; I suspect that, as we move into the yearned-for realm of reliable information, we will find out that society and nature were co-conspirators in the tragedy. And the societal fault won’t all have been the federal government’s. The wetlands that protected the city on the south and west have been deteriorating from commercial exploitation for years, thanks to inaction by Louisiana as well as by the United States. It isn’t Washington that decided it’s O.K. to let retail establishments in New Orleans sell firearms—which are now being extensively stolen and turned to the service of increasing the chaos in the city. It seems like a million years ago that President Bush had admirers who saw in him a Churchillian ability to rally a nation in crisis; last week, as both the President and Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, offered bland, undignified, and ill-timed restatements of the obvious about the direness of the situation, you could practically see them thinking, I’m not getting blamed for this! But they were positively helpful next to Louisiana’s governor, who cried and said that we should all pray, and New Orleans’ mayor, who told citizens they should evacuate but didn’t say how, predicted a second major flood, which didn’t materialize, sniped at the federal authorities, and kept reminding everyone that the situation was desperate. Because the feeling of a crisis fades so quickly, it’s worth recalling that for the whole week of the hurricane most people in the city had no access to official help. The emergency numbers didn’t work. There was no obvious person in charge, and no obvious plan being carried out. If you were lucky enough to have Internet access, you were more likely to find useful information—about, for example, which parts of the city were dry, or where drinking water was available—on blogs than on any government site. People who could find their way to institutional protection seemed almost worse off than people individually trapped, subjected as they were to violence, disease, starvation, overcrowding, and lies. It was unbelievable that it could take so long to get supplies in and people out, and to restore public safety, and to fix the levees. Even to have a person who could project calm and hope, and who could offer useful, reliable counsel would have been a gift from above—but that the emergence of such a person seemed so completely out of the question demonstrates an unimaginable failure at all levels. If national officials are incapable of rising to the occasion, the responsibility and duty of local officials goes beyond simply pointing that out. There is a final, even deeper recess of the New Orleans mind, where a constant awareness of the possibility of the breakdown of the social order resides. The televised scenes of civil collapse that have so horrified the country have registered with New Orleanians as the awful realization of an ever-present set of fears. It isn’t just that New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the country; the city has repeatedly been the scene of armed conflict, most notably during Reconstruction and the governorship of Huey Long. Walker Percy’s 1971 novel “Love in the Ruins,” set on the Gulf Coast outside New Orleans, imagined a scene not too far from (though not nearly as bad as) what we’ve seen for the past week, with armed bands roaming the countryside, columns of smoke rising on the horizon, and people hiding out in half-destroyed buildings. Thirty years earlier, in a memoir called “Lanterns on the Levee,” Percy’s cousin William Alexander Percy proudly conjured up the echt-Bourbon picture of himself facing down unruly homeless African-Americans in the wake of the 1927 flood. The dramatic weather alone is not sufficient to explain the thinness of the veneer of civilization in the Gulf South. A society that doesn’t deliver for its many poor people, most of whom are black, doesn’t generate a lot of trust and cohesion. The Biblical weather events reveal a deep civic weakness that makes violence a constant possibility. We’re all wondering now what will become of New Orleans. A big American city has never before been entirely emptied of people, and had most of its housing rendered useless, and had all its basic systems fail at once. While the city is being cleared and drained and given an infrastructure, there will be no economic activity there at all. That will be the case for weeks (remember how devastating just a few days of inactivity in just a few industries and neighborhoods was after September 11th), so how will people live? How many will wait until they can move back and repossess their ruined homes and pray for the restoration of their jobs? Over the years, New Orleans has moved from being a top-ranked port toward becoming an economically optional city. Traditionally, it has had the kind of developing economy that runs on plantation agriculture, mineral extraction, and an intentionally impoverished, unempowered, and uneducated populace; its transformation into a tourist mecca was a form of going to ground, and it means that the city will be especially difficult to re-start. Every convention can always be held somewhere else. All one can do is hope that the city will be rebuilt with a much more solid social compact, as well as better hurricane protection. You don’t really think about the situation rationally at such an overwhelming time, of course. If it’s home, elegiac competes with angry for emotional first place. With information so frustratingly scarce, you can scan the citizen posts on the Internet for a scrap of news about a familiar place, or find yourself thinking in peculiarly specific terms about an acquaintance’s face, or a tree on a particular corner, or a long-ago meal in a place where, chances are, nobody will ever be able to go again. My family’s conversations seesaw between the tragedy in its full dimension—how many dead and how much destroyed, and, worse, what proportion was needless—and the quotidian minor resonances that the mind can’t help offering up. My oldest son called demanding to know what had become of a particular rock in Audubon Park where I used to perch him as a toddler. I’ve been preoccupied with our family burial plot in Metairie Cemetery, where we laid my mother to rest six summers ago. The suddenly famous Seventeenth Street Canal runs perilously nearby. I’ve always assumed that I would be buried there—but I guess not. *** В. Ню Йорк Таймс, 7 септември September 7, 2005 Osama and Katrina By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli TV. The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush administration is up to responding to this attack?" As best I can recall, I answered: "Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they know how to pull the trigger." It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society. Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home. These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy. For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging? And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane." An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town. The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch. Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing. So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time. As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party." Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company |
Надявам се събота, 24 септември 2005, да не стане Август 30-31.  На Фани - много здраве и успехи в С. Антонио. |
| Метеоролог: ураган "Катрина" – дело рук человеческих ----------------------------------------- --------------------------------------- 23.09 12:09 | MIGnews.com ----------------------------------------- --------------------------------------- Американский метеоролог Скотт Стивенс считает, что разрушительный ураган "Катрина", унесший жизни более тысячи американцев, имеет искусственное происхождение. Как сообщают телекомпания "Фокс" и выходящая в городе Айдахо Фоллс (штат Айдахо) газета "Пост-реджистер", Стивенс утверждает, что ураган был направлен на США с помощью разработанного еще в Советском Союзе секретного "погодного" оружия, основанного на принципе электромагнитного генератора. Советский Союз никогда официально не признавал наличия такого оружия. Версии об искусственном происхождении крупных природных катаклизмов, повлекших многочисленные жертвы, являются, по мнению психологов, обычной защитной реакцией, поэтому они так часто появляются после серьезных катастроф. "Установлено, что в 60-е и 70-е годы бывший Советский Союз разработал и гордился технологиями модификации погоды, которые начали применяться против США с 1976 года", - утверждает Стивенс на своем личном сайте, откуда эта версия и была почерпнута американскими СМИ. В интервью во вторник газете "Пост-реджистер" Стивенс сообщил также, что, по его данным, загадочные помехи, наблюдаемые в радиоэфире на коротких волнах, являются доказательством существования "русской машины контроля за погодой". В своих высказываниях метеоролог не всегда последователен. По данным выходящей в Питтсбурге (штат Пенсильвания) газеты "Пост-Газетт", Стивенс сказал, что "русские изобрели технологию, вызывающую шторм, в 1976 году и продали ее в конце 80-х годов по меньшей мере в десять государств и организаций". В интервью газете "Пост-реджистер", которое затем цитирует "Фокс", метеоролог уже утверждает, что ураган "Катрина" был искусственно вызван японской мафией в качестве возмездия за осуществленную США 60 лет назад атомную бомбардировку Хиросимы. На сайте Стивенс приводит и третью "версию" происхождения урагана "Катрина", намекая на то, что к катастрофе могли быть причастны уже американские власти. "С моей скромной точки зрения, "Катрина" была на каком-то уровне работой кого-то внутри. Возможно, спланированой и осуществленной властной элитой, не обязательно администрацией Буша, но с ведома каких-то элементов внутри, чтобы привнести изменения в американское общество", - пишет метеоролог, "доказывая" свою гипотезу ссылками на одновременный прорыв дамб в Новом Орлеане, остановку работы насосов, отключение средств связи с зоне бедствия и на другие "примеры" искусственного характера катастрофы на юге США. Стивенс даже обращает внимание на высказывание президента США во время его поездки в зону бедствия, которая "выглядела так, как если бы все побережье Мексиканского залива было уничтожено самым ужасным оружием, которое только можно представить". "Я полностью согласен с президентом", - пишет метеоролог. Сейчас Стивенс работает телеведущим раздела погоды в выпусках новостей на местном телеканале - филиале Эн-би-си в городе Покателло (штат Айдахо). Большинство ученых и экспертов, к которым американские СМИ обратились за комментариями, заявили о несерьезности "гипотезы" Стивенса, являющейся, по их мнению, классическим примером параноидальной "теории заговоров". Тем не менее, его теория была широко растиражирована американскими СМИ в последние дни. Генеральный менеджер телеканала Уильям Фоч, подчиненным которого является Стивенс, сообщил газете, что, по его мнению, метеоролог имеет право на личное мнение и что он не видит в этом проблемы до тех пор, пока Стивенс "не втягивает в это телеканал и его владельцев, а также признает, что это является его собственным мнением". РИА Новости |
