September 2005
2 tags
Confusion, Not Collaboration: The Lesson From...
I’ve written several posts recently about New Orleans, but I have yet to suggest anything that could be construed as a lesson to be learned from that monumental disaster; and perhaps it is still too early, too close to the event itself, for us to be able to step back from the inept response at all levels of government, to attempt to do so. But one thought has been niddling at the edge of my...
6 tags
Social Capital: De Tocqueville, Putnam, and the...
[reposted from Centrality, originally published 15 September 2005]
A recent Washington Post editorial by Joel Garreau on the heartbreaking Katrina disaster, entitled A Sad Truth: Cities Aren’t Forever, starts out stating a historial truth — that cities don’t necessarily live forever — and then winds up suggesting that New Orleans will find it difficult to bounce back from...
4 tags
Katrina, Bush, and Us
Ben Stein, who is not one of my favorite people (see Old Ways Die Hard: Ben Stein And Neo-conservative Dress), writes a bizarro-world apology for Bush’s handling of the Katrina nightmare. Truly frightening. Right wing fanatics can justify any fumble by W by wishing away the world. Stein states that it isn’t Bush’s job to protect American citizens from disaster — forgetting...
After The Storm
I mislaid my signature black cap the other day (actually, one of my sons absconded with it and left it in his bedroom, a place I would never have thought to look in), and that small annoyance took on an almost supernatural import for me. I looked everywhere, traced my steps, when through the dirty clothes. Nothing.
I have retrieved the cap, and the whole minor upset is over, but… in the...
