Dutch Alley artist

I am now part of the Dutch Alley Atrist's Co-op. My work is now for sale seven days per week. Things are going well. I'm starting to wonder if success will ruin me. I suppose it's worth the risk.

Permanently Temporary

When the city flooded five years ago a lot of our infrastructure was ruined. For example, all of the lift stations (pumps that keep the sewer lines flowing, not to be confused with the pumps that get rid of storm water) were ruined. Here is a picture of one such station that I go past just about every day, usually twice. It is on a busy street, a main artery near my house. The little white stucco building is the old lift station. The blue machine parked on the side of the street is the replacement.

It is some measure of how poorly we do things here that we are still operating this important function with a private contractor who is leasing the equipment to the city. This has already cost us more than it would have to repair or replace the old pumps. Plus it stinks.

Building on the Ground Zero Site

I am opposed to anyone building a red herring on the site of the 911 attack. I wish we could just ignore the issue. It was created as a provocative and emotional distraction. We derail our community and sew fear when we attend to the mewling of these creeps like the pathological ego-freak in Florida who thinks it is an act of liberation to burn books.

We can't ignore them. Like any emotional attack, if it stands without challenge it attracts even reasonable, caring people who may never have considered how really outrageous are these things we are expected to swallow. I remember being told that if we didn't carpet bomb Southeast Asia we would be fighting communists in our suburbs.

Youthful Rebellion

My son will turn 10 soon. I'm 53. Do the math. I'm a later-in-life parent with all the excess attention that suggests. One of the things I'm always looking forward to with some anxiety is my boy's rebellious phase. I think I would be crushed if he didn't rebel. And what have I left him to reject? Sex? Drugs? Revolution? Save me a taste. I don't see him headed into finance or war or bigotry, and if he did those avenues would lead to dead ends and he would be back soon. How will he break my heart?

Music. His music will break my heart. Not gangsta rap or death metal. I would not like that but at least there's some edge there. Instead he has gone for the "soft hits" genre. Magic 101.9. Stress-free music to get you through your work day. Abba, Footloose, Heart and another dozen vaguely familiar, bright and happy tunes from some in-between decade best forgotten. "Soft hits" could be some form of torture designed to leave no scars or bruises. I'll talk, I'll talk! Just make it stop.

The Indifference that Dares Not Speak Its Name

This blog is the perfect place for this comment. Nobody is likely to see it, so I won't be shunned, attacked or worse, and I still get it off my chest.

I don't care about the Saints. I'm glad they won yesterday and last year, etc, . . . But really. When I hear "Who Dat?" I wonder, "Who
cares?" This makes me more of a freak around here than does my distaste for air conditioning.

We are stressed. And for good reason. We are being abused. There are no apparent solutions. Our institutions are weak and under the control of business interests. So we focus instead on a game.

OK. I pick my battles. This one is not worth a fight. It does feel better to whisper this madness, but if anybody finds out, I'm in big trouble.

Back to Waveland

I spent Labor Day on the beach at Waveland, MS. This was my first time back to this closest bit of Gulf Coast since Katrina. I wasn't ready to go. I'm still not sure it was a good idea.

We had a wonderful time. The beach was beautiful. The weather was fine. Not crowded. We found the rare tar ball, as we would on any beach in California or the French Riviera. All the houses and other buildings were new and pretty. The pine trees are looking good too, though small.

And in the back of my mind this whole time was some obscure ache. As bad as things got five years ago and as horrible as the BP disaster was, here is a beautiful scene. The Gulf is huge. Nature is resilient. It will keep coming back after we abuse it. I suppose it could reach a point where it can't recover. We've had Hiroshima and Chernobyl and mountain top removal and factory chicken farms and so much more, and still Labor Day on the Gulf with the family was wonderful.

I no longer care to warn abusers that they will suffer for their sins. I have no evidence that they will. As far as I can tell, they never have. Some of us will suffer while others profit. Most of us will not see much change. So what will motivate a new model of cooperation and earth justice?

Monkeys

I stress out about the mess we're in. I stew and ruminate. When I can, I do something. Perhaps a blog post. Better, I go to a demonstration or take some kind of action. When the action is frustrated, as they often are, by indifferent or corrupt powers I am left worse off. That explains the blog silences.

And then there is the occasional poster or card. This doesn't feel the same as "action". It's not satisfying or frustrating. I don't even wonder if these efforts are effective. It's just what I do. Here's another one.

Resilient

Here's a recent poster, inspired by Tracie Washington. See her in this YouTube clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4itfAVq19U

Not just me

I often feel like a freak when I talk about our needed next steps. Like when I point out that we need to stop with the air conditioning. Maybe I am a freak, but I'm not the only one.

http://nyti.ms/alzdMd

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/09/AR2010070902341.html?sub=AR

Widows, Orphans and Workers

The insufficient, obvious and necessary moratorium on new drilling in the Gulf is the one instance where official action has been changed because of protest. Did they see the light and decide to make a better moratorium? No, they cancelled the moratorium all together.

I want to be shocked but it's too late for that. Oil vampires used the plight of unemployed oil workers to demand that they be allowed to continue sucking the life out of our earth for their short term gain. They say it is important to keep on the oil economy because we depend on it. Yes, a third of Louisiana workers are directly tied to oil. So that makes it all the more important that we get on with the business of change, especially since this non-renewable death spiral must end soon in any case. Our economic lives are chained to an industry that destroys our physical lives. So we need to kill the industry, not ourselves.

First step, seize BP. To fight this common sense response BP points to the plight of pensioners and others who depend on BP stocks to support their retirement funds. First of all, the stock market does not exist to serve the needy, it exists to serve the greedy. They drag our beloved widows and orphans into the fight on their side. But I look for the swindlers who sold us this load a junk in the first place. We want pensioners to live in dignity, we never said they must use oil money to do it. A pension is a promise. If some manager has made the mistake of tying my grandmother's survival to that of BP then that manager should apologize and fix his mistake, not drag us all into a poisoned future.

New Orleans weather

When it's 98 degrees and 70% humidity, what's the difference between your insides and outside?

Moratorium resisters

The Obama administration has put in place a very limited moratorium on new permits for deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. 33 out of the thousands of offshore rigs are affected. Even this timid and wholly inadequate action is met with howls of protest from the oil industry and it's allies. Like an abused spouse, some people get beaten, poisoned, exploited and left for dead and still they beg their tormentor not to leave.

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/offshore_drilling_ban_would_be.html

the President speaks

I want to believe all the good things I hear and yet I can't un-know what I know. Here I quote the President from his speech last night:

"But make no mistake: we will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long it takes. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy."

That sounds just like Bush after Katrina. And just like back then, people on the front lines know there are things that can and should be done and aren't and we smell a money-grubbing rat. President Obama gives us the reassuring words that he has sent the smartest guys in the world to work out a solution. It was the smartest guys who made this mess in the first place, just like Vietnam, collateralized debt obligations, Enron, . . .

He also said: "From the very beginning of this crisis, the federal government has been in charge of the largest environmental cleanup effort in our nation’s history – an effort led by Admiral Thad Allen, who has almost forty years of experience responding to disasters." And I cringe. He knows as well as anybody that from the very beginning BP has been in charge. The EPA ordered BP to stop using Corexit dispersant. BP said "no." Thad Allan is a fine human being, but he's essentially retired. What will be the consequence if he screws up? Admiral Allan has acknowledged that BP is making the decisions, on the theory that only they have the experience to deal with the situation. Only the fox understands how vulnerable the chickens are.

And don't tell me about our Nobel Prize winning Secretary of Energy. The President more than any of us should know that some people get that prize without earning it.

Famous Potatoes

Louisiana may have to look for a new slogan. Sportsman's Paradise refers to the abundant fishing and hunting provided for in the Gulf coast wetlands. This is a vast, varied and abundant area and it may well recover from this oil + dispersant disaster sooner than I think. As it stands we are flooding paradise with poison and creating hell on earth.

It's all about the fish eggs. Nature is not always efficient. Fish don't make babies one at a time. They put out millions of eggs and squirt loads of sperm all over the area and leave, confident that the next generation will be. And it works. Most of this rich biomass gets eaten by something else, and even most of the hatchlings get gobbled up too. The strategy is to start out with so many that enough survive to do it all over again. And everybody else gets fed in the meantime. In the case of the Gulf of Mexico, this includes just about every duck from Argentina to Alaska. It became known as the Sportsman's Paradise because people like to come here and shoot stuff. Some of these shooters have been alcoholic yahoos, but John James Audubon lived here for years and did his most important work here, while shooting tens of thousands of birds.

This scheme has worked pretty well for millions of years. Now we're going to see how much poison the fish nursery can tolerate.

The Taking Boy

I always hated this book, The Giving Tree. Look at the cover picture. Is that a young Tony Hayward catching the apple? Is it you? Is it me? We are encouraged to take and take from our loving mother nature. And what's to stop us? The tree will truly keep giving and giving until we kill it. And then we will sit on it's corpse and wonder what went wrong.

They don't want to stop the oil

In the most deeply broken part of my heart I believe that BP and it's fellows don't want to stop the oil that is flowing from their blown out well at all. They want to capture and recover oil, not plug the leak. Until now I have held that idea close for fear of sounding like a total nut job. It turns out that I'm not the one who is sick. The sick ones are in charge.

I'm relying on the words of a really well scrubbed white guy who is an Iraq war veteran and Navy submarine officer, Christopher J. Brownfield. He is quoted in a New York Times Magazine piece by Deborah Solomon: (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/magazine/13fob-q4-t.html?ref=todayspaper)

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I’m sure you’re aware that the energy secretary, Steven Chu, appears to be opposed to the idea of blowing up the well to bring it under control.
He seems to oppose using nuclear weapons. The approach I favor is a conventional demolition, not nuclear. Any combination of explosives that could be used to break the well and bury it under a lot of rock could be effective.

Why hasn’t that been done?
I’m very skeptical about why we haven’t done it. I think the reason is that when the oil companies are in charge of bringing the solutions to the table, they are going to advocate solutions that allow them to continue recovering the oil.

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For a while I allowed expert opinion to dismiss the idea because such an explosion could create more leak sites and multiply the problem. This lie is easy to see through. We all know that the rig floated nearly a mile from the Gulf floor but that's when the drilling started. The drill hole is less than 20 inches wide and close to four miles long. No explosion we are capable of creating could blow a four mile hole in the bottom of the Gulf. A moderately massive explosion of the type that our military is so fond could easily create a lovely plug.

Another story that I've been carrying around for a while is at least as sad. The rig didn't have to collapse like it did. If the rig had been allowed to burn to the water line it never would have collapsed the riser pipe. In this scenario the disaster would at least have been located at sea level. Instead they poured tons and tons of water on the uncontrollable fire (water on an oil fire?) in what looks like an attempt to save the equipment. Certainly some rescue firefighting was urgently needed, but any talk of this crushing weight of water to save lives is another BP lie.

Tony A-word

Catastrophizing

And what about when it really is a catastrophe? Smart people warn against going overboard with worst case scenarios, and yet right now dire consequences are well within the realm of possibility. In fact, widespread disaster becomes a probable outcome except for the fact of our ability to change our ways. So I hold out hope that we can dial back from oil disaster like we have (so far) with DDT and the atom bomb. This change will need to come from the margin. Leaders, scientists and smart people defend mass death as progress and the idea that we should save the world comes from wierdos with picket signs - The End is Near!

When Corporations Ruled the Earth

I wanted to have this catchy title and simply post a big picture of the poison spewing from the Gulf floor. When my blogging skills improve I'll be able to do that. In the meantime, here's a good link:

http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/no-clues-on-stopping-a-blowout-in-bps-oil-spill-response-plan

Pushed to the Margins

Here's a Washington Post article that moved me.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/04/AR2010060402482.html

Apathy is Mental Illness

Suffering comes in to our lives. All lives. Then comes power to resist. Leaving aside the question of who wins, the act of resistance is health. If we don't resist we die, even as we survive in quiet desperation. If we do resist we die anyhow. In the meantime we resist and live.

http://www.nola.com/living/t-p/index.ssf?/base/living-15/1275369609326590.xml&coll=1

Oiled Seafood

Boiled frogs in the industrial sacrifice zone

Maybe this oil mess is not bad enough to make us change. The good intentions of people who want to preserve life on the planet are up against a bloodless system that seeks only this quarter's profit. Fleshy people are vulnerable and sympathetic. Corporations are legal fictions that exist in an abstract world of spreadsheets and digital stock trades. They don't care because they can't care. Even if they wanted to care they would be sued for failing in their fiduciary duty.

Nature has a huge capacity to absorb the assault we make upon it. Massive as this BP crime is, the whole ocean is not going to die right now in response. Life is resilient and tenacious. We are wounded, scarred and suffering, yet we will survive. Like the frog in a pot of water, we adjust as the heat rises and rises.

I trust my own senses. I have seen oil production. I have walked on the grounds of a refinery. Not a blade of grass grows. Not a pigeon, dandelion, ant, cockroach, . . . nothing lives there except human enablers of the machine. And they leave every chance they get. And they die there by chance too.

I have walked in wild nature (or at least as wild as it can be in the 21st century.) It was not as comfortable as sitting in air conditioned comfort watching the nature channel. Some part of me prefers this comfort. I'd rather drive my own car to my son's school and on to work. I can do all this in half an hour. On bike or bus it would be three times that and quite a hassle. And yet, and yet, and yet . . . I was alive in wildness. I was full, overflowing, thrilled, surprised, calmed and whole.

BP disaster

More happy talk from BP on the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster. Dispersants just make it look better and probably make it worse. They're adding another toxin so the first poison will sink and spread out.

Questions: Has a "blow-out preventer" ever worked (or even been tested) at this depth? What do you call a person who installs a device with that fails pretty often and calls it "fail-safe"? (Answer: liar.) How is fishing in Prince William Sound, Alaska 20 years after Exxon Valdez? How about Campeche, Mexico 30 years later? Or Timor Sea after last year's blowout? What of the continuing disaster in the Niger Delta?How is clamming at Summerland, California 40 years after that blow-out?

When we assess risk we need to consider not just the chance of failure but the possible consequences. Since there is no such thing as "fail-safe" we need to insist that even a slim chance of total devestation is not a good bet, especially when the cost is borne by all (plants and animals too) and the benefits go mostly to machines and their servant/masters.

Louisiana oil disaster

Disaster alley. Strange coincidence that the path of the Deepwater Horizon-BP oil mess mimics Katrina's. Not so strange that our shameful and shameless junior Republican senator wants the federal government to take over the clean up. Privatize gain and when the inevitable result of corporate greed kicks in then we socialize loss.

Talk of clean-up is embarrassing. The oil is projected to make landfall from South Pass at the mouth of the Mississippi to Pensacola on the Florida Panhandle. I think thats about 300 miles. So far 22.5 miles of booms are in place to protect the shoreline, and most of these have been blown ashore or otherwise rendered useless by rough seas. Talk of burning off the oil at the site of the leak is fantasy. Just the image of the Gulf aflame should give up pause. And it won't work. It's too windy and the oil is mixing with water, most of it won't light. Skimming with boat towed booms would be marginal help in the best of conditions and with the wind the way it is on the Gulf they can't even deploy the boats.

I search for vocabulary. This is not an oil spill. A tanker with a drunk at the wheel can run aground and all the oil aboard can spill. That is a disaster, an oil spill of a known quantity. Decades later Prince William Sound is still crippled by the Exxon Valdez spill. Here we have a huge lake of oil, blowing out through a hole we punched in the skin of our home planet a mile below the sea where we have no real chance to patch it. It is expected that the abrasive flow now seeping out of the damaged pipe will cause the whole well head to fail soon and the flow will increase tenfold or more. And nobody knows how much oil we can expect from this.

"Responsible" people point out that there are risks involved, but we need the oil. Who is "we"? BP, Haliburton, Shell, etc. . . they would not exist without oil. For me and for you it would be possible, very hard perhaps but possible, to do without oil. Not so hard really to do with much less. I am reminded of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, surrounded by hostile Natives. The Ranger turns to Tonto and says, "We're in big trouble now," and Tonto replies, "Why do you say 'we,' whitey?"

Getting started

One thing leads to another. I started using Facebook and got frustrated that the posts had to be so brief. So I set up this blog and now I'm enabling mobile capacities. All that to say this is a test and I hope this becomes more than a self indulgent tech splurge.

Glen Beck and me

I've been thinking about how much I have in common with Glen Beck. I'm a few years older than he is but we're both white guys who were raised Catholic, on the west coast (he's from the Puget Sound area, I'm from Los Angeles). We now both live far from the Pacific Ocean (he's in Connecticut, I'm in New Orleans) and we became estranged from the Church (he's a Mormon, I'm not so sure.) We've both had substance abuse issues (I don't want to talk about it much, he seems to have missed the memo about anonymity.) Neither one of us has much past a high school education and yet we both seem to think we know a lot of important things. We both know that fear is a powerful motivator, only I think it can't motivate us to do anything of lasting value. If he knew me we would also have this in common, each would think the other a total idiot.