The Existentialist Cowboy: disasters

Showing posts with label disasters. Show all posts

Saturday, August 28, 2010

'I Decline to Accept the End of Man'

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

We look back at New Orleans recalling Katrina and more recently the reckless disregard shown the Gulf of Mexico by BP, a 'person' by SCOTUS reckoning. By going unpunished, BP proved SCOTUS to be as wrong as they are either stupid or crooked or both.

That --of course --is the difference. That is why 'corporations' are not people and never will be people however absurdly SCOTUS may decree it. People are charged, arrested and tried for crimes. But corporations have been put above the law. To call them 'people' is beyond stupid; it is unconscionable, wrong and wrong-headed. It is a lasting testament to the failure of American education that SCOTUS has apparently gotten away with it.

SCOTUS has proven itself oblivious to truth, logic or common sense. Five wing nuts on that court have established a body of odious 'case law' that not only makes of people mere legal abstractions; it robs us of what it means to be human. In doing so, SCOTUS has guaranteed that it will play its utterly dishonorable role in many catastrophes yet to play out. Bertolt Brecht had people like SCOTUS in mind when he wrote: "A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!" Five ideologues on the 'high court' are crooks! Those five ideologues are either crooks or idiots --possibly both.

It was not so long ago that yet another Gulf disaster was unfolding amid justified fears that it would reach biblical proportions. But this article is not about BP nor the Gulf though BP is all but off the hook and the Gulf seems unlikely to return to normal in our lifetimes --if ever!

In terms of the age of the universe some 251 million years ago is just a recent event. It was then --the so-called Permian extinction --that a 'mammoth undersea methane bubble' literally burst destroying in the process some 95 percent of all life on Earth, primarily by poisoning the atmosphere. It was the greatest mass extinction in world history.

I am reminded at these critical junctures of William Faulkner who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950, a time in which we rightly feared the imminent end of earth and mankind by way of a Nuclear Holocaust.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
--William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 10, 1950

William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Acceptance s Speech, 1950

1950 was also the year that the great Philosopher Bertrand Russell was honored.

Bertrand Russell: Nobel Prize Acceptance, 1950

We simply cannot and must not tolerate the proliferation of the panoply of horrendous and environmentally disastrous weapons of war. These weapons cannot and will not be confined to battlefields. Indeed, the battlefield itself has become any target -military or civilian -that murderous military militants can target globally. This level of mass and official psychopathy is untenable, completely unacceptable. We must will ourselves to become sane! Only a global revolution will save us. The question is: how does one wage a war against these monsters and win?

I would hope that it is yet too early to search out that 'last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening' from which to view that last blood red sunset. Nevertheless, it must be clearly understood that we simply cannot tolerate another BP disaster. As we write and debate, the margin for error declines in an ever steeper curve. At some point on that curve, a point that is yet unknown, we may never return.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

When the Sea Walks Over the Land

History, they say, repeats itself. But always with a variation. On September 8, 1900, before hurricanes were given names, the city of Galveston was slammed by the 'Storm of the Century'. A 17 foot wall of water seemed to have just risen up to walk across a thin sliver of land, in truth little more than a glorified sand bar. Driven by winds of 135 mph, it submerged the island city and laid waste to all houses but those of the very, very rich. Those houses still dominate the atmosphere and personality of Galveston.

Over the last week, Ike threatened to relive the experience of some 100 years ago. There were many echoes of the past but significant differences. Modern Galveston, as a result of its 1900 experience, built a protective 17 foot seawall to protect the city against another storm surge of such biblical proportions. The nature of a storm surge was explained best in a line of dialogue from the Bogey/McCall movie Key Largo: "The wind blows so hard the ocean gets up on its hind legs and walks right across the land."

A storm surge is, literally, the apogee of a huge wave formed by high winds and low pressure. It is as if the ocean literally rises up and moves landward with the storm accompanied by high winds and pounding rain. There are few natural events more exciting than a hurricane; even fewer are so deadly.

Rescuers saved nearly 2,000 people from waterlogged streets and shredded houses in Galveston.
"Quite frankly we are reaching a health crisis for the people who remain on the island," said Steve LeBlanc, the city manager in Galveston, where at least a third of the community's 60,000 residents remained in their homes - refusing to leave.
Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas pleaded with those residents who left last week not to return right away.
"Do not come back to Galveston," the mayor said. "You cannot live here at this time."
Houston, the nation's fourth-largest city, was under a week-long dusk-to-dawn curfew to prevent looting.
Energy provider CenterPoint Energy reported power was restored to 500,000 customers, but more than 1.6 million remained in the dark, including Houston's big corporations.
Mayor Bill White said all city workers were expected to report to work, but most corporations told employees to stay home.
--Devastated Galveston tells residents their town is unlivable

The Worst of Ike

In Houston, I slept through many tropical storms and a hurricane or two. Some important points must be made. I never lived in what the locals call a "flood plain"; I never lived within sight of the Gulf; I never tried to sleep through storms of the magnitude of Andrew, Rita, or Gustav.

My very first experience with a hurricane was Audrey which struck the coast and seemed to gain strength even as she struck deep in the Piney Woods of SE Texas. Audrey had reached Category 4 status in June and went on to cause 'catastrophic damage across eastern Texas and western Louisiana'. I was a child but still remember clearly incredible winds of some 75 miles MPH striking deep inland, ripping branches off oak and pine, slamming them into parked cars and houses. A window was blown out. Heavy oaken furniture was blown across the room.

It is appropriate that the name 'Audrey' is now retired. Audrey left in its wake 600 dead and 1 billion dollars in damages, the sixth deadliest US hurricane since accurate record-keeping began in 1900. There was nothing like Audrey until Katrina swept into New Orleans in 2005.

What is so striking is that Ike, Audrey of 1957, and the unnamed storm of 1900 all seem to have made 'landfall' between Galveston and the Texas-Lousiana border. We may be justified in calling it Hurricane alley.

If you wish to imagine what it might be like to survive the first impact to find yourself inside the eerie 'eye of the storm, there is probably no better read than Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson. Galveston was not taken completely by surprise. City 'fathers' were, indeed, aware of the island city's vulnerability. There were no barrier islands to protect it against the sea and sky. Galveston put its bare face against the Gulf.

Instead of warning the residents of Galveston, instead of lending his support to efforts to float bonds for the construction of a seawall, meteorologist Isaac Cline, instead, wrote an article in 1891, in which he characterized the fear of hurricanes as an 'absurdd delusion. He claimed that rising surgewaters would spread first over the vast lowlands 'behind Galveston which, he claimed, were even closer than Galveston to sea level. "It would be impossible," he wrote, "for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city."

At the competing Galveston Tribune, editor Clarence Ousley spent Saturday morning writing his editorials for the Sunday editions. He looked out the window at the harsh sky, patches of blue still showed, but mostly he saw clouds a black and low as any he had ever seen. The storm seemed a good subject for comment. Off and on that morning had called home for reports from his family on the condition of the surge, which his wife and children could watch from the windows of the second floor. It was very exciting --storms always were --but he did not think this one would be terribly different from any other.
--Eric Larson, Isaac's Storm

As the storm approached Galveston, the rains increased. Many sought refuge at the train station. An elderly man produced a barometer and insisted upon reading out the descending atmospheric pressure periodically, a practice that did not endear him to his fellows.

No one else seemed terribly worried either. Galveston apparently took such things in strike.
The first 'intimation' of the true extent of the disaster, Benjamin recalled, "came when the body of a child floated into the station."
--Eric Larson, Isaac's Storm

It is not only the Gulf Coast states of the US that are threatened by hurricanes. In 1703, an "extratropical hurricane", believe to have originated in the Atlantic east of Florida, struck the great city of London.

Though it has been called 'the perfect hurricane', it is atypical. It was reported to have crossed the 'cold Atlantic'. Storms associated with SE US are believed to be nurtured by warm Gulf water. Otherwise, decriptions of London's storm read very much like a descriptions of Ike or Andrew moving right up the Houston Ship Channel. The storm wreaked havoc upon some 700 ships, moored in the 'Pool of London'. The Royal Navy lost 13 war ships. The death toll was staggering --as high as 15,000. Queen Anne sought refuge in the cellar at St. James Palace'. Lead roofing was blown off Westminster Abbey. Like Andrew and Ike over the lowlands north of Galveston, TX, London's storm moved northward over the Midlands. In his very first book, The Storm, Daniel DeFoe wrote of "...the tempest that destroyed woods and forests all over England. No pen could describe it, nor tongue express it, nor thought conceive it unless by one in the extremity of it."