From Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters:
Congress Takes Five Days To Act, Criticizes 'Bureaucracy'
In what would be seen as irony under less-deadly circumstances, Congress took the opportunity to carp at the federal response to Hurricane Katrina after passing a $10.5B funding bill five days after the destruction of New Orleans. The New York Times reports that members of both parties criticized the relief efforts while promising hearings into supposed bureaucratic inertia:
Members of Congress from both parties acknowledged on Friday that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina had fallen far short and promised hearings into what had gone wrong. ...
Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, who plans to go to the New Orleans area this weekend, said he had asked the committee that oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency to convene hearings so that "any lessons learned during this experience are brought to the forefront so that we may continue to be more effective in responding to any future disaster."
Before the House action, members of the Congressional Black Caucus strongly criticized the federal response to the hurricane, saying the government had abandoned many poor and frail victims, most of them members of minorities. ...
Republican lawmakers were also critical, with Representative Jim McCrery of Louisiana choking up during a news conference.
"You might note a bit of frustration in my face and in my voice," said Mr. McCrery, whose district in the northwest part of the state was spared by the storm but is struggling to deal with evacuees. "I will tell you: It is there. I am frustrated in my attempts to deal with a wide array of bureaucracy in trying to get assets on the ground."
Let's talk about poor response. Why did it take Congress five days to take action? They knew this storm went to a category 5 last week before it made landfall. No matter where it hit, it had a 100% chance of doing catastrophic damage somewhere, and by Friday it had New Orleans squarely in its sights. Congress should have been back in DC by Monday to get this bill passed and hand it to President Bush, not five days later. They couldn't be bothered to come back from their August vacation more than a couple of days early.
If CQ readers have not guessed it, a night's sleep has changed my mood somewhat. The above paragraph is more or less a parody of the criticisms aimed at George Bush, but if they apply to the President, they also apply to Congress. In fact, they simply don't apply to anyone.
When the storm reached Cat-5 status in the Gulf of Mexico, what did George Bush do? He declared the entire Gulf coast an emergency area and mobilized FEMA. Until it actually made landfall, however, he could not pinpoint the assets. Even at the last moment, the brunt of the storm hit Gulfport, not New Orleans. The levee failure came later, on Tuesday, and until then the damage to New Orleans was major, not catastrophic.
Even so, the existence of the storm off the coast of Louisiana should have prompted governments on all levels to act. What happened? The city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana asked people to evacuate, but made no preparations to assist people in that endeavor. By Friday the outbound roads clogged with people in cars looking to escape, which all did. However, an entire fleet of school buses -- hundreds of them -- sat in their parking lots, gathering dust. Until George Bush called Governor Blanco personally and pleaded with her to make the evacuation order mandatory on Saturday, neither Mayor Nagin nor Blanco told people they had to leave. Apparently, that order only went out over the TV and radio from their press conference; no attempt was made to direct people out of their homes and onto the road.
After the levees broke on Tuesday, the situation broke down rapidly, a drearily predictable result. The two main refugee centers, the official one at the Superdome and the ad-hoc site at the Convention Center, should have been evacuated at that point. However, even two days after landfall, New Orleans had not moved its buses to high ground to keep them ready for use in case the levees broke. Lousiana's governor had not called out her National Guard units, only 25% of which have deployed to Iraq. With I-10 from the east completely unusable for vehicular traffic and the New Orleans PD completely absorbed by search-and-rescue functions, looting ran wild and order completely broke down. Nagin only ordered the PD to take on looting as a high priority on Thursday.
What did George Bush do? He had a wide area of devastation to manage. Mississippi has also sustained catastrophic damage, with entire towns destroyed, flooded, and unable to fend for themselves. He does not have the authority to call out anyone's National Guard until he federalizes the units, a move usually reserved for use when governors prove recalcitrant in mobilization. Yet within three days of the levee burst and the drowning of New Orleans, Bush had 40,000 troops entering the city to take over the management from Nagin and Blanco, delivering the aid that had waited for lines of communication to get established and the order that the NOPD and Louisiana could not maintain.
We work within a federal system, where cities and states control the allocation of resources used within their borders. We do this because we recognize that, for the most part, federalism works. Local decisions about resource allocation usually create better results than top-down bureaucratic management. The main requirement for that to work is local leadership. Blaming George Bush because he delivered results within three days of the major catastrophic event while following these rules is as silly as blaming Congress for taking five days to pass an aid bill.
The main failure in New Orleans came when the local and state governments refused to recognize that the storm had a high chance to cause catastrophic damage and use its assets to get the poor and infirm out of its way. They had plenty of resources (in vehicles) with which to do that, but left them right where the floods would destroy them. All the rest of the damage would have been mere property destruction, difficult to rebuild but nonetheless easier to accept than the unbelievable hardship we've seen this week.
However, I suspect that all of this will come out in whatever hearings get held after the rescues have been completed. In the meantime, let's continue to focus on getting assistance where needed and drop the idea of holding political events that will distract the very people conducting the emergency operations from their primary tasks. CQ readers have done a wonderful job of helping Catholic Charities, and I would encourage them to keep giving.
Saturday, September 03, 2005
From National Journal;
America's Anti-Reagan Isn't Hillary Clinton.
It's Rick Santorum.
By Jonathan Rauch
Friday, Sept. 2, 2005
In 1960, a Republican senator named Barry Goldwater published a little book called The Conscience of a Conservative. The first printing of 10,000 copies led to a second of the same size, then a third of 50,000, until ultimately it sold more than 3 million copies. Goldwater's presidential candidacy crashed in 1964, but his ideas did not: For decades, Goldwater's hostility to Big Government ruled the American Right. Until, approximately, now.
Rick Santorum, a second-term Republican senator from Pennsylvania, has written a new book called It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. The book is worth taking seriously for several reasons, not least of which is that it is a serious book. The writing and thinking are consistently competent, often better than that. The lapses into right-wing talk-radioese ("liberals practically despise the common man") are rare. Santorum wrestles intelligently, often impressively, with the biggest of big ideas: freedom, virtue, civil society, the Founders' intentions. Although he is a Catholic who is often characterized as a religious conservative, he has written a book whose ambitions are secular. As its subtitle promises, it is about conservatism, not Christianity.
Above all, it is worth noticing because, like Goldwater's Conscience, it lays down a marker. As Goldwater repudiated Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, so Santorum repudiates Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It's now official: Philosophically, the conservative movement has split. Post-Santorum, tax-cutting and court-bashing can hold the Republican coalition together for only so much longer.
As a policy book, It Takes a Family is temperate. It serves up a healthy reminder that society needs not just good government but strong civil and social institutions, and that the traditional family serves all kinds of essential social functions. Government policies, therefore, should respect and support family and civil society instead of undermining or supplanting them. Parents should make quality time at home a high priority. Popular culture should comport itself with some sense of responsibility and taste.
Few outside the hard cultural Left -- certainly not Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., who makes several cameos as Santorum's bete noir -- would disagree with much of that. Not in 2005, anyway. Moreover, Santorum's policy proposals sit comfortably within the conservative mainstream. But It Takes a Family is more than a policy book. Its theory of "conservatism and the common good" seeks to rechannel the mainstream.
In Santorum's view, freedom is not the same as liberty. Or, to put it differently, there are two kinds of freedom. One is "no-fault freedom," individual autonomy uncoupled from any larger purpose: "freedom to choose, irrespective of the choice." This, he says, is "the liberal definition of freedom," and it is the one that has taken over in the culture and been imposed on the country by the courts.
Quite different is "the conservative view of freedom," "the liberty our Founders understood." This is "freedom coupled with the responsibility to something bigger or higher than the self." True liberty is freedom in the service of virtue -- not "the freedom to be as selfish as I want to be," or "the freedom to be left alone," but "the freedom to attend to one's duties -- duties to God, to family, and to neighbors."
This kind of freedom depends upon and serves virtue, and virtue's indispensable incubator and transmitter is the family. Thus "selflessness in the family is the basis for the political liberty we cherish as Americans." If government is to defend liberty and promote the common welfare, then it must promote and defend the integrity of the traditional family. In doing so, it will foster virtue and rebuild the country's declining social and moral capital, thus fostering liberty and strengthening family. The liberal cycle of decline -- families weaken, disorder spreads, government steps in, families weaken still further -- will be reversed.
"Freedom is not self-sufficient," writes Santorum. He claims the Founders' support, and quotes John Adams ("Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people") and George Washington to that effect. But, notes William A. Galston, a University of Maryland political scientist, Washington and (especially) Adams stood at one end of a spectrum of debate, and it was a debate that they ultimately lost.
Other Founders -- notably James Madison, the father of the Constitution -- were more concerned with power than with virtue. They certainly distinguished between liberty and license, and they agreed that republican government requires republican virtues. But they believed that government's foremost calling was not to inculcate virtue but to prevent tyranny. Madison thus argued for a checked, limited government that would lack the power to impose any one faction's view of virtue on all others.
Freedom, for Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and others, was an end, not just a means. A government that allows individuals to pursue happiness in their own fashions, they believed, is most likely to produce a strong society and a virtuous citizenry; but the greatest benefit of freedom is freedom itself. Civic virtue ultimately serves individual freedom, rather than the other way around.
It was in this tradition that Goldwater wrote, "Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development." Note that first "and": Individual and social welfare go together -- they're not in conflict. All the government needs to do, Goldwater said, is get out of the way. "The conservative's first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?" Reagan spoke in the same tradition when he declared that government was the problem, not the solution to our problems.
Goldwater and Reagan, and Madison and Jefferson, were saying that if you restrain government, you will strengthen society and foster virtue. Santorum is saying something more like the reverse: If you shore up the family, you will strengthen the social fabric and ultimately reduce dependence on government.
Where Goldwater denounced collectivism as the enemy of the individual, Santorum denounces individualism as the enemy of family. On page 426, Santorum says this: "In the conservative vision, people are first connected to and part of families: The family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society." Those words are not merely uncomfortable with the individual-rights tradition of modern conservatism. They are incompatible with it.
Santorum seems to sense as much. In an interview with National Public Radio last month, he acknowledged his quarrel with "what I refer to as more of a libertarianish Right" and "this whole idea of personal autonomy." In his book he comments, seemingly with a shrug, "Some will reject what I have to say as a kind of 'Big Government' conservatism."
They sure will. A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, "individual development accounts," publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in "every school in America" (his italics), and more. Lots more.
Though he is a populist critic of Big Government, Santorum shows no interest in defining principled limits on political power. His first priority is to make government pro-family, not to make it small. He has no use for a constitutional (or, as far as one can tell, moral) right to privacy, which he regards as a "constitutional wrecking ball" that has become inimical to the very principle of the common good. Ditto for the notions of government neutrality and free expression. He does not support a ban on contraception, but he thinks the government has every right to impose one.
The quarrel between virtue and freedom is an ancient and profound one. Santorum's suspicion of liberal individualism has a long pedigree and is not without support in American history. Adams, after all, favored sumptuary laws that would restrict conspicuous consumption in order to promote a virtuous frugality. And Santorum is right to observe that no healthy society is made up of people who view themselves as detached and unencumbered individuals.
"But to move from that sociological truism to the proposition that the family is the fundamental unit of political liberty," says Galston, "goes against the grain of two centuries of American political thought, as first articulated in the Declaration of Independence." With It Takes a Family, Rick Santorum has served notice. The bold new challenge to the Goldwater-Reagan tradition in American politics comes not from the Left, but from the Right.
-- Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer for National Journal magazine, where "Social Studies" appears. His e-mail address is jrauch@nationaljournal.com.
America's Anti-Reagan Isn't Hillary Clinton.
It's Rick Santorum.
By Jonathan Rauch
Friday, Sept. 2, 2005
In 1960, a Republican senator named Barry Goldwater published a little book called The Conscience of a Conservative. The first printing of 10,000 copies led to a second of the same size, then a third of 50,000, until ultimately it sold more than 3 million copies. Goldwater's presidential candidacy crashed in 1964, but his ideas did not: For decades, Goldwater's hostility to Big Government ruled the American Right. Until, approximately, now.
Rick Santorum, a second-term Republican senator from Pennsylvania, has written a new book called It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. The book is worth taking seriously for several reasons, not least of which is that it is a serious book. The writing and thinking are consistently competent, often better than that. The lapses into right-wing talk-radioese ("liberals practically despise the common man") are rare. Santorum wrestles intelligently, often impressively, with the biggest of big ideas: freedom, virtue, civil society, the Founders' intentions. Although he is a Catholic who is often characterized as a religious conservative, he has written a book whose ambitions are secular. As its subtitle promises, it is about conservatism, not Christianity.
Above all, it is worth noticing because, like Goldwater's Conscience, it lays down a marker. As Goldwater repudiated Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, so Santorum repudiates Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It's now official: Philosophically, the conservative movement has split. Post-Santorum, tax-cutting and court-bashing can hold the Republican coalition together for only so much longer.
As a policy book, It Takes a Family is temperate. It serves up a healthy reminder that society needs not just good government but strong civil and social institutions, and that the traditional family serves all kinds of essential social functions. Government policies, therefore, should respect and support family and civil society instead of undermining or supplanting them. Parents should make quality time at home a high priority. Popular culture should comport itself with some sense of responsibility and taste.
Few outside the hard cultural Left -- certainly not Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., who makes several cameos as Santorum's bete noir -- would disagree with much of that. Not in 2005, anyway. Moreover, Santorum's policy proposals sit comfortably within the conservative mainstream. But It Takes a Family is more than a policy book. Its theory of "conservatism and the common good" seeks to rechannel the mainstream.
In Santorum's view, freedom is not the same as liberty. Or, to put it differently, there are two kinds of freedom. One is "no-fault freedom," individual autonomy uncoupled from any larger purpose: "freedom to choose, irrespective of the choice." This, he says, is "the liberal definition of freedom," and it is the one that has taken over in the culture and been imposed on the country by the courts.
Quite different is "the conservative view of freedom," "the liberty our Founders understood." This is "freedom coupled with the responsibility to something bigger or higher than the self." True liberty is freedom in the service of virtue -- not "the freedom to be as selfish as I want to be," or "the freedom to be left alone," but "the freedom to attend to one's duties -- duties to God, to family, and to neighbors."
This kind of freedom depends upon and serves virtue, and virtue's indispensable incubator and transmitter is the family. Thus "selflessness in the family is the basis for the political liberty we cherish as Americans." If government is to defend liberty and promote the common welfare, then it must promote and defend the integrity of the traditional family. In doing so, it will foster virtue and rebuild the country's declining social and moral capital, thus fostering liberty and strengthening family. The liberal cycle of decline -- families weaken, disorder spreads, government steps in, families weaken still further -- will be reversed.
"Freedom is not self-sufficient," writes Santorum. He claims the Founders' support, and quotes John Adams ("Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people") and George Washington to that effect. But, notes William A. Galston, a University of Maryland political scientist, Washington and (especially) Adams stood at one end of a spectrum of debate, and it was a debate that they ultimately lost.
Other Founders -- notably James Madison, the father of the Constitution -- were more concerned with power than with virtue. They certainly distinguished between liberty and license, and they agreed that republican government requires republican virtues. But they believed that government's foremost calling was not to inculcate virtue but to prevent tyranny. Madison thus argued for a checked, limited government that would lack the power to impose any one faction's view of virtue on all others.
Freedom, for Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and others, was an end, not just a means. A government that allows individuals to pursue happiness in their own fashions, they believed, is most likely to produce a strong society and a virtuous citizenry; but the greatest benefit of freedom is freedom itself. Civic virtue ultimately serves individual freedom, rather than the other way around.
It was in this tradition that Goldwater wrote, "Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development." Note that first "and": Individual and social welfare go together -- they're not in conflict. All the government needs to do, Goldwater said, is get out of the way. "The conservative's first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?" Reagan spoke in the same tradition when he declared that government was the problem, not the solution to our problems.
Goldwater and Reagan, and Madison and Jefferson, were saying that if you restrain government, you will strengthen society and foster virtue. Santorum is saying something more like the reverse: If you shore up the family, you will strengthen the social fabric and ultimately reduce dependence on government.
Where Goldwater denounced collectivism as the enemy of the individual, Santorum denounces individualism as the enemy of family. On page 426, Santorum says this: "In the conservative vision, people are first connected to and part of families: The family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society." Those words are not merely uncomfortable with the individual-rights tradition of modern conservatism. They are incompatible with it.
Santorum seems to sense as much. In an interview with National Public Radio last month, he acknowledged his quarrel with "what I refer to as more of a libertarianish Right" and "this whole idea of personal autonomy." In his book he comments, seemingly with a shrug, "Some will reject what I have to say as a kind of 'Big Government' conservatism."
They sure will. A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, "individual development accounts," publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in "every school in America" (his italics), and more. Lots more.
Though he is a populist critic of Big Government, Santorum shows no interest in defining principled limits on political power. His first priority is to make government pro-family, not to make it small. He has no use for a constitutional (or, as far as one can tell, moral) right to privacy, which he regards as a "constitutional wrecking ball" that has become inimical to the very principle of the common good. Ditto for the notions of government neutrality and free expression. He does not support a ban on contraception, but he thinks the government has every right to impose one.
The quarrel between virtue and freedom is an ancient and profound one. Santorum's suspicion of liberal individualism has a long pedigree and is not without support in American history. Adams, after all, favored sumptuary laws that would restrict conspicuous consumption in order to promote a virtuous frugality. And Santorum is right to observe that no healthy society is made up of people who view themselves as detached and unencumbered individuals.
"But to move from that sociological truism to the proposition that the family is the fundamental unit of political liberty," says Galston, "goes against the grain of two centuries of American political thought, as first articulated in the Declaration of Independence." With It Takes a Family, Rick Santorum has served notice. The bold new challenge to the Goldwater-Reagan tradition in American politics comes not from the Left, but from the Right.
-- Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer for National Journal magazine, where "Social Studies" appears. His e-mail address is jrauch@nationaljournal.com.
From City Journal:
A Perfect Storm of Lawlessness
New Orleans’ vicious looters aren’t the real face of the city’s poor—their victims are.
By Nicole Gelinas
1 September 2005
New Orleans hasn’t even been disarmed yet, but the story of those who looted, trashed, and terrorized the city this week is already being re-written. Al Sharpton went on MSNBC Thursday night to say that “looters are people who pay their taxes whose infrastructure caved in on them.” The final PC version of the story is likely to go like this: The desperate people left behind in New Orleans, nearly all black, had justification in brutally attacking their city because the help they frantically sought didn’t come.
In truth, the looters, rapists, and murderers who have terrorized New Orleans since Monday began their post-Katrina reign of terror a full day before the situation grew truly desperate—and it was their increasingly lawless behavior that kept willing but unarmed professional and volunteer rescue workers away from the city and from the poor people who needed saving.
Let’s go back to last Sunday morning—such a long time ago, it now seems. Most New Orleanians with means—the most resourceful poor, the middle class, and the affluent—left the city of nearly half-a-million residents that day, 24 hours before Katrina hit. They took planes, they drove, they hitchhiked, and some walked. Save for the home and business owners who valued their property more than their lives, most of the 100,000 or so who stayed behind were those not only poor in financial resources but in human capital as well.
Some who stayed behind are the New Orleanians who depend on the government on a good day—impoverished women, children, and elderly folks who went to the Superdome and to the Convention Center Sunday, expecting their government to take care of them. And those were the smart ones—those who moved rationally and proactively, despite a lack of transportation out of the city and a lack of government co-ordination, to secure their own physical safety. Thousands of others who stayed in their low-lying homes in the 9th Ward (which predictably flooded, as it flooded 40 years ago during Hurricane Betsy) drowned or now find themselves trapped—starved and dying of dehydration.
And the others who stayed behind, unfortunately, are those who terrorize New Orleans on a low-grade level on a good day—and have now taken over the stricken city. What’s happened is the predictable civil deterioration of a city whose fragile civil infrastructure can’t control or contain its core criminal class in peacetime.
Katrina didn’t turn innocent citizens into desperate criminals. This week’s looters (not those who took small supplies of food and water for sustenance, but those who have trashed, burned, and shot their way through the city since Monday) are the same depraved individuals who have pushed New Orleans’ murder rate to several multiples above the national average in normal times. (New Orleans, without Katrina, would have likely ended 2005 with 330 or so murders—compared to about 65 in Boston, a city roughly the same in size.) Today may not be the best day to get into New Orleans’ intractable crime problem, but it’s necessary, since it explains how this week’s communications and policing vacuum so quickly created a perfect storm for the vicious lawlessness that has broken out.
During the mid-1990s, New Orleans made some progress in cutting down its murder rate from its one-time peak as the Murder Capital of America. With the help of the feds, the city weeded out the worst of its police force (including two murderers) and implemented some new policing techniques borrowed from successful cities like New York, including COMSTAT. But New Orleans—and the state judicial system—has never cemented a sustainable institutional infrastructure to build on early progress, and the murder rate had risen perceptibly again.
New Orleans, first off, doesn’t have the middle-class or affluent tax base to afford the professional police or prosecution force it needs—crime has created a vicious cycle, pushing out taxpayers who fund the police. Nor have the city and state cemented the command-and-control direction of financial and human resources that police, detectives, and prosecutors need to do their jobs.
In New York, the mayor, police, and prosecutors know that taking one killer off the streets means preventing more killings, because a murderer frequently murders again. In New Orleans, killers and other violent criminals remain free, because in many cases, they aren’t arrested or tried; conviction rates remain abysmal. The lawlessness these criminals create in pockets of the city breeds more killers and more lawlessness. Witnesses and crime victims in the inner city fear to come forward: they know that even if a criminal winds up arrested, his associates will be free to intimidate them.
On a normal day, those who make up New Orleans’ dangerous criminal class—yes, likely the same African-Americans we see looting now—terrorize their own communities. Once in a while, a spectacular crime makes headlines—the shooting death of a tourist just outside the French Quarter, or the rape and murder of a Tulane student. But day in and day out, New Orleans’ black criminal class victimizes other blacks. Churches put up billboards in the worst neighborhoods that plead: “Thou shalt not kill.” The inner-city buses shuttle what look like hundreds of war veterans around the city—young black men, many of them innocent victims, paralyzed in wheelchairs.
This week, this entrenched criminal class has freely roamed the streets—and terrorized everyone. On Monday, New Orleans still had food and water stocked in stores across the city, but young looters began sacking stores, trashing the needed food and stealing TVs, DVDs, and other equipment. If the uncoordinated, understaffed New Orleans police had even a prayer of keeping order, it was Monday. By Tuesday, the looters had armed themselves with ample weapons supplies available in stores all across the city; by Wednesday, the armed gangs, out of food and water like everyone else, were not only viciously dangerous but desperate, hungry, and thirsty.
But while the looters have reportedly killed police offers and have shot at rescue workers, they’re mainly victimizing, as usual, other poor blacks. The vicious looters aren’t the face of New Orleans’ poor blacks. Their victims are: the thousands of New Orleanians who made their way to shelter before the storm, and who rescued others and brought them to shelter during and after the storm—but who now cannot get the help they desperately need.
This week’s looting was predictable. When Hurricane Georges, another potentially catastrophic storm (it spared New Orleans at the last minute) was about to hit in 1998, I foolishly refused to evacuate my Uptown apartment. More than one person said I should evacuate not due to the storm, but because looters would terrorize the city afterward.
Was this week’s looting preventable? Failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans’ officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the same time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now, those uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims—according to multiple accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter the city.
Armed marauders have now taken over every dry area of a deluged city. They’ve hampered rescue efforts: without wanton looting, there was at least a chance that individual police officers could have distributed food in stores to those who needed it most. And they’ve likely hampered rebuilding efforts down the road: they’ve smashed much of intact Uptown and the French Quarter, which will surely be a pyschological barrier for those who knew that the storm didn’t destroy their homes and their livelihoods—fellow citizens did.
Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco lost whatever fragile authority they ever had over New Orleans early Monday, as the waters still rose. The federal government was unacceptably slow at assessing a rapidly deteriorating situation. Now, no civil authorities can re-assert order in New Orleans. The city must be forcefully demilitarized, even as innocent victims literally starve. What has happened over the past week is an embarrassment to New Orleans—and to America.
A Perfect Storm of Lawlessness
New Orleans’ vicious looters aren’t the real face of the city’s poor—their victims are.
By Nicole Gelinas
1 September 2005
New Orleans hasn’t even been disarmed yet, but the story of those who looted, trashed, and terrorized the city this week is already being re-written. Al Sharpton went on MSNBC Thursday night to say that “looters are people who pay their taxes whose infrastructure caved in on them.” The final PC version of the story is likely to go like this: The desperate people left behind in New Orleans, nearly all black, had justification in brutally attacking their city because the help they frantically sought didn’t come.
In truth, the looters, rapists, and murderers who have terrorized New Orleans since Monday began their post-Katrina reign of terror a full day before the situation grew truly desperate—and it was their increasingly lawless behavior that kept willing but unarmed professional and volunteer rescue workers away from the city and from the poor people who needed saving.
Let’s go back to last Sunday morning—such a long time ago, it now seems. Most New Orleanians with means—the most resourceful poor, the middle class, and the affluent—left the city of nearly half-a-million residents that day, 24 hours before Katrina hit. They took planes, they drove, they hitchhiked, and some walked. Save for the home and business owners who valued their property more than their lives, most of the 100,000 or so who stayed behind were those not only poor in financial resources but in human capital as well.
Some who stayed behind are the New Orleanians who depend on the government on a good day—impoverished women, children, and elderly folks who went to the Superdome and to the Convention Center Sunday, expecting their government to take care of them. And those were the smart ones—those who moved rationally and proactively, despite a lack of transportation out of the city and a lack of government co-ordination, to secure their own physical safety. Thousands of others who stayed in their low-lying homes in the 9th Ward (which predictably flooded, as it flooded 40 years ago during Hurricane Betsy) drowned or now find themselves trapped—starved and dying of dehydration.
And the others who stayed behind, unfortunately, are those who terrorize New Orleans on a low-grade level on a good day—and have now taken over the stricken city. What’s happened is the predictable civil deterioration of a city whose fragile civil infrastructure can’t control or contain its core criminal class in peacetime.
Katrina didn’t turn innocent citizens into desperate criminals. This week’s looters (not those who took small supplies of food and water for sustenance, but those who have trashed, burned, and shot their way through the city since Monday) are the same depraved individuals who have pushed New Orleans’ murder rate to several multiples above the national average in normal times. (New Orleans, without Katrina, would have likely ended 2005 with 330 or so murders—compared to about 65 in Boston, a city roughly the same in size.) Today may not be the best day to get into New Orleans’ intractable crime problem, but it’s necessary, since it explains how this week’s communications and policing vacuum so quickly created a perfect storm for the vicious lawlessness that has broken out.
During the mid-1990s, New Orleans made some progress in cutting down its murder rate from its one-time peak as the Murder Capital of America. With the help of the feds, the city weeded out the worst of its police force (including two murderers) and implemented some new policing techniques borrowed from successful cities like New York, including COMSTAT. But New Orleans—and the state judicial system—has never cemented a sustainable institutional infrastructure to build on early progress, and the murder rate had risen perceptibly again.
New Orleans, first off, doesn’t have the middle-class or affluent tax base to afford the professional police or prosecution force it needs—crime has created a vicious cycle, pushing out taxpayers who fund the police. Nor have the city and state cemented the command-and-control direction of financial and human resources that police, detectives, and prosecutors need to do their jobs.
In New York, the mayor, police, and prosecutors know that taking one killer off the streets means preventing more killings, because a murderer frequently murders again. In New Orleans, killers and other violent criminals remain free, because in many cases, they aren’t arrested or tried; conviction rates remain abysmal. The lawlessness these criminals create in pockets of the city breeds more killers and more lawlessness. Witnesses and crime victims in the inner city fear to come forward: they know that even if a criminal winds up arrested, his associates will be free to intimidate them.
On a normal day, those who make up New Orleans’ dangerous criminal class—yes, likely the same African-Americans we see looting now—terrorize their own communities. Once in a while, a spectacular crime makes headlines—the shooting death of a tourist just outside the French Quarter, or the rape and murder of a Tulane student. But day in and day out, New Orleans’ black criminal class victimizes other blacks. Churches put up billboards in the worst neighborhoods that plead: “Thou shalt not kill.” The inner-city buses shuttle what look like hundreds of war veterans around the city—young black men, many of them innocent victims, paralyzed in wheelchairs.
This week, this entrenched criminal class has freely roamed the streets—and terrorized everyone. On Monday, New Orleans still had food and water stocked in stores across the city, but young looters began sacking stores, trashing the needed food and stealing TVs, DVDs, and other equipment. If the uncoordinated, understaffed New Orleans police had even a prayer of keeping order, it was Monday. By Tuesday, the looters had armed themselves with ample weapons supplies available in stores all across the city; by Wednesday, the armed gangs, out of food and water like everyone else, were not only viciously dangerous but desperate, hungry, and thirsty.
But while the looters have reportedly killed police offers and have shot at rescue workers, they’re mainly victimizing, as usual, other poor blacks. The vicious looters aren’t the face of New Orleans’ poor blacks. Their victims are: the thousands of New Orleanians who made their way to shelter before the storm, and who rescued others and brought them to shelter during and after the storm—but who now cannot get the help they desperately need.
This week’s looting was predictable. When Hurricane Georges, another potentially catastrophic storm (it spared New Orleans at the last minute) was about to hit in 1998, I foolishly refused to evacuate my Uptown apartment. More than one person said I should evacuate not due to the storm, but because looters would terrorize the city afterward.
Was this week’s looting preventable? Failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans’ officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the same time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now, those uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims—according to multiple accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter the city.
Armed marauders have now taken over every dry area of a deluged city. They’ve hampered rescue efforts: without wanton looting, there was at least a chance that individual police officers could have distributed food in stores to those who needed it most. And they’ve likely hampered rebuilding efforts down the road: they’ve smashed much of intact Uptown and the French Quarter, which will surely be a pyschological barrier for those who knew that the storm didn’t destroy their homes and their livelihoods—fellow citizens did.
Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco lost whatever fragile authority they ever had over New Orleans early Monday, as the waters still rose. The federal government was unacceptably slow at assessing a rapidly deteriorating situation. Now, no civil authorities can re-assert order in New Orleans. The city must be forcefully demilitarized, even as innocent victims literally starve. What has happened over the past week is an embarrassment to New Orleans—and to America.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen?
'Times-Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues
By Will Bunch
Published: August 31, 2005 9:00 PM ET
PHILADELPHIAEven though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters may still keep rising in New Orleans. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until it's level with the massive lake.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."
In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
"That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said."
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late.
One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday.
The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."
Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."
'Times-Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues
By Will Bunch
Published: August 31, 2005 9:00 PM ET
PHILADELPHIAEven though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters may still keep rising in New Orleans. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until it's level with the massive lake.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."
In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
"That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said."
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late.
One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday.
The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."
Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."
From The Associated Press:
Politicians Failed Storm Victims
By Ron Fournier
WASHINGTON (AP) - At every turn, political leaders failed Katrina's victims. They didn't strengthen the levees. They ceded the streets to marauding looters. They left dead bodies to rot or bloat. Thousands suffered or died for lack of water, food and hope. Who's at fault?
There's plenty of blame to go around - the White House, Congress, federal agencies, local governments, police and even residents of the Gulf Coast who refused orders to evacuate. But all the finger-pointing misses the point: Politicians and the people they lead too often ignore danger signs until a crisis hits.
It wasn't a secret that levees built to keep New Orleans from flooding could not withstand a major hurricane, but government leaders never found the money to fully shore up the network of earthen, steel and concrete barriers.
Both the Bush and Clinton administrations proposed budgets that low-balled the needs. Local politicians grabbed whatever money they could and declared victory. And the public didn't exactly demand tax increases to pay for flood-control and hurricane-protection projects.
Just last year, the Army Corps of Engineers sought $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans. The White House slashed the request to about $40 million. Congress finally approved $42.2 million, less than half of the agency's request.
Yet the lawmakers and Bush agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-laden highway bill that included more than 6,000 pet projects for lawmakers. Congress spent money on dust control for Arkansas roads, a warehouse on the Erie Canal and a $231 million bridge to a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.
How could Washington spend $231 million on a bridge to nowhere - and not find $42 million for hurricane and flood projects in New Orleans? It's a matter of power and politics.
Alaska is represented by Republican Rep. Don Young, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, and Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, a senior member of the all-important Senate Appropriations Committee. Louisiana's delegation holds far less sway.
Once the hurricane hit, relief trickled into the Gulf Coast. Even Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown, whose agency is in charge of disaster response, pronounced the initial results unacceptable.
The hurricane was the first major test of FEMA since it became part of the Homeland Security Department, a massive new bureaucracy that many feared would make the well-respected FEMA another sluggish federal agency.
Looting soon broke out as local police stood by. Some police didn't want to stop people from getting badly needed food and water. Others seemed to be overwhelmed. Thousands of National Guard troops were ordered to the Gulf Coast, but their ranks have been drastically thinned by the war in Iraq.
On top of all this, Katrina is one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the United States. The best leaders running the most efficient agencies would have been sharply challenged.
"Look at all they've had to deal with," former President Clinton told CNN shortly after joining former President Bush on a fundraising campaign for hurricane relief. "I'm telling you, nobody every thought it would happen like this."
That's not true. Experts had predicted for years that a major hurricane would eventually hit New Orleans, swamping the levees and filling the bowl-shaped city with polluted water. The politicians are doing what they do in time of crisis - shifting the blame.
"The truth will speak for itself," Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said of potential lapses by government. Later, her office blamed the White House for budget cuts.
If it's not the Republicans' fault, perhaps some in Washington would like to blame New Orleans itself. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., questioned whether a city that lies below sea level should be rebuilt. "That doesn't make sense to me," he said.
But for anybody living - or dying - in the devastated region, there are far too many villains to name.
"We're out here like pure animals. We don't have help," the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center.
Robin Lovin, ethics professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said it's too convenient to blame one branch of government when they are all, at some level, failing people. From Watergate to Clinton's impeachment, governmental institutions have disappointed the public.
"Bush, Congress, the mayor - each of them are symptoms of a bigger problem, that we don't have accountability for disasters or challenges of this scale," Lovin said. "That's all the public wants in trying times - accountability."
Thus, Americans are doing what people do when government lets them down - they're turning to each other. Donations are pouring into charities. Internet sites are being used to find relatives. Residents of far-off states are opening their homes to victims.
The community spirit is reminiscent of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. So is the second-guessing. It will happen again after the next crisis. You've heard the warnings: a cataclysmic California earthquake, another terrorist strike, a flu pandemic, a nuclear plant meltdown, a tsunami, the failure to address mounting U.S. debt - and on and on.
Will the public and its leaders be better prepared next time?
Politicians Failed Storm Victims
By Ron Fournier
WASHINGTON (AP) - At every turn, political leaders failed Katrina's victims. They didn't strengthen the levees. They ceded the streets to marauding looters. They left dead bodies to rot or bloat. Thousands suffered or died for lack of water, food and hope. Who's at fault?
There's plenty of blame to go around - the White House, Congress, federal agencies, local governments, police and even residents of the Gulf Coast who refused orders to evacuate. But all the finger-pointing misses the point: Politicians and the people they lead too often ignore danger signs until a crisis hits.
It wasn't a secret that levees built to keep New Orleans from flooding could not withstand a major hurricane, but government leaders never found the money to fully shore up the network of earthen, steel and concrete barriers.
Both the Bush and Clinton administrations proposed budgets that low-balled the needs. Local politicians grabbed whatever money they could and declared victory. And the public didn't exactly demand tax increases to pay for flood-control and hurricane-protection projects.
Just last year, the Army Corps of Engineers sought $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans. The White House slashed the request to about $40 million. Congress finally approved $42.2 million, less than half of the agency's request.
Yet the lawmakers and Bush agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-laden highway bill that included more than 6,000 pet projects for lawmakers. Congress spent money on dust control for Arkansas roads, a warehouse on the Erie Canal and a $231 million bridge to a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.
How could Washington spend $231 million on a bridge to nowhere - and not find $42 million for hurricane and flood projects in New Orleans? It's a matter of power and politics.
Alaska is represented by Republican Rep. Don Young, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, and Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, a senior member of the all-important Senate Appropriations Committee. Louisiana's delegation holds far less sway.
Once the hurricane hit, relief trickled into the Gulf Coast. Even Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown, whose agency is in charge of disaster response, pronounced the initial results unacceptable.
The hurricane was the first major test of FEMA since it became part of the Homeland Security Department, a massive new bureaucracy that many feared would make the well-respected FEMA another sluggish federal agency.
Looting soon broke out as local police stood by. Some police didn't want to stop people from getting badly needed food and water. Others seemed to be overwhelmed. Thousands of National Guard troops were ordered to the Gulf Coast, but their ranks have been drastically thinned by the war in Iraq.
On top of all this, Katrina is one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the United States. The best leaders running the most efficient agencies would have been sharply challenged.
"Look at all they've had to deal with," former President Clinton told CNN shortly after joining former President Bush on a fundraising campaign for hurricane relief. "I'm telling you, nobody every thought it would happen like this."
That's not true. Experts had predicted for years that a major hurricane would eventually hit New Orleans, swamping the levees and filling the bowl-shaped city with polluted water. The politicians are doing what they do in time of crisis - shifting the blame.
"The truth will speak for itself," Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said of potential lapses by government. Later, her office blamed the White House for budget cuts.
If it's not the Republicans' fault, perhaps some in Washington would like to blame New Orleans itself. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., questioned whether a city that lies below sea level should be rebuilt. "That doesn't make sense to me," he said.
But for anybody living - or dying - in the devastated region, there are far too many villains to name.
"We're out here like pure animals. We don't have help," the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center.
Robin Lovin, ethics professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said it's too convenient to blame one branch of government when they are all, at some level, failing people. From Watergate to Clinton's impeachment, governmental institutions have disappointed the public.
"Bush, Congress, the mayor - each of them are symptoms of a bigger problem, that we don't have accountability for disasters or challenges of this scale," Lovin said. "That's all the public wants in trying times - accountability."
Thus, Americans are doing what people do when government lets them down - they're turning to each other. Donations are pouring into charities. Internet sites are being used to find relatives. Residents of far-off states are opening their homes to victims.
The community spirit is reminiscent of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. So is the second-guessing. It will happen again after the next crisis. You've heard the warnings: a cataclysmic California earthquake, another terrorist strike, a flu pandemic, a nuclear plant meltdown, a tsunami, the failure to address mounting U.S. debt - and on and on.
Will the public and its leaders be better prepared next time?
From The News & Observer:
Goodmon says: Get it together
By Jonathan B. Cox
PINEHURST -- Jim Goodmon, one of the Triangle's most powerful corporate executives, blistered the business community Wednesday, saying leaders are unconcerned about problems facing the state.
North Carolina is failing to progress, said Goodmon, chief executive of Capitol Broadcasting, owner of the Triangle's CBS and Fox television affiliates. It is struggling with a flawed education system, low worker morale and an inadequate juvenile court system.
And it lacks a plan to fix them, he said. Politicians have failed to develop a strategy for improvements, even incremental ones.
"It's our fault," Goodmon told attendees at a conference of the N.C. Technology Association in Pinehurst. "It's our fault as business leaders, because we don't hold our elected officials accountable. Let's get together and come up with some really good efforts to help somebody other than ourselves."
Goodmon is one of the most prominent members of the region's business community, with his hand in a wide range of ventures. In addition to his media empire, Goodmon also owns the Durham Bulls baseball team and is the developer behind the renaissance at the American Tobacco complex -- a shuttered tobacco plant in downtown Durham that has become a thriving corporate and retail campus.
Goodmon is known for speaking his mind, and speaking off the cuff. He had no prepared speech Wednesday, only a spiral-bound notebook. The conference, sponsored by the biggest trade group for North Carolina technology companies, focused on building competitiveness through innovation.
Goodmon, whose speech went a little off track, said that he was especially fired up because he was "so ... [darn] mad about the lottery."
Goodmon opposed the lottery, which Gov. Mike Easley signed into law Wednesday. The lottery is billed as a way to boost education spending, but Goodmon said that is unlikely.
Another prominent businessman, and the Triangle's wealthiest resident, had a similar view.
"It will help for about a year," Jim Goodnight, the billionaire chief executive of SAS, the world's largest private software developer, said in an interview after speaking at the Pinehurst conference. "The money now set aside for education will be spent on something else."
What's more, Goodnight, a statistician by training, said lotteries aren't kind to those who play.
"It's certainly the most unfair game ever devised by man," he said, if fairness is measured by how much cash can be recovered.
With the card game blackjack, a gambler will get back about 99.5 percent of the money wagered, he said. Those who buy a lottery ticket will recoup only about 10 percent of the money they bet.
Goodnight has been an outspoken advocate of changes to the state's education system, going so far as to build a school in Cary, where SAS is based, to implement technology-tailored curricula. He advocates smaller classes and a bigger emphasis on technology.
"Obviously, if we are not producing a work force for a 21st-century economy, we will not be able to attract or retain the industry we need," Goodnight said.
Problems in the state go beyond education, Goodmon said. Consider state workers. Their health benefits have been cut amid rising costs, pay raises have been minimal during the budget crunch and people call state employees lazy.
That's not a conducive environment for attracting the best and brightest to government work, Goodmon said.
"If you wanted to make a list of how can I make sure my work force hates working for me," elected officials have done it, he said.
But those aren't the issues that are drawing the attention of business leaders. Instead, the biggest corporate lobbying group -- N.C. Citizens for Business and Industry -- is pushing to lower taxes for industry and the wealthiest residents of the state.
"That plays really well," Goodmon said. "I would say we've lost our credibility with the folks, with the community."
Phil Kirk, president of the business group, couldn't be reached for comment.
Goodmon was short on specifics during much of his speech. He did encourage business leaders to vote against politicians who don't have a plan for fixing problems in the state and urged them to work with government to craft and promote solutions to vexing issues.
Goodmon says: Get it together
By Jonathan B. Cox
PINEHURST -- Jim Goodmon, one of the Triangle's most powerful corporate executives, blistered the business community Wednesday, saying leaders are unconcerned about problems facing the state.
North Carolina is failing to progress, said Goodmon, chief executive of Capitol Broadcasting, owner of the Triangle's CBS and Fox television affiliates. It is struggling with a flawed education system, low worker morale and an inadequate juvenile court system.
And it lacks a plan to fix them, he said. Politicians have failed to develop a strategy for improvements, even incremental ones.
"It's our fault," Goodmon told attendees at a conference of the N.C. Technology Association in Pinehurst. "It's our fault as business leaders, because we don't hold our elected officials accountable. Let's get together and come up with some really good efforts to help somebody other than ourselves."
Goodmon is one of the most prominent members of the region's business community, with his hand in a wide range of ventures. In addition to his media empire, Goodmon also owns the Durham Bulls baseball team and is the developer behind the renaissance at the American Tobacco complex -- a shuttered tobacco plant in downtown Durham that has become a thriving corporate and retail campus.
Goodmon is known for speaking his mind, and speaking off the cuff. He had no prepared speech Wednesday, only a spiral-bound notebook. The conference, sponsored by the biggest trade group for North Carolina technology companies, focused on building competitiveness through innovation.
Goodmon, whose speech went a little off track, said that he was especially fired up because he was "so ... [darn] mad about the lottery."
Goodmon opposed the lottery, which Gov. Mike Easley signed into law Wednesday. The lottery is billed as a way to boost education spending, but Goodmon said that is unlikely.
Another prominent businessman, and the Triangle's wealthiest resident, had a similar view.
"It will help for about a year," Jim Goodnight, the billionaire chief executive of SAS, the world's largest private software developer, said in an interview after speaking at the Pinehurst conference. "The money now set aside for education will be spent on something else."
What's more, Goodnight, a statistician by training, said lotteries aren't kind to those who play.
"It's certainly the most unfair game ever devised by man," he said, if fairness is measured by how much cash can be recovered.
With the card game blackjack, a gambler will get back about 99.5 percent of the money wagered, he said. Those who buy a lottery ticket will recoup only about 10 percent of the money they bet.
Goodnight has been an outspoken advocate of changes to the state's education system, going so far as to build a school in Cary, where SAS is based, to implement technology-tailored curricula. He advocates smaller classes and a bigger emphasis on technology.
"Obviously, if we are not producing a work force for a 21st-century economy, we will not be able to attract or retain the industry we need," Goodnight said.
Problems in the state go beyond education, Goodmon said. Consider state workers. Their health benefits have been cut amid rising costs, pay raises have been minimal during the budget crunch and people call state employees lazy.
That's not a conducive environment for attracting the best and brightest to government work, Goodmon said.
"If you wanted to make a list of how can I make sure my work force hates working for me," elected officials have done it, he said.
But those aren't the issues that are drawing the attention of business leaders. Instead, the biggest corporate lobbying group -- N.C. Citizens for Business and Industry -- is pushing to lower taxes for industry and the wealthiest residents of the state.
"That plays really well," Goodmon said. "I would say we've lost our credibility with the folks, with the community."
Phil Kirk, president of the business group, couldn't be reached for comment.
Goodmon was short on specifics during much of his speech. He did encourage business leaders to vote against politicians who don't have a plan for fixing problems in the state and urged them to work with government to craft and promote solutions to vexing issues.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
A fair and balanced article referencing Intelligent Design, from an unexpected source.
Just Check the ID
By Sally Jenkins
Monday, August 29, 2005
Athletes do things that seem transcendental -- and they can also do things that are transcendentally stupid. They choke, trip and dope. Nevertheless, they possess a deep physical knowledge the rest of us can learn from, bound as we are by our ordinary, trudging, cumbersome selves. Ever get the feeling that they are in touch with something that we aren't? What is that thing? Could it be their random, mutant talent, or could it be evidence of, gulp, intelligent design?
The sports section would not seem to be a place to discuss intelligent design, the notion that nature shows signs of an intrinsic intelligence too highly organized to be solely the product of evolution. It's an odd intersection, admittedly. You might ask, what's so intelligently designed about ballplayers (or sportswriters)? Jose Canseco once let a baseball hit him in the head and bounce over the fence for a home run. Former Washington Redskins quarterback Gus Frerotte gave himself a concussion by running helmet-first into a wall in a fit of exuberance. But athletes also are explorers of the boundaries of physiology and neuroscience, and some intelligent design proponents therefore suggest they can be walking human laboratories for their theories.
First, let's get rid of the idea that ID (intelligent design) is a form of sly creationism. It isn't. ID is unfairly confused with the movement to teach creationism in public schools. The most serious ID proponents are complexity theorists, legitimate scientists among them, who believe that strict Darwinism and especially neo-Darwinism (the notion that all of our qualities are the product of random mutation) is inadequate to explain the high level of organization at work in the world. Creationists are attracted to ID, and one of its founding fathers, University of California law professor Phillip Johnson, is a devout Presbyterian. But you don't have to be a creationist to think there might be something to it, or to agree with Johnson when he says, "The human body is packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and evolutionary gradualism can't account for that."
The idea, so contentious in other contexts, actually rings a loud bell in sports. Athletes often talk of feeling an absolute fulfillment of purpose, of something powerful moving through them or in them that is not just the result of training. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a neuroscientist and research professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, is a believer in ID, or as he prefers to call it, "intrinsic intelligence." Schwartz wants to launch a study of NASCAR drivers, to better understand their extraordinary focus. He finds Darwinism, as it applies to a high-performance athlete such as Tony Stewart, to be problematic. To claim that Stewart's mental state as he handles a high-speed car "is a result of nothing more than random processes coming together in a machine-like way is not a coherent explanation," Schwartz said.
Instead, Schwartz theorizes that when a great athlete focuses, he or she may be "making a connection with something deep within nature itself, which lends itself to deepening our intelligence." It's fascinating thought. And Schwartz would like to prove it's scientifically justifiable.
Steve Stenstrom, who played quarterback for the Bears and 49ers, works as a religious-life adviser to athletes at Stanford, where he organized a controversial forum on intelligent design last May. "I don't think it's a reach at all," he said. "Talk to any athlete, and if they really are honest, they realize that while they have worked and trained, and put a lot of effort into being great, they started with some raw material that was advantageous to them, and that it was meant to work a certain way. We all recognize that we have a certain design element."
A strict Darwinist would suggest this is an illusion and point out that there are obvious flaws in the body. Peter Weyand, a researcher in kinesiology and biomechanics at Rice University, observes, "Humans in the realm of the animal kingdom aren't terribly athletic."
Racehorses are much faster, and, for that matter, so are hummingbirds. We seem to have a basic quest to go higher, farther, faster -- one of our distinguishing features is that we push our limits for a reason other than survival, and construct artificial scales of achievement -- but we have some built-in debilities. Human muscle can only get so strong, it will only produce as much force as it has area, about 3.5 kilograms of weight per square centimeter. "We're endowed with what we have by virtue of evolution, and it's not like engineering where we can pick materials and throw out what doesn't work," Weyand said.
Our bodies break down a lot. If we were designed more intelligently, presumably we wouldn't have osteoporosis or broken hips when we get old. Some evolutionists suppose that the process through which people evolved from four-legged creatures to two, has had negative orthopedic consequences.
We are flawed cardiovascularly. Horses carry much more oxygen in their blood, and have a storage system for red blood cells in their spleens, a natural system of blood doping. Humans don't. Also, while a lot of aerobics can make our hearts bigger, our lungs are unique. They don't adapt to training. They're fixed. We're stuck with them, and can only envy the antelopes.
None of which satisfies Schwartz, or Stenstrom. "I don't think we can attach athletic design to 'better' design," Stenstrom said. ". . . Some people are designed with an ear for music, others with a capacity to think deep thoughts about the world."
Schwarz finds little or nothing in natural selection to explain the ability of athletes to reinterpret physical events from moment to moment, the super-awareness that they seem to possess. He has a term for it, the ability to be an "impartial spectator" to your own actions. "The capacity to stand outside yourself and be aware of where you are," he said. "Deep within the complexities of molecular organization lies an intrinsic intelligence that accounts for that deep organization, and is something that we can connect with through the willful focus of our minds," he theorizes.
Crackpot speculation? Maybe -- maybe not. ID certainly lacks a body of scientific data, and opponents are right to argue that the idea isn't developed enough to be taught as equivalent to evolution. But Darwin himself admitted he didn't know everything about everything. "When I see a tail feather on a peacock, it makes me sick," he once said, before he understood it was for mating. And try telling a baseball fan that pure Darwinism explains Joe DiMaggio. As Tommy Lasorda once said, "If you said to God, 'Create someone who was what a baseball player should be,' God would have created Joe DiMaggio -- and he did."
None of this is to say that we shouldn't be wary of the uses for which ID might be hijacked. In the last year, numerous states have experienced some sort of anti-evolution movement. That makes it all the more important for the layman to distinguish the various gradations between evolutionists, serious scientists who are interested in ID, "neo-Creos," and Biblical literalists. One of the things we learn in a grade school science class is a concrete way of thinking, a sound, systematic way of exploring the natural world.
But science class also teaches us how crucial it is to maintain adventurousness, and surely it's worthwhile to suggest that an athlete in motion conveys an inkling of something marvelous in nature that perhaps isn't explained by mere molecules. Johann Kepler was the first to accurately plot the laws of planetary motion. But he only got there because he believed that their movements, if translated musically, would result in a celestial harmony. He also believed in astrology. And then there was Albert Einstein, who remarked that "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." Historically, scientific theorists are sandlot athletes, drawing up plays in the dirt.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Just Check the ID
By Sally Jenkins
Monday, August 29, 2005
Athletes do things that seem transcendental -- and they can also do things that are transcendentally stupid. They choke, trip and dope. Nevertheless, they possess a deep physical knowledge the rest of us can learn from, bound as we are by our ordinary, trudging, cumbersome selves. Ever get the feeling that they are in touch with something that we aren't? What is that thing? Could it be their random, mutant talent, or could it be evidence of, gulp, intelligent design?
The sports section would not seem to be a place to discuss intelligent design, the notion that nature shows signs of an intrinsic intelligence too highly organized to be solely the product of evolution. It's an odd intersection, admittedly. You might ask, what's so intelligently designed about ballplayers (or sportswriters)? Jose Canseco once let a baseball hit him in the head and bounce over the fence for a home run. Former Washington Redskins quarterback Gus Frerotte gave himself a concussion by running helmet-first into a wall in a fit of exuberance. But athletes also are explorers of the boundaries of physiology and neuroscience, and some intelligent design proponents therefore suggest they can be walking human laboratories for their theories.
First, let's get rid of the idea that ID (intelligent design) is a form of sly creationism. It isn't. ID is unfairly confused with the movement to teach creationism in public schools. The most serious ID proponents are complexity theorists, legitimate scientists among them, who believe that strict Darwinism and especially neo-Darwinism (the notion that all of our qualities are the product of random mutation) is inadequate to explain the high level of organization at work in the world. Creationists are attracted to ID, and one of its founding fathers, University of California law professor Phillip Johnson, is a devout Presbyterian. But you don't have to be a creationist to think there might be something to it, or to agree with Johnson when he says, "The human body is packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and evolutionary gradualism can't account for that."
The idea, so contentious in other contexts, actually rings a loud bell in sports. Athletes often talk of feeling an absolute fulfillment of purpose, of something powerful moving through them or in them that is not just the result of training. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a neuroscientist and research professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, is a believer in ID, or as he prefers to call it, "intrinsic intelligence." Schwartz wants to launch a study of NASCAR drivers, to better understand their extraordinary focus. He finds Darwinism, as it applies to a high-performance athlete such as Tony Stewart, to be problematic. To claim that Stewart's mental state as he handles a high-speed car "is a result of nothing more than random processes coming together in a machine-like way is not a coherent explanation," Schwartz said.
Instead, Schwartz theorizes that when a great athlete focuses, he or she may be "making a connection with something deep within nature itself, which lends itself to deepening our intelligence." It's fascinating thought. And Schwartz would like to prove it's scientifically justifiable.
Steve Stenstrom, who played quarterback for the Bears and 49ers, works as a religious-life adviser to athletes at Stanford, where he organized a controversial forum on intelligent design last May. "I don't think it's a reach at all," he said. "Talk to any athlete, and if they really are honest, they realize that while they have worked and trained, and put a lot of effort into being great, they started with some raw material that was advantageous to them, and that it was meant to work a certain way. We all recognize that we have a certain design element."
A strict Darwinist would suggest this is an illusion and point out that there are obvious flaws in the body. Peter Weyand, a researcher in kinesiology and biomechanics at Rice University, observes, "Humans in the realm of the animal kingdom aren't terribly athletic."
Racehorses are much faster, and, for that matter, so are hummingbirds. We seem to have a basic quest to go higher, farther, faster -- one of our distinguishing features is that we push our limits for a reason other than survival, and construct artificial scales of achievement -- but we have some built-in debilities. Human muscle can only get so strong, it will only produce as much force as it has area, about 3.5 kilograms of weight per square centimeter. "We're endowed with what we have by virtue of evolution, and it's not like engineering where we can pick materials and throw out what doesn't work," Weyand said.
Our bodies break down a lot. If we were designed more intelligently, presumably we wouldn't have osteoporosis or broken hips when we get old. Some evolutionists suppose that the process through which people evolved from four-legged creatures to two, has had negative orthopedic consequences.
We are flawed cardiovascularly. Horses carry much more oxygen in their blood, and have a storage system for red blood cells in their spleens, a natural system of blood doping. Humans don't. Also, while a lot of aerobics can make our hearts bigger, our lungs are unique. They don't adapt to training. They're fixed. We're stuck with them, and can only envy the antelopes.
None of which satisfies Schwartz, or Stenstrom. "I don't think we can attach athletic design to 'better' design," Stenstrom said. ". . . Some people are designed with an ear for music, others with a capacity to think deep thoughts about the world."
Schwarz finds little or nothing in natural selection to explain the ability of athletes to reinterpret physical events from moment to moment, the super-awareness that they seem to possess. He has a term for it, the ability to be an "impartial spectator" to your own actions. "The capacity to stand outside yourself and be aware of where you are," he said. "Deep within the complexities of molecular organization lies an intrinsic intelligence that accounts for that deep organization, and is something that we can connect with through the willful focus of our minds," he theorizes.
Crackpot speculation? Maybe -- maybe not. ID certainly lacks a body of scientific data, and opponents are right to argue that the idea isn't developed enough to be taught as equivalent to evolution. But Darwin himself admitted he didn't know everything about everything. "When I see a tail feather on a peacock, it makes me sick," he once said, before he understood it was for mating. And try telling a baseball fan that pure Darwinism explains Joe DiMaggio. As Tommy Lasorda once said, "If you said to God, 'Create someone who was what a baseball player should be,' God would have created Joe DiMaggio -- and he did."
None of this is to say that we shouldn't be wary of the uses for which ID might be hijacked. In the last year, numerous states have experienced some sort of anti-evolution movement. That makes it all the more important for the layman to distinguish the various gradations between evolutionists, serious scientists who are interested in ID, "neo-Creos," and Biblical literalists. One of the things we learn in a grade school science class is a concrete way of thinking, a sound, systematic way of exploring the natural world.
But science class also teaches us how crucial it is to maintain adventurousness, and surely it's worthwhile to suggest that an athlete in motion conveys an inkling of something marvelous in nature that perhaps isn't explained by mere molecules. Johann Kepler was the first to accurately plot the laws of planetary motion. But he only got there because he believed that their movements, if translated musically, would result in a celestial harmony. He also believed in astrology. And then there was Albert Einstein, who remarked that "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." Historically, scientific theorists are sandlot athletes, drawing up plays in the dirt.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
How New Orleans Was Lost
By Paul Craig Roberts
Chalk up the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush’s Iraq war.
There were not enough helicopters to repair the breeched levees and rescue people trapped by rising water. Nor are there enough Louisiana National Guards available to help with rescue efforts and to patrol against looting.
The situation is the same in Mississippi.
The National Guard and helicopters are off on a fool's mission in Iraq.
The National Guard is in Iraq because fanatical neoconservatives in the Bush administration were determined to invade the Middle East and because the incompetent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refused to listen to the generals, who told him there were not enough regular troops available to do the job.
After the invasion, the arrogant Rumsfeld found out that the generals were right. The National Guard was called up to fill in the gaping gaps.
Now the Guardsmen, trapped in the Iraqi quagmire, are watching on TV the families they left behind trapped by rising waters and wondering if the floating bodies are family members. None know where their dislocated families are, but, shades of Fallujah, they do see their destroyed homes.
The mayor of New Orleans was counting on helicopters to put in place massive sandbags to repair the levee. However, someone called the few helicopters away to rescue people from rooftops. The rising water overwhelmed the massive pumping stations, and New Orleans disappeared under deep water.
What a terrible casualty of the Iraqi war—one of our oldest and most beautiful cities, a famous city, a historic city. The World Trade Towers count as little compared to the loss of New Orleans.
Distracted by its phony war on terrorism, the US government had made no preparations in the event Hurricane Katarina brought catastrophe to New Orleans. No contingency plan existed. Only now after the disaster are FEMA and the Corp of Engineers trying to assemble the material and equipment to save New Orleans from the fate of Atlantis.
Even worse, articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and public statements by emergency management chiefs in New Orleans make it clear that the Bush administration slashed the funding for the Corp of Engineers’ projects to strengthen and raise the New Orleans levees and diverted the money to the Iraq war.
Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune (June 8, 2004): "It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Why can’t the US government focus on America’s needs and leave other countries alone? Why are American troops in Iraq instead of protecting our own borders from a mass invasion by illegal immigrants? Why are American helicopters blowing up Iraqi homes instead of saving American homes in New Orleans?
How can the Bush administration be so incompetent as to expose Americans at home to dire risks by exhausting American resources in foolish foreign adventures? What kind of "homeland security" is this?
All Bush has achieved by invading Iraq is to kill and wound thousands of people while destroying America’s reputation. The only beneficiaries are oil companies capitalizing on a good excuse to jack up the price of gasoline and Osama bin Laden’s recruitment.
What we have is a Republican war for oil company profits while New Orleans sinks beneath the waters.
By Paul Craig Roberts
Chalk up the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush’s Iraq war.
There were not enough helicopters to repair the breeched levees and rescue people trapped by rising water. Nor are there enough Louisiana National Guards available to help with rescue efforts and to patrol against looting.
The situation is the same in Mississippi.
The National Guard and helicopters are off on a fool's mission in Iraq.
The National Guard is in Iraq because fanatical neoconservatives in the Bush administration were determined to invade the Middle East and because the incompetent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refused to listen to the generals, who told him there were not enough regular troops available to do the job.
After the invasion, the arrogant Rumsfeld found out that the generals were right. The National Guard was called up to fill in the gaping gaps.
Now the Guardsmen, trapped in the Iraqi quagmire, are watching on TV the families they left behind trapped by rising waters and wondering if the floating bodies are family members. None know where their dislocated families are, but, shades of Fallujah, they do see their destroyed homes.
The mayor of New Orleans was counting on helicopters to put in place massive sandbags to repair the levee. However, someone called the few helicopters away to rescue people from rooftops. The rising water overwhelmed the massive pumping stations, and New Orleans disappeared under deep water.
What a terrible casualty of the Iraqi war—one of our oldest and most beautiful cities, a famous city, a historic city. The World Trade Towers count as little compared to the loss of New Orleans.
Distracted by its phony war on terrorism, the US government had made no preparations in the event Hurricane Katarina brought catastrophe to New Orleans. No contingency plan existed. Only now after the disaster are FEMA and the Corp of Engineers trying to assemble the material and equipment to save New Orleans from the fate of Atlantis.
Even worse, articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and public statements by emergency management chiefs in New Orleans make it clear that the Bush administration slashed the funding for the Corp of Engineers’ projects to strengthen and raise the New Orleans levees and diverted the money to the Iraq war.
Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune (June 8, 2004): "It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Why can’t the US government focus on America’s needs and leave other countries alone? Why are American troops in Iraq instead of protecting our own borders from a mass invasion by illegal immigrants? Why are American helicopters blowing up Iraqi homes instead of saving American homes in New Orleans?
How can the Bush administration be so incompetent as to expose Americans at home to dire risks by exhausting American resources in foolish foreign adventures? What kind of "homeland security" is this?
All Bush has achieved by invading Iraq is to kill and wound thousands of people while destroying America’s reputation. The only beneficiaries are oil companies capitalizing on a good excuse to jack up the price of gasoline and Osama bin Laden’s recruitment.
What we have is a Republican war for oil company profits while New Orleans sinks beneath the waters.
From View from the Right:
Sauron's forces gathering in the East—
sorry, I mean Bush and allies pushing for open borders
By Lawrence Auster
John O’Sullivan has a useful article in National Review (available online for subscribers only) summing up the current, churning state of the immigration issue, with President Bush, Sen. McCain and others mobilizing more furiously than ever to open America’s borders, despite the desire of a large majority of Americans that immigration be reduced rather than increased. It’s worth underscoring that Bush and his allies of both parties are still working to pass the most extreme plank of his January 7, 2004 proposal, which I have called the most radical proposal ever made by a U.S. president, to admit to the United States anyone who can underbid an American for a job. Since I recently had a lively e-mail exchange with John Fund who strenuously objected to my calling him an open-borders advocate (I listened to his objections, then gave him my reasons why I still considered him such), my interest was especially piqued by this paragraph which hits the nail on the head:
Finally, writers previously known for their fervent enthusiasm for more or less open immigration—Tamar Jacoby in The Weekly Standard, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, and David Brooks in the New York Times—have suddenly reinvented themselves as “realistic” immigration reformers. They are worried that immigration laws are routinely flouted and call for a balanced response to this illegality. This balance turns out to be legalizing illegals already here (maybe with fines and waiting periods to show we mean business), having a guest-worker program that would admit new immigrants in line with business demand, and then cracking down on border security. Exactly why we would need a border crackdown when almost anyone could come here quite legally is an unanswered question; presumably this measure is included to soothe the American people into going along with a program that is otherwise simply a program for more immigration.
The next paragraph perfectly captures how Bush through his own religious fanaticism for open borders triggered the current, unprecedented debate:
Why has the sleeping dog of immigration suddenly woken up? To be sure, public concern over the social costs of illegal immigration is rising, especially in border states. But both the costs and the concern have been rising for two decades. Democrats can see that the GOP is vulnerable, especially in its core southern-white-male vote, over the low-wage competition posed by illegal immigration. Again, however, the GOP has been vulnerable in this way for several decades. Indeed, all the risks and dangers of uncontrolled immigration have been visible for some time. What has changed is that whereas previously the political elites were content to do nothing about it — in effect, to legalize it by stealth — the president has decided to legalize it openly and above board.
Sauron's forces gathering in the East—
sorry, I mean Bush and allies pushing for open borders
By Lawrence Auster
John O’Sullivan has a useful article in National Review (available online for subscribers only) summing up the current, churning state of the immigration issue, with President Bush, Sen. McCain and others mobilizing more furiously than ever to open America’s borders, despite the desire of a large majority of Americans that immigration be reduced rather than increased. It’s worth underscoring that Bush and his allies of both parties are still working to pass the most extreme plank of his January 7, 2004 proposal, which I have called the most radical proposal ever made by a U.S. president, to admit to the United States anyone who can underbid an American for a job. Since I recently had a lively e-mail exchange with John Fund who strenuously objected to my calling him an open-borders advocate (I listened to his objections, then gave him my reasons why I still considered him such), my interest was especially piqued by this paragraph which hits the nail on the head:
Finally, writers previously known for their fervent enthusiasm for more or less open immigration—Tamar Jacoby in The Weekly Standard, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, and David Brooks in the New York Times—have suddenly reinvented themselves as “realistic” immigration reformers. They are worried that immigration laws are routinely flouted and call for a balanced response to this illegality. This balance turns out to be legalizing illegals already here (maybe with fines and waiting periods to show we mean business), having a guest-worker program that would admit new immigrants in line with business demand, and then cracking down on border security. Exactly why we would need a border crackdown when almost anyone could come here quite legally is an unanswered question; presumably this measure is included to soothe the American people into going along with a program that is otherwise simply a program for more immigration.
The next paragraph perfectly captures how Bush through his own religious fanaticism for open borders triggered the current, unprecedented debate:
Why has the sleeping dog of immigration suddenly woken up? To be sure, public concern over the social costs of illegal immigration is rising, especially in border states. But both the costs and the concern have been rising for two decades. Democrats can see that the GOP is vulnerable, especially in its core southern-white-male vote, over the low-wage competition posed by illegal immigration. Again, however, the GOP has been vulnerable in this way for several decades. Indeed, all the risks and dangers of uncontrolled immigration have been visible for some time. What has changed is that whereas previously the political elites were content to do nothing about it — in effect, to legalize it by stealth — the president has decided to legalize it openly and above board.
If there is a Republican leader with any gonads, they'll be introducing bills to open ANWR to drilling as soon as Congress convenes. There isn't. They won't.
Gasoline prices
By Walter E. Williams
August 31, 2005
Nationally, the average per gallon price for regular gasoline is $2.50.
Are gasoline prices high? That's not the best way to ask that question. It's akin to asking, "Is Williams tall?" The average height of U.S. women is 5'4", and for men, it's 5'10". Being 6'4", I'd be tall relative to the general U.S. population. But put me on a basketball court, next to the average NBA basketball player, and I wouldn't be tall; I'd be short. So when we ask whether a price is high or low, we have to ask relative to what.
In 1950, a gallon of regular gasoline sold for about 30 cents; today, it's $2.50. Are today's gasoline prices high compared to 1950? Before answering that question, we have to take into account inflation that has occurred since 1950. Using my trusty inflation calculator (www.westegg.com/inflation), what cost 30 cents in 1950 costs $2.33 in 2005. In real terms, that means gasoline prices today are only slightly higher, about 8 percent, than they were in 1950. Up until the recent spike, gasoline prices have been considerably lower than 1950 prices.
Some Americans are demanding that the government do something about gasoline prices. Let's think back to 1979 when the government did do something. The Carter administration instituted price controls. What did we see? We saw long gasoline lines, and that's if the gas station hadn't run out of gas. It's estimated that Americans used about 150,000 barrels of oil per day idling their cars while waiting in line. In an effort to deal with long lines, the Carter administration introduced the harebrained scheme of odd and even days, whereby a motorist whose license tag started with an odd number could fill up on odd-numbered days, and those with an even number on even-numbered days.
With the recent spike in gas prices, the government has chosen not to pursue stupid policies of the past. As a result, we haven't seen shortages. We haven't seen long lines. We haven't seen gasoline station fights and riots. Why? Because price has been allowed to perform its valuable function -- that of equating demand with supply.
Our true supply problem is of our own doing. Large quantities of oil lie below the 20 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The amount of land proposed for oil drilling is less than 2,000 acres, less than one-half of one percent of ANWR. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are about 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil in ANWR. But environmentalists' hold on Congress has prevented us from drilling for it. They've also had success in restricting drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the shore of California. Another part of our energy problem has to do with refining capacity. Again, because of environmentalists' successful efforts, it's been 30 years since we've built a new oil refinery.
Few people realize that the U.S. is also a major oil-producing country. After Saudi Arabia, producing 10.4 million barrels a day, then Russia with 9.4 million barrels, the U.S. with 8.7 million barrels a day is the third-largest producer of oil. But we could produce more. Why aren't we? Producers have a variety of techniques to win monopoly power and higher profits that come with that power. What's a way for OPEC to gain more power? I have a hypothesis, for which I have no evidence, but it ought to be tested. If I were an OPEC big cheese, I'd easily conclude that I could restrict output and charge higher oil prices if somehow U.S. oil drilling were restricted. I'd see U.S. environmental groups as allies, and I would make "charitable" contributions to assist their efforts to reduce U.S. output. Again, I have no evidence, but it's a hypothesis worth examination.
Gasoline prices
By Walter E. Williams
August 31, 2005
Nationally, the average per gallon price for regular gasoline is $2.50.
Are gasoline prices high? That's not the best way to ask that question. It's akin to asking, "Is Williams tall?" The average height of U.S. women is 5'4", and for men, it's 5'10". Being 6'4", I'd be tall relative to the general U.S. population. But put me on a basketball court, next to the average NBA basketball player, and I wouldn't be tall; I'd be short. So when we ask whether a price is high or low, we have to ask relative to what.
In 1950, a gallon of regular gasoline sold for about 30 cents; today, it's $2.50. Are today's gasoline prices high compared to 1950? Before answering that question, we have to take into account inflation that has occurred since 1950. Using my trusty inflation calculator (www.westegg.com/inflation), what cost 30 cents in 1950 costs $2.33 in 2005. In real terms, that means gasoline prices today are only slightly higher, about 8 percent, than they were in 1950. Up until the recent spike, gasoline prices have been considerably lower than 1950 prices.
Some Americans are demanding that the government do something about gasoline prices. Let's think back to 1979 when the government did do something. The Carter administration instituted price controls. What did we see? We saw long gasoline lines, and that's if the gas station hadn't run out of gas. It's estimated that Americans used about 150,000 barrels of oil per day idling their cars while waiting in line. In an effort to deal with long lines, the Carter administration introduced the harebrained scheme of odd and even days, whereby a motorist whose license tag started with an odd number could fill up on odd-numbered days, and those with an even number on even-numbered days.
With the recent spike in gas prices, the government has chosen not to pursue stupid policies of the past. As a result, we haven't seen shortages. We haven't seen long lines. We haven't seen gasoline station fights and riots. Why? Because price has been allowed to perform its valuable function -- that of equating demand with supply.
Our true supply problem is of our own doing. Large quantities of oil lie below the 20 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The amount of land proposed for oil drilling is less than 2,000 acres, less than one-half of one percent of ANWR. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are about 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil in ANWR. But environmentalists' hold on Congress has prevented us from drilling for it. They've also had success in restricting drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the shore of California. Another part of our energy problem has to do with refining capacity. Again, because of environmentalists' successful efforts, it's been 30 years since we've built a new oil refinery.
Few people realize that the U.S. is also a major oil-producing country. After Saudi Arabia, producing 10.4 million barrels a day, then Russia with 9.4 million barrels, the U.S. with 8.7 million barrels a day is the third-largest producer of oil. But we could produce more. Why aren't we? Producers have a variety of techniques to win monopoly power and higher profits that come with that power. What's a way for OPEC to gain more power? I have a hypothesis, for which I have no evidence, but it ought to be tested. If I were an OPEC big cheese, I'd easily conclude that I could restrict output and charge higher oil prices if somehow U.S. oil drilling were restricted. I'd see U.S. environmental groups as allies, and I would make "charitable" contributions to assist their efforts to reduce U.S. output. Again, I have no evidence, but it's a hypothesis worth examination.
Acts of God we can handle: it's man's actions that leave us stumped
By Mark Steyn
If memory serves, the last British hurricane warning was the one delivered - or, rather, non-delivered - by Michael Fish on the BBC: "A lady's just called in to say there's a hurricane. Hur-hur," chuckled Michael dismissively, shortly before it swept in and destroyed all seven oaks in Sevenoaks.
On Sunday, the New Orleans bureau of the National Weather Service, the Met Office's US equivalent, was rather more specific: "Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer. All gabled roofs will fail. The majority of industrial buildings will become non-functional. All wood-framed low-rising apartment buildings will be destroyed. All windows will blow out. Power outages will last for weeks. Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards. The vast majority of native trees will be snapped or uprooted. Few crops will remain."
All gabled roofs? All low-rise apartment buildings? All windows? As the weekend wore on, this weather forecast of biblical proportions turned out to be one of the more understated voices of doom. Associated Press reported: "Estimates have been made of tens of thousands of deaths from flooding that could overrun the levees and turn New Orleans into a 30ft-deep toxic lake filled with chemicals and petroleum from refineries, and waste from ruined septic systems."
Not to mention the snakes and crocodiles and all the dead bodies from the city's above-the-ground burial plots. I switched on the television to find one expert speculating on the impact of a vast increase in West Nile mosquitoes on those Gulf Coasters who are HIV-positive. And, if that seems a fairly unlikely combination of factors, how about the scene at the New Orleans Superdome? The last refuge of those trapped in the city, the sports stadium was expected to have its lower two stories flooded, while up above huddled 40,000 people with little light, no functioning bathrooms, no air conditioning and temperatures up in the nineties. That's if the roof holds in the 160mph winds.
Anything else? Only the devastation of a big chunk of the oil industry. The estimated $30 billion economic damage was scheduled to begin with a 20-cent-per-gallon rise at the nation's petrol stations by this weekend.
By the time you read this, it may all have come to pass, and West Nile-infected Aids victims may be swimming through the toxic soup of the flooded French Quarter dodging crocodiles and thousands of corpses. But as the cable news speculation and anticipation wandered off down ever more recherché byways in the 24 hours before landfall, it occurred to me that these days Macmillan's bit of alleged political wisdom has never been more wrong. Asked what he feared most, Macmillan replied: "Events, dear boy, events." But today in the developed world we don't "fear" events; quite the opposite. It's not that we exactly look forward to them per se, but that we relish the opportunity to rise to the occasion.
And, on the whole, we do. Oh, to be sure, there are always folks who panic, or loot. But most people don't, and many are capable of extraordinary acts of hastily improvised heroism.
I wrote about the phenomenon of "social co-ordination" a few weeks ago apropos the Air France crash in Toronto, and I'm sure there's plenty of it going on in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. "Events" we can cope with. If life were a disaster movie, we'd be fine.
You might recall last year's hilarious eco-doom blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, in which (warning: plot spoiler) a speech by Vice-President Dick Cheney brings on the flash-freezing of the entire northern hemisphere.
I'm not an environmentalist, but I'll take their word for it that that's scientifically possible. If it happens, we'll get over it. In the film, the so-called "money shot" of New York's harbour frozen solid looked to me like a typical February day at the Saguenay fjord in my beloved Quebec. No doubt if you're a commodities broker or an assistant choreographer, it'd be a bit of a bummer, but you'd be surprised at how quickly you pick up the basics of ice-fishing and snow insulation.
The real problems are the non-events - the things that aren't sudden but gradual, the frog-in-the-slow-boiling-water stuff. It's not just that we don't notice the slow-boil threats, but that, insofar as we do take the long view, we obsess on utterly fictional dangers.
Jared Diamond currently has a bestselling book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. A timely subject, so I bought a copy. More fool me. It's all about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. That's why they're not a G8 member. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious choices of "societies". Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. Russia is collapsing and it's nothing to do with deforestation. Conversely, Diamond's book is a huge bestseller with those who see it as a warning on the perils of excessive consumerism - even though, in fact, America returns land to the wilderness every year, and my own town is far more forested than it was in either 1905 or 1805. Diamond's book couldn't be any loopier than if he'd argued that deforestation of Arabia was responsible for September 11.
So the real test of this hurricane is whether, after the event, there's still the will to tackle the long-term questions. For example, as further refutation of the Diamond thesis, in 1981 America had 315 oil refineries in operation; today, it has 144.
Louisiana has 17 of them, operating - pre-hurricane - at capacity. Which is why petrol will be up 20 cents a gallon by the weekend. Why, in the middle of a war centred on unstable foreign oil regimes in the Middle East, is it still politically impossible to upgrade the capacity of the domestic oil industry?
As the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina demonstrate, mankind has got very good at responding to acts of God. We're not so hot at responding to the acts (political and cultural) of man.
By Mark Steyn
If memory serves, the last British hurricane warning was the one delivered - or, rather, non-delivered - by Michael Fish on the BBC: "A lady's just called in to say there's a hurricane. Hur-hur," chuckled Michael dismissively, shortly before it swept in and destroyed all seven oaks in Sevenoaks.
On Sunday, the New Orleans bureau of the National Weather Service, the Met Office's US equivalent, was rather more specific: "Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer. All gabled roofs will fail. The majority of industrial buildings will become non-functional. All wood-framed low-rising apartment buildings will be destroyed. All windows will blow out. Power outages will last for weeks. Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards. The vast majority of native trees will be snapped or uprooted. Few crops will remain."
All gabled roofs? All low-rise apartment buildings? All windows? As the weekend wore on, this weather forecast of biblical proportions turned out to be one of the more understated voices of doom. Associated Press reported: "Estimates have been made of tens of thousands of deaths from flooding that could overrun the levees and turn New Orleans into a 30ft-deep toxic lake filled with chemicals and petroleum from refineries, and waste from ruined septic systems."
Not to mention the snakes and crocodiles and all the dead bodies from the city's above-the-ground burial plots. I switched on the television to find one expert speculating on the impact of a vast increase in West Nile mosquitoes on those Gulf Coasters who are HIV-positive. And, if that seems a fairly unlikely combination of factors, how about the scene at the New Orleans Superdome? The last refuge of those trapped in the city, the sports stadium was expected to have its lower two stories flooded, while up above huddled 40,000 people with little light, no functioning bathrooms, no air conditioning and temperatures up in the nineties. That's if the roof holds in the 160mph winds.
Anything else? Only the devastation of a big chunk of the oil industry. The estimated $30 billion economic damage was scheduled to begin with a 20-cent-per-gallon rise at the nation's petrol stations by this weekend.
By the time you read this, it may all have come to pass, and West Nile-infected Aids victims may be swimming through the toxic soup of the flooded French Quarter dodging crocodiles and thousands of corpses. But as the cable news speculation and anticipation wandered off down ever more recherché byways in the 24 hours before landfall, it occurred to me that these days Macmillan's bit of alleged political wisdom has never been more wrong. Asked what he feared most, Macmillan replied: "Events, dear boy, events." But today in the developed world we don't "fear" events; quite the opposite. It's not that we exactly look forward to them per se, but that we relish the opportunity to rise to the occasion.
And, on the whole, we do. Oh, to be sure, there are always folks who panic, or loot. But most people don't, and many are capable of extraordinary acts of hastily improvised heroism.
I wrote about the phenomenon of "social co-ordination" a few weeks ago apropos the Air France crash in Toronto, and I'm sure there's plenty of it going on in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. "Events" we can cope with. If life were a disaster movie, we'd be fine.
You might recall last year's hilarious eco-doom blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, in which (warning: plot spoiler) a speech by Vice-President Dick Cheney brings on the flash-freezing of the entire northern hemisphere.
I'm not an environmentalist, but I'll take their word for it that that's scientifically possible. If it happens, we'll get over it. In the film, the so-called "money shot" of New York's harbour frozen solid looked to me like a typical February day at the Saguenay fjord in my beloved Quebec. No doubt if you're a commodities broker or an assistant choreographer, it'd be a bit of a bummer, but you'd be surprised at how quickly you pick up the basics of ice-fishing and snow insulation.
The real problems are the non-events - the things that aren't sudden but gradual, the frog-in-the-slow-boiling-water stuff. It's not just that we don't notice the slow-boil threats, but that, insofar as we do take the long view, we obsess on utterly fictional dangers.
Jared Diamond currently has a bestselling book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. A timely subject, so I bought a copy. More fool me. It's all about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. That's why they're not a G8 member. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious choices of "societies". Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. Russia is collapsing and it's nothing to do with deforestation. Conversely, Diamond's book is a huge bestseller with those who see it as a warning on the perils of excessive consumerism - even though, in fact, America returns land to the wilderness every year, and my own town is far more forested than it was in either 1905 or 1805. Diamond's book couldn't be any loopier than if he'd argued that deforestation of Arabia was responsible for September 11.
So the real test of this hurricane is whether, after the event, there's still the will to tackle the long-term questions. For example, as further refutation of the Diamond thesis, in 1981 America had 315 oil refineries in operation; today, it has 144.
Louisiana has 17 of them, operating - pre-hurricane - at capacity. Which is why petrol will be up 20 cents a gallon by the weekend. Why, in the middle of a war centred on unstable foreign oil regimes in the Middle East, is it still politically impossible to upgrade the capacity of the domestic oil industry?
As the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina demonstrate, mankind has got very good at responding to acts of God. We're not so hot at responding to the acts (political and cultural) of man.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
From Queensland Newspapers, Australia:
Still singing on the wires
Noel Mengel
20aug05
JIMMY Webb chuckles, in the way that people do when they discover they've been described as an "endangered species". A little ruefully.
"By all indications," he agrees in a voice that still has traces of his Oklahoma upbringing despite 40 years of adult life on the coasts. "I'm not going to argue with you."
The facts are indisputable. Webb is a star in the history of pop, and a rare bird these past 40 years: someone who rose to the top as the writer of songs for others.
His songbook includes By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Galveston and Wichita Lineman for Glen Campbell and MacArthur Park for Richard Harris.
He's been making music ever since that golden streak, and although his solo albums never made the same kind of commercial impression, they provide a masterclass for anyone interested in the songwriter's craft.
The rise of The Beatles put an end to the golden age of the backroom songwriter, which was mostly how the music business had been done until then.
They are still there – Diane Warren is one – but few flourish for as long or so successfully as Webb, whose songs have been recorded by Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Frank Sinatra, Joe Cocker and The Highwaymen.
His song Highwayman gave the superstar country quartet of Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings their name.
He's not out of touch with modern music – three of his sons are songwriters and play in a band, the critically lauded Webb Brothers – but he doesn't like much of what he's hearing on the radio. And he has a theory why:
"I think up until my generation there was a kind of unbroken chain of homage and respect," Webb says.
"This went back to the Jerome Kerns, to Rodgers and Hart to, let's say, Hal David and Burt Bacharach, to Leiber and Stoller, the Brill Building with Gerry Goffin and Carole King and Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann.
"I certainly looked at those writers and thought, 'I want to write that well'."
He thinks songwriters need to get back in touch with that tradition.
"Something a little curious happened, a kind of disconnect, and there's an unwillingness to pay respect to traditional songwriting forms. There's a kind of decoupage, cut-and-paste, nihilistic attitude to writing songs, with the idea that any effort towards organisation is not hip, not cool.
"I can see a song like this becoming very successful now: 'I don't know why you hang around me because I don't care anything about you'. That would be a hit because it's a kind of dismissive, misogynistic type of thing.
"All right, if that's the way you see the world, if you really don't love women. It's hard for me to believe that boys don't fall in love with girls any more."
Love and heartbreak in all its forms were at the heart of Webb songs like By the Time I Get to Phoenix, which Sinatra rated as the greatest torch song ever. And Wichita Lineman, with its immortal couplet "And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time".
Crying In My Sleep, recorded by Art Garfunkel, was a true story for Webb, so broken up over a woman that he knocked the phone in his motel room off the stand and the receptionist asked, "Sir, can I help you please?"
"The things I used to confess in my songs I'm sure are embarrassing to my kids, their songs are much more . . . They write good songs, but if you stuck a thermometer into one of those it would be 20, 30 degrees cooler than one of mine!"
Still, he sees there is a hope for his breed, and it's in a surprising place: American Idol and its many spin-offs.
"Rappers don't need songs and they account for a big percentage of the market. Bands account for another large slice of the pie, and they write their own songs, for better or worse. These kinds of shows represent songwriting's best shot because the singers they produce need songs."
Not that anyone seems to be coming up with tunes of the quality that Webb, Bacharach and David and Goffin and King produced, otherwise surely the new breed of talent-show products might have a longer shelf life.
In the '90s Webb made a triumphant return to the recording studio to revisit his best-known songs with Ten Easy Pieces.
"To this point these songs well and truly belonged to other singers, to Streisand, Sinatra, Waylon Jennings, Joe Cocker. So for me to be able to reclaim them was no small feat. To do Galveston without thinking about Glen . . . I really had to go through a lot of psychological twists to make a record like that."
His latest, Twilight of the Renegades, alludes to the passing of an era, and not just in songwriting.
"It's about a type of rugged individual, a kind of artist that I admired, like Harry Nilsson, Warren Zevon, a kind of 'Here, stick this in your eye' attitude.
"We're moving into a more homogenised world, these artists who are greenhouse orchids, cultured pearls, it's slicker and slicker. I've taken a look back at some characters I've known, people who carved life out for themselves, made it go the way they wanted it to go. They didn't go quietly with the masses, which is what I feel and see happening."
Webb is one who carved out a life on his own terms.
"You could paint pictures with songs, express these emotions that others were perhaps less capable of expressing. It was a valuable service in exposing these feelings.
"People come up to me at my concerts and every one of them has something to say. Usually it's something like, 'I want you to know that such and such is my favourite song, I was so glad you wrote it because I was going through a really bad time and it really helped me.'
"When someone says that then it sweeps away all the crap, the rejection. If one human being can do that by writing a song . . ."
Still singing on the wires
Noel Mengel
20aug05
JIMMY Webb chuckles, in the way that people do when they discover they've been described as an "endangered species". A little ruefully.
"By all indications," he agrees in a voice that still has traces of his Oklahoma upbringing despite 40 years of adult life on the coasts. "I'm not going to argue with you."
The facts are indisputable. Webb is a star in the history of pop, and a rare bird these past 40 years: someone who rose to the top as the writer of songs for others.
His songbook includes By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Galveston and Wichita Lineman for Glen Campbell and MacArthur Park for Richard Harris.
He's been making music ever since that golden streak, and although his solo albums never made the same kind of commercial impression, they provide a masterclass for anyone interested in the songwriter's craft.
The rise of The Beatles put an end to the golden age of the backroom songwriter, which was mostly how the music business had been done until then.
They are still there – Diane Warren is one – but few flourish for as long or so successfully as Webb, whose songs have been recorded by Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Frank Sinatra, Joe Cocker and The Highwaymen.
His song Highwayman gave the superstar country quartet of Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings their name.
He's not out of touch with modern music – three of his sons are songwriters and play in a band, the critically lauded Webb Brothers – but he doesn't like much of what he's hearing on the radio. And he has a theory why:
"I think up until my generation there was a kind of unbroken chain of homage and respect," Webb says.
"This went back to the Jerome Kerns, to Rodgers and Hart to, let's say, Hal David and Burt Bacharach, to Leiber and Stoller, the Brill Building with Gerry Goffin and Carole King and Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann.
"I certainly looked at those writers and thought, 'I want to write that well'."
He thinks songwriters need to get back in touch with that tradition.
"Something a little curious happened, a kind of disconnect, and there's an unwillingness to pay respect to traditional songwriting forms. There's a kind of decoupage, cut-and-paste, nihilistic attitude to writing songs, with the idea that any effort towards organisation is not hip, not cool.
"I can see a song like this becoming very successful now: 'I don't know why you hang around me because I don't care anything about you'. That would be a hit because it's a kind of dismissive, misogynistic type of thing.
"All right, if that's the way you see the world, if you really don't love women. It's hard for me to believe that boys don't fall in love with girls any more."
Love and heartbreak in all its forms were at the heart of Webb songs like By the Time I Get to Phoenix, which Sinatra rated as the greatest torch song ever. And Wichita Lineman, with its immortal couplet "And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time".
Crying In My Sleep, recorded by Art Garfunkel, was a true story for Webb, so broken up over a woman that he knocked the phone in his motel room off the stand and the receptionist asked, "Sir, can I help you please?"
"The things I used to confess in my songs I'm sure are embarrassing to my kids, their songs are much more . . . They write good songs, but if you stuck a thermometer into one of those it would be 20, 30 degrees cooler than one of mine!"
Still, he sees there is a hope for his breed, and it's in a surprising place: American Idol and its many spin-offs.
"Rappers don't need songs and they account for a big percentage of the market. Bands account for another large slice of the pie, and they write their own songs, for better or worse. These kinds of shows represent songwriting's best shot because the singers they produce need songs."
Not that anyone seems to be coming up with tunes of the quality that Webb, Bacharach and David and Goffin and King produced, otherwise surely the new breed of talent-show products might have a longer shelf life.
In the '90s Webb made a triumphant return to the recording studio to revisit his best-known songs with Ten Easy Pieces.
"To this point these songs well and truly belonged to other singers, to Streisand, Sinatra, Waylon Jennings, Joe Cocker. So for me to be able to reclaim them was no small feat. To do Galveston without thinking about Glen . . . I really had to go through a lot of psychological twists to make a record like that."
His latest, Twilight of the Renegades, alludes to the passing of an era, and not just in songwriting.
"It's about a type of rugged individual, a kind of artist that I admired, like Harry Nilsson, Warren Zevon, a kind of 'Here, stick this in your eye' attitude.
"We're moving into a more homogenised world, these artists who are greenhouse orchids, cultured pearls, it's slicker and slicker. I've taken a look back at some characters I've known, people who carved life out for themselves, made it go the way they wanted it to go. They didn't go quietly with the masses, which is what I feel and see happening."
Webb is one who carved out a life on his own terms.
"You could paint pictures with songs, express these emotions that others were perhaps less capable of expressing. It was a valuable service in exposing these feelings.
"People come up to me at my concerts and every one of them has something to say. Usually it's something like, 'I want you to know that such and such is my favourite song, I was so glad you wrote it because I was going through a really bad time and it really helped me.'
"When someone says that then it sweeps away all the crap, the rejection. If one human being can do that by writing a song . . ."
Conservatism: A House Divided
By Patrick J. Buchanan
As the nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsberg was being whistled through the Senate, a morose friend called, “Can you believe it? The vote was 96-3!”
“Who were the other two?” I asked.
We laughed. For we did not need to be told where Jesse Helms stood on elevating to the Supreme Court an ACLU activist like Judge Ginsberg.
If one were to name the two elected leaders of the last third of the 20th century who best represented the conservative creed in national politics, they would be Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms. It is a defining difference between a traditional conservative and a neocon that the former would name Helms as the best senator of the era, while the latter would name “Scoop” Jackson or Pat Moynihan.
Which raises a question. While the Republican Party today controls the White House and Congress, how stands conservatism, using Reagan-Helms as the gold standard?
On tax cuts, a strong national defense and the nomination of federal judges who believe America is a republic where the people rule through elected representatives, not a judicial dictatorship, George W. Bush meets the gold standard.
But on spending, Bush and Congress do not even meet the Clinton standard. They qualify as Great Society Conservatives. The Republican Revolution of 1994 turned out like that vaunted Vanguard we launched after Sputnik that got four feet off the ground.
Anti-communism and resistance to the “evil empire” once united the Right. But that unifying cause died with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
On foreign policy, conservatives are no longer a house united. While all but six GOP House members voted to authorize President Bush to take us to war in Iraq, and 75 percent of Republicans still believe in the war, among conservative and libertarian writers, there was no such plurality, and some are having second thoughts. There is no conservative consensus on foreign policy today.
The neoconservative position, to make promoting democracy the altarpiece of our foreign policy, to increase U.S. forces in Iraq, and to extend the war to Iran and Syria to win it, appears no longer to be Bush policy. And despite the president’s resolve to stay the course, his generals continue to talk of substantial withdrawals by spring.
On foreign aid—given the increases for Africa, the Middle East and the Millennium Challenge—the president and Congress seem squarely in the liberal internationalist tradition. They believe in it.
On social issues, the GOP remains a pro-life party, but less volubly than it once was, with House and Senate Republicans moving to back embryonic stem-cell research. Rather than battleground issues on which the GOP likes to fight, these are wedge issues on which the GOP likes to campaign in October to rally the Red Staters. And the base is beginning to get the message. They are the girls of summer who are dumped when the boys go back to school.
On sovereignty, the White House has maintained its opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and International Criminal Court but continues to accept the dictations of a World Trade Organization, to which the Gingrich-Dole internationalists subordinated U.S. sovereignty in ‘94.
But on two issues, besides the war, the Bush Republicans are starting to lose their conservative base as well as the country.
House Republicans voted 7-1 for CAFTA, but enthusiasm for that trade deal was nonexistent, and Bush had to twist arms in his own party to win. Weekly stories of factory closings, jobs being outsourced, and foreign workers coming in to take American jobs at Third-World wages are killing the old faith in free trade.
The Business Roundtable and its house organ, the Wall Street Journal, have lost the country, which is why Democrats voted 14-1 against CAFTA. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing on globalization.
But it is on America’s bleeding border that the GOP faces a crisis. If President Bush is unwilling to protect this border where 1 to 2 million attempt to break in yearly, and half a million succeed, this issue could sink the party in 2006. Mass immigration is eating up tax dollars—in health, education, welfare, and prison, police and court costs—bankrupting states and imperiling our security.
Where do conservatives stand? Almost all are demanding that Bush do more to stop the Mexican invasion.
Thus on free trade, immigration and the war, all major issues, conservatism is a house divided. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, the leading candidates to succeed Bush, stand with him on all three, but the country stands against all three, on all three issues. The last best hope of the GOP in 2008 is—as always—the Democrats.
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
As the nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsberg was being whistled through the Senate, a morose friend called, “Can you believe it? The vote was 96-3!”
“Who were the other two?” I asked.
We laughed. For we did not need to be told where Jesse Helms stood on elevating to the Supreme Court an ACLU activist like Judge Ginsberg.
If one were to name the two elected leaders of the last third of the 20th century who best represented the conservative creed in national politics, they would be Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms. It is a defining difference between a traditional conservative and a neocon that the former would name Helms as the best senator of the era, while the latter would name “Scoop” Jackson or Pat Moynihan.
Which raises a question. While the Republican Party today controls the White House and Congress, how stands conservatism, using Reagan-Helms as the gold standard?
On tax cuts, a strong national defense and the nomination of federal judges who believe America is a republic where the people rule through elected representatives, not a judicial dictatorship, George W. Bush meets the gold standard.
But on spending, Bush and Congress do not even meet the Clinton standard. They qualify as Great Society Conservatives. The Republican Revolution of 1994 turned out like that vaunted Vanguard we launched after Sputnik that got four feet off the ground.
Anti-communism and resistance to the “evil empire” once united the Right. But that unifying cause died with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
On foreign policy, conservatives are no longer a house united. While all but six GOP House members voted to authorize President Bush to take us to war in Iraq, and 75 percent of Republicans still believe in the war, among conservative and libertarian writers, there was no such plurality, and some are having second thoughts. There is no conservative consensus on foreign policy today.
The neoconservative position, to make promoting democracy the altarpiece of our foreign policy, to increase U.S. forces in Iraq, and to extend the war to Iran and Syria to win it, appears no longer to be Bush policy. And despite the president’s resolve to stay the course, his generals continue to talk of substantial withdrawals by spring.
On foreign aid—given the increases for Africa, the Middle East and the Millennium Challenge—the president and Congress seem squarely in the liberal internationalist tradition. They believe in it.
On social issues, the GOP remains a pro-life party, but less volubly than it once was, with House and Senate Republicans moving to back embryonic stem-cell research. Rather than battleground issues on which the GOP likes to fight, these are wedge issues on which the GOP likes to campaign in October to rally the Red Staters. And the base is beginning to get the message. They are the girls of summer who are dumped when the boys go back to school.
On sovereignty, the White House has maintained its opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and International Criminal Court but continues to accept the dictations of a World Trade Organization, to which the Gingrich-Dole internationalists subordinated U.S. sovereignty in ‘94.
But on two issues, besides the war, the Bush Republicans are starting to lose their conservative base as well as the country.
House Republicans voted 7-1 for CAFTA, but enthusiasm for that trade deal was nonexistent, and Bush had to twist arms in his own party to win. Weekly stories of factory closings, jobs being outsourced, and foreign workers coming in to take American jobs at Third-World wages are killing the old faith in free trade.
The Business Roundtable and its house organ, the Wall Street Journal, have lost the country, which is why Democrats voted 14-1 against CAFTA. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing on globalization.
But it is on America’s bleeding border that the GOP faces a crisis. If President Bush is unwilling to protect this border where 1 to 2 million attempt to break in yearly, and half a million succeed, this issue could sink the party in 2006. Mass immigration is eating up tax dollars—in health, education, welfare, and prison, police and court costs—bankrupting states and imperiling our security.
Where do conservatives stand? Almost all are demanding that Bush do more to stop the Mexican invasion.
Thus on free trade, immigration and the war, all major issues, conservatism is a house divided. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, the leading candidates to succeed Bush, stand with him on all three, but the country stands against all three, on all three issues. The last best hope of the GOP in 2008 is—as always—the Democrats.
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
From The New OrleansTimes-Picayune:
Will New Orleans survive?
By James Varney
On the southern fringe of New Orleans' City Park there is a live oak with a branch that dips low, goes briefly underground, and comes up the other side still thriving.
It's ancient and gnarled, this tree, and filtered sunglight slants through its crown at dusk. It's a sublime thing.
When we talk about these majestic items that dot New Orleans' landscape we say, "is," but we may mean, "was." The reports are still scattered, the news from the ground still incomplete, but Hurricane Katrina may have annihilated New Orleans.
It looks bad to everyone. "It's impossible for us to say how many structures can be salvaged," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said late Tuesday. But can the birthplace of jazz truly be wiped from the face of the earth?
New Orleans may yet surprise. Too often the city is written off as a whiskey nirvana, where one guzzles Pimms cups at Napoleon House in the French Quarter at night, and eggs and grits at the Camellia Grill in the Riverbend at sunrise.
In truth, however, New Orleans is as sublime as it is Rabelaisian. For example - and this is a thing few tourists know - the French Quarter, home of Bourbon Street and jazz and possessor of a global reputation for parties, is in fact a National Park. Now and then, through the spokes of a horse-drawn carriage taking honeymooners up Royal Street, one can spot the distinctive, "Smokey," hat of a park ranger telling a more earnest visitor some genuine history.
That could include the iconic statue of Andrew Jackson, rearing back on his mustang between the Mississippi River and the St. Louis Cathedral. At its base - and this is a thing few locals know - are the words, "Our Union: It Must and Shall be Preserved."
Jackson said that as president, and his toast was first carved into the statue by Union troops during the Civil War, a reminder to the former Confederate citadel that even one of the South's greatest sons was, at heart, a Union man.
Of course, the locals in 1864 didn't cotton to that sentiment. Legend holds the ladies residing in the Pontalba, the graceful brick apartment buildings that flank Jackson Square and are reputedly the oldest such edifices in the United States, would dump their human waste pots on the caps of officers strolling underneath.
Fortunately - and how odd that word sounds in association with New Orleans today - the French Quarter was still mostly dry, largely intact, late Tuesday. In another Big Easy quirk, the impossibly charming neighborhood Uptown, which is hard against the Mississippi River, is one of the highest spots in the city.
The true highest spot is an upriver paddlewheel ride away: Monkey Hill in the New Orleans zoo. No one reportedly sought refuge there as Katrina surged about the city, although it might not have been that bad a spot since it's at the opposite end of the zoo from the king cobra and the Komodo dragon.
The zoo itself is another example of how New Orleans, for all its famous decay, can survive. What was once dubbed an "animal ghetto" was turned around by the city and was, until the dreaded "Big One" grazed the city, a bucolic spot.
Other areas, too, may weather the storm. Certainly the fishing spots in the bayous of eastern New Orleans will remain; the fate of the gorgeous trellis of live oak branches arching over St. Charles Avenue is less certain.
Those 19th century trees are one symbol of New Orleans. A 20th century symbol, William Faulkner, was first published in The Times-Picayune while he was living in the city and writing his first novel. He called the city, "a courtesan whose hold is strong upon the mature, and to whose charm the young must respond."
Now, in the 21st century, the courtesan cries for help. The response from young and old will decide if she lives or dies.
Will New Orleans survive?
By James Varney
On the southern fringe of New Orleans' City Park there is a live oak with a branch that dips low, goes briefly underground, and comes up the other side still thriving.
It's ancient and gnarled, this tree, and filtered sunglight slants through its crown at dusk. It's a sublime thing.
When we talk about these majestic items that dot New Orleans' landscape we say, "is," but we may mean, "was." The reports are still scattered, the news from the ground still incomplete, but Hurricane Katrina may have annihilated New Orleans.
It looks bad to everyone. "It's impossible for us to say how many structures can be salvaged," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said late Tuesday. But can the birthplace of jazz truly be wiped from the face of the earth?
New Orleans may yet surprise. Too often the city is written off as a whiskey nirvana, where one guzzles Pimms cups at Napoleon House in the French Quarter at night, and eggs and grits at the Camellia Grill in the Riverbend at sunrise.
In truth, however, New Orleans is as sublime as it is Rabelaisian. For example - and this is a thing few tourists know - the French Quarter, home of Bourbon Street and jazz and possessor of a global reputation for parties, is in fact a National Park. Now and then, through the spokes of a horse-drawn carriage taking honeymooners up Royal Street, one can spot the distinctive, "Smokey," hat of a park ranger telling a more earnest visitor some genuine history.
That could include the iconic statue of Andrew Jackson, rearing back on his mustang between the Mississippi River and the St. Louis Cathedral. At its base - and this is a thing few locals know - are the words, "Our Union: It Must and Shall be Preserved."
Jackson said that as president, and his toast was first carved into the statue by Union troops during the Civil War, a reminder to the former Confederate citadel that even one of the South's greatest sons was, at heart, a Union man.
Of course, the locals in 1864 didn't cotton to that sentiment. Legend holds the ladies residing in the Pontalba, the graceful brick apartment buildings that flank Jackson Square and are reputedly the oldest such edifices in the United States, would dump their human waste pots on the caps of officers strolling underneath.
Fortunately - and how odd that word sounds in association with New Orleans today - the French Quarter was still mostly dry, largely intact, late Tuesday. In another Big Easy quirk, the impossibly charming neighborhood Uptown, which is hard against the Mississippi River, is one of the highest spots in the city.
The true highest spot is an upriver paddlewheel ride away: Monkey Hill in the New Orleans zoo. No one reportedly sought refuge there as Katrina surged about the city, although it might not have been that bad a spot since it's at the opposite end of the zoo from the king cobra and the Komodo dragon.
The zoo itself is another example of how New Orleans, for all its famous decay, can survive. What was once dubbed an "animal ghetto" was turned around by the city and was, until the dreaded "Big One" grazed the city, a bucolic spot.
Other areas, too, may weather the storm. Certainly the fishing spots in the bayous of eastern New Orleans will remain; the fate of the gorgeous trellis of live oak branches arching over St. Charles Avenue is less certain.
Those 19th century trees are one symbol of New Orleans. A 20th century symbol, William Faulkner, was first published in The Times-Picayune while he was living in the city and writing his first novel. He called the city, "a courtesan whose hold is strong upon the mature, and to whose charm the young must respond."
Now, in the 21st century, the courtesan cries for help. The response from young and old will decide if she lives or dies.
Monday, August 29, 2005
From The Bruce Springsteen Collection, Asbury Park Public Library:
The Born To Run Reviewers In Their Own Words, 30 Years Ago
During 1973 and 1974, fans who had been to Bruce Springsteen's shows in the clubs and theaters, where he was building a solid cult following, snatched up Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. To the rest of the record buying world, he was largely unknown, and with Dark Side of the Moon, Houses of the Holy, and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road ruling the charts, Bruce's first two albums were commercial flops.
In the rock press, critics gave both albums a passing grade, some warily, others finding much to like. Creem critics Robert Christgau and Dave Marsh, for instance, thought enough of Greetings to publish favorable reviews in back-to-back issues. Rolling Stone called The Wild, The Innocent "gritty and serious." If none of this translated into significant sales, it did at least start a buzz that would resonate through the long months of 1974 and early 1975 as Springsteen struggled under intense pressure from his record label to produce his third album.
When Born to Run was finally released in late summer of 1975, the buzz transmuted into a firestorm of critical acclamation. "If I seem to OD on superlatives," wrote Lester Bangs in Creem, "it's only because Born to Run demands them." Famed Philadelphia DJ Ed Sciaky wrote in Phonograph that Born to Run was "a magnificent album, lyrically and musically." From the French journal Extra Nouvelle: "This record is fabulous – let us not be afraid of the word." There were doubters then, as now, but as the following reviews excerpted from publications in The Bruce Springsteen Special Collection amply demonstrate, Born to Run simultaneously hit the most of the critical press and public consciousness with supernova megawatts that continue to illuminate the way, 30 years down the road.
THE REVIEWS
"[His] lyrical approach is perfectly relayed through music that is, to say the least, stunning. The eight songs on Born To Run are all striking with Springsteen's powerful, expressive voice providing a punch unlike that of any other singer ... It's useless to say that one song is better than the next, as each is potent in some way. After several listenings, the subtle beauty of the vocals, the instrumentation and the arrangements, combined as a unit, become profound ."
– Bill Scott, NOW, Sept. 5, 1975
"Born To Run is aimed right. It just doesn't go off ... Though considerable attention has been paid to the arrangements, many of the tracks amount to an attempt to evolve an impression of artificial verite as Springsteen sweats through his urban rock-renewal programme ... Many of the melodies, riffs, rhythms, and hooks sound as if they floated straight off the car-radio and into Springsteen's subconscious ... The title cut is a distillation of Spector without the charisma, 'She's The One' is Bo Diddley, 'Jungleland' starts off by sounding like The Who ('Baba O'Riley'), cops a few licks from Reed and Rundgren, and finished off keeping the listener entertained until the next Laura Lyro album."
– Roy Carr, NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS (UK), Sept. 6, 1975
"Three tracks, 'Night,' 'Jungleland' and the beautiful reflective 'Meeting Across The River' are a model of structure composition. But elsewhere the band fails to convey the variation of mood that Springsteen's songs demand ... This is not an essential album to have in the way that the previous two were, and yet my initial mixed feelings of surprise and slight disappointment have abated. Springsteen's new musicians have got the chops alright while his own brilliance is now contained rather than allowed to run free. But the point is that it's still there and it's the distinction from the two previous efforts that makes this album so interesting. I have grown to love it but newcomers to Bruce's music would be better advised to check out what the critics have been raving about in the past. Old fans will need to persevere."
– Jerry Gilbert, SOUNDS, Sept. 13, 1975
"Springsteen's new songs are no longer rooted solely in images from his scuffling boardwalk youth: he's now taken the emotional gruel of those narratives and put them into overdrive by adding his overwhelming fear of entrapment. Literally every song is touched with that drive to escape, from the desperately romantic 'Thunder Road' to the screaming realizations of 'Backstreets.' The more I listen the more I think that Born To Run is Springsteen's most intensely personal album, with the musical components from his favorite period, early sixties Spector-sound power-drive, and the emotional meat from both his struggling days and the here-and-now."
– John Milward, CHICAGO READER, Sept. 19, 1975
"Born To Run is a magnificent album, lyrically and musically. If it seems enigmatically produced, give it time. Springsteen's visions combined simple elements into an intrinsically complex blend of sounds, producing rich and most powerful rewards. While this is not live Springsteen, it is Bruce's effort at letting us hear these songs as he hears them, at recreating on record what's in his head...Springsteen deals primarily in emotions, using his story-songs not so much to tell a story as create, piece by piece, character by character, a fantasy world, an opera of images rich in feeling. The songs hold-up individually and totaled become a vision of the violence and tenderness, of life on the street."
– Ed Sciaky, PHONOGRAPH, October 1975
"The biggest American revelation of 1975 will without doubt be Bruce Springsteen, whose shows at the Bottom Line in New York in August triggered a veritable glowing hysteria in the press and in the public. Bluntly called "the savior of rock" etc etc, for the last two years, he was immediately labeled as 'the new Dylan,' (but) has presently freed himself up from this heavy load and offers a rock alloy that is very funky and extremely poetic which captivates both small and large. One will quickly be able to judge with his third album, Born to Run, recently released amid the highest honors on the charts. It's a beautiful collective hysteria."
– BEST (France), October 1975
"Musically, the album is built around the rhythm section, the piano, and varying lead instruments. Each performs a function, both in the sound and the development of the lyric themes. A number of the songs begin in the same way as 'Backstreets,' building slowly around an intensifying piano rhythm, above which Springsteen first speaks, second sings, and third howls the words of a world without escape. Through the first verses the lead instrument cuts across the rhythm, then takes off in a mid-song solo, finally returning to echo the words on the run-in. It's the oldest trick in the book – counterpointing an endless piano with sharp cutting leads – but it's rarely been done better, and it's essential to the overall vision ... The two main lead instruments are Clarence Clemons' saxophone, which adds a touch of sleaziness to the images, and Bruce's guitar. As is apparent from the cover, he wears it low on the hip, and he uses it throughout like a weapon: a Bo Diddleyish hammer in 'She's The One', a B-movie 'strangler-in-the-fog' in 'Backstreets'', a scythe slashing Who riffs across fast-flowing piano in 'Jungleland'. If there's one criticism of this album it's that he doesn't use the guitar often enough. Whenever it appears it's mesmerizingly violent, the perfect foil to Roy Bittan's rolling keyboard work."
– Dave Downing, LET IT ROCK (UK), October 1975
"Bruce Springsteen, at the time wrongly launched as another Dylan-imitator, is finally going to make it, in spite of the 'CBS sales talk' and the, after all, very unprofessional sounding Greetings from Asbury Park record ...[H]is third record should be seen as a new beginning. Springsteen is making very grown-up music nowadays. He's no longer trying to sing about his frustrations like some mediaeval minstrel, but he's busy creating his own sound, which goes further than Dylan's electronic inventions by the time of Blonde on Blonde ... It's a new episode in the great American tradition from Seeds, Dylan and Doors. All that aggression, which was temporarily put into the Vietnam war, is now being put into music again."
– VERONICA (The Netherlands) Oct. 4, 1975
"It is a magnificent album that pays off on every bet ever placed on him — a '57 Chevy running on melted down Crystals records that shuts down every claim that has been made. And it should crack his future wide open ...'Born to Run' is the motto that speaks for the album's tales, just as the guitar figure that runs through the title song — the finest compression of rock & roll thrill since the opening riffs of 'Layla' — speaks for its music ... The songs, the best of them, are adventures in the dark, incidents of wasted fury. Tales of kids born to run who lose anyway, the songs can, as with 'Backstreets,' hit so hard and fast that it is almost impossible to sit through them without weeping. And yet the music is exhilarating. You may find yourself shaking your head in wonder, smiling through tears at the beauty of it all ... It is a measure of Springsteen's ability to make his music bleed that 'Backstreets,' which is about friendship and betrayal between a boy and a girl, is far more deathly than 'Jungleland,' which is about a gang war. The music isn't 'better,' nor is the singing — but it is more passionate, more deathly and, necessarily, more alive. That, if anything, might be the key to this music: As a ride through terror, it resolves itself finally as a ride into delight."
– Greil Marcus, ROLLING STONE, Oct. 9, 1975
"Springsteen joined the pantheon with the release of Born To Run. The music is urgent, full of abrupt stops and startling changes of tempo; the lyrics tell powerful stories of characters on the edge, living out rock and roll dreams ... Springsteen's characters are 'tramps ... born to run' whose glory lies in a moment, not in a lifetime. Their dream is to flash just once; to chance everything in hopes of grabbing some onto something they can call their own. These are the dreams that dissolve into lives of quiet desperation."
– David McGee, RECORD WORLD, Oct. 25, 1975
"Born To Run is a bridge between Springsteen the raffish rocker and the more ragged, introverted street poet of the first two albums. Although he maintains that he 'hit the right spot' on Born To Run, it is the second album, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, that seems to go deepest. A sort of free-association autobiography, it comes closest to the wild fun-house refractions of Springsteen's imagination."
– Jay Cocks, TIME, Oct. 27, 1975
"This record is fabulous – let us not be afraid of the word. Lyrics and composer are remarkable, and Bruce also has a personality that will not leave his listener indifferent ...One thinks a bit of Roger McGuinn, of the Band and of Dylan but always from now on we'll have to get used to thinking of Bruce Springsteen as a personality and an original creator because this is one of the best records of all time."
– EXTRA NOUVELLE (France), November 1975
"'Thunder Road' opens with harmonica; then the first sounds of the voice grab you throughout the body. As if Dylan had a son who sings harder than he, but not Dylan, there will never be another Dylan, the old Bob did nicely, and Springsteen is well there, [with his] infuriating words, sentences and phrases to place himself abruptly bitching toward the black sky ... The band sounds ruthlessly fat, but the organ and piano parts alternate with subtlety, and the magnificent chorus of black sax knows how to gush so truly, at the precise instant, just when one needs the haughty splendor of a saxophone ... Springsteen croaks out his images or his passions in a terrifying manner, like a tightrope walker too drunk and then a little too amorous, but so strong that he can outdo you with a monstrous riff and prop you up with his grin ... .[F]or all those who climb the walls at night, be happy, Bruce Springsteen is for you. The rest [i.e. the rock and roll alternatives] is nothing but junk made of shit."
РFran̤ois Ducray, ROCK & FOLK (France), November 1975
"Springsteen's landscapes of urban desolation are all heightened, on fire, alive. His characters act in symbolic gestures, bigger than life. Furthermore, there's absolutely nothing in his music that's null, detached, or perverse and even his occasional world-weariness carries a redemptive sense of lost battles passionately fought. Boredom appears to be a foreign concept to him – he reminds us what it's like to love rock 'n' roll like you just discovered it, and then seize it and make it your own with certainty and precision ... If I seem to OD on superlatives, it's only because Born To Run demands them; the music races in a flurry of Dylan and Morrison and Phil Spector and a little of both Lou Reed and Roy Orbison, luxuriating in them and an American moment caught at last, again, and bursting with pride ... In a time of squalor and belittled desire, Springsteen's music is majestic and passionate with no apologies."
– Lester Bangs, CREEM, November 1975
"What we have is high quality, tense, often tearing, thriving, sometimes irritating to the point of flipping-out, heavy but not physical, sensual and mind-blowing, skillful, and with each note, each line, a new feeling. Born To Run is a mature record from a hyper-sensible poet and musician ... The American rock magazine, 'Crawdaddy'still refers to Bruce Springsteen as "Bruce Dylan", but since the release of his second album Springsteen has proved his worth over his idols to the people who didn't believe in him. His own material is far away from the folk-rock concept of Dylan and compared to him, Bruce deals better with foreign influences ... If anything, Born To Run is a little like Astral Weeks was for Van Morrison, the final and logical step for a musical past ... where comparisons don't work anymore, where he would simply be someone who sings his own songs ... Sometimes Springsteen is just a little over the top, his energy is just out of control, but it's this energy, the continuous pulsation, that makes this record alive and compelling."
– Van Jiirgen Legath, SOUNDS (Germany) November 1975
"The forced internal rhymes of the earlier song lyrics have given way to a brash, long-lined lyricism in which focal images of cars and motorcycles, thunder, neon signs, clashing gangs, and the throbbing, sexy beat of Jersey Shore, honky-tonk fleshpots merge into as powerful a metaphor for urban America as any rock poet has yet supplied ... [W]hat is finally most impressive about Born To Run are the song lyrics, which communicate a street-life experience that is both personal and mythic. With this accomplishment, Springsteen embodies the myth of rock & roll as an urban, proletarian outburst. By personifying the poet-hoot, boy-man, rebel-hero of American mass culture from Brando, Dean, and Presley through Dylan, Springsteen reminds us that rock & roll came from the streets as a cultural necessity, an instinctual urge toward self-transcendence and self-definition."
– Stephen Holden, CIRCUS RAVES, December 1975
"This was one of those LPs awaited in Spain ... (because of) the entire range of commentary which we have read in the American press about the Springsteen "boom" ... Born To Run is one of the best albums which I have seen this year, of absolute quality, extraordinary rhythms and a series of fantastic themes, all dominated by Bruce's talent and primarily his voice. There is nothing wasted in the album in any sense. The central theme is a display of energy, but 'Night', 'Jungleland', 'Backstreets', and 'Thunder Road' don't take a back seat. And it is not only Bruce, but his group, the production, the depth of all the work put together by a great artist at this time ... Springsteen is a 'boom' in flesh and blood, an authentic hero of the rock scene of 1975 and the 1970s."
– DISCO EXPRESS (Spain) Dec. 5, 1975
TRACK BY TRACK
Thunder Road
"The images ... touch us down in our core. In 'Thunder Road,' there is the line 'Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet'; given the symbolic importance attached to the graduation gown, it is one of rock's most powerful images. 'What else can we do now,' Springsteen asks, 'except to roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair.' In essence, your future's nil, but at least you're free, so ... take a chance."
– David McGee, RECORD WORLD, Oct. 25, 1975
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
" ... a delighted R&B song about how Springsteen formed his band, introduced by the type of prologue that rings up the curtain on Shakespearean productions."
– Stephen Holden, CIRCUS RAVES, December 1975
Night
"The title cut, a rock standard by any definition, builds an incredible energy with wall-to-wall sound. I can't remember a more thrilling song of the road. 'Night,' a less ambitious number, suffers only by comparison."
– Stephen Holden, CIRCUS RAVES, December 1975
Backstreets
"... begins with music so stately, so heartbreaking, that it might be the prelude to a rock & roll version of The Iliad."
– Greil Marcus, ROLLING STONE, Oct. 9, 1975
Born To Run
"Springsteen's characters 'sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream,' skating for a longshot in automobiles and beds with the omnipresent roar of the radio driving them on to connect anew, as even in the failure of their striving they are redeemed by Springsteen's vision: 'Tramps like us – baby, we was born to run.'"
– Lester Bangs, CREEM, November 1975
She's The One
"... an extraordinary song where all the gestures are of suffering."
РFran̤ois Ducray, ROCK & FOLK (France), November 1975
Meeting Across The River
" ... a real surprise, a dramatic monologue/song, featuring the sultry trumpet of Randy Brecker."
– Ed Sciaky, PHONOGRAPH, October 1975
Jungleland
"A great hooligan tide washing through New York dusky nights, playing guitars and clawing their way toward love."
– Dave Downing, LET IT ROCK (UK) October 1975
(Special thanks to Maggie Powell, Ed Toskaner, Roy van Rees, Klaus Boettger and Deborah Robinson for translations; Dan Toskaner and the staff of the Asbury Park Public Library for research assistance; and Christopher Phillips of Backstreets for editing and encouragement. Compiled by Bob Crane.)
The Born To Run Reviewers In Their Own Words, 30 Years Ago
During 1973 and 1974, fans who had been to Bruce Springsteen's shows in the clubs and theaters, where he was building a solid cult following, snatched up Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. To the rest of the record buying world, he was largely unknown, and with Dark Side of the Moon, Houses of the Holy, and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road ruling the charts, Bruce's first two albums were commercial flops.
In the rock press, critics gave both albums a passing grade, some warily, others finding much to like. Creem critics Robert Christgau and Dave Marsh, for instance, thought enough of Greetings to publish favorable reviews in back-to-back issues. Rolling Stone called The Wild, The Innocent "gritty and serious." If none of this translated into significant sales, it did at least start a buzz that would resonate through the long months of 1974 and early 1975 as Springsteen struggled under intense pressure from his record label to produce his third album.
When Born to Run was finally released in late summer of 1975, the buzz transmuted into a firestorm of critical acclamation. "If I seem to OD on superlatives," wrote Lester Bangs in Creem, "it's only because Born to Run demands them." Famed Philadelphia DJ Ed Sciaky wrote in Phonograph that Born to Run was "a magnificent album, lyrically and musically." From the French journal Extra Nouvelle: "This record is fabulous – let us not be afraid of the word." There were doubters then, as now, but as the following reviews excerpted from publications in The Bruce Springsteen Special Collection amply demonstrate, Born to Run simultaneously hit the most of the critical press and public consciousness with supernova megawatts that continue to illuminate the way, 30 years down the road.
THE REVIEWS
"[His] lyrical approach is perfectly relayed through music that is, to say the least, stunning. The eight songs on Born To Run are all striking with Springsteen's powerful, expressive voice providing a punch unlike that of any other singer ... It's useless to say that one song is better than the next, as each is potent in some way. After several listenings, the subtle beauty of the vocals, the instrumentation and the arrangements, combined as a unit, become profound ."
– Bill Scott, NOW, Sept. 5, 1975
"Born To Run is aimed right. It just doesn't go off ... Though considerable attention has been paid to the arrangements, many of the tracks amount to an attempt to evolve an impression of artificial verite as Springsteen sweats through his urban rock-renewal programme ... Many of the melodies, riffs, rhythms, and hooks sound as if they floated straight off the car-radio and into Springsteen's subconscious ... The title cut is a distillation of Spector without the charisma, 'She's The One' is Bo Diddley, 'Jungleland' starts off by sounding like The Who ('Baba O'Riley'), cops a few licks from Reed and Rundgren, and finished off keeping the listener entertained until the next Laura Lyro album."
– Roy Carr, NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS (UK), Sept. 6, 1975
"Three tracks, 'Night,' 'Jungleland' and the beautiful reflective 'Meeting Across The River' are a model of structure composition. But elsewhere the band fails to convey the variation of mood that Springsteen's songs demand ... This is not an essential album to have in the way that the previous two were, and yet my initial mixed feelings of surprise and slight disappointment have abated. Springsteen's new musicians have got the chops alright while his own brilliance is now contained rather than allowed to run free. But the point is that it's still there and it's the distinction from the two previous efforts that makes this album so interesting. I have grown to love it but newcomers to Bruce's music would be better advised to check out what the critics have been raving about in the past. Old fans will need to persevere."
– Jerry Gilbert, SOUNDS, Sept. 13, 1975
"Springsteen's new songs are no longer rooted solely in images from his scuffling boardwalk youth: he's now taken the emotional gruel of those narratives and put them into overdrive by adding his overwhelming fear of entrapment. Literally every song is touched with that drive to escape, from the desperately romantic 'Thunder Road' to the screaming realizations of 'Backstreets.' The more I listen the more I think that Born To Run is Springsteen's most intensely personal album, with the musical components from his favorite period, early sixties Spector-sound power-drive, and the emotional meat from both his struggling days and the here-and-now."
– John Milward, CHICAGO READER, Sept. 19, 1975
"Born To Run is a magnificent album, lyrically and musically. If it seems enigmatically produced, give it time. Springsteen's visions combined simple elements into an intrinsically complex blend of sounds, producing rich and most powerful rewards. While this is not live Springsteen, it is Bruce's effort at letting us hear these songs as he hears them, at recreating on record what's in his head...Springsteen deals primarily in emotions, using his story-songs not so much to tell a story as create, piece by piece, character by character, a fantasy world, an opera of images rich in feeling. The songs hold-up individually and totaled become a vision of the violence and tenderness, of life on the street."
– Ed Sciaky, PHONOGRAPH, October 1975
"The biggest American revelation of 1975 will without doubt be Bruce Springsteen, whose shows at the Bottom Line in New York in August triggered a veritable glowing hysteria in the press and in the public. Bluntly called "the savior of rock" etc etc, for the last two years, he was immediately labeled as 'the new Dylan,' (but) has presently freed himself up from this heavy load and offers a rock alloy that is very funky and extremely poetic which captivates both small and large. One will quickly be able to judge with his third album, Born to Run, recently released amid the highest honors on the charts. It's a beautiful collective hysteria."
– BEST (France), October 1975
"Musically, the album is built around the rhythm section, the piano, and varying lead instruments. Each performs a function, both in the sound and the development of the lyric themes. A number of the songs begin in the same way as 'Backstreets,' building slowly around an intensifying piano rhythm, above which Springsteen first speaks, second sings, and third howls the words of a world without escape. Through the first verses the lead instrument cuts across the rhythm, then takes off in a mid-song solo, finally returning to echo the words on the run-in. It's the oldest trick in the book – counterpointing an endless piano with sharp cutting leads – but it's rarely been done better, and it's essential to the overall vision ... The two main lead instruments are Clarence Clemons' saxophone, which adds a touch of sleaziness to the images, and Bruce's guitar. As is apparent from the cover, he wears it low on the hip, and he uses it throughout like a weapon: a Bo Diddleyish hammer in 'She's The One', a B-movie 'strangler-in-the-fog' in 'Backstreets'', a scythe slashing Who riffs across fast-flowing piano in 'Jungleland'. If there's one criticism of this album it's that he doesn't use the guitar often enough. Whenever it appears it's mesmerizingly violent, the perfect foil to Roy Bittan's rolling keyboard work."
– Dave Downing, LET IT ROCK (UK), October 1975
"Bruce Springsteen, at the time wrongly launched as another Dylan-imitator, is finally going to make it, in spite of the 'CBS sales talk' and the, after all, very unprofessional sounding Greetings from Asbury Park record ...[H]is third record should be seen as a new beginning. Springsteen is making very grown-up music nowadays. He's no longer trying to sing about his frustrations like some mediaeval minstrel, but he's busy creating his own sound, which goes further than Dylan's electronic inventions by the time of Blonde on Blonde ... It's a new episode in the great American tradition from Seeds, Dylan and Doors. All that aggression, which was temporarily put into the Vietnam war, is now being put into music again."
– VERONICA (The Netherlands) Oct. 4, 1975
"It is a magnificent album that pays off on every bet ever placed on him — a '57 Chevy running on melted down Crystals records that shuts down every claim that has been made. And it should crack his future wide open ...'Born to Run' is the motto that speaks for the album's tales, just as the guitar figure that runs through the title song — the finest compression of rock & roll thrill since the opening riffs of 'Layla' — speaks for its music ... The songs, the best of them, are adventures in the dark, incidents of wasted fury. Tales of kids born to run who lose anyway, the songs can, as with 'Backstreets,' hit so hard and fast that it is almost impossible to sit through them without weeping. And yet the music is exhilarating. You may find yourself shaking your head in wonder, smiling through tears at the beauty of it all ... It is a measure of Springsteen's ability to make his music bleed that 'Backstreets,' which is about friendship and betrayal between a boy and a girl, is far more deathly than 'Jungleland,' which is about a gang war. The music isn't 'better,' nor is the singing — but it is more passionate, more deathly and, necessarily, more alive. That, if anything, might be the key to this music: As a ride through terror, it resolves itself finally as a ride into delight."
– Greil Marcus, ROLLING STONE, Oct. 9, 1975
"Springsteen joined the pantheon with the release of Born To Run. The music is urgent, full of abrupt stops and startling changes of tempo; the lyrics tell powerful stories of characters on the edge, living out rock and roll dreams ... Springsteen's characters are 'tramps ... born to run' whose glory lies in a moment, not in a lifetime. Their dream is to flash just once; to chance everything in hopes of grabbing some onto something they can call their own. These are the dreams that dissolve into lives of quiet desperation."
– David McGee, RECORD WORLD, Oct. 25, 1975
"Born To Run is a bridge between Springsteen the raffish rocker and the more ragged, introverted street poet of the first two albums. Although he maintains that he 'hit the right spot' on Born To Run, it is the second album, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, that seems to go deepest. A sort of free-association autobiography, it comes closest to the wild fun-house refractions of Springsteen's imagination."
– Jay Cocks, TIME, Oct. 27, 1975
"This record is fabulous – let us not be afraid of the word. Lyrics and composer are remarkable, and Bruce also has a personality that will not leave his listener indifferent ...One thinks a bit of Roger McGuinn, of the Band and of Dylan but always from now on we'll have to get used to thinking of Bruce Springsteen as a personality and an original creator because this is one of the best records of all time."
– EXTRA NOUVELLE (France), November 1975
"'Thunder Road' opens with harmonica; then the first sounds of the voice grab you throughout the body. As if Dylan had a son who sings harder than he, but not Dylan, there will never be another Dylan, the old Bob did nicely, and Springsteen is well there, [with his] infuriating words, sentences and phrases to place himself abruptly bitching toward the black sky ... The band sounds ruthlessly fat, but the organ and piano parts alternate with subtlety, and the magnificent chorus of black sax knows how to gush so truly, at the precise instant, just when one needs the haughty splendor of a saxophone ... Springsteen croaks out his images or his passions in a terrifying manner, like a tightrope walker too drunk and then a little too amorous, but so strong that he can outdo you with a monstrous riff and prop you up with his grin ... .[F]or all those who climb the walls at night, be happy, Bruce Springsteen is for you. The rest [i.e. the rock and roll alternatives] is nothing but junk made of shit."
РFran̤ois Ducray, ROCK & FOLK (France), November 1975
"Springsteen's landscapes of urban desolation are all heightened, on fire, alive. His characters act in symbolic gestures, bigger than life. Furthermore, there's absolutely nothing in his music that's null, detached, or perverse and even his occasional world-weariness carries a redemptive sense of lost battles passionately fought. Boredom appears to be a foreign concept to him – he reminds us what it's like to love rock 'n' roll like you just discovered it, and then seize it and make it your own with certainty and precision ... If I seem to OD on superlatives, it's only because Born To Run demands them; the music races in a flurry of Dylan and Morrison and Phil Spector and a little of both Lou Reed and Roy Orbison, luxuriating in them and an American moment caught at last, again, and bursting with pride ... In a time of squalor and belittled desire, Springsteen's music is majestic and passionate with no apologies."
– Lester Bangs, CREEM, November 1975
"What we have is high quality, tense, often tearing, thriving, sometimes irritating to the point of flipping-out, heavy but not physical, sensual and mind-blowing, skillful, and with each note, each line, a new feeling. Born To Run is a mature record from a hyper-sensible poet and musician ... The American rock magazine, 'Crawdaddy'still refers to Bruce Springsteen as "Bruce Dylan", but since the release of his second album Springsteen has proved his worth over his idols to the people who didn't believe in him. His own material is far away from the folk-rock concept of Dylan and compared to him, Bruce deals better with foreign influences ... If anything, Born To Run is a little like Astral Weeks was for Van Morrison, the final and logical step for a musical past ... where comparisons don't work anymore, where he would simply be someone who sings his own songs ... Sometimes Springsteen is just a little over the top, his energy is just out of control, but it's this energy, the continuous pulsation, that makes this record alive and compelling."
– Van Jiirgen Legath, SOUNDS (Germany) November 1975
"The forced internal rhymes of the earlier song lyrics have given way to a brash, long-lined lyricism in which focal images of cars and motorcycles, thunder, neon signs, clashing gangs, and the throbbing, sexy beat of Jersey Shore, honky-tonk fleshpots merge into as powerful a metaphor for urban America as any rock poet has yet supplied ... [W]hat is finally most impressive about Born To Run are the song lyrics, which communicate a street-life experience that is both personal and mythic. With this accomplishment, Springsteen embodies the myth of rock & roll as an urban, proletarian outburst. By personifying the poet-hoot, boy-man, rebel-hero of American mass culture from Brando, Dean, and Presley through Dylan, Springsteen reminds us that rock & roll came from the streets as a cultural necessity, an instinctual urge toward self-transcendence and self-definition."
– Stephen Holden, CIRCUS RAVES, December 1975
"This was one of those LPs awaited in Spain ... (because of) the entire range of commentary which we have read in the American press about the Springsteen "boom" ... Born To Run is one of the best albums which I have seen this year, of absolute quality, extraordinary rhythms and a series of fantastic themes, all dominated by Bruce's talent and primarily his voice. There is nothing wasted in the album in any sense. The central theme is a display of energy, but 'Night', 'Jungleland', 'Backstreets', and 'Thunder Road' don't take a back seat. And it is not only Bruce, but his group, the production, the depth of all the work put together by a great artist at this time ... Springsteen is a 'boom' in flesh and blood, an authentic hero of the rock scene of 1975 and the 1970s."
– DISCO EXPRESS (Spain) Dec. 5, 1975
TRACK BY TRACK
Thunder Road
"The images ... touch us down in our core. In 'Thunder Road,' there is the line 'Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet'; given the symbolic importance attached to the graduation gown, it is one of rock's most powerful images. 'What else can we do now,' Springsteen asks, 'except to roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair.' In essence, your future's nil, but at least you're free, so ... take a chance."
– David McGee, RECORD WORLD, Oct. 25, 1975
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
" ... a delighted R&B song about how Springsteen formed his band, introduced by the type of prologue that rings up the curtain on Shakespearean productions."
– Stephen Holden, CIRCUS RAVES, December 1975
Night
"The title cut, a rock standard by any definition, builds an incredible energy with wall-to-wall sound. I can't remember a more thrilling song of the road. 'Night,' a less ambitious number, suffers only by comparison."
– Stephen Holden, CIRCUS RAVES, December 1975
Backstreets
"... begins with music so stately, so heartbreaking, that it might be the prelude to a rock & roll version of The Iliad."
– Greil Marcus, ROLLING STONE, Oct. 9, 1975
Born To Run
"Springsteen's characters 'sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream,' skating for a longshot in automobiles and beds with the omnipresent roar of the radio driving them on to connect anew, as even in the failure of their striving they are redeemed by Springsteen's vision: 'Tramps like us – baby, we was born to run.'"
– Lester Bangs, CREEM, November 1975
She's The One
"... an extraordinary song where all the gestures are of suffering."
РFran̤ois Ducray, ROCK & FOLK (France), November 1975
Meeting Across The River
" ... a real surprise, a dramatic monologue/song, featuring the sultry trumpet of Randy Brecker."
– Ed Sciaky, PHONOGRAPH, October 1975
Jungleland
"A great hooligan tide washing through New York dusky nights, playing guitars and clawing their way toward love."
– Dave Downing, LET IT ROCK (UK) October 1975
(Special thanks to Maggie Powell, Ed Toskaner, Roy van Rees, Klaus Boettger and Deborah Robinson for translations; Dan Toskaner and the staff of the Asbury Park Public Library for research assistance; and Christopher Phillips of Backstreets for editing and encouragement. Compiled by Bob Crane.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
