Photoblog of house-rebuilding efforts in New Orleans by a group called Celebration Church. It’s got some pretty harrowing images.
Big Sleazy
Going into this weekend, I wasn’t sure if the re-election of Ray Nagin as mayor of New Orleans would be tantamount to Marion Barry’s re-election in Washington, DC after being caught smoking crack cocaine.
Then the city’s member of the House of Representatives got caught on video taking $100,000 in cash to facilitate bribing Nigerian officials for an internet venture (evidently not this one), and I thought, “Well, at least Nagin’s not part of the political establishment.”
Will Collier at Vodkapundit has a good take on the need to revamp politics in New Orleans and Louisiana:
Louisianans in general and New Orleanians in particular made too many bad choices for too long. They acquiesced to governmental corruption and incompetence with a shrug and the inevitable, “that’s just Louisiana.” They allowed an unfettered criminal class to fester and thrive, until it literally took over the city. They put too much trust in luck and “the great elsewhere,” as local author Chris Rose puts it, to bail them out when things were at their worst.
And so they lived and died with those choices.
Now it’s time for them to choose again.
Read the whole shebang.
Flood the zone
When you compare the Army Corps of Engineers to the Catholic church, you’re hitting below the belt.
If you’re interested in the policy that led to the flooding of New Orleans, you need to read this article by Michael Grunwald.
Paris By Night
Athens, Jerusalem and Gillette
I’m here in the Real O.C.! I haven’t seen Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows anywhere, nor Kristin Cavallari’s roots, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
During the flight, I watched No Maps for These Territories, a documentary about William Gibson. I’m ruminating on that one, and might write a lengthy, rambling take on it next weekend. Harass me about it, so I can formulate some more.
Also, I read a pair of short columns that I think you might like, and that seem somehow intertwined. I haven’t gone to Arts & Letters much lately; not sure why. But Amy hit it this weekend and came across both of these pieces, so all credit goes to the official VM wife.
The first is a review of Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, which explores Bloom’s visions and revisions on the relationship between the Old and New Testaments:
Bloom interprets the trinity as an essentially polytheistic “structure of anxiety” in which God the Fatherâ€â€whom Bloom finds “lacking in personality”â€â€is a mere shade of Yahweh. Yahweh, “the West’s major literary, spiritual, and ideological character,” has not, according to Bloom, “survived in Christianity.” In J’s portraitâ€â€the earliest biblical layerâ€â€Yahweh is “anxious, pugnacious, aggressive, ambivalent,” not to mention all too often absent. But unlike Jesus Christ and God the Father, he is emphatically not a theological God. Indeed, Bloom asserts that “no God has been more human.”
The other piece is about wet shaving, Homer, and the possibility of redemption. I can’t begin to do it justice.
The Passed Over & the Elite
Greeted Passover on a flight home from Chicago. I haven’t held or been to a seder in a few years. The last one was the time I ended up meeting the Zionist Conspiracy To Get Me Married To A Nice Jewish Girl. It’s nice to see that the Jewish lobby isn’t as effective as Drs. Mearshimer and Walt think it is.
But I made it in safe and sound, with a little in-flight bumpiness and traffic delay. Just about finished Geek Love, which I’m enjoying a bunch. I sorta disagree with Dunn’s use of an X-Men-like character in the midst of an otherwise believable world of a really demented sideshow freak family.
The BIO conference went well; I had some good interviews and got a lot of good anecdotes & bits of intel about various aspects of the industry. I also got to meet several people with whom I’ve been in work-e-mail contact for years. That usually helps facilitate the working relationship, except when one of the two parties doesn’t remember having met the other face-to-face at a previous conference.
Anyway, the conference was described to me as “a singles club for CEOs and VCs,” and it’s true that a lot of the conversation was about funding, in-licensing developmental products (as in, a big company looking to buy the rights to a smaller company’s drug that’s currently in clinical trials). The conference is also filled with regional economic development councils for various states or countries (like that Malaysia group I mentioned a while back). They work hard to get companies to choose their regions for R&D or manufacturing facilities, and I like hearing them explain their virtues. The Maine pavilion had a slogan on one of its displays that read (paraphrasing): “Bangor: more metropolitan than you think!”
Well, duh.
Anyway, one of the funnier moments of the last day occurred as we were getting ready to board the plane back to Newark. It was one of the first Continental flights after show’s end, and the gate area was filled. The clerk called for all Elite Access passengers to board. None of us stepped back to make room. Turns out, when you have a conference that’s as money-centric as BIO, with so many attendees who constantly travel, everyone has Elite status.
Except my associate editor, who felt that her non-Elite status was a badge of honor.
The Cos on the Cleanup
Bill Cosby spoke at a rally in NO,LA about reconstruction:
Cosby, whose criticism of some aspects of modern African-American culture has stirred controversy in recent years, told a rally headed by black leaders that the city needed to look at the “wound” it had before Katrina struck.
“It’s painful, but we can’t cleanse ourselves unless we look at the wound,” Cosby told the rally of about 2,000 people in front of the city’s convention center.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you had the highest murder rate, unto each other. You were dealing drugs to each other. You were impregnating our 13-, 12-, 11-year-old children,” he said.
“What kind of a village is that?”
In yesterday’s Washington Post, Pastor Johnny Ray Youngblood also discussed the introspective portion of the rebuilding process:
With Katrina, as with East Brooklyn and North Philadelphia and Southeast Washington, the way out is straight ahead. We have to act our way out of this — as in constructive action by hopeful actors who work with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other.
We have to raise our own money, not just wrestle over government money. We have to find our own housing sites. We have to hire and monitor builders and developers who work for us, not for some bureaucrat in Washington.
We have to deflect all the hustlers and talkers within our community who see this catastrophe as just another opportunity to shake people down and line their pockets.
We have to see this as a generational struggle — 10 years, maybe 20 — not as a quick fix.
Moon Over Malaysia
Check out the Virtual Memories Podcast!
I’m headed to the BIO conference in a few weeks. It’s in Chicago this year, a city that I haven’t seen much of. I had a parenteral drug conference there in the spring of 2000, and enjoyed the environs and architecture. I’m hoping for a little more time to get out and explore this time. This trip will unfortunately be contrasted by another conference two weeks later in Anaheim.
The BIO conference is dominated by regional economic development councils, which are intent on bringing biotech companies and their manufacturing facilities into their areas. These EDCs have a lot of incentives to offer and different ways of enticing companies to set up shop. I wrote all about it in the April issue of my magazine; I’ll post a link to that piece when it’s available, in case you’re interested in the stuff I spend my days working on.
A lot of these EDCs want trade magazine editors to visit during BIO, so they can explain to us what their region has to offer. Sometimes this evolves into a trip to that region; that’s how my Sweden/Denmark trip in August 2004 happened. I’ve been to a few other sites as part of this process: Puerto Rico, Spokane, WA, Phoenix/Scottsdale, and probably some others that I’m forgetting. Generally, I’m too busy to travel on some many junkets, so I make the rounds at BIO and learn what I can about the regions.
Which leads me to the invite I received from a PR firm by e-mail today. They’d like me to sit down for an interview with the CEO of the Malaysian Biotechnology Corp., the government agency devoted to building a biotech industry in that country. It was a pretty gracious invite, and it’s flattering that the firm considers my magazine worth the interview-time.
But I looked at the invite for a few moments, thinking, “Malaysia . . . Malaysia . . . Oh, that’s right! They won’t let you into the country if you have an Israeli passport!”
I spent a few minutes researching to make sure that was the case (which led me to the previous Prime Minister’s anti-semitic comments from 2003). Yup! Malaysia doesn’t recognize Israel’s existence (but does recognize Palestine’s: whew!).
I was prepared to write off the invite then and there, but it occurred to me that Israel might have the exact same policy. You never know. I’d hate to be more of a hypocrite than I already am.
I ended up having to call the Israeli consulate to clear up the issue: Malaysians aren’t treated differently than any other nationality coming to visit Israel; they just need a visa like anyone else. I told the young lady on the phone about Malaysia’s policy. She said, “Ooh. That’s not nice.” We agreed that my mother wouldn’t be happy about it, either.
After that, I struggled to write the e-mail to the PR rep. I didn’t want to take on an adversarial tone, or imply that she was morally compromised by helping represent Malaysia. But I did want to express my point of view about what I wouldn’t meet with them. I went with
I know this is going to sound terrible, but I can’t in good conscience discuss the attractions of a biotech base in a country that would turn away most of my family at the border because of the passports they carry.
As near as I can tell, Malaysia has a blanket ban on entry by Israeli nationals (with case-by-case exceptions), and I’m afraid that I can’t publicize/promote a country with that policy.
If I have my facts wrong, please let me know ASAP.
Thanks,
Gil Roth
Now there’s only a problem if the MBC decides to start advertising. Still, it wouldn’t be as bad as taking an 8-page ad insert from Sudan, like the NYTimes did. I was hoping it would open with the banner: “Sudan: More than Genocide and Civil Wars!”
Check out the Virtual Memories Podcast!
Always with the pictures
Just downloaded the pix from my digital camera!
Snaps from our stay in Healdsburg, CA (near Sonoma)
We drove through Monterey and the 17-Mile Drive in Pebble Beach.
Then we spent two nights in Big Sur.
I’ll write all about it soon. We’re still cleaning up the house, getting food-shopping done, writing thank-you cards, and all that post-wedding/post-trip stuff. And gazing blissfully into each other’s eyes, which makes it tough to type.
Lunch of the gods
You should score yourself an Ambrosiaburger at Nepenthe someday.