It's the place we longed for -- the place to get away from it all. The place to be an individual just like the Joneses, with whom we must keep up.
It's the adjustable-rate American Dream, the one where we lose ourselves as we lose our way, and the neighbors can't help because -- frankly -- we don't know them all that well.
It's the hour commute of our discontent. It's where we come to know poverty can be more than a lack of disposable income. It's where we have everything and have nothing.
It's a way of life we're finding we no longer can afford, fueled by resources we're running out of.
It's Suburbia . . . and we're taking a musical look at it this week on 3 Chords & the Truth, just in time for the release of Arcade Fire's excellent new album, The Suburbs.
What does it all mean? Well, it depends.
Download the Big Show, put on your musical thinking cap and see whether you can sort it all out. Or just turn off your brain and rock out -- it's totally up to you.
Really. LET'S SEE . . . what else we got going on on this edition of 3 Chords & the Truth? Well, lots, actually.
We go under the covers, and you can use your imagine to decide what that's all about, because I ain't giving it away here. You'll have to listen to be sure.
And . . . what else? Let's see, we also go all the way back to 1949 to see what was on the radio back then, as we look for the roots of rock 'n' roll in there somewhere.
Sound like fun? Yeah? Then what are you waiting for? It's up there on the audio player, and it's here, too.
They heard me singing and they told me to stop Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock These days my life, I feel it has no purpose But late at night the feelings swim to the surface
'Cause on the surface the city lights shine They're calling at me, come and find your kind Sometimes I wonder if the World's so small That we can never get away from the sprawl Living in the sprawl Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains And there's no end in sight I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights
-- Arcade Fire, Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
Let me see if I have this straight. Or gay. I forget.
The country is in an uproar over gay marriage, because that's all weird and stuff, because the gays found out that everybody else was married to somebody else on Facebook and all they had was a crappy little ceremony in the San Francisco courthouse, when everybody else gets a destination wedding in Italy -- and then one at Disney World, complete with fireworks but no divorce, which is so easy today that half of all married couples get one (So what's the deal with forgetting that common little detail?) -- and that's, like, bigamy, only the lawyers say they're just being drama queens, because nobody sexted them pictures of their junk like Brett Favre, who supposedly texted pictures of himself playing with his while wearing Crocs -- Crocs? -- because Jenn Sterger is hot and kinda looks like his wife, only 16 years younger and not a grandma.
We know Sterger because she's got a show on Versus because she used to go to Florida State football games damn near nekkid, which got her enhanced physique into Maxim and Playboy -- before she took her implants out, because she wanted to, like,totally go countercultural here -- which led to a Sports Illustrated column and a gig as a New York Jets sideline reporter, which is what apparently intrigued Mr. Retirement's penis, and now Whoopi Goldberg is all pissed off and cussing a blue streak at gate crashers, if not penis posers, which makes Michaele Salahi cry, because somebody's gonna be irate when pictures of your wanger end up on Facebook for your other wife to find, and why should gays have to miss out on that kind of wedded bliss?
AND WHY DID Michelle Obama ditch the prez on his birthday anyway to spend hundreds of grand on a Spanish vacay with the kid?
I ask this because we are a sensible, sober and moral people who think marriage is sacred and not to be trifled with by just any Tom, Dick or Harry. Or any consenting combination of the above.
IT IS the very sanctity of marriage and the spiritual and cultural gravity of sexuality (and how we use it) that is what's behind the monster effin' rush you get by boinking pert little interns less than half your age. Or sleeping your way up the corporate food chain.
You know what Bob Inglis is? A socialist. A Republican socialist.
The veteran South Carolina congressman is a conservative-hating, Bilderburger-coddling, quisling traitor who's trying to kiss that crook Bill Clinton's ass while he runs interference for the communist "organizer" Barack Hussein Obama -- the Kenyan witch doctor now occupying (in the Nazi sense of the word) the White House.
Inglis is a hoity-toity little snot who thinks he's better than the people he's selling out up there in Washington, D.C., and now he's bitter because patriots saw through his "conservative" act and handed him his pinko-commie ass in the Republican runoff.
AND NOW the little traitor is showing his true colors, what with all his sour-grapes trash talking about God-fearing tea-party patriots to that godless commie rag Mother Jones:
During his primary campaign, Inglis repeatedly encountered enraged conservatives whom he couldn't—or wouldn't—satisfy. Shortly before the runoff primary election, Inglis met with about a dozen tea party activists at the modest ranch-style home of one of them. Here's what took place:
I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, "What the heck are you talking about?" I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, "You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!" And I said, "Please forgive me. I'm just ignorant of these things." And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.
Later, Inglis mentioned this meeting to another House member: "He said, 'You mean you sat there for more than 10 minutes?' I said, 'Well, I had to. We were between primary and runoff.' I had a two-week runoff. Oh my goodness. How do you..." Inglis trails off, shaking his head.
(snip) Why not give these voters what they wanted? Inglis says he wasn't willing to lie:
I refused to use the word because I have this view that the Ninth Commandment must mean something. I remember one year Bill Clinton—the guy I was out to get [when serving on the House judiciary committee in the 1990s]—at the National Prayer Breakfast said something that was one of the most profound things I've ever heard from anybody at a gathering like that. He said, "The most violated commandment in Washington, DC"—everybody leaned in; do tell, Mr. President—"is, 'Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.'" I thought, "He's right. That is the most violated commandment in Washington." For me to go around saying that Barack Obama is a socialist is a violation of the Ninth Commandment. He is a liberal fellow. I'm conservative. We disagree...But I don't need to call him a socialist, and I hurt the country by doing so. The country has to come together to find a solution to these challenges or else we go over the cliff.
Inglis found that ideological extremism is not only the realm of the tea party; it also has infected the official circles of his Republican Party. In early 2009, he attended a meeting of the GOP's Greenville County executive committee. At the time, Republicans were feeling discouraged. Obama was in the White House; the Democrats had enlarged their majorities in the House and Senate. The GOP seemed to be in tatters. But Inglis had what he considered good news. He put up a slide he had first seen at a GOP retreat. It was based on exit polling conducted during the November 2008 election. The slide, according to Inglis, showed that when American voters were asked to place themselves on an ideological spectrum—1 being liberal, 10 being conservative—the average ended up at about 5.6. The voters placed House Republicans at about 6.5 and House Democrats at about 4.3. Inglis told his fellow Republicans, "This is great news," explaining it meant that the GOP was still closer to the American public than the Democrats. The key, he said, was for the party to keep to the right, without driving off the road.
Inglis was met, he says with "stony" faces: "There's a short story by Shirley Jackson, 'The Lottery.'" The tale describes a town where the residents stone a neighbor who is chosen randomly. "That's what the crowd looked like. I got home that night and said to my wife, 'You can't believe how they looked back at me.' It was really frightening." The next speaker, he recalls, said, "'On Bob's ideological spectrum up there, I'm a 10,' and the crowd went wild. That was what I was dealing with."
OOOOOOH. Tea-party patriots are scawy, scawy people. Ooooooh, the mean tea-pawty peoples aw gowing to huwt powah, powah Biwul Ingwiss!
The RINO sounds like Barney . . . Barney Frank! HAAAAAA!
And I'll bet some Jew put him up to saying tea-party people are anti-Semitic.
OH . . . get this! He says the Republicans will regret following the common-sense, freedom-loving patriots instead of the commie-libs and Bilderburgers!
Inglis is a casualty of the tea party-ization of the Republican Party. Given the decisive vote against him in June, it's clear he was wiped out by a political wave that he could do little to thwart. "Emotionally, I should be all right with this," he says. And when he thinks about what lies ahead for his party and GOP House leaders, he can't help but chuckle. With Boehner and others chasing after the tea party, he says, "that's going to be the dog that catches the car." He quickly adds: "And the Democrats, if they go into the minority, are going to have an enjoyable couple of years watching that dog deal with the car it's caught."
AND WE'RE GONNA enjoy watching you burn in hell with your communiss friends, you America-hating pansy!
You just don't get that sometimes you have to destroy the village to save it. Destroy it all!Destroy it so that the green shoots of freedom will emerge from the rubble of the socialist state, fertilized by the corpses of all the pinkos and the parasites.
In this vintage trade ad for Channel 2 in Baton Rouge, WBRZ, being smothered in crude oil would seem to be the least of Pierre the Pelican's problems.
As a matter of fact, that 100 kilowatts of radio-frequency excitement he's hangin' onto is about to wipe the smile right off his beak.
If you're laughing right now, you just may be a geek.And if, in the lede, you recognized the wording WBRZ used in every on-air legal identification way back when, you may be a double-plus geek. Me? I would be your leader.
"I'm the best thing in this town," she arrogantly declared after cops busted her for being a drunk nuisance Friday, according to an insider.
"She was bad-mouthing everyone who walked by her [in the police stationhouse]. She was saying 'I'm a star, you can't do this to me.'"
Snooki unleashed a boozed-up, expletive-filled rant after being arrested for disorderly conduct, and attempted to use her new-found fame as a "get-out-of-jail-free" card.
"You can't tell me what to do - I'm Snooki," she yelled at officers, according to witnesses. "Do you know who I am? I'm f------ Snooki. You can't do this to me. I'm f------ Snooki. You guys are going to be sorry for this. Release me!"
Not surprisingly, her harsh language didn't do the trick.
The pint-sized reality TV star was hauled away from the Jersey shore boardwalk in cuffs Friday as her oversized shades slid down her nose. A photo of her looking dishevelled with mascara running down her face while in custody also surfaced yesterday, as locals took stock of her unruly behavior and lashed out at the reality show cast.
"My world's been turned upside down," says Chris Wilson, a charter boat captain in Venice, La. "Our life as fishing guides and marina owners — and everybody down here. We used to fish every day. Now we ride around and look for oil, or ride people around, you know. They say we're working, they say they're paying us, but nobody's got paid yet ... I guess it's coming."
This quotation comes from photographer David Zimmerman's latest series, "Gulf Coast." A fine-art photographer based in New York and Taos, N.M., Zimmerman relocated to Louisiana just after BP's April oil spill and, for the past few months, has been using a large-format view camera to put faces to the oil spill. "For all the devastation I saw offshore," Zimmerman writes in his artist statement, "the worst of what I saw was onshore; in the faces and voices of the people who call this place home."
Welcome to one of my earliest television memories -- Sing Along With Mitch.
"Mitch," of course, was the legendary Mitch Miller -- TV sing-along host, world-class oboist and hit-making record executive -- who died Saturday at 99. And, yes, his program was as corny as hell.
The critics hated it. But the audience loved it -- this show that would come to be known to Boomers nationwide, along with Guy Lombardo and The Lawrence Welk Show, as an exemplar of Stuff Your Parents Liked.
As a toddler, I liked the bouncing ball over the on-screen lyrics.
AS A MIDDLE-AGED, graying (and balding) Baby Boomer, I like that watching old episodes of Sing Along With Mitch makes me smile. And sing along.
And as someone who bemoans our culture's penchant for giving the Snookis of the world their own TV shows -- and I'm not sure what's more disturbing, laughing at the white trash or wanting to be the white trash -- I desperately miss the innocence of the idea of sitting around the Zenith console and singing along to songs whose prime was a long, long time ago.
LIKE AN old song of Milton Berle's says (and, yes, Milton Berle wrote songs), "I'd give a million tomorrows for just one yesterday." Wouldn't we all -- especially nowadays.
YEAH, this is corny stuff. Embarrassingly so. Just like family.
And it feels comfortable, like a cup of hot tea and lemon -- though we're loathe to admit it.
It feels like home . . . or what our time-edited memories of home would have us believe.
Now Mitch Miller is dead. He was preceded in death by a world that could countenance such as Sing Along With Mitch on the public airwaves.
And we mourn him. And we mourn his lost world -- that bygone era of gentler sensibilities and no Snooki . . . well, at least not on television.
Never has there been a more appropriately named place than Delacroix, La. Delacroix. De la croix.
Of the cross.
Two millennia ago, civilized society hung the Son of God on a cross and killed him due to practical concerns, as recounted in John 11:
47 So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, "What are we going to do? This man is performing many signs. 48 If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation." 49 But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing, 50 nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish." 51 He did not say this on his own, but since he was high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, 52 and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God. 53 So from that day on they planned to kill him.
TWO MILLENNIA LATER, modern, industrial society hung Delacroix, its people and their way of life on a modern, industrial cross and killed it due to practical concerns, as recounted in The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune:
On a blustery spring day, Delacroix native Lloyd Serigne stands on the banks of Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, 30 miles south of New Orleans, talking about the village that raised him in the 1950s. Reaching into a deep well of memories, he paints an idyllic picture: A community of several hundred fishers, farmers and trappers whose homes were surrounded by a wetlands paradise of high ridges, marshes and swamps. The outside world -- unwanted, unneeded -- seemed a thousand miles away.
But the scene surrounding him only mocks that vision.
Naked slabs and raw pilings that once supported homes stand like tombstones in open, soggy ground. Bare tree trunks rise from a salt marsh that used to be a vegetable field. Battered home appliances, ice chests and derelict boats litter the bank while a high tide moves through the remains of a hardwood forest. And a steady stream of heavy equipment heads down the road to fight the invasion of BP's oil.
None of it matches memories that seem as sharp as yesterday's news.
"Really, what we had here was a paradise -- a natural paradise," Serigne, 70, says with a smile of fond remembrance. He pauses to shake his head, a gesture half of wonder, half of despair.
"But when I try to tell the young people about this, they just stare at me like I'm crazy. They just can't imagine what was here such a short time ago.
"And now it's gone. Just gone."
DELACROIX. It died for your sins -- or, more specifically, for your SUV and all your stuff. A people, a culture and a now-gone landscape have born a cross of our society's making.
And the blood of people, cultures and whole places that are no more is upon us and our children . . . and our avarice.
Look at the television -- and radio -- biz as the Hundred Years' War. Back when broadcasters were first itching for a fight, back when a radio was a big wooden box with glowing tubes inside, the War Between the Stations was a glorious cause, and Brand X was a dastardly foe worthy of one's best shot. We note above the enthusiasm which Dr. San Guinary enters the fray for KMTV on the Omaha battlefield of the 1970s.
Yes, the combatants were full of piss and vinegar and, by God, Brand X would be finished off in a few months at worst. Think of the barbecue at Twelve Oaks at the start of Gone With the Wind
BUT THE WAR drags on. And war is expensive. And you get politicians corporate execs who figure the ratings war can be fought on the cheap -- a calculated strategy for reducing taxpayers' burden increasing shareholder value.
The troops become weary, and morale flags. Then, on stage at an industry gathering, open dissent:
NOW, DECADES later, radio is all but dead. Local television is but a shell of its former self.
Dr. San Guinary was canceled in 1980 and, sadly, departed this mortal coil in 1988.
And today, Channel 7 is hanging on, Channel 6 is known as Channel Sux, while the once-proud army for which the good doctor fought so . . . er . . . for which the good doctor fought so, is known simply by the results of its ratingskampf:
If you're wondering what happened to this week's edition of3 Chords & the Truth . . . there isn't one. We're taking the week off. As you can see from this picture of my assistant Scout, we're tired.
As you also can see from my assistant Scout, it's impossible to find good help that works for dog treats.
We figure the Big Show will be back next weekend, and we also figure that it just might blow your mind.
It already has blown Scout's.
It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there next week (or listen to the archives now). Aloha.
Hey, if you're going gaga for old Baton Rouge TV commercials for stuff that ain't dere no more -- and you know who you are -- I think you'll really freak for this thing on the Internets, Gene Nelson's Podcast.
What's not to love about hours of vintage top-40 radio from the Big 91, WLCS. Which, of course, ain't dere no more. Hasn't been for 26 years.
I LOVED that station. And I may have written about it previously.
I wonder what's being burned into the brains of young people today -- what memories, or old sights, or old sounds will instantly take them back to this present when it's long past in some uncertain future.
What is it they take for granted today that will tomorrow become a touchstone . . . a glimpse into an increasingly murky mind's-eye vision of who they were?
I don't know. Neither do they.
Me, I have my old memories. And the sights and sounds of what helped make me who I am today -- God help us all.
There's a fella in Baton Rouge who's hit the mother lode of TV-commercial nostalgia for those of us -- those of us of a certain age -- who grew up in Red Stick.
In other words,this YouTube page is something akin to video meth for Baby Boomers from thereabouts. I mean, Gordon Lloyd McLeod . . . holy crap! I haven't thought about McLeod's appliances in 20 years -- at least.
But there you go! And Goudchaux's, too (where the difference was U). If I have to explain it, you ain't from there, and most likely don't care anyway.
FOR THOSE of you who do care, though, let me present the Baton Rouge edition of Ain't Dere No More, beginning in three . . . two . . . one . . . roll 'em!
PHIL'S! Oysters! (sob)
AMERICAN BANK . . . ain't dere no more. And we ain't Young Americans no more, neither.
ABBY! The only chick who ever gave a guy a buck on a Saturday night. (Hey, it's the '70s . . . I'm supposed to be sexist!)
SIMPLE THINGS, like two in the morning . . . life was simple yesterday. And these Louisiana National Bank ads -- almost 40 years later -- are doin' their best to bring me yesterday.
LNB. My first bank. Sigh.
CAPITAL BANK. Weill/Strother ad agency, before Ray went to D.C., and became a political guru.
OBVIOUSLY, Ossie Brown never spied the bodacious tatas on display in this Del Lago commercial, being that the spot presumably aired more than once . . . and the meat market that was orders of magnitude groovier than Smiley's shook its booty for some years to come. That ad probably aired only on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, when Ossie was safely ensconced in a church pew.
No, the late district attorney was not a Del Lago kind of guy. But every testosterone-crazed high school boy sure as hell wanted to be.
THE GAP wasn't the only thing that was widening here. Go buy yourself an RCA XL-100 color TV and hep' Gordon Lloyd out.
STILL MR. BINGLE gently weeps . . . cause ain't no Goudchaux's . . . or Maison Blanche . . . or that God-awful slash-o-nated thing dere no more.
Well, that's about it for now. I do declare, the only thing that could have improved upon this experience would be going to the videotape of Al Crouch laying a sloppy, wet one on Joni Anderson, Tex Carpenter warning Channel 9 weather watchers about the nefarious "troffaloff" . . . or uncovering complete episodes of The Buckskin Bill Show or Storyland.
Because, boys and girls, Baton Rouge was a zoo. Count Macabre said.
Well, I think that Afghanistan venture is going rather swimmingly, don't you?
The news is so encouraging, and the happy natives seem so grateful for our benevolent presence. What?
Uh . . . Isuppose you can believe the following report from MSNBC if you like -- and that horrid, horrid video from the "mainstream, lamestream media," but I am obligated to caution you against such anti-American behavior.
WHY WOULD any patriot believe this kind of communistic agitprop, which we absotively must refudiate at every turn?
Six U.S. service members have been killed in Afghanistan, bringing the toll for July to at least 66 and making it the deadliest month for American forces in the near-nine-year war.
A NATO statement Friday said three troops died in two separate blasts in southern Afghanistan Thursday. The statement gave no nationalities, but U.S. officials said all three were Americans. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity pending notification of kin.
Another statement issued later Friday said three more had died, one following an insurgent attack and twin a roadside bombing in southern Afghanistan.
U.S. and NATO commanders had warned that casualties would rise as the international military force ramps up the war against the Taliban, especially in their southern strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar provinces. President Barack Obama ordered 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan last December in a bid to turn back a resurgent Taliban.
British and Afghan troops launched a new offensive Friday in the Sayedebad area of Helmand to try to deny insurgents a base from which to launch attacks in Nad Ali and Marjah, the British military announced. Coalition and Afghan troops have sought to solidify control of Marjah after overrunning the poppy-farming community five months ago.
The six deaths raised the U.S. death toll for the month to at least 66, according to an Associated Press count. June had been the deadliest month for the U.S. with 60 deaths. There have been 264 U.S. service members killed in combat and noncombat situations so far this year in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, according to the AP.
DON'T YOU believe all this talk about dead American soldiers -- they're resting. Or maybe they're stunned.
That easily could happen, as wild as those Afghan parties get. Just like the one above, which the lamestream media wants you to believe was a riot.
The first tomato of the season, that is. Yeah, it looks like it's going to be another one of those too-cool years where the tomatoes make late and get ripe later.
That's how it went last year, and when we finally started to get a bunch of ripe tomatoes, the blight hit. Wiped out most everyone's crop hereabouts.
This year, we've had precious few really scorching-hot, perfect tomato weather days, but it looks like we're getting a decent number of fruit on the vines. So far, too, it looks like the blight is being held at bay.
(Yes, it's extremely difficult to type with your fingers crossed. Knock on wood. And where's my damned rabbit's foot?)
On the other hand, the jalapeños seem to be doing fine. I've already picked a small mess of them. A couple of those went into a bottle of red wine vinegar to make hot sauce for the mustard greens in the bunny-proof wheelbarrow bed.
Ah reckon that's about it for the Revolution 21 farm report. I'm your Mighty Favog reporting.
P.S.: The headline? A pun probably understood only in Quebec or south Louisiana, based on "Lâche pas la patate," or "Don't drop the potato," which is a colloquialism for "Hang in there."
And no, "mon nèg" has no racial connotation whatsoever here -- it's a Cajun term of endearment. For what it's worth.
If, of course, you think of ABC' television's Wipeout as public-service broadcasting in the sense that people watch it and learn not to do that at home. Or anywhere.
Or perhaps the ongoing E! and Entertainment Tonight coverage of the travails of Lindsay Lohan (and the fashion faux pas that is the orange jumpsuit) is the type of public-service programming making advertisers go gaga. Message: It's glamorous being a 20-something addict . . . until it's not.
In radio today, "public service" is a functioning Emergency Alert System to interrupt the automation when there's a tornado warning.
If you ask me, the whole concept of "progress" died a horrible and tawdry death about the time Don Draper started dressing like Herb Tarlek. "Jocko Homo," y'all.
Now this has been a problem for a very, very long time. You can see that corporations were illegal at the founding of America. And even Thomas Jefferson complained that they were already bidding defiance to the laws of our country. Okay, people who say they're conservative, if they really wanted to be really conservative and really patriotic, they would tell these corporations to go to hell. That's what it would really mean to be conservative. So what we really need to do is regain the idea that it's our government safeguarding our interests and regain a sense of unity and common cause in our country that really has been lost.
When you're ignorant, you don't have options. You're an easy mark, because you lack power and, oftentimes, because you're too ignorant to know you're being played.
Or if you are savvy enough to know you're being played, what are you going to do about it?
Say you're a fisherman in Louisiana. You may or may not have much education -- and being that it's Louisiana we're talking about, chances are, not. All you've done is fish. All your daddy has done is fish. All your family has done for a hundred years or more is fish.
You have no options, because other options -- at least in many cases -- never have occurred to you. School, in all likelihood, wasn't a priority for you, just like it wasn't a priority for your daddy, or your daddy's daddy, or for the whole dying culture down there, for Pete's sake.
Same deal for all the other workers whose best option in life right now is to work cleanup for BP, sopping up or skimming up a toxic soup of crude oil and chemical dispersant that has a nasty habit of exploding the cells of mammals and fish. PEOPLE on the Gulf Coast = mammals. For some reason, I felt the need to make that clear.
Today, 27,000 workers in the BP-run Gulf cleanup effort may still be in danger. Some are falling sick, and the long-term effects of chemical exposure for workers and residents are yet unknown.
Workers lack power on the job to demand better safety enforcement. They fear company retaliation if they speak out and are wary of government regulators who have kept BP in the driver's seat.
BP carries a history of putting profit before worker safety. A 2005 refinery explosion in Texas City, Texas, killed 15 and injured another 108 workers. The Chemical Safety Board investigation resulted in a 341-page report stating that BP knew of "significant safety problems at the Texas City refinery and at 34 other BP business units around the world" months before the explosion.
One internal BP memo made a cost-benefit analysis of types of housing construction on site in terms of the children's story "The Three Little Pigs." "Brick" houses -- blast-resistant ones -- might save a few "piggies," but was it worth the initial investment?
BP decided not, costing several workers' lives. Federal officials found more than 700 safety violations at Texas City and fined BP more than $87 million in 2009, but the corporation has refused to pay.
(snip)
Now workers in the cleanup effort face similar challenges to those Jason Anderson and his 10 slain co-workers woke up to each morning. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policy analyst Hugh Kaufman says workers are being exposed to a "toxic soup," and face dangers like those in the Exxon Valdez, Love Canal, and 9/11 cleanups.
The 1989 Exxon Valdez experience should have taught us about the health fallouts of working with oil and chemical cleaners, but tests to determine long-term effects on those workers were never done, by either the company or OSHA. It appears they have faced health problems far beyond any warnings given by company or government officials while the work was going on.
Veterans of that cleanup, such as supervisor Merle Savage, reported coming down with the same flu-like symptoms during their work that Gulf cleanup workers are now experiencing. Savage, along with an estimated 3,000 cleanup workers, has lived 20 years with chronic respiratory illness and neurological damage.
A 2002 study from a Spanish oil spill showed that cleanup workers and community members have increased risk of cancer and that workers with long-term exposure to crude oil can face permanent DNA damage.
So far, Louisiana has records of 128 cleanup workers becoming sick with flu-like symptoms, including dizziness, nausea, and headaches, after exposure to chemicals on the job. BP recorded 21 short hospitalizations. When seven workers from different boats were hospitalized with chemical exposure symptoms, BP executives dismissed the illnesses as food poisoning.
BP bosses have told workers to report to BP clinics only and not to visit public hospitals, where their numbers can be recorded by the state.
Surgeon General Regina Benjamin has said that without the benefit of studies, or even knowing the chemical makeup of the Corexit 9500 dispersant (which its manufacturer calls a "trade secret"), scientific opinion is divided on long-term health impacts to the region.
Workers in the Gulf are not receiving proper training or equipment, says Mark Catlin, an occupational hygienist who was sent to the Exxon Valdez site by the Laborers union.
BP has said it will provide workers with respirators and proper training if necessary, but the company has yet to deem the situation a health risk for workers. The Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN) provided respirators to some workers directly, but BP forbade them to use them.
THE TENDENCY of anybody looking for a good story, one that engages the heart as well as the mind in such situations, is to spend much time romanticizing the poor and the vulnerable. The majority of the media coverage of the BPocalypse follows this well-trod path into the morass of sentimentality and, ultimately, cognitive dissonance when the cold, hard (and complicated) facts of life break through the spin and screw up the narrative.
The facts of the matter is that many of the people we're supposed to be feeling sorry are victims of not only BP, but also of accidents of birth, the deficiencies of a culture that too often hasn't valued all the things that immunize a people against victimhood, and a crapload of poor choices accumulating throughout one's lifetime.
If you're in Grand Isle, La., faced with a royal screwing by a multinational oil company -- and, for that matter, one's own government -- it's all too easy to just take it out on the "animals," which is postmodern Southern-speak for "n***ers." Who happen to be cleaning up the multinational oil company's hazardous waste off your beach and out of your marshes.
And if you're one of those cleanup workers -- poorly paid, without respirators and working under ATV-riding "overseers" in a setup that looks so much like a fast-forward of what slavery might look like had the South won the Civil War -- you further screw up a good narrative by getting shitfaced in a titty bar and treating a bunch of strippers like the pieces of meat you know yourself to be. At least in the eyes of your "betters."
Who, you can be assured, will collect their piece of the pie (and yours, too) no matter how much they screw up the lives of others by hook . . . and by crook. Why? Because they can, that's why.
THE POOR . . . the "victims," who resist all attempts at romanticizing their plight much more successfully than they fend off humiliation and depredation by them that's got, will not fare well here. Neither will a state like Louisiana, home to so many of the poor, and likewise so much more adept at resisting all attempts to romanticize its desperate plight than it is at fending off humiliation, depredation and marginalization at the hands of Corporate America and the government it has bought and paid for.
It's Suburbia . . . and we're taking a musical look at it this week on 3 Chords & the Truth, just in time for the release of Arcade Fire's excellent new album, The Suburbs.
