The past couple of days I’ve been playing “Águas de Março” over and over again.
Monday was the four-year anniversary of the passing of David Campbell, drummer, bon vivant, lover of life and good friend to so many.
“Listening to Elis & Tom today,” commented Erica, one of Dave’s many musical collaborators, on a Facebook post featuring an old photo of Dave. I liked that idea, and set aside some time to listen. I kept being drawn back to this absolutely amazing video of Elis Regina and Tom Jobim vocalizing and harmonizing in ways that seem impossible for mere mortals. It appears they did this in a single take! Remarkably, Elis keeps that cigarette going the whole time; understandably, Jobim collapses when it’s over.
“Águas de Marςo” was among the more memorable songs on a cd of brasilero music Dave burned for me not long before he died. He was passionate about that music, and let it inhabit his whole being.
I say “Águas de Marςo” was memorable, but I didn’t really give it a proper listen until yesterday. I googled around for translations and found the lyrical poetry jaw-droppingly great. I can’t really think of a poem or song, in any language, that gently cascades (literally, it cascades) from simple concrete images to profound, and profoundly melancholy, musings on life, loving life, decay, renewal.
É pau, é pedra,
é o fim do caminho
A stick, a stone,
The end of the road
***
And the riverbank talks
of the waters of March,
It’s the promise of life
in your heart, in your heart
A stick, a stone,
The end of the road,
The rest of a stump,
A lonesome road
A sliver of glass,
A life, the sun,
A knife, a death,
The end of the run
For what it’s worth, the simple elegance of the lyrics called to mind two disparate works, both extraordinary in their own way–Margaret Wise Brown’s The Quiet Noisy Book and Ronnie Lane’s Stone. See if you agree. I’m pretty convinced of it.
I was kind of taken by surprise to hear (in an out-of-the-blue Facebook message from an old friend), that it had been four years since Dave died.
That friend, Marie, now works as an architect in Paris. Paris! I almost shouted out when I read that, at the same time fretting about my rather non-glamorous list of duties for the day, having to get outside and feed the chickens and prepare my sad cattle pen for another attempt to keep my cattle from escaping the trailer. (A week ago, two steers had literally leapt out of the pen with the stunning power and form of steeplechase horses).
I ventured that Paris must be an amazing place to live and work, and Marie didn’t disagree, but hastened to add:
But most of the time the weather here is horrible. Damp winters, grey, never cold enough to make it feel like winter
My reply:
have the same complaints about Kentucky winters, which are usually never quite cold enough to deserve the name. gorgeous here now though. Overwhelmed by fecundity.
I think she thought that was sort of funny. and closed our chat by riffing on my choice of words, “I will leisurely peruse your fecundity photos later … at work at the moment.”
And really, at this time of year in central Kentucky, well, that is a pretty good word, Fecundity. I’ve been catching a swarm of bees nearly every day for the past two weeks, can barely keep up with the mowing, and my cattle, well, they have been very frisky in the cold weather. While cutting out those steers last week, I had trouble coaxing the bull out of the pen. He was keenly interested (as were some of the mature calves) in an orange cow that miscarried last spring. He was so interested that he attempted the deed not once but twice right there in broad daylight. I was scandalized, and only just managed to get out of the way, but was glad to see he was capable of that sort of exertion (he is a rather passive bull most times). And had to make the mental note to haul that orange cow off to sell. Still in heat after being with a bull for nearly four months, she wasn’t going to be calving this season (or any)…. It’s the way of the barnyard.
And the way of the world.
I hope my readers don’t find this weird that I return to the topic of Dave once again. I am moving on and living my life, which is full and wonderful. I also hope it’s not weird to say that, like all the people who’ve gone and died on me, he comes back in dreams. Fairly regularly. We have a chat about where he has been and how long he’s been away. Sometimes it makes sense, but not always. There is often some sort of separation, but nothing really traumatic. I’ve never really had my dreams analyzed, but to me it seems like this is what they are for. I wake up, feeling the loss, but also feeling we’ve reconnected somehow.
Less and less do I think with absolute grief about the loss of a friend, or my dad, brother or mother. It’s more like, They’ve gone to a place where I’m going too, in no particular hurry.
A long dry spell at the old blog. Been busy around the farm, bees and cows and lawn and garden. Not reading much, sadly.
My boys and I have bonded over basketball. They love to play their own special version of the game out back on our eight-foot hoop with a mostly grass court, with a few spots where the grass has been trodden down and you can dribble a little. Both boys are obsessed with dunking, and to that end have set up mini-trampolines. I’m always telling them, “You should be working on the basics before worrying about dunking.” Yes, I have become that dad.
And we have been watching the games together as much as we can. My older boy Daniel checks his Kindle first thing in the morning and always has something to say about the late game. We talk about the amazing feats of Durant and Chris Paul and the rageful ineptitude of Cedric Kendrick Perkins, and the roller-coaster ride Larry Legend has been on.
It’s a nice thing. Totally unexpected.
Other than that, I feel the events of the wider world will not be affected much by my commentary. That will probably change. It always does.
I keep up with my tumblr because that is something mindless to do while scanning the Internets in the morning. And an unexpected delight has been an increased participation in This Is My Jam. I had fairly low expectations of the service, but I find the fellowship of other musical obsessives is a corrective to the musical tedium of the Spotify era, where having all music at your disposal is not a lot better than having none.
Below is just one of many inspiring finds I’ve stumbled upon. The song by Voices of East Harlem is divine and the video of the uninhibited, inebriated Homo Brittanicus is delightful.
After a long and vaguely hellish winter, spring is bustin’ out all over the farm. Oddly, my beehives are all thriving and I’ve already had a swarm to capture. That’s kind of early but I’m not complaining.
Below is part of something I wrote two years ago. I’ve trimmed commentary on then-current events, but the key question remains the same: will my kids’ kids even know what a real drone is?
And I can only add my recent blinding insight: honeybees are the original twerkers.
Been a great year for the nectar flow, which started very early and is still going great guns, so much so that I woke with a start last night with the realization that I’ve got three bee hives resting on a single horizontal plank, with an unprecedented mass of honey above. (File under “Complications Resulting from Unusual Natural Bounties.”)
Another consequence of the nectar bounty is that hives become so strong that they swarm. Which is really not a bad thing for the bees. But for a beekeeper, aka honey thief, you like to avoid having swarms take away half your bee population, so if you’re lucky and observant you can catch your own swarms, which I did this weekend, twice.
On Saturday, after a little set-to with my increasingly emotional 11-year-old son (another ominous trend), I stomped out of the house and wandered to the bee yard, where they were swarming for the second day in a row.
If you’ve never stood in the middle of a bee swarm, put it on your bucket list. It feels like the early stages of the apocalypse might feel, and yet it’s really just a beautiful natural thing. Basically, the bee super-organism feels it is robust enough to reproduce, so it swarms. In a first swarm, roughly half the bees (five thousand, ten perhaps) accompany the old queen and look for a new home. Upon leaving the hive they fly in mad-seeming circles, creating a cone of bees about ten yards wide and forty feet high. It is noisy and scary and exhilarating. I half expect the voice of James Earl Jones to begin booming out.
The bees in this state are about as gentle as they can be. They’ve gorged on honey prior to leaving the hive, and are merely seeking an intermediate place to settle while the scouts find a permanent location. Lucky for me, they roost on a fence post right next to the hive, the same place another swarm had chosen just yesterday (and not, say, on a branch sixty feet off the ground).
I set to putting them into a temporary hive, as I had done with Friday’s swarm.
And let me talk about the Nasonov pheremone for a brief moment. Because it means a lot to me.
When I ponder all I’ve gained in moving to the country from a house and respectably well-paid job in New York, and giving up all that goes with same — annual 401k contributions, good health insurance, paid holidays, pay! — I can now add as a compensation an intimate familiarity with the workings of the Nasonov pheremone, which is what worker bees release to orient returning forager bees back to the colony.
When capturing swarms, beekeepers are looking for the distinctive butt-up, fanning behavior (displaying the Nasonov gland) as an indication that they have succeeded in transporting the queen from the temporary roost to the intended hive destination. To start moving the swarm I scoop handfuls of bees into the box. One random scoop had what looked like a virgin queen but I wasn’t entirely sure. When I laid the scoop into the box, bingo! The timbre of the buzzing changed instantly and dozens of bees suddenly stationed themselves at the edges of the box and began the fanning action. My work was pretty much done at this point. I walked away and returned at dusk, and the hive was full. All I had to do was put the hive cover on.
It’s possible that our generation may lose bees altogether. I won’t lay out the case for bee extinction, but a few minutes of googling around, and you will at least be familiar with it. It occurs to me as I type this that our kids’ kids won’t know what a real drone is, but they will be all too familiar with the mechanized war-fighting snooping machines that are named after the least useful members of the bee family….
But that is some disturbing, dispiriting stuff, and as I have already said, today I’m not letting that sort of thing harsh my buzz.
Heather and the kids were at the beach all last week. While I missed them dearly and eagerly awaited their return, I will say that it is also true that I reveled in being a bachelor and having the place to myself. But bad things tend to happen on the farm when I’m on my own.
When Friday dawned, I pondered my options for the coming day. Golf? Maybe a drive to Louisville or Lexington? Or perhaps visit a distillery? Be a nice day trip to Clermont, Loretto, Bardstown…
All that evaporated the moment I walked out to the pasture, coffee mug in hand, and came upon a commotion: the entire herd clustered around and nosing at a cow down on her side. I could see from the gate she had bloated. Her left side was grotesquely distended. It’s common to describe a bloated bovine as having blown up like a balloon. This is not an exaggeration.
I tried to stand the 1500-pound cow up. By myself. Futility. I started calling neighbors for help, left a few messages, and then got the vet assistant to pick up. He told me to get a hose down her to let off some of the gas. ASAP. Two years ago I had a heifer die of bloat a couple of hours after being turned out into a fresh clover paddock. (As it turns out, that heifer was the calf of the cow in question. A major aha! re the common genetics, but a little late to be useful).
Number 19 in happier times. I always think that bit of hay looks like a cigarette hanging out the corner of her mouth. That is the kind of attitude this cow had.
So I cut off a length of my garden hose and ran out to the cow, who was lying in mud, eyes rolled back in her head. I eased the hose (as easily as one can) down her throat. Enter my neighbor Mike, a seasoned cattleman of the old school, who told me the hose I was using was too flexible. I ran back to the house and cut a section of PE pipe, and ran back to the cow. No, Mike said, too stiff. So back to the house to cut a third section of hose, satisfactory to Mike, and we worked it down together. My job was to listen for the gas to see if we had the hose in the stomach. At one point I said I was not sure, and he asked me to hold it up so he could hear. When I did, a good-sized stream of bile and foam squirted into his ear. He took it in stride, and patiently explained that it was probably a good idea to hold the end of the hose NEXT to the ear. Ever the slow learner, five minutes later I had a pint of the same stuff running down my neck.
The cow’s left side was coming down some and she was able to breathe a little easier. Her eyes were closed, no longer rolled back. The next thing was to get her stood up, but in the mud that proved to be an impossible task, even after we were joined by my brother-in-law Tom. We wrapped a chain around her neck and tried to pull her up tug-of-war style, to no avail. Then we attached the chain to the hitch of Mike’s truck. We got her sitting, tucked her legs under her, and for just a second had her on her feet. Then she toppled over on to her right side. We repeated this comic routine for another 45 minutes. I was the last to realize this was not going to work.
“Well, you could beef her.”
I hated the idea. Number 19 (her tag long since rubbed off on a T-post) was the last left alive of the first five cows I had bought to start the herd, and the first one to calve. She was a bossy old thing, probably the herd’s alpha cow, and I was kind of fond of her. But the consensus was that she was never getting up and I had to make a quick decision. Either take her for meat or call the Dead Truck.
We called a few local small processors. Not one was willing to come kill and quarter her in the pasture on such short notice. And apparently no processor is allowed (or willing) to hang and butcher halves or quarters of beeves they hadn’t killed themselves.
Another neighbor, Albert, had appeared, and Mike soon somehow managed to volunteer Albert for the job of killing and butchering the cow. Albert was less than keen at first, but he started talking it through. He said give me half an hour for lunch and if you haven’t figured anything else out, give me a call.
Albert had grown up on a farm, and had a business raising and training walking horses. Previously he had worked as a nuclear physicist for the military. We had a bit of shared bond as (over)educated farmers and outsiders, having arrived in central Kentucky from different places. He from Kansas, I from Minnesota. And it turns out he had worked in a butcher shop as a teenager. Between his skill set and my pristine copy of Basic Butchering of Livestock & Game, we could make a go of it.
So in the early afternoon Albert came and did the deed. We made idle conversation as the cow bled out, and that is never a pleasant thing to be near. Albert then chained the rear legs to the hay fork on his John Deere and hoisted the once-cow/now-carcass over to a grove of trees in front of the barn, out of the howling and at times bitter wind. Albert had asked his friend Brian, a fellow horseman, to join us, and he was strong, energetic and clever, an indispensable addition. The skinning and quartering of a 1500-pound animal is a big undertaking at any time, especially as we lacked certain power tools that would have made the job much easier. We had to take turns with a meat saw to bisect the thing. I continued to consult The Book. Dissect the bung, and tie it off with a piece of string. Each turned page had another smear of blood.
Having split the carcass, Albert drove the tractor to our back yard, where we commandeered our picnic table and an old sheet for the butchering. We worked at that from 4 til well after dark. Albert had the butchering skills, Brian and Tom, both hunters, applied their experience with deer to the larger animal, and I … well, I assisted in whatever ways I could. Mike said he had a powerful meat grinder, which was excellent news, but when we went to get it, we weren’t sure what to make of it. Someone, a cousin of Mike’s, had taken an old hand-cranked grinder, bolted it to a piece of barn timber, and attached a motor. It took us some time to assemble it and to gauge the amount of meat we could feed into it without making it grind to a halt. We soon realized that when it choked we could just manually spin the wheel, minding our fingers, to force stuck pieces of meat or fat through. My skills being on the low end of the hierarchy, I was on hamburger duty while the others separated the carcass into primal cuts and found the parts that might produce steaks.
“Do you care about the short ribs?” When I said I might want some, we had to find a way to cut them up. I remembered my circular saw, and set to cleaning the wood and cobwebs off. It spat flecks of beef all over the place, but was pretty useful in cutting up the ribs.
We had to stop when it was completely dark, and improvised ways to store the meat away from our dog and cats and whatever else might wander into the yard, attracted to the smell.
Saturday morning, while I was waiting for the others to show up, I observed the cows getting nutty: the scent of the blood got the entire herd into a crazy state. There was a lot of head butting and full-tilt sprinting across the pasture, and much bellowing. The bull, usually the mellowest of animals, was frantic. It was an awe-inspiring and slightly intimidating scene.
A little before noon Tom and Albert came back to finish the butchering. We worked pretty much nonstop through the afternoon into the evening. The first Final Four game between UConn and Florida was midway through the first half when we had finally packed both my chest freezers full and sent off a crate with Albert.
The work was hard and constant but we were all in good humor through both days. Albert said he probably would not have taken on the job if he had known what was involved, and I think we all agreed with that. I said I might be calling you again, knowing what all you can do. He said, I’ll be sure not to pick up the phone when I see your name and number.
Early Saturday afternoon I seared a big brisket on the grill and stuck it into the oven to braise. Tom threw four strip steaks onto the grill, and we broke for lunch. I guess I had been apprehensive about actually eating this meat from a mature cow, meat that we had no way to properly age. But the steaks tasted amazing, as did the brisket, which we ate as we watched the Wildcats win yet another game with a last-second Aaron Harrison shot.
And last (Sunday) night came the true test, when I served up old number 19 to the wife and children. I had fears they would resist on sentimental grounds, or would think the meat tasted funny, and I would be stuck with two chest freezers full of beef I would have to eat myself. Fears unfounded, all three of them wanted a second helping!
I could easily insert some Wendell Berry-esque reflections on the nature of community and work, and they would be appropriate. But I’ve been out here in the country for over a decade now, and I am somewhat ambivalent about Mr. Berry. Sometimes (often) I give thanks and praise for his soul and wisdom. Bless His Heart. I really do think he is the Greatest Living Kentuckian, if not in the running for Greatest Living American. But for me there are other times when it’s Goddamn Wendell Berry for getting me into this farming life. I know it’s not his fault. I’m coming to realize now that I lack many, or most, of the attributes necessary to become a good farmer, and am too scattered, too corrupted by modernity, too fond of bourbon and rock n roll and sleeping in and watching basketball all night while reading Vogue magazine. Lack of self-knowledge. That’s on me. I’m fairly sure Wendell might find me a peculiar kind of farmer if ever we met.
This weekend my farming adventure came together in a very Berry way, though, and ended well. Until the next farming catastrophe, it will be Wendell, Bless His Heart.
Number 19 was my first cow to calve. She was not crazy about me and my camera.Bloat is nasty business.
I’m kind of obsessed with Kentuckians for Strong Leadership, a faux-grassroots super-PAC of out-of-state millionaires ponying up big bucks to re-elect the odious turtle vampire zombie Mitch McConnell. That is some of their artwork up there. Pretty high quality, wouldn’t you say? In the graphic on the right there appear to be issues with color balance. Why, McConnell’s challenger Alison Grimes seems to be as dark, if not darker, than President Obama. Surely some mistake has been made!
As for the “Kentuckians” part. Well well well. Don’t see too many Kentuckians on this list. In fact, don’t see any.
Anyway, while I’m sure it cost a pretty penny, the Kentuckians for Strong Leadership web site looks to have been assembled by middle-schoolers. This particular page seems to take for granted that Harry Reid is some sort of radical liberal, and that the idea that coal makes us sick is some sort of laughable notion.
Ha ha. Reid is only talking about easily verified research — and he was only talking about air pollution. Look to West Virginia to see what coal does to our water. Kind of ironic, but not exactly funny, that the current water crisis catastrophe is caused by toxic chemicals used to make coal CLEAN (for the air, sort of).
When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.
But lately, (this is pure speculation) since she has moved from the Washington DC area, Cox’s perspective appears to have broadened a bit.
In June she issued a series of tweets name-checking Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” That’s a poem I’m pretty much obsessed with so I notice these things. “Amazing how this poem, rolling around in my mind for the past month or so, keeps becoming relevant to the news,” she wrote. More recently she has used her bully pulpit as the US politics correspondent for the Guardian to shout to the mountaintops that the West Virginia water catastrophe is a big fucking deal, certainly orders of magnitude bigger than the stories that catch the imagination of establishment journalists.
Noting that there has been a second leak at Freedom Industries, inexplicably still in business following some shady bankruptcy/temporary financing sleight-of-hand, and more of the obfuscation we’ve come to expect from West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection, Cox writes:
This seems like juicy stuff to me. Yet the story, as the national media sees it, is over. On Friday, MSNBC killed a segment with activist Erin Brockovich on the topic in order to devote more airtime to Chris Christie’s traffic problems.
bumped by @msnbc as they cover Christie, 300k without water in WV & all these officials do is play political games http://t.co/rDkxoj8wWa
To anyone that follows environmental news, this arc is familiar: A human-interest story with an environmental pollution angle breaks through the media chatter. Cable news outlets roll clips of distraught residents. Footage the damage unspools (with or without stomach-turning images of dead or injured wildlife). There is a news conference of dubious utility. Investigative reporters find evidence of previous infractions of safety and environmental regulations. Politicians declare the need for hearings and more strict enforcement. Volunteers show up to help. Sometimes there’s a concert.
Then we move on. We move on despite the fact that the chemical leak was, in some ways, an improvement on the status quo for West Virginians: at least the residents knew there were questions about the water piped into their homes. Most of the time, most West Virginians simply live in the toxic aftermath of the daily release of not-quite-as-verifiably deadly chemicals. The mix of air, water, and soil pollution that is a matter of course in coal mining counties means that children born in those areas have a 26% higher risk of developing birth defects than those born in non-coal-mining counties. That’s not from drinking water that’s been declared contaminated, that’s from drinking water, breathing air, and playing on ground they’ve been told is safe.
The underlying crisis behind most environmental tragedies is the part of the story that we rarely hear about. Our attention is shifting away from chemical spill, as it has from mine collapses and explosions, from oil spills, and, often, from natural disasters as well.
Cox goes on to explore “a distressingly simple pattern of cause and effect”:
… for 200 years, and most particularly during the last two decades, the coal industry (and the energy lobby in general) has been as much, if not more, effective and industrious in its influence on politicians than it has been in generating electricity.
Our country has grown a vast and complex regulatory and financial support system for cheap, dirty energy: tax breaks, loopholes and the like. Researchers estimate that if Americans has to pay the real cost for each kilowatt-hour, factoring in hidden costs to communities’ health, economy, ecology, we would pay three times as much than we do today. The energy lobby’s approach to influence peddling, on the other hand, has [the?] systematic elegance of a see-saw: They put money into politicians’ pockets, and they get legislative favors back. Indeed, it has been 38 years since Congress passed any law that had a substantive impact on the use of toxic chemicals. To put that in context: in 1975, we were still using asbestos in our walls, you could smoke on airplanes and food packagers did not have to report or monitor pesticide residue levels on fresh produce.
Cox also mentions the stunning news (to anyone paying attention at the time) that the New York Times dismantled its environmental reporting desk last year, leaving “approximately 15 dedicated environmental reporters among the nation’s top five papers.” I do wish she had acknowledged the indefatigable, jaw-droppingly excellent work done by regional reporters. (If the Charleston Gazette staff does not win a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Freedom Industries debacle, I will know the fix is in).
I was going to conclude this post by wishing Ms. Grimes well in her campaign against the McConnell machine, but then made a quick visit to her campaign web site and my shoulders slumped a little bit to read her “energy” position statement featuring boilerplate that could have been borrowed from Mitch himself.
I strongly oppose President Obama’s attack on Kentucky’s energy industry. This Administration has taken direct aim at Kentucky’s coal industry, crippling our state’s largest source of domestic energy and threatening thousands of jobs. Washington Democrats and Republicans need to be realistic about what powers our nation and recognize that developing Kentucky’s supplies of coal is crucial.
War on Coal. Please. Do not start with that. If Obama were fighting a war on coal, maybe he would have offered a comment on the Charleston debacle. He released disaster money for the Charleston, area, but otherwise … crickets.
From the EPA, that evil all-powerful slayer of the angelic job creators of the coal industry, pretty much crickets as well. The White House and the EPA are integral parts of the “tableau of abdication” Jedidiah Purdy noted in the New Yorker a few weeks back.
As are politicians from states controlled (there is no other word) by coal. One day there will be a Kentucky politician who acknowledges the real costs and depredations of the business of coal, which extracts the coal out of the ground, and the profits out of the state. But this ain’t that day. Even with the West Virginia catastrophe in the headlines, our state has no politicians to take the side of its mountains, streams and people against a brutally destructive business, a business that is, by any objective standards, “a loser economically, environmentally, and in terms of public health.”
Fifty States of Fear by Northwestern University philosophy professor Peter Ludlow is insightful on so many fronts: the manipulative and coercive nature of terror-scaring; the counterproductive nature of drone attacks; the gradual but steady widening of the net to include environmental activists as terrorists; and this:
But while we spend more than 7 billion dollars a year on the T.S.A.’s national security theater in which over 58,000 T.S.A. employees make sure we are not carrying too much toothpaste or shampoo onto airplanes, the budget for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is under $600,000 per year. It seems that our threat assessments are flawed.
We are conditioned to fear persons in caves in Pakistan but not the destruction of our water supply by frackers, massive industrial accidents, climate change or the work-related deaths of 54,000 American workers every year. Fear of outside threats has led us to ignore the more real dangers from within.
The actual threat of shoddy workplace safety and environmental protections is orders of magnitude greater than that posed by intentional terrorists, but no stone is left unturned to catch terrorists, even before they do anything, to say nothing of terror plots hatched and/or enabled by the authorities themselves. In contrast, the “unintentional” terroristswreakers of catastrophic havoc–old-fashioned, red-blooded American entrepreneurs–are given a pass. The pundit class yawns:
Few, if any, of the Sunday TV talk shows discussed the [West Virginia water catastrophe], but imagine the fear that would have been pedaled on those shows if terrorists had poisoned the water of those 300,000 Americans. Of course the danger is the same whether the cause is terrorism or corporate indifference and malfeasance.
Cutting corners to make a buck, deregulating, keeping regulatory agencies toothless to enforce already weak regulations, hey, it’s the American way. Shit happens, and when it does, we’ll pray hard for you, West Virginia….
“The incident that happened with this spill is not related to my view of the EPA, of overreaching and not looking at economics and trying to reach a balance in the energy industries,” Capito said, according to the Charleston Gazette. “I see this as a chemical issue, and so the coal issue is secondary. It’s a product used in the coal industry.”
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin: “This was not a coal company, this was a chemical supplier, where the leak occurred….. As far as I know there was no coal company within miles.”
“This is a chemical spill accident. It just so happens that the chemical has some applications to the coal industry, just that fact alone shouldn’t cause people to point fingers at the coal industry,” said Jason Bostic, vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association.
One problem with all of this, of course, is that the coal industry is always very insistent that every single job — direct, indirect, induced, whatever — be counted whenever anyone discusses the positive economic impacts of the coal-mining business to West Virginia. If that’s the way the industry and its political supporters want the discussion to go, then they’ve got to own this sort of accident as well.
The other thing, though, is that there are other clear connections between this chemical spill and its impacts and what the coal industry’s effects on West Virginia are like all the time. Plenty of West Virginia communities have watched their drinking water supplies be either polluted or dried up because of coal (see here, here and here). Me and my neighbors are getting a taste right now of what some coalfield residents live with all the time.
And then there’s this, explained most clearly on Friday by the folks at Appalachian Voices:
News reports of Thursday’s spill of a coal-processing chemical into West Virginia’s Elk River—and emergency orders to thousands of people to not drink or use their tap water—are currently focused on the still-unknown potential for direct harm to human health.
But the widespread disruption caused by the spill raises other important questions, including: How could a relatively small-volume spill in one small river cut off drinking water access to roughly 300,000 people across eight counties—16% of the state’s entire population?
An increasing number of private wells in southwestern and central West Virginia, where the spill occurred, have been contaminated by decades of coal mining and processing. One result has been an ongoing expansion of municipal water systems to rural communities that would otherwise rely on well water.
Yes, the well water has been pretty thoroughly poisoned. BY THE COAL INDUSTRY.
What if? What if this had happened to the water supply of the Upper West Side or Arlington or Berkeley? Would the reactions of the federal agencies allegedly responsible been so tepid? Shouldn’t the director of the EPA fly in and distribute water and vow to get to the bottom of this? (Really, this is the agency fighting a “war on coal”?) Where is the president on this? He released disaster money but has not addressed the subject directly. (I’m happy to be corrected on this point.) I think the inertia of the CDC and EPA speaks for itself. (Jedediah Purdy in the New Yorker: “The entire crisis is a tableau of abdication”). Incredibly, the strategy of the federal government is mainly to wait til it blows over.
And maybe it will.
It’s hard for me to think clearly about this catastrophe, so I will simply encourage everyone to follow the indefatigable Ward on twitter. I’m pretty much in awe of his output, and he always seems to be striking the right tone of anger or skepticism or fatalism at the appropriate moments.
But I don’t really think he is fatalistic, or resigned. Maybe this is wishful thinking, or projection, or just delusion, but I think Ward knows, or hopes, that this will be the event that sours people on coal in West Virginia, and the nation. I have been thinking that for days, and then yesterday he sort of confirmed it when he issued this gnomic tweet:
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Liz Eggleston’s impeccably and indefatigably curated collection of sixties and seventies images–the glorious, the tacky and the gloriously tacky–mainly from her own scans of British and French magazines, is an unspeakably great treasure. Her focus is on the British Boutique movement, but she confesses to being inspired by “the weirder, even seedier, aspects of popular culture.” This is the kind of amateur (in the French sense) labor of love that the pre-listicle era Internet promised, but really didn’t deliver….
Still processing Andrew Huszar’s remarkable Confessions of a Quantitative Easer, which appeared on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page on Monday.
A former Morgan Stanley managing director, Huszar managed the Federal Reserve’s $1.25 trillion agency mortgage-backed security purchase program from 2009 to 2010. Since the crash of 2008, he writes, the Fed has, by one estimate, spent over $4 trillion for a total return of as little as a $40 billion bump in output, which is minuscule (it’s sometimes tough to visualize a trillion dollars. Here is a handy reference.)
This, while BOTH parties insist “we’re broke” (Obama’s very words).
We’re broke, but the Fed can create $4 trillion to loan to the banks. Oh, I see. In return the nation got very little, but for the banks it was a windfall.
Despite the Fed’s rhetoric, my program wasn’t helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were extending wasn’t getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash.
Here is a naive question: If the government can print $4 trillion to give to banks, to very little positive effect for the country, why can’t it print even a fraction of that amount to finance massive public works to make need infrastructure repairs, make education more affordable (or better yet, free), and convert our energy economy to one that is sustainable?
Hell,giving every American a few thousand bucks would be a much more effective stimulus than what the Fed has done.
And don’t forget that the QE program rewards the very entities that created the crisis.
Having racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in opaque Fed subsidies, U.S. banks have seen their collective stock price triple since March 2009. The biggest ones have only become more of a cartel: 0.2% of them now control more than 70% of the U.S. bank assets.
As for the rest of America, good luck. Because QE was relentlessly pumping money into the financial markets during the past five years, it killed the urgency for Washington to confront a real crisis: that of a structurally unsound U.S. economy. Yes, those financial markets have rallied spectacularly, breathing much-needed life back into 401(k)s, but for how long? Experts like Larry Fink at the BlackRock investment firm are suggesting that conditions are again “bubble-like.” Meanwhile, the country remains overly dependent on Wall Street to drive economic growth.
Even when acknowledging QE’s shortcomings, Chairman Bernanke argues that some action by the Fed is better than none (a position that his likely successor, Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen, also embraces). The implication is that the Fed is dutifully compensating for the rest of Washington’s dysfunction. But the Fed is at the center of that dysfunction. Case in point: It has allowed QE to become Wall Street’s new “too big to fail” policy.
