I love the blogger digby--I read her (and her co-bloggers) pretty much every day. But one has to bear in mind that she's an unrepentant, California, Baby Boom leftie. Which is one of the reasons I read her--God knows we need more of those--but sometimes it does irk me.
See, I live in Austin, and have for almost 10 years. My wife's family is in Louisiana, and we got there as often as we can. So I kind of have a different perspective than your garden-variety California progressive. And in one of her posts yesterday, digby's attitude, more than what she said, really kind of rankled. (Fortunately, Mike Madden of Salon had a partial antidote today--thanks, Mike!) digby's posts often have the subtext (or even the overt text!) of, "If only they would listed to us California Liberals, we'd all be doing so much better." This time, while she kept it below full-on digby bore, it was still discomfiting.
See, here's the thing: I'm reasonably sure that digby simply has no idea what life in the Gulf states, and particularly in Louisiana, is like. None. It can't be explained, it can only be experienced.
My in-laws are from Louisiana. My father-in-law works in the oil bidness for Halliburton. It's easy for people in California--I was one of them!--to think that Louisianans are clueless, back-country hicks who don't know what's good for them. The fact is, though, that it ain't true.
The oil business has been very, very good for Louisiana. My Father-in-law, starting life in a shack with no indoor plumbing, managed to buy a nice house, raise a family, and put two kids through college on oil money. So have tens of thousands of others in Louisiana and Texas. Yup, the business is crooked, and it dumps toxic shit into the water, and they have tanker leaks and explosions and leaky tanks that spill oil into hurricane-flooded rivers. And they put my Pop's kids through college, so they wouldn't have to live in Louisiana and drink toxic water and breathe chemical fumes from the PPG plant on the lake.
Add that to the fact that Louisiana politics is crooked, unbelievably crooked. This is the state that gave us Huey Long, remember. But do you know how folks in Louisiana remember Huey Long? "He built roads." That was Huey Long . . . if you're a Louisianan. This is the state where David Duke ran for Senate. This is the state where one gubernatorial contest was between an indicted felon and a convicted felon. This isn't simple "hand in the cookie jar" corruption; this is generations-long, nepotistic, ingrained corruption of the first water. And the problem is, as bad as it can be, those people often get shit done. So how are you supposed to feel about that? Appalled? Grateful? Disgusted? Relieved? Who the hell can say?
But Louisianans know the dangers. Believe me they do. Sami's grandfather died at 56 of heart failure--after jumping off an exploding rig and swimming for his life. People don't swim in Lake Charles, and make jokes about Gulf water. Rigs have been offshore since the 20s--these people know the score, believe me.
I think digby (and other non-Southern progressives) know this stuff intellectually, but until you've been there, lived there, had relatives working there, you can't understand it really, not in your gut. And until you do, your opinons are going to sound like those of an arrogant Yankee carpet-bagging liberal who thinks he or she knows what's best for those dumb, swamp-dwelling, gumbo-eating hicks. Even if that's not what you're thinking, that attitude seeps through. Believe me; Sami whacks me often enough over it.
I have enormous respect for digby. Huge. Hers is one of only three or four blogs that I read every day. But when it comes to the oil business, and the people who make their livlihoods from it, I don't think she really understands. So kvetch about Landrieu all you want--Lord knows she deserves it. But bear in mind that there's far worse out there than her. Louisianans know. They know, because they've lived through them.
Just something to think about.
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I get so tired of the racism that it's hard for me to talk to some of these people some times.
My father worked on the oil rigs for a little while after he left the Marines when we moved back to Louisiana. My older brother works now for an oil company-Civil Engineer. And I have many young family members working for the oil companies.
Yes, the oil business is a Louisiana livelihood. I do get that.
As a Independent-Moderate that voted Democratic in 2008 I understand the importance of a clean environment.
Nothing is ever simple---nothing is Black and White -except the color black and the color white--everything else are shades of gray.
I wrote this because I had a emotional conflict brewing inside since the oil spell.
Oil--oil workers---Louisiana livelihood---environmentalist--wildlife--seafood Industry---Louisiana livelihood---
Like I stated about---nothing is white or black
http://open.salon.com/blog/susanthur/2010/05/04/louisianans_bleed_together_louisianans_suffer_together
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Can you point out what specifically she says that gives you the impression she is looking down on anyone as a stupid hick? Or even which paragraph gives you that impression? I don't see it at all.
Thanks for setting the record straight! Rated
John: no one knows that better than the poor guys who work the rigs. The previous administration did their very best to gut regulatory policies; this explosion is just the most obvious example of that deliberate neglect.
Henry: I don't think she's *clueless*; I just think she needs to spend some time outside of California. Hell, I think *everyone* does--including me.
Diva: I know just what you mean--Sami got bonked with that kind of attitude all the time she was in CA before we moved to Austin. Fortunately, so many Californians are already from "somewhere else," it's hardly universal.
She must have seen this because she just took you downcourt, or down ice, or whatever it is that guys say! She took you down! ;)
I guess seeing something that isn't there is one way to get attention. You got Digby's attention. She's one of the best. You pissed her off so much by accusing her of something she never did, said, or implied, that you got one of the top bloggers to link to you. So, though I may quibble with the method, I guess I have to give you props for that.
And as a side note, Huey Long didn't just build roads. Before him, there was no bridge spanning the Mississippi at New Orleans. The Huey Long Bridge--still used by thousands of cars a day--is also a railroad bridge used by freight trains.
Now, consider that the vast majority of grain exports in America pass through here, and that, when the Port of New Orleans is combined with the Port of South Louisiana just a few miles up the river in the suburb of LaPlace, this is the fourth largest port in the entire world. That bridge is extremely important not just to the local economy, but to the national one.
Also, before Long, the poor--both black and white--de facto could not vote because they had to pay the poll tax, which had to be paid in person, at the courthouse, at Christmas.
No one down here denies that he was a crook. But he got shit done.
I love LA - it's a different world. Not stupid or unsophisticated - just running on a different thought-system. Isn't it the only state in the nation still to use Napoleanic code?
Great post - and congrats on the cover!
I don't doubt they will get a bail out. Obama has no choice. It is one of the few places left in the country that believes that bankrupting the future is good policy. I do suspect it will come after November however.
I completely understand the need of Louisianans to seek an un-befouled beach for their vacation but it makes me think about the deal with the devil they made generations ago to allow the desecration of their own natural endowment by chemical and oil industries. Greed and ignorance have similar consequences.
It's the old story again of money buying power and influence. The people of Louisiana must bear some of the guilt however for allowing the inbred corruption of their governments and their failure to preserve their natural heritage. Yes, their taxes are low, but the cost of tolerating this plutocracy is one of the most polluted environments in America.
But in this case, I just don't see it. It seems to me Digby is limiting her criticisms to the senator. If your critique of Digby's post is based on some amorphous complaint about her "attitude," such that you don't quote anything she actually says, I think that suggests your critique isn't very fair. Maybe she doesn't understand something about Louisiana politics that would put Landrieu's comments in some sort of necessary perspective, and you suggest as much, but that's very different from saying she thinks Landrieu can get away with it because Louisiana is full of "hicks."
Speak for yourself, Doug. This state has gotten wingnuttier and wingnuttier over the years (creationism in the schools?!) and it's not because of oil. Most Louisiana voters do not, in fact, work for oil companies. If anything, it's probably because Huey Long F*CKED us back in the day and so we've had to put up with all the neurotoxic effects of oil contamination with no royalty money to clean it up.
Just kidding. Yes, oil brings in the money, but I REALLY do not think it's the case that the Louisiana people uniformly love oil companies and Landrieu takes lots of money from them and so the people follow the money with their votes and keep her in office.
I think it's more like the oil companies fund her reelection, because Landrieu certainly doesn't do anything to endear Louisiana Democrats, what with her opposition to healthcare reform and pretty much every single progressive issue. That's what keeps her in office, not her pathetic groveling at the feet of Big Oil, all so they can say "Even the Democrat Mary Landrieu says that drilling a hole you can't close is a wonderful idea!"
I understand that your family is very into the oil business but you surely realize that there are a whole lot of fishermen out there who don't have warm fuzzy feelings about the industry. There are many of us who are nauseated by this blatantly bought-and-paid-for Senator. The difference is that you think she's bought and paid for by misunderstood salt-of-the-earth roughnecks and so it's OK.
Different geology between Florida and Louisiana.
The cajuns have been discriminated against since they were banished from Nova Scotia. My grandfather grew up speaking french but they forbid him from speaking it in school. So he had to learn English. Don't you know it, that when WWII hit he was sent to northern Africa and France only to do translations for folks in the battle field?
Come-on Liberals! Stop being racist! lol!
But I'm also from Alberta, the Texas of Canada, source of twice as much oil as you buy from Saudi Arabia; and within Canada, we poll furthest to the right and are regarded by some who haven't been here or read deeply, as a bunch of rednecks. I'm not in the oil industry, and even I am defensive about the "dirtiest oil in the world" phrase going around lately. (Well, until two weeks ago...)
So I'm in the odd position of sympathizing with the redneck stereotyping while simultaneously being mystified at how everybody didn't happily jump on board Dennis Kucinich health care plan.
But I do think Alberta can be "explained". You don't have to just come live here and immerse in the culture to understand it. We have clear reasons for putting up with the environmental costs of the Athabasca tar sands, the lower service levels that come from low tax rates, and so forth.
Heck, Discovery Channel explains rainforest tribes and Chinese peasants and Pakistani extremists well enough to give the viewers a handle on their viewpoints and motivations. Is Louisiana culture harder to "explain" that them?
Or is it just impossible to *sympathize* with their viewpoint until you live there, dependent on the culture and economy around you? Is this just about Mark Twain's adage about it being difficult to understand something when your salary depends on not understanding it?
Because that isn't about a culture so deep and complex it "must be experienced". That' s just about drinking the Kool-Aid.
I was born and raised in Alberta, like my father and his mother. (And that's about how far back you can go, this far west; she was raised in a city with as many aboriginals in buckskins as settlers in gingham.) But I know fossil fuels can't go on forever - not even for many decades. Alberta has to change its economy.
Germans and Japanese had utter destruction and poverty imposed from outside a few generations back; before and after that destruction, they industrialized in a way that had appalling environmental costs which they recognized and diligently began to reverse, with great success, and both have gone from poorer and less-educated than Louisiana to much wealthier and better educated. Both had enormously high self-regard as being superior races; the Japanese in particular have an old, complex culture you "just have to live in to get". But both cultures *changed* and grew, before our eyes, the last few generations and have changed almost out of recognition.
Do Louisianans understand they have to change their economy, their culture, their whole outlook, if they don't want to be one of the poorest, least-educated places in North America? Those facts aren't the result of nature and poor resources, or imposed by evil Yankee carpet-baggers from outside, not in the last hundred years; they're endemic in the culture.
And if they don't "get it", I'm sorry, that does make them ignorant hicks of the worst kind: willfully ignorant, and unwilling to adapt as all life and all cultures must.
I admit I grew up in Houston, not LA. I will never truly understand what it is like to actually be from there. I do know that for generations Louisiana has been treated as the ass-end of the country. Long before there was oil, there were jokes about the sewage being dumped into the Mississippi and ending up inside a Louisianan. I detest the comments which seem to blame all of this on Louisiana. Bigotry is never a virtue.
"Do Louisianans understand they have to change their economy, their culture, their whole outlook, if they don't want to be one of the poorest, least-educated places in North America? Those facts aren't the result of nature and poor resources, or imposed by evil Yankee carpet-baggers from outside, not in the last hundred years; they're endemic in the culture.
And if they don't "get it", I'm sorry, that does make them ignorant hicks of the worst kind: willfully ignorant, and unwilling to adapt as all life and all cultures must."
Okay, Roy, you've got my attention. What's interesting is that you could replace Louisiana with Afghanistan and have an equally useless and nonsensical snotty piece about a place where all opportunities are squandered and a lazy ignorant culture wallows in its own failure forever and ever. The only difference is that instead of militant Islam, in Louisiana every single person spends 364 days a year vomiting up Hand Grenades on Bourbon Street. Right? Right.
As to Louisiana's real problems: well, we have a whole bunch of inbred fundies, just like the rest of the Bible Belt. Rural Louisiana is no better and no worse than rural Alabama when it comes to anti-intellectualism, patriarchy, racism, everything associated with toothless rednecks. It's definitely a bad culture but it's hardly unique. New Orleans, well things are getting better. Outsiders would do well to keep in mind that, honestly, there was a time when Ray Nagin seemed like a decent human being.
If you want to hear my alternative explanation for why Louisiana is perpetually behind, say, Texas, there is one massive reason: WE DON'T GET THE OIL MONEY. A long time ago, Huey Long sent some cretin to negotiate oil royalties, and instead of asking 30% he said all-or-nothing. And so the oil companies chose nothing. Ever since, we've been scraping by with the shitty parts of the oil industry: refineries and shipping (i.e. oil spills). Sure, they pay the salaries of many Louisianians, but if things had gone differently 80 years ago when the drilling began then Louisiana would be the richest state in the nation.
I'm sure you'll say that money means nothing and we should be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps like Imperial Japan, but I think that's sheer fantasy. Louisiana is a mess because we're poor.
The key solution of development away from a resource economy where richer people exploit you is literacy. That's just step #1, of course, but without it, there is no step #2.
"Imperial Japan", yes, and also post-colonial India, which claims a shift from 10% literacy rate to nearly 70% between 1950 and 2010.
http://mydd.com/users/ravi-verma/posts/india-turns-a-corner
They did this on an average of $3800 per person, per year.
Unfair comparison? Totally. That's just *basic* literacy. Louisiana, infamously, has a 28% "functionally illiterate" rate, a different thing, with some 40% of the Katrina victims unable to read the forms to get assistance. The problem is that the number isn't moving.
And that's not so much about money, (Cuba, income $4100/person, has a 96% literacy rate) as about a culture, a culture that says, "We don't want to be like the past, we want to be different people from our parents". Education success isn't even (mostly) about the schools, as zillions spent on education has proven; it's about pushing the kids and having expectations, and that comes from culture. And oh, man, do Germans and Japanese have a culture of high expectations and schoolwork and accomplishment. (To a fault, perhaps, viz, Japanese suicides over test results.)
Perhaps I'm stereotyping or generalizing, if so, pray instruct me (with some numerical facts) and get another apology. But I just see the whole "Deep South" corner of the country as the heart of the "I want my country back" meme we heard at the Town Hells, the resistance to change. An "attitude, more than what [they] said" that higher education leads to "elitism" and a Bad Thing.
It's been depressing to watch that rhetoric in the news, and the post here struck me as a kind of apologetics for a culture that has got to make some changes.
You're dead right that it's about the money, but "poor" is fixable; the key is willingness to change, though. It's those "anti-elitists" (that may be a stereotype and my mistake, please, please tell me so) that need to be seen as a Bad Thing.
Thank you, scarshapedstar!
I am a Louisianian, a born and bred Cajun girl with a family tree that goes back through Nova Scotia to the royal lines of France. I am also very liberal and believe that rather than running away from Louisiana's issues, some of us need to stay here to fight for change. Yes, the environment is very important to me and mine. On the other hand, my best friend's husband has made his living in the oilfield. They are progressives as well and know intimately the struggle between making a living and making the world a better place.
Those of us who have lived here our entire lives remember the oilfield of not so many years ago when explosions and fires were much more frequent occurrences. The oilfield has become a much safer place through the years. We're thankful and will keep pushing to make it safer and cleaner.
As for Senator Landrieu, she's certainly not my favorite. She's about as middle of the road as she can be. She was trained by long-time Senator John Breaux who believed in reaching across the aisle. As a liberal I would much prefer to see her fight for more progressive issues but I also know she's the best we've got right now. Our only other alternative is Republican David Vitter. Next to him, Mary Landrieu looks like a progressive saint.
We know what we're up against here and we don't plan to stop fighting any time soon. Don't paint us with such a broad brush and don't count us out.
Well, there's the constructive topic. And we have in common that our views are in a hopeless minority where we live and things are not getting better.
My approach is that this doesn't have to be about Right/Left politics. Conservatives can be all for good schools, hospitals, more white-collar business than blue-collar, and normally are; the disagreement is about how to get there.
On the environment issue, on regulation of industry, a Louisiana liberal should look for ways to promote your views with specific proposals that create opportunities for somebody to get rich.
A great deal of environmentalism can be posed as the development of new technologies, new industries and businesses. It's been shown so in many places.
Me, I'm pushing that Alberta go nuclear before the fossil fuels go out of style, so we can remain an energy centre in a post-carbon future. Billions to be made.
You could push for Louisiana to be the place that develops new spill cleanup technologies; now would be a perfect time to bring it up.
Growing up on the East Coast (NY/NJ) I observed this acutely in all media, TV, movies.
Our global pursuit created a domestic snobbery that only people like Sarah Palin (whom I dislike greatly), can attest to.
Thus, if you have a Spanish accent - you are worldly, kind, cosmopolitan... if you have a Southern accent - you are stupid, back woods, small minded, judgmental and probably dumb.
Perception is everything. And this one must change.
It's time to defend against stereotypes. And to those here who criticize people who worked the rigs.. or the safety.. arm chair warriors.. finger pointers.. F.U.
Until you walk a mile in another man's moccasins.. clueless, you are .
"Yup, the oil business is crooked, and they dump toxic shit in the water. " " . . . Louisiana politics is crooked, unbelievably crooked."
Man, what stellar recommendations! Bet your tourist trade will be booming! And this from somebody who is PRAISING Louisiana. Certainly everybody in the state is not a hick and an idiot. But there is such a thing as a dominant social attitude, regardless of the good people and their sacrifices. It isn't the snobbish attitudes of other people toward Louisiana that has caused this disaster and crushed the good people and made their sacrifices tragic. It's that prevailing if not universal attitude.
Straw man, bo. Grow up and quit making excuses.
This is so universal that about the only people (seen generally) who have been exceptions have been the slaves brought from Africa to the new world, and their descendants ... they have generally not participated in much of any improvement in their lives this way ... the 'better' jobs have not been available to them until recently.
In my family tree wealth was created by cutting down the forests of the new world and selling them to the old world (starved for timber), cultivating and refining sugar (in part using slave labor in the Caribbean, later on the Hawaiian islands) ... and the opium trade.
That's right, my relatives traded opium to China ... don't be surprised ... major fortunes were made that way. The Roosevelts depended on it, so did the Bouviers (Jacqueline) ... my family did too ... for a time.
To be frank, I don't see this as all that different than dealing in oil right now. But I'm not getting morally hissy about this ... that wealth in the 18th and 19th centuries left my family able to educate its children (even though the real 'big money' was long gone) ... able to have other choices.
This is the same as your "Digby," that's what allowed us to be 'liberals.'
My point is that when you see some kid dealing crack cocaine on a street corner ... think for second. How different is it REALLY ... other than the odds of spending the rest of your life in jail?