Dear My Entire Contact List. Re: Gulf Coast Recovery Act.

I've been trying to send this around as much as possible.

Have you seen this?

Did you see or hear about this Anderson Cooper interview with Doug Brinkley last night?

Brinkley says he's got admin sources talking about unveiling a massive Gulf Coast Recovery Act? It sounds too good to be true. I haven't seen any other press reporting on it or confirming Brinkley. A massive public works project to rebuild coastline and related infrastructure has been desired above all else in S. LA since before Katrina and especially since. I can think of nothing that would be more meaningful to these communities. Even if Brinkley was jumping the gun, it would be a massive help to at least get a discussion going on something like this.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/doug-brinkley-administration-going-come-ou

Relevant transcript excerpted in my postscript.

Eli

BRINKLEY: Well, I mean, there are three things, I mean, I think, big baskets, going on.

One is close that well, get the -- capture as much oil as you can, keep the pressure on BP on the relief wells. Second is immediate cleanup. And I think more can be done by the Obama administration. And I -- and but I think the big third piece is coming, when President Obama comes to Florida and Alabama and Mississippi, and that is holding BP responsible for the Natural Resource Damage Act, for the Oil Spill Response Act. And, by that, I mean BP is going to end up paying somewhere from $10 billion to $15 billion, maybe even $20 billion, because they're going -- one of the only ways to save the Louisiana wetlands is going to be -- you know, the Mississippi River has been channelized for navigation.

Well, now the Mississippi River has to be redirected. It's going to have to be flooded and sediment pumped into these marshlands to save it. I think the Obama administration...

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: So, no, wait. No, wait. Doug, is this just a hope on your part?

BRINKLEY: No.

COOPER: Or -- I mean, I know you have been talking to sources. Do you believe this is actually going to happen?

BRINKLEY: Yes. Yes.

And it's one of the reasons why the president is not talking to Tony Hayward. And they are going to come out with a large Gulf recovery act, because the oil and gas industry has been dredging. We have disappearing barrier islands. For 40 years down there, it's abused the wetlands.

This is a turning point. There is an appetite on Capitol Hill for Gulf recovery act. The Mississippi River is going to have to be redirected into the marshlands. And BP and Transocean and other, you know, operations, Cameron, other companies are going to have to pay up to $10 billion and $15 billion for breaking national acts.

(CROSSTALK)

BRINKLEY: In addition, for offshore drilling in the Gulf, Anderson, there will be a conservation excise tax that, yes, there will be offshore drilling, but Louisianians will start getting some of the revenue to stay in state.

CARVILLE: If -- if the president does that, I will be the biggest supporter in the world. He will be beloved in Louisiana.

If he -- if he has a restoration act and the kind of things that Doug Brinkley is talking about, who Doug, by the way, lived here. His wife is from here. He knows exactly what he is talking about. If there is that kind of action from the White House and this president, he will go down, in my opinion, as one of the great presidents in history.

And I have not hesitated to criticize him. But if that kind of action is -- that -- that kind of thing starts to happen, that's going to be a very encouraging sign for South Louisiana, and for the country, too.

COOPER: Doug, I mean, what percent -- I mean, you -- you -- you're saying this based on people you have talked to?

BRINKLEY: Yes.

Steps on the rubber, checks his sign, steps off the rubber, wipes his brow, adjusts his cap, steps back up on the rubber

I've really been struggling to truly scale back my news consumption. It is, I've realized, a project. And it is one I've been working on for two or three weeks now with some important but limited success. The impetus for my effort was my decision to go to grad school but it could have just have easily been related to burnout. Geopolitical affairs have seemed especially volatile for the last month and especially over the last two weeks. It is extraordinarily stressful to read the paper these days, especially for friends of the Gulf. The national discourse has seemed especially frantic and inconsistent.

I've also been interested in a couple of interesting pieces that question what our increasing use of the internet and gadgets are doing to how we think and live. Basically, our attention spans are being tested and so are our ability to analyze larger, long term phenomenon. I don't think I've fallen into the hole but I've certain walked around the edge and peered into it. Certainly, it took me a lot longer to read my latest book than it should have.

---

I've been trying to spend more time with my favorite past time, the great game of baseball.

I happened to be watching the Tigers play the Indians live when poor Armando Galarraga lost his perfect game bid to a horrendous blown call by first base umpire Jim Joyce.

The immediate reaction to the mistake from chatterers was to call for expanded instant replay use. The argument was that since we have the technology, we should digitize the baseball rule book in order to eliminate human error from the game.

Yet the incredible class with which the perp, Joyce, and the victim, Galarraga, conducted themselves after the blown call turned out to be incredibly heartwarming and wonderful. It was such that after the immediate calls for replay, there were glowing columns and reports about the great lesson America had just learned about sportsmanship. In all probability, Galarraga's near-perfect game will be remembered for longer and more fondly than an actual perfect game would have been.

And so had instant replay been in place, we all would have been denied what is undeniably an awesome reaffirmation of the beauty of imperfection and the irreplicable nature of the human touch.

(Though for the record, I do think there has got to be an unintrusive way to use replay to overturn really bad calls in baseball.)

The calls for the mechanized reduction of human error come amid a context in which player evaluation decisions are increasingly being made with the assistance of computerized evaluation of player statistics and ability. The movement within professional player evaluation and popular with fantasy baseball players seeks to project what a player "should" do statistically speaking. The popularity of these methodologies has ushered what some have probably already referred to the "Moneyball era" of baseball team personnel management. The idea originally was that teams were relying on less-than-appropriate statistical measures or on unquantifiable measures like whether a player's was "clutch."

But it's not hard to imagine what happens when the pendulum swings to far in that direction. I believe the success of the Phillies in recent years is due, in part, to the organization's emphasis on a player's individual personality and on team chemistry. It has gotten to the point where instead of a particular measure of player skill being poorly evaluated by baseball GMs, the most undervalued baseball commodity comes from imprecise and difficult to measure judgement of a player's character.

(Though for the record, I do think a lot of GMs are still foolishly making really boneheaded personnel decisions based on their 'guts' instead of on what can be and already is measured.)

The other area in baseball in which there is an increasing clamor involves the length of games. Some, even within the world of baseball fandom, argue that baseball takes too long. Indeed, baseball has lost market share to the NFL. There is so much irregularity in baseball. There is no clock so games can last from anywhere from one and a half to four hours. That makes it difficult for busy people to stay attentive and it complicates television broadcasts.

(Though for the record, I appreciate the initiative umpires may already take to keep players moving within the rhythm of the game.)

I've enjoyed considering these somewhat related movements in baseball toward mechanization, digitization, precise calculation, and strict time management. To an important degree, they seem antithetical to the whole point of baseball in modernity and related to my struggles with my attention span when it comes to gadgetry and the internet.

What happens when the very things that are designed to require intense concentration and attention to detail, and which are characterized by imprecise rhythm and artistry, become overrun by our impulse to eat, chew, and move on to the next one?

I am absolutely not concerned about baseball or worried about the encroachment of impulsive reactionaries upon it.

But I have been considering the tension between our apparently shrinking attentions spans and the nature of leisure and deep thought.

What was this 'sposed to be?

A few weeks ago, I made the final decision to attend grad school this coming fall and quit, for the first time since I launched this blog in 2007, writing about New Orleans.

I wanted to take some time to enjoy my last month in New Orleans, to have a leisurely staycation in which I would slowly sell off my possessions to finance some restaurant goodbyes. I wanted to try to reevaluate my work here over the last couple of years, to try to paint a big picture in my mind.

What was this all about and what did I learn?

The reflection process has, so far, been way less successful than that which is forcing me to retire snug pairs of pants at an alarming rate.

My self-imposed rehabilitation and semi-retirement from writing has not stopped me from impulsively and compulsively reading the news about New Orleans, especially as it relates to the BP disaster. I just can't quite seem to quit it, at least not while I'm here experiencing the smell of it all and trying to pump up stories like this one with national media. It has been impossible to think cumulatively while simultaneously considering the daily intricacies of the unfixable oil catastrophe and coverage of it in the media.

I spent all weekend exiled in the woods to dry out a little bit. It did wonders for the soul. When I get to Philly and am at the ballpark, I think I'll be able to separate myself even more successfully.

I'm not sure I will now be able to successfully deliver to you a meaningful or interesting series that will review and revise this blog. There's too much to say.

A couple of people have said that I should write a book. It is probably true that I've got a few hundred pages worth of long-winded feelings, rants, and analysis about recovery from the failure of New Orleans' levee systems and the state of politics and governance in New Orleans more generally inside of me. But that doesn't mean it would be the least bit entertaining. Or even interesting or useful.

So what I thought I'd do, since I have resolved not to "blog" (in the sense that I refuse to "cover" anything anymore), is to try to get my own gears going by restating what I think my mission was back when I started We Could Be Famous right after the second anniversary of Katrina in 2007.

Let's see.

I was 22 years old and had just graduated Tulane University the previous spring. I was an enthusiastic student but was feeling kind of lost in terms of what to do next. I spent the entire summer backpacking through Mexico and if I knew anything it was that I wasn't ready to join the traditional 9-5 workforce in any field.

I certainly knew what my interests were and felt like I had pretty well-defined values. I care about helping beleaguered cities and knew that I would eventually find a "career" that allowed me to do that. But fresh out of college and full of that totally irritating combination of exuberance and ennui, I decided to feel out my own path.

I also saw an opportunity.

I was an early adopter of "blogs" (I still really really hate the word 'blog') as important sources of news and opinion. In Philly, I noticed the efforts of people who were starting to upset the traditional Democratic Party machine by mounting electoral challenges to ward leaders. I was amazed and inspired in 2004 as the long-shot Dean campaign, which I admired but never supported (not that I'd be ashamed to say if I did - I liked that liar John Edwards in '04), used the internet to get people organized in real life for real life purposes. I was amazed and inspired by the way it seemed like short video clips or short snarky comments by a few well positioned and widely read liberal curmudgeon outsiders could shake up the mainstream news. Even though the internet and the blogosphere (another word I detest) wasn't that different from what it is today, it kind of felt like the Wild West, especially at the local level. To put it crudely, it seemed like if you were funny and made consistent arguments, famous people would link to you and then you would be famous too.

(That inelegant conclusion was part of the thinking behind the tongue-in-cheek blog name of my blog. The other part was that I was very interested in the way that the characteristics we expected of entertainers were increasingly indistinguishable from those we expect from political leaders. I felt like 'fame' had basically become equivalent to 'success' and hoped to make snarky superficial commentary about this into a running theme. I pretty much abandoned this within the first few weeks of publication.)

I noticed and was troubled by the fact that it didn't seem like there was anybody talking about New Orleans regularly among the liberal/progressive/netroots bloggers I read. It seemed like a big hole to me since the correlation between the near-destruction of New Orleans, the deterioration of the Bush agenda, and the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006 seemed so strongly correlated. It was clear to me that New Orleans was, in September of 2007, clearly not recovering - something I deduced from living here without a whole lot of reading - and I assumed that my fellow progressive liberals from around the country would be interested in finding out why and in helping. The other thing I deduced from living here was that local political leadership was totally and remarkably pathetic. I felt like an overwhelmingly awesome city overrun with liberals and Democrats ought to be able to organize itself to put really strong, articulate, and unwavering progressive leaders into City Council, the State Legislature, and Congress.

And so I set off to work on several things simultaneously. I wanted to use the internet to help other New Orleanians successfully build a progressive political movement on the local level. I wanted to use the internet to help New Orleanians explain the recovery process to a national audience. I wanted to find myself professionally and figure out where, within the wide world of beleaguered cities, I could be happiest and most helpful.

I was just talking the other day to Brad V. about the how ironic it is that, as proud as I am of my efforts and the "successes" that have resulted, I've essentially failed on every single front. I feel successful in that I am now going to an elite graduate school after having built up a tremendous network of friends and colleagues through my basically well-regarded work as a blogger/writer and political organizer. But those successes are really just a personal silver lining from what was really an across-the-board failure. I accomplished zero of the goals set forth in the previous paragraph. Maybe it's unrefined to put it that way since I feel like I've landed somewhere respectable on the success continuum and not simply at one pole or another but it is what it is.

I accomplished zero of the goals I set forth when I started this blog.

I have learned a lot of useful lessons though. Without making any promises, I'd love to figure out a way to share some of them. I'm not sure if I can get it together to put together a grand conclusion about New Orleans and the recovery but I figured I'd at least get started on sorting my thoughts by restating what I think I said or felt my mission was and going back over the assumptions that lead me to start this project. Maybe if you haven't purged WCBF from your reader, you have some questions or suggestions that might get me going.