Don’t you hate it when news outfits won’t just report the, uh, news and even the better ones succumb to the cute wordplay angle or feel that they have to cast current American events in a larger political light? For the love of information, does everything have to be couched in re-electability, i.e. how a given political figure’s reaction to a given issue positions them on the Upcoming Elections Risk boardgame?

Like today’s NPR Morning Edition segment on Bobby Jindal: Oil Spill Crisis Puts Jindal Back On Center Stage.  I think they played “again a rising star” three times in the lead-up. And they even put up the Messiah Bobby picture on the web edition.

Let’s see how the governor has really been doing, shall we?

NYTimes | Louisiana Wants U.S. Help, and Its Own Way

[I]nterviews with more than two dozen state and federal officials and experts suggest that Louisiana, from the earliest days of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, has often disregarded its own plans and experts in favor of large-scale proposals that many say would probably have had limited effectiveness and could have even hampered the response.

CBS | Gulf Coast Governors Leaving National Guard Idle

But nearly two months after the governor requested – and the Department of Defense approved the use of 6,000 Louisiana National Guard troops – only a fraction – 1,053 – have actually been deployed by Jindal to fight the spill.

Businessweek | La. gov’s budget vetoes hit his political foes

Coastal parish lawmakers argued local communities can’t afford to float [$24.9 million] for response efforts and wait for reimbursement.

“The local governments are crying for financial help, and apparently the governor’s decided to let them go cry to BP and let the chips fall where they may,” [Louisiana House Speaker Jim] Tucker said Monday.

Sensuous Curmudgeon | As the Gulf Gushes, Jindal & Creationists Pray

The only thing that surprises us is how such a misfortune could have occurred at all ” and to Louisiana of all places. Surely, with the concentrated spiritual power of that state“s creationist population, they should have have been immune to this kind of thing.

Jeffrey with the wrap-up

In other words: Now, you listen here, he’s not the messiah. In fact, he’s a very naughty boy. Now go away!

Not that I don’t care any more. I care too much. It’s why I can’t write and research and collate about it like I did. At least not right now.

With each day’s developments, a blog post like this one goes through my head. Sometimes it gets typed, most of the time it doesn’t.

This also ties in with a problem I’ve had for … well, forever. There is so much to say because, no matter how out of sorts you are and how much this or that depresses you, what’s happening is so much bigger than you are. And then, something like that media-circus congressional hearing happens followed by a godawful TED hipsterthon. One two.

And you stop.

You wonder: Is this it? Then your brain slaps you and says: Of course it’s not. And you wonder again, But what is it?

It’s like a giant reset button in your head was pushed.

And you stop.

And you send more money to the bird washers.

LiveScience

A new study of samples from these more leisurely fault sections has revealed that tiny particles of clay [less than 100 nanometers thick] keep these sections lubricated and less likely to violently shake.

… Some have speculated that fluids facilitate slippage, while others have focused on serpentine ” a greenish material that can chemically react to form talc (the mineral that in loose form is commonly known as talcum powder).

But geologist Ben van der Pluijm and colleagues at the University of Michigan and Germany’s Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität Institut für Geographie und Geologie found that neither of these was the explanation.

Cool. Nanocoating as lubricant.

Also cool: SAFOD or the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth.

Came very close to attending graduate school at Michigan to work with van der Pluijm, co-author with my undergraduate advisor, Stephen Marshak, of Earth Structure – An Introduction to Structural Geology and Tectonics. Good thing I didn’t or I’d have been a … no, don’t say it … Wolverine.

I’ve been talking to people lately.

Dave Walker of the New Orleans Times Picayune interviewed me for a piece about the response of blog communities to David Simon’s show, Treme. Walker and I had a nice long phone conversation about The Storm, what kind of person it takes to capture it in a semi-fictional tv series and the blog as a mere yet powerful medium. I’ll expand on this over at Back Of Town in a little bit.

***

The Big news on the desi intertubes yesterday was a TIME column by Joel Stein entitled “My Own Private India.” Oh boy, you say. Yeah. It seems Stein suffers from some inner turmoil about the changing ethnic nature of his Jersey hometown which Tums and a glass of Shut The F**k Up juice alone could not settle. He had to share on the pages of a national newsweekly. And they accuse the blogs of killing journalism. The inimitable ANNA wasn’t going to let this slide and wrote an appropriately scathing response over at Sepia Mutiny, in which she quotes from emails that friends and I sent in to her. I encourage you to read both before coming back here.

My entire email response to Anna follows. As you read it, keep in mind that the older I get, it’s not the overt racists and the content of the racism that bother me as much as the “latent” racists among us and the why of what they say and do. (South Carolina Senator Jake Knotts calling gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley a “f**king raghead” is the dual-headed demon of old hick racism and dirty politics as usual at play. Then, there’s the super-educated white guy I know who has referred to a bunch of brown folks, including me, as terrorist one time too many. Is it different? Moreover, what does this level of discourse prove and why is it so easy?). Anyway, my response:

“Even if this were a simple observation on Joel Stein’s part of how his town has changed economically through the decades, he could have done it a bit differently. Case in point: ‘In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if ‘dot heads’ was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.’ Like these attributes of Hindu gods are insult-worthy. With this, Stein gave up the protection of self-deprecation and crossed that line. Why is it still so easy to do so?

“I was recently invited to a costume party which encouraged attendance dressed as your favorite Indian of the western or eastern variety. The photo montage on the front of the invite (because such a thing requires overt, graphic description) consisted of badly cut-and-pasted Pocahontas, Sitting Bull, a South Indian dancer, Hindu goddess Durga, and Gandhi positioned over a wild west barrel. For a while, I fumed over it. Even if they live in a small town outside of Cleveland Ohio, these are adults, “professionals” even, who have attended college. How could young, ostensibly educated people in 2010 create and enjoy not-malicious-but-tasteless shite like this, especially when this town overflows with Indians of all walks of life, some of whom employ area residents by the hundreds? Who do these people think they are sending out an invite like that? How would they feel if I were to send them ones for a Come Dressed As Your Favorite Undereducated Small-Town White B party?

“Then I realize that no matter the globalized, trendy clothes they wear and ‘ghetto’ music that they listen to [forget that they’d probably pee their Ed Hardys if they accidentally walked into an actual ghetto], they are products of their upbringing and do not have editors, internal or external, who tell them they ought to know better.

“Time Magazine ought to know better.

“Yet, still, hitherto, even at this point, I can dismiss the whole article as noise. What really cooks me here is not Stein’s provincialism or even how easy it still is to use Indians as the butt of jokes. It’s the Indian-Americans, the ones who keep their heads down, ‘adjust,’ and don’t make waves, who will tell us not to be so sensitive and to shrug it off. ‘Let them say what they want. We should not internalize these things and let them bother us. Grow a sense of humor.’ Because of their being doormats, it is easy for the Steins of the world to give ink to the Wholly Unnecessary. They make it so easy to do so. No more. I’m an American. The residents of Edison have been Americans for longer than Stein’s had a column. They don’t need this. Fuck you if you can take a ‘joke.’

“And you can tell the [expletive deleted, but it’s the favorite of one Mr. Al Swearengen of Deadwood] who will inevitably show up in the SM comments’ section, ever pointing out the thin nature of our confused brown skins, I said so.”

One more thing: Not all of us are doctors or engineers, ok? Some of us reserve the inalienable American right to be straight fuck-ups. Like business owners or musicians or geologists or journalists. My mother is as disappointed about this as I’m sure Stein’s mom is.