‘American Zombie’ blogger outs himself while facing libel suit from New Orleans City Hall employee

[Jason] Berry decided to dispense with pseudonym for this news story; the anonymity wouldn’t last anyway, he said. Berry said he’s never hidden his identity out of fear, but as a way to encourage dialogue about corruption in a city where few problems are addressed head-on.

…  In New Orleans, perhaps fittingly, the battle between blogger and subject comes in the arena of alleged City Hall corruption, which Berry says he hopes to help expose. His blog American Zombie has focused on City Hall contracts, especially the technology contracts, such as those for the city’s crime camera program, along with the Mayor Ray Nagin free trips to such exotic locales as Hawaii. He has repeatedly scrutinized former city technology chief Greg Meffert — now under investigation by the feds — and the array of companies he is connected with.

The mere fact that Berry is read widely enough to spur someone to hunt him down may signal a maturing of the local blogosphere.

Sounds like a case of  You Don’t Know Who I Am to me.

We could all just get our news from Chris Wallace, that king of hard-hitting journalism.

Update: It’s a banner day for journalism, folks.  Jenna Bush is the newest NBC White House correspondent.  Take that, collective American IQ liberal media bias!

Never forget.

Image from America’s Black Holocaust Museum

Since leaving New Orleans a few months back, I’ve met a LOT of people.

There are those who exclaim “Oh, New Orleans, wow, that must have been exciting!” and ones who ask with genuine concern, “Were you there when …?”

There are those who ask if we can make them gumbo and jambalaya. Of course, darlin’, just bring yourself and the family!

There are those who spent a drunken, heavily-beaded three days ogling boobies in the Quarter a decade ago and know “what New Orleans is all about.”  Conspiratorial wink and everything.  To which they get a disgusted look from me. [Like Harry Shearer, who spoke at last week’s Rising Tide conference said, I’m delighted to be anywhere, any time I’m in New Orleans. But, Bourbon Street at night is not one of those places. In all my years in NOLA, I can safely say that I walked the entirety of the tourist portion of that street all of three times, mostly avoiding it by taking Royal, Dauphine, Burgundy, and a series of cross streets, my favorite being Toulouse for one obvious reason.]

There are the Mennonite few who step away from me when I let them know that some of “those gays and trannies in that end of the Quarter” are my friends. There are the Mennonite many who traveled down to New Orleans and Slidell in late 2005 and early 2006 to bring supplies, gut houses, and help us clean up.  Thank you.

Surprisingly, there has been only one who has vehemently remarked that the wretched hive of scum and villainy should never have been rebuilt and ought to be sunk into the swamp whence it came. Dude, people live there much like people live all over America at the mercy of geology, weather, and government capriciousness.  Yes, I left for family and work, and I’ve been seriously frustrated with the place on more than one occasion, but many still live there strengthening their ties to a place they call home. Not your tourist destination and subsequent object of ire. Their home. Chill. Mind your own glass house. A hundred retorts come to mind, but I’ve found there is no reasoning with such crushing self-assurance and anger. Other problems lurk there.

The most irritating and endearing creature here, though, is Mr. or Ms. Let Me Tell You What Happened During Katrina. “The government response was pathetic, shameful. You see, the river levee fell into St. Barnhard Parish and then they bombed it following which Bush zipped in on a jet ski and said, ‘You’ve done a great job, Mr. Brown!‘ And those poor people in the Superdome for weeks. That disaster would never have happened if it weren’t for global warming.” These are the moments that flummox.  After four years, such blessed interest, passion and rage for what happened in New Orleans in 2005, but the facts are all wrong as is the audacity to inform me, who actually lived there at the time and went through the whole wretched thing.

So, I do only that which can be done on days like today.  Inform you.  Again.

All of New Orleans is not below sea level and Hurricane Katrina did not come to New Orleans. Were either of this true, my house in the Lower Garden District would have flooded or been sheared off its foundations to land somewhere in Mississippi.

… A population map of New Orleans in 1878 indicates that almost none of today“s flooded zones was inhabited back then and that the city really didn’t expand until swamp reclamation in the early- to mid-twentieth century.  Therefore, the city wasn’t built below sea level, it was expanded below sea level.

Again, Hurricane Katrina did not touch New Orleans and skated to the east of us laying waste to Bay St. Louis, Waveland, Biloxi/Gulfport in Mississippi, Mobile, Alabama, and Slidell, Louisiana in all her Category 3 glory.

Last but by no means least:

“The city’s vaunted levee system, mandated by Congress to provide no more than Category 3 hurricane protection, was untested.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which was in charge of all New Orleans levees, had seen its local budget slashed repeatedly by the Bush administration – by some $80 million in 2005 alone.”

Yes, the city started with smugglers and prostitutes and wouldn’t be what it is without its driving forces of disorder and dysfunction. Yes, an amazing level of corruption, grandstanding, lies, and sheer apathy on the part of the federal, state and local governments, and the people of Louisiana caused a deadly flood in place of just another hurricane that went east. But, these are not what we ought to shake our heads and weep over.

The real tragedy is that no one who can do something about it really cares even now, after the worst possible happened. We all know why New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are important to this nation’s interests, what threatens it, what can be done about it and that absolutely no steps will be taken to protect it. I hope I’m wrong and know that this presidency is still young and beleaguered by the recession and predecessorial mess, but Come On. Where are you, President Obama? This is your chance to keep that campaign promise. This is your chance to shine and help a great, cultural, colorful, and unique American city.

Look at it as practice. Manhattan’s next.

***

“Like Venice, New Orleans has been burdened with an accumulated and shared touristic vocabulary that everyone uses to describe its character, and which, for various reasons, remains the sole content of its foreseeable future.

“… As the Venetian floods quickly exceeded their actual significance to achieve a charged, symbolic meaning, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is likely to alter the symbolic, and consequently physical and social, structure of the city. Tourism in New Orleans, though not so global a force as it is in Venice, led to a certain sort of vision that was blind to whatever did not accord with the spectacle. A doomed New Orleans has no history to answer for, and can be remade into any whimsical vision that visitors have of it. When we visit such a place, we can pretend that it has no past other than the one we see pleasantly deteriorating with exotic, carefully manicured negligence. With such a New Orleans, we needn’t engage in any handwringing over racism, poverty, or any injustice at all, except the sort that finds accord with our own nostalgia. If a city’s fate is already determined by “water-gods,” well, that’s no injustice after all – certainly nothing we could help. In a doomed place where only the inevitable takes place, nothing can be reformed except purely mythic problems, in colossal, “pharaonic” ways. To the resolution of particular issues, we prefer catastrophic visions. We like to have objects of reform that are too grand to fix but lovely to contemplate and pity, even if it’s the particulars that will add up to the very catastrophe we spent so long dreaming of.

“It was such thinking that rendered New Orleans’ poorer, mostly black residents invisible, beyond contemplation, before the hurricane. Now the districts where many of them lived have been destroyed, and are not likely to be rebuilt. The former residents have become refugees, stateless citizens, within their own country.”

— Nikil Saval in Invisible Cities

We’ve been blogging for 10 years, but drilling for oil and gas 15 times as long. Today marks the 150th anniversary of the first oil well, drilled not far away from where I sit, in a small northwestern Pennsylvania town called Titusville.

[Edwin Laurentine] Drake’s genius was to drive pipe into the ground so debris wouldn’t clog the drill hole. On Aug. 27, 1859, the method proved successful when his driller struck oil 69.5 feet below ground.

… Drake, who had no drilling or engineering background, had been hired by the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Co. to oversee drilling primarily because he was a retired railroad conductor and could ride trains free, thereby saving the company money. He’d been forced to retire in his mid-30s because of ill health and was working as a hotel clerk in New Haven, Conn., where he met James Townsend, an investor in the company.

Those of you who have read Daniel Yergin’s The Prize know why this find was critical (emphasis mine).

¦ For those who had money, oil from the sperm whale had for hundreds of years set the standard for high-quality illumination; but even as demand was growing, the whale schools of the Atlantic had been decimated ¦ For the whalers, it was the golden age, as prices were rising, but it was not the golden age for their consumers, who did not want to pay $2.50 a gallon a price that seemed sure to go even higher.  Cheaper lighting fluids had been developed.  Alas, all of them were inferior.

And goes to show that if consumers in 1859 could switch from whale oil to modern light crude, we can be better customers and demand responsible oil & gas use as well as a source of energy more sustainable.

Alexis Madrigal has a wonderful writeup and photo gallery of drilling, storage and transportation of oil in Oil Creek valley of 1859.  Look at those pictures and then ones taken during my visit to a Gulf of Mexico drill ship and platform.  How far miraculous feats of engineering (and human resources) have come in 150 years.

1859: Lady visits rig

2006: Lady works on rig