Noted: Harper’s Contributing Editor Matthew Power’s story “Mississippi Drift”, from the March 2008 issue, has been selected for Best American Travel Writing and Best American Nonrequired Reading for next year.
Also today: Harper’s Contributing Editor Scott Horton appears on the Brian Lehrer show where he “explains why it may be very difficult for the Justice Department to prosecute the Bush Administration officials responsible for the torture memos.”
Matthew Power on the Mississippi
Two summers ago, Matt [Bullard] sent an invitation that I could not ignore. He was in Minneapolis, building a homemade raft, and had put out a call for a crew of “boat punks” to help him pilot the vessel the entire length of the Mississippi River, all the way to New Orleans. They would dig through the trash for sustenance. They would commune with the national mythos. They would be twenty-first-century incarnations of the river rats, hoboes, and drifters of the Mississippi’s history, the sort who in Mark Twain’s time would have met their ends tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail. Catfish rose in my mind; ripples expanded outward and scattered any doubts. I wrote back straightaway and asked to join up.
I met Matt on a scorching July afternoon and followed him through leafy, upper-middle-class residential streets toward Minneapolis’s West River Park. The industrious hum of weed-whackers and leaf-blowers filled the air, and helmeted children tricycled along a path, their watchful parents casting a suspicious eye at
us. But through a small hole in the foliage by the edge of the bike path, we instantly stepped out of the
middle-American idyll, scrambling down a narrow path through the tangled undergrowth, through cleared patches in the woods littered with malt-liquor cans and fast-food wrappers, hobo camps with the musty wild smell of an animal’s den. I clutched at the roots of saplings to keep from tumbling down the slope. The sounds of civilization receded to white noise. We stumbled out of the trees onto a sandy spit, and I suddenly saw the river before me, narrow and amber-colored, flowing silently south, lined
on both banks with
forested bluffs.
From the Web
“So, are the stress tests worthless? They did provide a much clearer picture of the position of individual banks than we had previously. It is worth noting that this is a 180 degree shift from the original course pursued by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson last fall. Paulson tried to conceal the situation of individual banks, putting a cloud over all of them. Treasury also should be credited for disclosing many of the specifics of the stress tests so it is possible to do a quick (or more in depth) analysis of its assumptions and explore the implications of alternative assumptions. Still, it is hard not to conclude that these stress tests, and certainly the PR campaign around them, were intended to paint as positive a picture as possible of the banks’ financial condition. If this picture proves to be wrong then it means that we will have unnecessarily delayed the clean-up of the financial system. It will also be bad political news for the administration (Geithner and Summers will presumably be joining the ranks of the unemployed).”
“It is a slow yet steady process. Before the price of aluminum fell to 30 cents a pound, from 85 cents, he had accumulated more than $10,000, he said, almost enough to pay the electrician. But despite such progress, last Friday a worker from the Federal Emergency Management Agency delivered a letter informing him that it would soon repossess the trailer that is, for now, his only home. ‘I need the trailer,’ said Mr. Hammond, 70. ‘I ain’t got nowhere to go if they take the trailer.’ Though more than 4,000 Louisiana homeowners have received rebuilding money only in the last six months, or are struggling with inadequate grants or no money at all, FEMA is intent on taking away their trailers by the end of May. The deadline, which ends temporary housing before permanent housing has replaced it, has become a stark example of recovery programs that seem almost to be working against one another.”
“A Taxonomy of Health Care Systems”; “Fifteen seats at the table; not one for single-payer?”; Hannity’s socialist apples
“A lawyer who wants to see what a potential witness says to personal contacts on his or her Facebook or MySpace page has one good option, a recent ethics opinion suggests: Ask for access. Alternative approaches, such as secretly sending a third party to ‘friend’ a Facebook user, are unethical because they are deceptive, says the Philadelphia Bar Association in a March advisory opinion.” (via)
