I am in Turkey right now, about 44 hours before I return home. I've been gone for two weeks, and I'm quite ready to see my family again. Hopefully, after I get back, I'll blog regularly, or at least more than once every nine or ten days.
Personal: September 2005 Archives
I'm in London on business with the Nameless Entity. I just finished with the British Shakespeare Association conference in Newcastle, where I led a seminar discussing online versions of Shakespeare. That was just a diversion -- no tax dollars were used to fund my trip, in case you were wondering -- but the whole experience was fascinating and gratifying.
Before that, I was in San Diego for a conference on behalf of the Entity. After London, I will go to another country, and won't get back until next week. Needless to say, I'm missing my family very much, but at least I'm doing intersting things.
I feel totally disconnected from America in a way that I have never felt, because when I left, New Orleans still existed. Blogging about that seems rather solipsistic, since it really has nothing to do with me, but I know this is obviously a tremendously important event in the life of our country, and it's odd to watch it from across an ocean.
Has any First World country ever lost an entire city since the end of World War II? The way some people talk, you would think it's a routine occurence. I watched two BBC anchors who were perplexed that "the richest and most advanced country in the world" couldn't do something as simple and straightforward as remove several hundred thousand people on short notice, even in a city where the government is notoriously corrupt, inefficient, and slow.
It's hard to explain our federal system to regular, everyday British subjects. Not that they're incapable of understanding it, but the U.K. is so much more geograpically compact, and their government is so much more centralized, that they have difficulty conceiving that the president can't just swoop in with thousands of troops and federal workers. Even today, CNN reported that the governor of Louisiana is resisting President Bush's plan to federalize the whole mess.
Isn't it time to revisit the concept of "acts of God"?
