In James Howard Kuntsler's The Long Emergency, he argues that the region of the US you want to live in when the profound social and economic dislocations of peak oil hit are the old Union States, where the roots in communitarian action will help new solutions evolve. When I first encountered this, I was disgusted by Kuntsler's regional chauvinism. Anyway, wouldn't you want to be further south, where you didn't have to battle the winter? I thought about this a lot when I moved to Maine, and in today's paper was an article that speaks to what Kuntsler might have had in mind.

The headline -- "Recluse's death spurs town to action" -- and the story itself -- a reclusive, mentally ill 51-year-old woman dies alone, in a condemned rural house with a failed furnace and a basement full of mold -- doesn't look very promising at first.

But I honestly can't remember ever reading such a story in a Texas newspaper. And when you actually read the story, you realize that the woman had a bunch of people looking out for her. Workers from the oil company came to repair the furnace, but couldn't work because the mold had taken over her basement. The police and Code Enforcement came; the house was condemned, and the woman wasn't going to be removed until several days later, out of concern for her autonomy.

"She kept saying she was going to be fine and that she was going to visit a relative over the weekend," Champlin said. "I told (the police) if you get the phone call and if she needs to be placed (in alternative housing), here's my phone number. Call me."

The woman, Imelda LaRoche, was the only child of a woman who was also mentally ill:

Littlefield said the police were called to the house "almost daily" in the 1970s by LaRoche's mother, who insisted they check for prowlers and complained of strange knocks and sounds, insisting there was a man nearby who wished her harm. When she answered the door, she always was clutching a hammer under her sweater, he said.

In the years since her mother died, it was LaRoche who began to call with similar complaints. Since 2005, she had called police almost 50 times, usually about a man who was trying to get inside and hurt her.

Over the weekend, the police checked several times, but for LaRoche to not answer the door wasn't unusual, the police said.

Littlefield explained that police didn't force their way into the house over the weekend because it wasn't unusual for her to not come to the door. They spent considerable time Tuesday, knocking, calling her name, hitting the police car's siren to get her attention before deciding, in part because of piled-up mail and newspapers, to force the door.

"We're kind of on unsteady ground when we're talking about intruding into people's homes," he said. "She's an adult, and just because she doesn't answer the door, we can't go in."

When the police went in, they found her dead by her bedside. The following week provoked soul-searching by Sanford residents; the cynic in me wants to say this was Monday-morning quarterbacking, borne out of guilt.

Since news of LaRoche's death first became public, Champlin said Sanford residents have been contacting her about how they might help, or just to say how sorry they are that it happened.

"I get stopped daily at the (supermarket). I had one gentleman from an oil company come in and say that if this ever happens again and you need somebody, call me," Champlin said. "It's been overwhelming."

Today, pine boards are nailed across the doors of the small white clapboard house and a bright red sign says it has been condemned. Some clothes are still pinned to a broken clothesline in the yard, next to a broken-down wooden glider chair and a rusted Radio Flyer wagon.

But check out the kicker of the article:

"This continues to bother me today," Champlin said. "I just want people to be aware: If you have a neighbor in need or a family member in need, you need to watch out for them."

Something about that was very touching and seemed genuine. Look, the tragic news in Austin was usually about traffic deaths, murders, and kidnapped girls, a standard set of preoccupations, to be sure. But the death of someone who lived and died outside the system, not ignored by the system but respected by it, and helped to the degree that she allowed them? It's not news in Austin. (Am I wrong? Please give me an example if I am.) If it did show up in the paper, the tone of the report would reinforce those values that you're on your own, so prepare to die that way, not (as the Maine paper's was) a rejoinder to watch out for each other. The only publication in Texas that regularly reinforces care for each other as the norm is the Texas Observer, long may it stand proud. Every other publication writes about these things out of prurience.

So yeah, I'm thinking that Kuntsler might be right.

UPDATE:

Or maybe Kuntsler isn't right, and is just a regional chauvinist. A recent spate of robberies in Windsor Park has people talking on the WP listserv, where many of the refrains have been along these lines:

I think we all have to be vigilant and try and look out for another as much as possible. Since our area is experiencing what seems to me to be an inordinately high number of instances for a short period of time, I think we need to continue to request increased police patrols and get to know neighbors on our block whom we maybe have never met before.

Two Christian prayers in Globish:

Our Father,
Who comes to us from above,
Your name is holy.
Your rule will soon be here,
Your will will be executed, in this world, and in the above as well,
Give us today the food we need everyday,
And forgive what we do wrong
As we will also forgive the other persons who do wrong to us,
Do not lead us to have bad desires,
But, free us from all that is evil,
For your are the ruler of the above, and yours are the power, and highest honour for ever and ever.
Amen.

Hello, Mary,
Who was most holy,
God is with you,
Among all the women, you are the one who was most honoured,
And Jesus, the fruit coming from your body is also holy,
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us wrong-doers at this very moment,
And at the time of our death,
Amen.

Which makes you realize how much archaic English exists in the versions (whether Catholic or Protestant) that English speakers commonly use.

Robert Draper, in an October 7 interview on Louisville's WFPL "State of Affairs" show with Julie Kredens, says

...I went around my business after that, I didn't intend to make a cottage industry out of George W. Bush as other Texas writers would...

It is fashionable, of course, in Texas Monthly-type stratospheres to make digs at Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose by association, but maybe Draper means Bill Minutaglio, I don't know.

In 2005, Ibrahim Sara, an Egyptian-born man living in New Jersey, signed up with L-3 Communications, a San Diego-based defense contractor that has provided translators and linguists to the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. The job pays well: for a US citizen, the average salary is $176,000. It's not known how many translators are currently working in Iraq; L-3 says it has 6,900 employees, a mix of US citizens, Iraqis, and other nationals. But it's an exceedingly dangerous job. Over a third of the private contractors killed in Iraq, more than 200, have been translators or interpreters. One such casualty was Sara, who died with three Marines on patrol in November of 2006.

The next month, the US Army decided to dump L-3 and award its $4.6 billion, 5-year contract to a new company, called Global Linguist Solutions, which had been formed specifically to compete for this contract. It was headed by two men with extensive experience in languages and national security: the president, James "Spider" Marks, is a retired major general and was senior vice president of McNeil Technologies, another major defense contractor that also competes in the translation market, and its vice president, Michael Simone, was a former intelligence officer and commander of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.

After the Army decided to go with GLS, L-3 protested to the Government Accountability Office, which ruled in favor of L-3. (L-3's stock price also dropped, and DynCorp and McNeil's both jumped.) The Army asked the GAO to reconsider its decision, but on June 8 the GAO said it wouldn't.

The issue had been in limbo until today: INSCOM handed the contract to GLS, again. Will L-3, the incumbent, protest again? We'll see. Given the GAO's analysis of the GLS bid (mainly that they didn't have the expertise), it's hard to see how GLS could have overcome those criticisms in less than a year. I bet DynCorp investors are happy; that stock moved up 8.8% today on the news.

Underneath this dry account of government procurement are a couple of remarkable things: One, the amount of money involved, especially the $5 billion price tag for the contract. But also, in 2005, L-3 purchased another contractor, Titan, for $2 billion, largely because of Titan's language service assets. Other companies are also involved: Thomas Computer Solutions, a Virginia-based contractor, received a $730 million contract in late 2006. There are probably others. I would love to know what all goes into "language services" and why it's so expensive.

Two, we're used to hearing that the US government faces a shortage of language experts. This isn't entirely true: the government has all the experts it needs -- if it hires them from the contractors. This is a side of the language and national security story that's never been reported, and even now that private contractors are coming under increasing scrutiny, it's still not picked up on. Here's the thing: the translator/linguist shortage in the federal gov't has always been due to poaching by private contractors, who pay more than federal salaries.

Here's the other thing: I used to see DARPA projects in machine translation, etc., as a gee-whiz techno fantasy by people who were predisposed to downplaying human contributions. Now I see it as a competitive human resource response. If we only had machines to do the work, we wouldn't have to give so much $ to the contractors.

From Stephen Metcalf's review of a new collection of Malcolm Lowry tidbits:

“Essentially a humble fellow,” Lowry wrote of his alter ego Sigbjorn Wilderness in the expressionistic bender “Through the Panama,” “he has tried his hardest all his life to understand (though maybe still not hard enough) so that his room is full of Partisan Reviews, Kenyon Reviews, Minotaurs, Poetry mags, Horizons, even old Dials, of whose contents he is able to make out precisely nothing, save where an occasional contribution of his own, years and years ago, rings a faint bell in his mind, a bell that is growing even fainter, because to tell the truth he can no longer understand his own early work either.”

Metcalf calls Lowry's first novel, Ultramarine, "a mediocre novel." It just so happens that I finished re-reading Ultramarine the other night; I read it ten years ago or so and fished it from a box when I was packing books for the move. Had always meant to read it again, and did. Everything I liked in it the first time around I found again: the high-modernist realism paired with long flights of stream of consciousness, the disjunction between his immature internal longings and his macho posturings, the long stretches with nothing but dialogue, all from different speakers and jammed together. The last quarter or so of the book is all heard, not seen. So "mediocre," I don't know. Children's Hospital is mediocre. Yiddish Policeman's Union is mediocre. Ultramarine has cojones.

From Stephen Metcalf's review of a new collection of Malcolm Lowry tidbits:

“Essentially a humble fellow,” Lowry wrote of his alter ego Sigbjorn Wilderness in the expressionistic bender “Through the Panama,” “he has tried his hardest all his life to understand (though maybe still not hard enough) so that his room is full of Partisan Reviews, Kenyon Reviews, Minotaurs, Poetry mags, Horizons, even old Dials, of whose contents he is able to make out precisely nothing, save where an occasional contribution of his own, years and years ago, rings a faint bell in his mind, a bell that is growing even fainter, because to tell the truth he can no longer understand his own early work either.”

Metcalf calls Lowry's first novel, Ultramarine, "a mediocre novel." It just so happens that I finished re-reading Ultramarine the other night; I read it ten years ago or so and fished it from a box when I was packing books for the move. Had always meant to read it again, and did. Everything I liked in it the first time around I found again: the high-modernist realism paired with long flights of stream of consciousness, the disjunction between his immature internal longings and his macho posturings, the long stretches with nothing but dialogue, all from different speakers and jammed together. The last quarter or so of the book is all heard, not seen. So "mediocre," I don't know. Children's Hospital is mediocre -- the author loses control of the sprawl. Yiddish Policeman's Union is mediocre -- it's just overedited, and felt like software had a hand in producing it. Ultramarine is hardcore. So confident it's hard not to like.

I used to joke that once we got to Maine we'd try to find a community-supported fishing operation -- like community-supported agriculture, except that you get a share of every catch. Well, it turns out to be true, kind of:

For $2,995 a year, customers buy the rights to all the lobsters caught in a designated trap off the rocky Maine coast — at least 40 a season, probably more — and have them shipped whenever and wherever they want.

Two owners of a seafood restaurant here in Portland figured out how to do it and were written up by the Associated Press.

So I go into this great bookstore here in Portland, Rabelais, which has every sort of food book you'd want: cook books, food porn, food studies, rare books, art books (motto: thought for food): and I get into a conversation with the owner. Misty had been in earlier in the week and talked to him about CSAs, so he knew that we'd come from Austin, so we got talking about that.

"I'm not anti-development or anything like that," he said, then pointed out all the weird development schemes happening in Portland, how city government made strange decisions to pick a developer for a $100 million pier development project, how the city wants to run a multi-lane highway down the center of the peninsula, to hook the Old Port to the highway. How a comedy club had been closed down because the piers under it were rotted, but how this was probably a scheme just to knock down and rebuild the pier. "You're not going to get away from it, man," he said. "You can't get away from it."

"Yeah, I said, "I know development is going to happen, I know I can't get away from that. And I know I'll never get away from that huge distance between the wonderful, glorious way a project is sold to the people and how it's actually realized as crappy. But everybody wants to move to Austin. I want to get to a place where I can figure out why."

And these are my mots d'escalier: I also want to get away from an atmosphere where you're expected to sit back while crappy changes are crammed down your throat, and where everybody sits back, wondering: Should I like it? I want to go to a place that's cool but which I don't care that much about, that I'm not attached to, so however it was ruined or is going to get ruined it doesn't bother me. Where all the activist hopes, when they fail, as they inevitably do, I can note their naivete and move on. I want to go to a place that I can apprehend as a place, not somewhere I know so much about, I can't stop at a stoplight without knowing so much about what was there, when I stopped there last and with whom, what used to be on the corner, that little store, will it make it? And the guilt: I should have gone there more, now it's closed, that little place. Or: I should have swum there more, now I can't get there as easily. Or: I should have done this or that. How much a place where you live can be laced with regret it's astounding. Standing there in the bookstore I make an embarrassment of myself, bitter and rageful about the place he just left, as if it wasn't him that left, as if he hadn't been a self-proclaimed nomad for so long.

It was ironic in a way to be standing in a food bookstore ranting about this, because food is now THE focus of desires and politics and moralities. (Note that Michael Pollan's first book was about place, but every one since has been about food.) Was place ever that focus? I know theories of place were hot in academia in the 70s and 80s. Has the fetish of place been replaced by a fetish of food? And maybe we should go back to taking place more seriously again. There are multiple hitches there, I realize, namely that food is a useful device because it lies at the core of the consuming American self. I'm not saying food isn't interesting, or the fascination with food doesn't have merit. (And I love Rabelais Books. And in a few days we're going to Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal, at Don's recommendation. And yesterday I bought an oyster knife.) But when the limits of that consuming American self are reached, when the food you love can't be shipped from Chile or California or wherever, and when it's prohibitively expensive to drive, you will learn to, have to learn, to appreciate place anew.

We won't see a new politics of place arise until the real energy crisis sets in. It's like musical chairs: when the music stops, you'll have to love where you end up.

Last night, Christmas Eve, Misty and I wandered into what appeared to be the only bar open in Portland. The bartender talking to a guy. Two women at the end of the bar. That turned into three more people over the course of the night, then four more, so we made it a lively place. Turns out that the first guy talking to the bartender had just returned to Portland himself after 5 years living in Oregon and Minnesota, though he has a serious claim on the place, tracing his family to arrivals in 1670 and 1770 and also to Penobscot blood.

"If you're born here but your parents weren't, then you're still from away," he told us.

We bonded over what outsiders do to a place when they come in, even as he eyed us warily. "We're happy to have you," he said, "but just don't get involved in local politics. As soon as you get involved in local politics, then we're going to have problems."

My only requirements for my birthday this year is that 1) I be out of the country and 2) I be with Misty. So tomorrow we go to Montreal, where I plan to turn 40 with my first taste of foie gras at Au Pied de Cochon.

Is it a slip of the tongue when newscasters & presidential candidates say "Osama" instead of "Obama"?

Jeff Bercovici, who blogs for Portfolio, called me last week to clear up the question after CNN's Glenn Beck made the slip. Was this a sign of some unconscious equating of Obama with terrorists?

Bercovici's piece was posted on my birthday. I recommend reading the piece, in which Bercovici quotes me amply and accurately, but also because the comments (from obvious supporters of Obama) indicate quite remarkably the confusion about slips of the tongue and what they mean. In this case, it indicates to these supporters that there's a persistent, well-coordinated campaign to smear Obama. To me, the slip is a perfectly nonanomalous error.

I posted this comment on the site as well:

You can tell whatever political story you like, but the plain fact is that though the slip misserves your candidate, you haven't provided any evidence of any plan, intention, or directive by any campaign to replace "Obama" with "Osama" -- and I do not think any of the posters are claiming that CNN is in cahoots with Mitt Romney. (Are you?)

This isn't to say that real, honest slips of the tongue don't, or won't, have historical or political consequences. And I'm not saying that propagandists don't work (and succeed) by deliberately mislabeling. But I hope the historians of the future will be smart enough to consider the linguistic story before they embrace what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in American politics in order to tell the political story they would want to tell anyway.

If you want to begin to convince me that this is a deliberate plan to smear Obama by intentionally saying "Osama," you might start by showing that all of these speakers (Beck, Romney, & Cho) make many fewer slips of the tongue in general. I haven't done this and don't plan to, but if you were to actually count their slips, you would probably find that they occur within a range consistent with people who produce a lot of speech in high-pressure situations. In other words, if they only mess up Obama's name and no one else's, then you might have an argument. I doubt this is the case.

This slip does your candidate a disservice, but it's not linguistically anomalous.

I might have also added that I'm talking about slips of the tongue, not miswritten headlines or captions. Even those are signs of human incompetence, though, not conspiratorial malevolence. And I do believe former is more richly documented than the latter.