THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE, short of reporters, has recently sent highly paid columnists to "blanket the Gulf Coast to detail the toll on lives and livelihoods" of folks affected by the BP oil spill.
Much of their work has been good. See, for instance, Loren Steffy's nice piece on Louisiana oystermen.
This should be no surprise. Most columnists are former reporters who can report and write better than their colleagues and, in some cases (though not always at the Chronicle), can think better. Sending columnists to the scene of the oil spill was, in theory at least, a good way to add color and depth to the coverage.
But the first piece in the series was perfectly awful -- spectacularly awful, awful in ways that should win awards for awfulness -- both as . . .
. . . reporting and as opinion.
"In the first installment," the Chronicle said, "Lisa Gray looks back at the 1979 Ixtoc I oil spill off Mexico's coast." ("Along the Texas coast, they've lived this before," June 20, 2010)
Not a bad idea, and Ms. Gray promised some real reporting: "Why are we still using technology much like the attempts that failed at Ixtoc?"
"Technology" refers to things and "attempts" refers to action, so the sentence is technically nonsense. But you get the idea. The article would presumably explain how the blowout preventer for the Deepwater Horizon was "much like" the one that failed at Ixtoc and explore why that was so and what that means.
Well, it did no such thing.
Nor did Ms. Gray tell us much about the extent of the damage to the lower Texas coast thirty-one years ago. Nor about the mighty efforts by governments, companies, and citizens to protect and clean the beaches. Nor about the long-term effects of the spill on man and nature.
No. What the article was really about was Ms. Gray's rage and Ms. Gray's contempt.
Ms. Gray builds her article around Tony Amos, described as a "white-bearded oceanographer" who cried salty tears when the oil rolled in and who remains "furious" about Ixtoc.
"To me," Ms. Gray writes, "Amos' [read Amos's] anger and sadness makes sense."
I came to the Texas coast expecting to find lots of people like Amos -- people as mad as I was, people who bore old psychic scars, people who still shivered to remember the 150 miles of Texas beaches coated in oil.
But this fine lady from Houston discovered, sadly, that the yokels were insufficiently furious.
But that wasn't the reaction I got. Except for sicentists like Amos, when I asked Port Aransas' [read Aransas's] old-timers about Ixtoc, most shrugged and struggled to remember something.
. . . .
Some of Port Aransas' [read Aransas's] old-timers are furious about the BP spill off Louisiana's coast. But they hardly ever think of Ixtoc -- the spill that hit their own coast and affected their own livelihoods. The spill that served as a warning.
It's as if their memories have been wiped as clean as their feet.
Later:
Denial was the town's favorite coping mechanism. Even as oil coated the beaches, people complained that reporters were making a big deal out of nothing.
"We have tar balls here all the time," the mayor told the Houston Chronicle.
More sarcasm:
At the time when the barrier islands carried a continuous ribbon of oil, 10 to 15 feet wide -- a one-lane road of tar at the tideline -- the weekly Port Aransas South Jetty newspaper reported that "local interests, still looking for a bright side, are noting that the offshore fishing is still producing pretty good catches, the beaches above the high tide line are still attractive, with some cleaner spots attracting swimmers, and Texas shrimp are still being landed outside the area of the drifting patches of oil."
A vacation paradise!
But what if, what if, what if? What if all those things were true? What if fish were still being harvested? What if some folks were still enjoying the beach? What if, despite the damage done by the spill, the self-reliant people of Port Aransas were, against all odds, coping?
Wouldn't that help explain why memories had faded?
And wouldn't it offer some degree of hope, some sense that both nature and humanity can endure these things and, in time, prevail? That the coping mechanisms of wind, waves, sun, and passage of time -- death and renewal, decay of tar balls and memory -- worked just fine, thank you very much.
Ms. Gray reports, finally -- as she must, given that she could apparently find no present-day physical evidence that Ixtoc had ever occurred -- that things indeed got better.
After the current shifted and stopped carrying the goo to Texas, crews scraped the tourist beaches clean. In September, tides kicked up by Hurricane Frederic washed much of the oil back into the ocean, and sand covered the tar mats dried on the beaches.
The well still hadn't been capped, and tar balls would plague our beaches for years. [Unca D: How many years?] But almost immediately, the state tourist agency launched a publicity campaign: "The coast is clear."
By her own reporting, the coast was, indeed, relatively clear. So what was wrong with letting people know that? What was wrong with calling tourists back to sand and sea, to try to ameliorate the economic damage?
In the real world, beaches had been cleaned and life could resume. But to a big-time columnist and editorialist from the big city, these perfectly sensible actions from decades past are worthy of naught but disdain.
It should have seemed ludicrous. But really, it wasn't ludicrous at all. The agency was simply asking Americans to do what most of them had wanted to do all along: To forget Ixtoc, even while it was happening.
This article, so filled with rage and contempt, tells us far more about Ms. Gray than it does about Ixtoc. It shows us how she thinks and, by extension, how most modern libs think.
They are elitists. They claim to speak for the public, but real flesh-and-blood people -- those in Port Aransas, for instance -- invariably lack the requisite intelligence and moral sensibility to be taken at all seriously.
Reread the piece. Not one person other than the worthy Ms. Gray and Mr. Amos is quoted by name. All others are cartoon figures, cardboard cutouts -- "old-timers" (twice), "retired deep-sea fishing guides," "a real estate agent," "a veteran," "the little town," "people."
Nameless nobodies, really.
And, by the way, there is no evidence in the essay that Ms. Gray bothered to go out on the water, walk on a sunny beach, or commune with a crab or a seagull (neither of which, by the way, would have remembered Ixtox.) Such enterprise might have stolen valuable screen time from what was truly important to her: Google: search term, "Texas, perfidy of."
Indeed, no Lisa Gray column or editorial is really complete without one of her signature insults to Texas and the horse it rode in on, and her tip o' old fedora to our betters in New York and California.
Nor did it help that in the U.S. [read United States], Ixtoc's oil washed up only in Texas, hardly a hotbed of environmentalism, and happy to rub its new [Unca D: new? new?] oil money in the rest of the country's face. Oil on Texas beaches? California and New York weren't crying.
That's you and me she's talking about, folks. Nature-hating, money-grubbing, rubbers of the faces of others, unworthy of the righteous concern of the people of California and New York, Ms. Gray's spiritual spiritual homes.
(Sometimes, I swear, this job is just too easy.)
Thomas Sowell has written about this phenomenon.
Contemporary denigrations of the masses echo a centuries-old tradition among the anointed, despite much rhetoric on the political left about "the people." Rosseau likened the masses of the people to "a stupid pusillanimous invalid," and Condorcet said that "the human race still revolts the philosopher who contemplates its history." To eighteenth-century British radical writer William Godwin, the peasant had "the contemptible insensitivity of an oyster."
(Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy (Basic Books, 1995, 305 pages))
Any of those quotes, modernized in language, could have been slipped into Ms. Gray's little essay without breaking its rhythm or train of thought. The people of Port Aransas, the people of Texas, the people of America (New York and California excepted) -- none of us measures up. We are but oysters.
George F. Will explained two years ago how this same contemptuous attitude defined candidate Barack Obama.
Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working-class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." . . .
By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescenion toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.
. . . .
[Historian Richard] Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.
Obama dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.
(George F. Will, "Candidate on a High Horse," Washington Post, April 15, 2008)
For Ms. Gray, the people of Port Aransas were victims, by golly, and they should act like it. They should have preserved their memories and tar-covered beaches in hard amber, monuments to victimhood. Instead, their false consciousness has robbed them of the politicized rage that in some unexplained way might have prevented the BP oil spill.
But the Port Aransans were not -- I'm borrowing words here from Thomas Sowell -- "as wise or as caring" or "as imaginative and bold" as Ms. Gray and her lonely Jeremiah, the white-bearded, 72-year-old oceanographer Tony Amos, who would never have let such a good crisis go to waste.
All of this helps to explain why the Houston Chronicle's editorial board is so badly matched to the Houston Chronicle's readers. The editors don't understand us, they don't respect us, and they certainly don't like us.
Texans are real people. We suffer through our rough patches, do the best we can, then go on with our lives. And that's just not good enough for Ms. Gray and her clever colleagues.
The people of Port Aransas are lucky. Ixtoc came and Ixtoc went. It's the people of Houston who still suffer, from the rage and contempt and ideologically driven unreason that spew daily from the platform -- where's a blowout preventer when we need one? -- of our miserable excuse for an editorial board.
Fire'em. Fire'em all.
* * *
Oh, and Ms. Gray was wrong when she said Ixtoc "spewed for an astounding 293 days." It was really 294 days. Nineteen-eighty was a leap year, Ms. G. Add a day.
The saintly Mr. Amos was wrong in saying Ixtoc was the biggest oil disaster the world had then seen. The worst was the Lakeview Gusher, Kern County, California, in 1910-1911. Look it up.
And, finally, how many columns did the hysterical Ms. Gray ever write about Ixtoc and its blowout preventer before, say, June 20, 2010? Where were her rage and contempt condescension when they might have done some good?
UPDATE: Thanks for the link from bloghouston.
I've said it before but will mention it again, "Articles like these are the reason I have not been able to stomach the Houston Chronicle in years." You mention my main beef with the Chronicle's writer's tones: that anyone who does not see things the same way or follow the same line of thinking is too closed minded or too stupid.
Oddly enough, I did purchase a Sunday paper today in the grocery store line because I wanted to see the great Fourth of July sales. Even that was a letdown, however, with the exception of Fry's One Day Sale.
Nice post, Unca Darrell. You point out the details of why this article is not an enjoyable or informative read.
Posted by: Phoenix | July 4, 2010 at 12:35 AM