The big news in California is that fires continue to burn — and could burn for days. (On a personal note, a show I was supposed to do yesterday was cancelled due to the fires but it would have been iffy getting to the location anyway since some roads near L.A. were closed). Cagle Cartoons owner Daryl Cagle lives in one of the areas impacted by the fires. In this Guest Voice he notes one of the news media’s seeming obsessions.

Celebrity Fires Consume the Media

by Daryl Cagle

A mandatory evacuation remains in effect for my neighborhood in Montecito after the devastating “Tea Fire” this week. My son and I stayed at my house longer than we should have, filling the cars with keepsakes and watering the place down with a garden hose until the howling winds driving the smoke and embers our way become too much for us.

The fire was churning on all the hills behind my house in wide, glowing swaths — not like the usual thin line of flame we’re used to seeing at the leading edge of a fire. Being in the path of the fire, the wind blew the smoke, soot and embers directly at us making it difficult to see more than a few feet at times, and sometimes clearing to reveal a brightening, eerie, orange glow as the fire drew closer. I was sure the fire was only a couple of houses away when we fled. Firemen were directing traffic and calling on people to evacuate; I didn’t see them doing any fire fighting when we left. The fire was moving too fast for fire fighting and all they could do was focus on people.

I found my way past police barricades the next morning to see that my house survived, along with all the houses on my street. I live adjacent to Westmont College, which lost a half dozen buildings, and the next street over from mine, Westmont Road, lost a number of homes. The hills all around are barren and charred. The last report I saw estimated 150 homes lost.

I know how my neighbors feel. I was a college student, living with my mother in the same spot, when the 1977 Sycamore Canyon fire destroyed our home and about 250 others. Both fires started in the exact, same location and burned much the same area.

I also get a sense of deja vu from the media coverage of the fire. Reports from around the world have focused on celebrities who live in town.
Read the rest of this entry »

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com

It seems that the Iraq invasion has doomed the United States to being an object of suspicion for many nations, and for some time to come.

A case in point is this article written by a member of the Brazilian lower house, the Assembly of Deputies.

After describing how the United States invaded Iraq under false pretexts and pointing out his perception that the U.S. actually invaded for the sake of the region’s oil resources, Eliene Lima, a member of parliament from a Brazilian state bordering Amazonia, writes for Brazil’s Jornal Nortao:

As we all know, this is the country with the largest reserves of drinking water in the world. And where is the water? In the Amazon! Read the rest of this entry »

New York Times: 77 Police Officers Hurt in Paris Riots

Nearly 80 French police officers were injured during clashes with youths in a working- and lower-class suburb north of Paris last night, and six are in serious condition, police officials said, after some of the youths used hunting shotguns as well as more conventional guns, fire bombs and rocks.

The audience cheered. They roared, in fact. You’d think it was for a movie star or something.

The guy they were cheering for was shouting “GO CHARGERS, GO!!” in the heart of San Diego Chargers country. The location was what had been the team’s home before 25,000 shell-shocked people took it over for nearly a week, taking refuge from a massive natural disaster.

The politician who elicited heart-felt cheers had, of course, been an actor before becoming California’s governor. But he had become something even more than both as he stood there that Sunday after hideous fires had decimated many parts of San Diego County and incinerated some 1200 structures. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was in Qualcomm Stadium during a Chargers football game to honor the firefighters. Just one day earlier, the 41-year-old stadium had been emptied of some 20,000 fire evacuees — some of them leaving to live in hotels, or elsewhere, because they were without homes. The game was a victory celebration of sorts.

The worst of the big fires were waning, and it seemed that Schwarzenegger was back in the good graces of the bulk of California voters. From cynical reporters to the man and woman on the street, the man some call “Ahnold” received high marks for his management style during the disaster that caused the largest evacuations in state history.

President George Bush’s high-concept imagery moment came after 9/11 when he picked up the bullhorn in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Much of that image would later dissipate in the partisan polarization wars that followed. But it was an image-making moment.

Schwarzenegger had earlier tried political polarization, got burned and pulled back. Arnold was back to the kind of politics for which a broad coalition of Californians elected him four years ago, when they angrily kicked out the hapless Governor Gray Davis in a recall election. He had come full circle.

Schwarzenegger never really had his bullhorn moment. But it could be argued that he has had his bullhorn phase — his handling of the California wildfires.

He became the role model of a governor on-the-move, a Consoler-in-Chief, a go-between clamoring for help for his state’s residents from federal officials. His poll numbers had been on the rise, but the tragedy of the fires seemed to restore Arnold to the man who came to office seeming to be a different kind of governor.

Schwarzenegger hit just the right note and received praise in newspapers and from the man and woman on the street. For instance, Bill Whalen, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, said:

READ THE REST HERE

On mission to post-trauma sites, I drag along a raggedy old journal I’ve handwrit over the decades. Inside the old moleskine, well, it’s overheavy with quotes from Heschel, Berry, Lorca, Mechtilde, and others. Freeze-dried nourishment for the climb.

Tonight, here in the Rockies with snow hanging heavy in the white night sky, the big wood owls land on the roof with such a thud that it sounds like a whole man has been dropped from the sky…

I’ve been thinking somewhat wearily, I must get to bed earlier, last night it was just after 5a.m., the night before 4 a.m…. trying to stay up late to write… trying to read and think and write in the interstices left from all other commitments to twenty-nine elses.

But, I’m see once again, from cruising many blogs and their comments tonight, that there are many souls who have need for rest this night that has nothing to do with lack of sleep… for anyone who registers the world with accuracy, these are times, as Wordsworth put it, “The World is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours…”

I’d prescribe for that condition, this to start; From the raggedy notebook, here, take this with water. Tonight, I’ll meet you there:

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

by Wendell Berry

On the Catholic Sabbath just past, Sunday, a man in San Francisco undressed, painted himself in colored paint, showed up on the steps of Grace Cathedral armed with small explosives, allegedly with the intent to set the church on fire and any people in it.

But, the news story has devolved into the following loudness in some radio and TV talk venues: Is the Catholic church (Grace is an Episcopal Church) a good or bad force in the world? Are people attacking the Catholic Church? Who will or won’t condemn this alleged arsonist? Was this man protesting the Church’s stance on homosexuality? And, How dare anyone criticize the Catholic Church? And on and on.

……..Instead of: What the ‘h.e. double hockey sticks’ was a person, any person, doing running around loose with “an ammunition belt of small explosives strapped around his waist,” who had allegedly been overheard by (or I think, possibly might have arranged for) a neighbor who called police, saying Mr. Paul Addis, a 35-year-old averring he is a performance artist, had planned to set fire to the old French Gothic cathedral and thereby any persons in it.

REGARDLESS of the ‘bomber’s’ political interests or mad-on… what is the real story under the screech-fest already rolling over the airwaves? Is the man insane? Has he hideously bad judgment? Does he confuse ‘acting out’ with performance art? Why would he be willing to threaten human lives? If it is about the Church’s understanding of homosexuality, how is threatening or pretending to threaten to harm the people inside a church better than a KKK line of logic?

How does he fit in with the recent spate of people acting publicly when they a) know cameras are present (don’t tase me bro,) or when a show is being taped live (Bill Maher ran off the stage to help eject a screamer from his audience)? Performance art and threatening to do actual harm in real time context, are two different ideas, yes or no? How can street theater be used in time-honored ways, and where /when? Surely there are Read the rest of this entry »

John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri

They haven’t yet announced that he changed his mind because he wanted to spend more time with his family — and hopefully the press conference that deals with the issue will be real — but there seem to have been consequences in the case of the fake FEMA news conference:

Pat Philbin, FEMA’s external affairs director, was scheduled to become director of public affairs for National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell on Monday. It was not immediately clear whether he offered his resignation or was fired just as he was set to begin the job.

As of Sunday, officials only said that they were aware of concerns.

But Monday, the director of national intelligence office issued this statement: “We do not normally comment on personnel matters. However, we can confirm that Mr. Philbin is not, nor is he scheduled to be, the director of public affairs for the office of the director of national intelligence.”

FEMA Director David Paulison said Philbin sent him an e-mail in which he took full responsibility for last week’s staging of the news conference.

The irony in all of this that FEMA was generally getting good reviews for its job performance here in California in contrast to its performance during Hurricane Katrina.

On the other hand, that wouldn’t be difficult to do.

Meanwhile, Philibin asserted today that the press conference had really been one, big, fat mistake and really not intentional deception:

John “Pat” Philbin, the now former director of external affairs for FEMA, told CBS News that he should have stopped the press conference that the agency held last week without any media present.

“I should have cancelled it quickly. I did not have good situational awareness of what was happening,” he told CBS News in a telephone interview.

Philbin himself was heard off-camera asking Vice Admiral Harvey Johnson, his boss, a question. He now says he feels terrible about what happened adding that the FEMA press office was under considerable pressure to get information on the California fires out to the press and was working on little sleep.

“I can definitively tell you that there were no discussions or conversations about setting up a fake news conference.”

Philbin said that Adm. Johnson, the second-in-command at the agency, did not realize it was FEMA staffers and not reporters who were asking questions, despite the fact that Johnson called on members of the FEMA staff by name during the press conference.

“I am not aware that he knew what was happening and all of sudden staff were asking questions,” Philbin said. “When the staff began asking questions I should have intervened and I didn’t.”

How bad — and d-u-m-b — was the fake press conference? So bad that Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff was sounding almost like a blogger:

Seldom does anyone in government come as clean as Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security, has come with his disdain for his own agency’s stunt.

“”I think it was one of the dumbest and most inappropriate things I’ve seen since I’ve been in government,” Chertoff said yesterday.

And just so the (real) press listening to him understood, he added this:

“”I have made unambiguously clear, in Anglo-Saxon prose, that it is not to ever happen again and there will be appropriate disciplinary action taken against those people who exhibited what I regard as extraordinarily poor judgment,’’ Chertoff said. “There will be appropriate discipline.’’

And, indeed, this truly seems to have been an event — intentional or inadvertent — that turned out to be so stupefyingly clumsy and self-defeating that it’s clear the consternation at the higher levels of the Bush administration is real.

Read our original post on the press conference here.

UPDATE: Read Ed Morrissey.

Del Mar, CALIFORNIA — The last refugees were leaving San Diego’s famous Qualcomm stadium Friday as the home of the Chargers was becoming….well, the home of the Chargers. The game against the Houston Texans would start as scheduled at 1 p.m. Sunday.

This was a symbolic moment: the devastating fires that caused more than $1 billion in property damage in San Diego County — with nearly a billion more in damages elsewhere in Southern California — had FINALLY given firefighters and residents an apparent breather and raised hopes that it signaled a chance to return to normalcy. Two words about that: fat chance.

Earlier this week Mommy Nature had a fit and there were fires amid fierce Santa Ana winds temperatures. But by Friday Mommy Nature had calmed down. It was damp — and the winds died down faster than a debate hall after Presidential debates have ended.

In media imagery terms, to some the story was starting to wind down.

Perhaps…but not really. Because this is part of a series of events that are impacting — and imprinting a new generation. And even as an event, it is far from even STARTING to be over.

Up the I-5, the historic Del Mar Fairgrounds told a different story about the saga of the fires that scorched 810 square miles, more than twice the size of New York City.

The 40 year old stadium had been relatively accessible for volunteers wanting to get in and help and for media types wanting to see how displaced families were faring and file reports. But security was tight at the fairgrounds. Once it was announced that Qualcomm was going to close fire refugees and their families it was announced that people were allowed to go back to their homes (if they still had them) or at least go back and collect valuables until their areas were open.. So Del Mar became the prime refugee center in San Diego County.
Read the rest here.

In the annals of American media-government relations, government attempts to deceptively package messages, and acts by an agency of a government that do nothing bring derision and denunciations upon itself there is a new nominee for The Darwin Awards.

In fact, a separate Darwin Awards book should be issued for this one:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s No. 2 official apologized yesterday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters listened on a telephone conference line and were barred from asking questions.

Somehow an apology may not be enough on this one to (a) satisfy the press and editors who now more than ever will distrust and “diss” the seemingly perpetually hapless emergency agency (b) bury the story and allow higher Bush administration officials to distance themselves from a stunningly inept, inappropriate and dishonest media event. The Washington Post continues:

“We are reviewing our press procedures and will make the changes necessary to ensure that all of our communications are straight forward and transparent,” Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson Jr., FEMA’s deputy administrator, said in a four-paragraph statement.

“We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgment,” Johnson said, a view repeated yesterday by press officers at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, who criticized the event.

“Doing” better isn’t going to cut it. Having agency officials pose as reporters isn’t something that happens by accident: it is deception. Just look at the bare facts:

FEMA announced the news conference at its Southwest Washington headquarters about 15 minutes before it was to begin Tuesday afternoon, making it unlikely that reporters could attend. Instead, FEMA set up a telephone conference line so reporters could listen.

In the briefing, parts of which were televised live by cable news channels, Johnson stood behind a lectern, called on questioners who did not disclose that they were FEMA employees, and gave replies emphasizing that his agency’s response to this week’s California wildfires was far better than its response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

This can’t be called “public relations.”

Despite its sometimes negative connotation in some quarters, public relations is a very honorable profession staffed by many people who are skilled communicators and/or former journalists who know how to navigate around perilous media waters so that positive points about their clients can also enter into an info news stream often dominated by negative material. Editors can pick and choose what seems valid and what is “spin” (and they do all the time).

“Spin” is a bit more insidious because it can border on lying. Still, it is accepted by most Americans (and editors) as a wink and nod by rote recitation of one side trying to put the best case to advance its side.

But this is pure, unadulterated deception. And unless you fell off a turnip truck about an hour ago, it appears clear that those who set it up wanted real reporters to watch a video feed and assume those asking questions were reporters.

But they never said it was real when it took place? Unless you fell off a turnip truck a minute ago, you can easily fill in the blanks on the intent.

House officials such as John P. “Pat” Philbin, FEMA’s director of external affairs, and White House Press Secretary Dana Perino scrambled to put as much distance between themselves and the phony journalists as a junior high school student being offered tickets to a Barry Manilow concert.

And you have to believe in sincerity on this one: White House and top FEMA p.r. people may come under attack but they don’t qualify as people seemingly having the intelligence of a can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli sitting on a shelf in a grocery store. This was a “news event’ bound to backfire.

This quote says it all:

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke called the staged briefing “totally unacceptable,” adding, “While it is an isolated incident, that does not make it any more tolerable.” He said reprimands are “very probable.” FEMA is part of DHS.

The Copley News Service’s Finlay Lewis, a longtime Washington correspondent, has an interesting post on the paper’s newsblog titled “FEMA: We’ll ask the questions, and give the answers” that provides an excerpt showing how the White House was trying to distance themselves from it. It’s opening paragraphs:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been pretty open about how it hopes its response to the California wildfires will redeem the organization from its dismal performance after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

But FEMA may be trying a little too hard already, by holding a news conference with staffers acting like reporters. Check out this back and forth, provided by a White House transcript of a briefing Friday with Press Secretary Dana Perino…

Read the entire exchange.
The story was thrust to the forefront by Washington Post columnist Al Kamen, whose entire column should be read here. A few excerpts:

We’re told the questions were asked by Cindy Taylor, FEMA’s deputy director of external affairs, and by “Mike” Widomski, the deputy director of public affairs. Director of External Affairs John “Pat” Philbin asked a question, and another came, we understand, from someone who sounds like press aide Ali Kirin.

Asked about this, Widomski said: “We had been getting mobbed with phone calls from reporters, and this was thrown together at the last minute.”

But the staff did not make up the questions, he said, and Johnson did not know what was going to be asked. “We pulled questions from those we had been getting from reporters earlier in the day.” Despite the very short notice, “we were expecting the press to come,” he said, but they didn’t. So the staff played reporters for what on TV looked just like the real thing.

Oh. And:

“If the worst thing that happens to me in this disaster is that we had staff in the chairs to ask questions that reporters had been asking all day, Widomski said, “trust me, I’ll be happy.”

Heck of a job, Harvey.

You’ve read the post..now see..the video:

How has this played? In weblog world, FEMA’s stage-managed “let’s-put-on-a-show!” debut is being panned by people on all sides of the political spectrum. Here is a small sampling of a rare coming-together by political weblogs:

Read the rest of this entry »

For the People of Southern California, San Diego and the Border Towns

This is a Public Service Post, to release the complete protocol letter I use to train therapists and citizen-helpers to serve in post-trauma recovery at disaster sites. It is addressed to the inner circle of victims, survivors, eye-witnesses, their families, workers, helpers, rescuers, and other affected persons.

I’m a Psychoanalyst and Specialist in Critical Incident and Post Trauma Recovery, who developed psychological recovery protocol for the Armenian earthquake rescue, served at Mexico City earthquake site, and at Columbine High School and community for four years after the massacre. I continue to work with 9-11 survivor families on both coasts.

This letter lists critical time-tested steps for recovery from shock and trauma.

RECOVERY AND NORMAL REACTIONS
TO SUDDEN LOSS, INJURY, AND CATASTROPHE

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Each person, depending on their innate physical and emotional constitution, is affected differently by sudden shocks and catastrophic events. Symptoms may differ also. Thus, over a period of time, if you of the inner circle, that is, if you are an eye-witness, a victim, a survivor, or a person who lost a loved one, or had a loved one seriously injured, if you are military, fire fighter, worker, helping professional, law enforcement, rescue worker, citizen rescuer, news gatherer, photographer, or in other close-in relationship, you may find yourself having one or more of the following reactions.

These are normal reactions to sudden shock relating to life and death events, to sudden twists of fate. When one has been involved in a critical incident, the body, mind and heart, and some believe too, that the spirit and soul, are shocked as well. It is shocking to see in full consciousness, in a split second, how close death came into our world, how fast, and often at first, how quietly… This witness is arresting to any human being with a heart and soul. The most time-tested remedies I know from my 37 years of clinical work in post-trauma recovery are outlined following this list of reactions:

Physical Reactions:
o Sleep disturbances including inability to sleep
o Lethargy, such as sleeping too much
o Exhaustion, fatigue
o Changes in appetite, digestive disturbances
o Feeling numb
o Crying
o Desire to comfort and be comforted physically
o Nightmares, night terrors
o Loss of memory
o Trembling, inner or outer
o Nausea
o Heart arrhythmia
o Pain in heart, not an organic disorder, but caused by sorrow
o Aching bones, not an organic disorder but caused by sorrow
o Headache, migraine

Behavioral Reactions:
o Hyperactivity
o Poor concentration
o Refusing to talk
o Talking ‘out of one’s mind’
o Startle reactions while awake or asleep
o Isolating, wanting to be alone.
o Wanting to just sit, or just stare
o Trying to help in any way one can, to the point of exhaustion; not wanting to leave the scene
o Hyper-vigilance, watching, listening, being unable to be at rest

Psychological Reactions:
o Loss of sense of time
o Feeling distraught and helpless
o Feeling that things are not real, as though in a dream
o Inability to recall sequences or retrace all of one’s steps
o Feeling the future has been lost forever
o Desire to comfort and be comforted psychologically
o Feeling one should not cry
o Wanting to scream, or screaming-weeping
o Inability to attach importance to anything but this event
o Flashbacks
o Nightmares
o Intrusive thoughts
o Over-reactions to mild to moderate irritations
o Recurrent dreams
o Horrified Anger
o Broken Heart
o Insecurity about the future
o Feelings of fear
o Feelings of guilt
o Feeling one cannot stop crying
o Unusual reserve, acting as though nothing much occurred
o Blaming of others, individuals, groups, passionate outbursts