There are three articles my readers will consider worthwhile
reading, if they haven’t already read them. I put two of them online so they will be free for interested
intellectuals doing research in our domain.
The first, Joel Kotkin describes the history of city disasters....
The first, Joel Kotkin describes the history of city disasters and points out that without a vision and entrepreneurial spirit a city does not return to its former glory. I immediately recognized Kotkin as a public intellectual and ordered his most recent book. I also began examining the future of San Francisco, should the next large earthquake be as disastrous as 1906.
Nineteen-o-six was so bad that my grandfather left his home,
his practice, a burned-out office, a $5,000 loan from the Bank of
California and moved with my grandmother to Berlin. Because American dentists were in high regard, having skills and
a university degree, he became dentist to Kaiser Wilhelm. (A decade later, when the U.S. entered the
war against the Kaiser, my grandparents and three children returned to San
Francisco.)
San Francisco in 1906 was a vibrant city of visionaries and
entrepreneurs. A.P. Giannini,
Zellerbach, Fleishacker, Kahn and many more were great builders. They had a
vision, planned for a great exposition in the Marina and rebuilt the city.
Today, Lefties control the City, dream of
the romantic past of the General Strike and blue-collar dockworker jobs. The
entrepreneurs have been steadily driven out of San Francisco. San Francisco, like New Orleans, is a tourist destination fantasy. The citizens are divided
between the self-centered rich on the hilltops and the poor service workers struggling to get ahead in the valleys.
I have serious doubts that San Francisco would be rebuilt. A wiser plan for both San Francisco and New Orleans would be to give FEMA money to the Disney Corp. and have sentimental models of San Francisco and New Orleans built at Disneyland and Disneyworld.
One friend argues that San Francisco would be rebuilt by the neighboring cities and suburbs, where all the vitality resides, because San Francisco is a shopping, night-on-the-town destination, for locals. He further argues that the Asian immigrant mix creates a metropolitanism that would be valued.
The second article is by David Brooks reminding us that natural devastation reveals grotesque social ills that had been previously ignored.
Cecil Williams, in San Francisco, called out “racism” based on his New Orleans information. I knew Cecil well and he never used the race card without reason. Unfortunately, the Uncle Remus stories don’t have one that matches the Little Boy Who Cried Wolf. No one will listen to Cecil when it matters because we have thirty years of black leaders calling “racism” when it was a “wolf, wolf” false alarm.
The third article is about African aid. The article was sent to me by my friend; a
totally reliable African development expert who is living in Africa. This article should be given great
weight.
We should also think about a Mephistopheles-ventriloquism Award for Bob Geldorf, Tony Blair (and Jimmy Carter for good measure.) They each mistake the voice of the devil talking to them as orders from God. Their self-righteous do-goodism does a million times the damage of the good they think they are doing.