Here is the latest news from David Gans, producer and host of the Grateful Dead Hour.
“Like a dog watching television”
SCHIEFFER: Finally, a personal thought. We have come through what may have been one of the worst weeks in America’s history, a week in which government at every level failed the people it was created to serve. There is no purpose for government except to improve the lives of its citizens. Yet as scenes of horror that seemed to be coming from some Third World country flashed before us, official Washington was like a dog watching television. It saw the lights and images, but did not seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality.As the floodwaters rose, local officials in New Orleans ordered the city evacuated. They might as well have told their citizens to fly to the moon. How do you evacuate when you don’t have a car? No hint of intelligent design in any of this. This was just survival of the richest.
By midweek a parade of Washington officials rushed before the cameras to urge patience. What good is patience to a mother who can’t find food and water for a dehydrated child? Washington was coming out of an August vacation stupor and seemed unable to refocus on business or even think straight. Why else would Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert question aloud whether New Orleans should even be rebuilt? And when he was unable to get to Washington in time to vote on emergency aid funds, Hastert had an excuse only Washington could understand: He had to attend a fund-raiser back home.
Since 9/11, Washington has spent years and untold billions reorganizing the government to deal with crises brought on by possible terrorist attacks. If this is the result, we had better start over.
Why New Orleans is vital
Amazingly informative piece on Stratfor by George Friedman, New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize.
Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina’s geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson’s days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.
The ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, the Port of South Louisiana is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products — corn, soybeans and so on. A larger proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 57 million tons, comes in through the port — including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.
A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn’t come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don’t get to the markets.
The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren’t enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities — assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can’t be.
and…
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city’s population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.
My patriotic act
I canceled a planned trip to Oregon this weekend. I was scheduled to play a private party west of Portland – a really nice tribal reunion that I played last year.
My decision was based in part on the cost of gasoline, but it’s more than that. It just seems like a bad time to be consuming. There are some genuine intrruptions in the gasoline delivery system due to Hurricane Katrina, but if history is any indicator, there will also be plenty of opportunitstic profiteering. It seems to me extremely unlikely that anyone in a position of leadership in this country is going to call on the oil industry to make any sacrifices.
Seems to me the best way to deny windfall profits is to spend as little as possible on gasoline during the crisis.
I’ve heard from many friennds who feel the same way.
I’d rather send some money to the people who need it, stay home and do some creative work. My friends in Oregon understand and accepted my decision. There are other musicians coming to the party from much shorter distances, so I’m not leaving the tribe high and dry.
Radio Memeworks’ “artist of the month”: David Gans
From Robert Tacker:
To celebrate David’s fine new release, Solo Electric, Radio Memeworks has made David our September artist of the month. We have all of David’s commercial releases, lots of live material both solo and with various friends and some Guilty Pleasures, and they will be in heavy rotation all month long.
If you have broadband/DSL or a better connection to the net, join us as we celebrate a fine American, a great guitar player, one of my favorite tunesmiths and the sharer of all that fine Dead related material these twenty years now.
Robert Tacker
GLIDE Magazine article about DG
Very nice piece about me by Chad Berndtson in the online magazine Glide. It’s titled “David Gans: Dialed In.” Two excerpts from a long piece:
It’s safe to say that David Gans knows his Grateful Dead: the radio show he hosts, the beloved “Grateful Dead Hour” – still broadcasted on KPFA 94.1 in Berkeley, California and syndicated nationwide – is twenty years old in 2005.
But what makes Gans especially compelling, even after twenty years charting the thrilling and oft-murky waters of this unique music, is that the show itself is but the tip of the iceberg in his own music-oriented career. Gans acknowledged in a recent interview the ongoing importance and prestige of the Grateful Dead Hour, but made clear that it will, in the end, be only part of his multifarious legacy –a superb musician in his own right, making music will always be his first and truest love, even if he’s lost none for the music of the Dead, which still continues to excite him.
Another excerpt…
Through everything, the format of the “Grateful Dead Hour” hasn’t much changed. The wonders of digital technology and the internet have made it easier than ever to access Dead material (archive.org hosts more than 2500 freely downloadable shows, for example), but don’t seem to affect the future or mission of the show itself.
“I’ve never programmed the show for the hardcore collectors,” Gans says. “That the music is so widely available is a great thing, and I feel like I’m hear to add something. I’m a scholar and a historian of this music, and the choices I make and the value that I add in producing this show is of zero interest to lots of people, but it’s of sufficient interest to sufficient numbers of people.”
One thing Gans has always consciously avoided is the notion that his position in Grateful Dead history – however unique relative to the fan side of things – at all makes him some sort of exalted, end-all-be-all Grateful Dead expert or number one fan.
“One of the things I’ve known for as long as I’ve been doing these shows is that there are a lot of people who could do it. It drives me fucking batty when I read headlines of magazine articles and stuff where they proclaim me, like, the premier Deadhead,” he says. “Obviously, I know what I’m talking about and bring something to the gig that the ‘average’ Deadhead might not have, but by no stretch of the imagination do I see myself as the premier Deadhead.”