The missing booms: the best laid schemes o’ government an’ men…

The New Neo Posted on by

…gang aft agley
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!

What is the moral to this story?:

If U.S. officials had followed up on a 1994 response plan for a major Gulf oil spill, it is possible that the spill could have been kept under control and far from land.

The problem: The federal government did not have a single fire boom on hand.

But in order to conduct a successful test burn eight days after the Deepwater Horizon well began releasing massive amounts of oil into the Gulf, officials had to purchase one from a company in Illinois.

When federal officials called, Elastec/American Marine, shipped the only boom it had in stock, Jeff Bohleber, chief financial officer for Elastec, said today.

At federal officials’ behest, the company began calling customers in other countries and asking if the U.S. government could borrow their fire booms for a few days, he said.

A single fire boom being towed by two boats can burn up to 1,800 barrels of oil an hour, Bohleber said. That translates to 75,000 gallons an hour, raising the possibility that the spill could have been contained at the accident scene 100 miles from shore.

“They said this was the tool of last resort. No, this is absolutely the asset of first use. Get in there and start burning oil before the spill gets out of hand,” Bohleber said. “If they had six or seven of these systems in place when this happened and got out there and started burning, it would have significantly lessened the amount of oil that got loose.”

Who’s to blame? Well, the plan without follow-through was hatched during the Clinton administration. But since then there’ve been both the Bush and Obama administrations, although neither president was probably aware of the deficiency in a scheme that called for the use of equipment that was never acquired.

If Bush had been president, however, you can be sure he would be the one most people and the MSM would blame. But I don’t see Obama getting off all that easy, either, when even the New York Times is criticizing him for his delay in reacting to the seriousness of the emergency.

Is the main problem here compartmentalization? Government grown so unwieldy and disconnected that a plan can be hatched with no attempt at actually following through? Is it also the elevation of words over actions—if the report is written and the study done, that is considered enough, without a thought as to what might be needed to actually implement it?

Here’s more:

…[F]ormer National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oil spill response coordinator Ron Gouguet — who helped craft the 1994 plan — told the Press-Register that officials had pre-approval for burning. “The whole reason the plan was created was so we could pull the trigger right away.”

What use is a trigger without a gun?

(But I’m sure the government will do just fine managing health care…)

Times Square terror suspect in custody

The New Neo Posted on by

And surprise surprise, he’s a naturalized American citizen of Pakistani descent, arrested at JFK Airport while trying to flee to Dubai.

No doubt, however, he’s also a right-wing Tea Partying extremist who’s against the health care bill. And of course he’s a lone wolf, too.

McCain has come out against Mirandizing suspect Shahzad. But this case is distinguished by the fact that the suspected bomber is a US citizen, which means that he is entitled to Miranda warnings (and probably has already received them). This advantage is one of the many reasons terrorists are eager to recruit citizens rather than foreign nationals for operations in this country.

Those who argue that this arrest is a vindication for the law enforcement approach to terrorism are confusing apples with oranges. Of course that system will often—and rightly—be involved in the apprehension of a terrorist who is in this country. Those who argue (as I have) that the law enforcement approach is not a good way to deal with terrorism in general are talking especially about a later part of the process, the criminal trial and sentencing. It is especially inappropriate for the trial of foreign nationals picked up outside this country as well as certain selected terrorists in this country. The arguments against using this system for such terrorists have to do, among other things, with the rules of discovery in our criminal justice system and the advantage it gives terrorists in finding out what we know and how we know it.

[ADDENDUM: Turns out that the investigation wasn’t quite the well-oiled machine we’d like to see, although in the end they got their man. But Shahzad came close to getting away:

Shahzad, who had been the subject of a huge manhunt, almost made it out of the country on a Emirates flight to Dubai, with a planned connection onward to Pakistan, according to officials.

“He appeared real close to getting away,” one federal official said. “The plane was buttoned up. Backed away from the jetway.”

Authorities said that despite the manhunt, his passport had not been flagged and he was able to buy a ticket with cash and clear airport security.

Wow.

(Hat tip: DrewM at Ace’s.)]

[ADDENDUM II: This is more reassuring, although it’s difficult to tell what’s true at this point:

This is NOT what they were saying on Fox in the early hours this morning. An LEO representative said they were behind him all the way and had agents on the plane.

They said they allowed him to board on purpose so as to see if he had accomplices on board as well.

They said there was never any danger of the plane leaving or him getting away.]

“The Fantasticks” was a fantastic investment

The New Neo Posted on by

The musical “The Fantasticks” is fifty years old, and the backers are still making money from what were originally very small stakes. “The Fantasticks” is a perennial favorite that’s easy to put on, requiring minimal sets and a small cast, but full of verve and fey charm—not to mention beautiful, beautiful music.

It holds a very warm and special place in my heart; I saw it as a child not too long after it opened, and remembered it always as a magical event. I’ve seen it many times since, and no matter how out of the way the venue or tiny the theater it has always been a joy (in fact, sometimes, the tinier the theater, the better).

Alas, I could find no videos of the original production. But here’s one that features the original cast recording of the most famous song of all from the musical, “Try to Remember,” sung by Jerry Orbach. Those of you who only knew him in his more elderly manifestation in “Law and Order” may not even realize that he starred in quite a few Broadway musicals in his earlier days. Some of the stills that accompany the song are from “The Fantasticks;” he’s the one wearing the black hat:

Fifty years is a long time. Try to remember.

On being called a bigot and/or racist

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been writing about the recent Harvard Law School flap, in which third-year student Stephanie Grace was excoriated for daring to suggest in a private email that there might even be a possibility that some of the gap in intelligence scores between whites and blacks could have some sort of genetic basis.

Which got me to thinking—it seems to me that cries of “racist” and “bigot” are coming faster and more furiously these days, despite (or perhaps because of?) the election of a black man to the presidency. But I can’t really blame this on Obama, although I think he’s done plenty to fan the flames and nothing to douse them—because he can hardly be held responsible for Gordon Brown’s big mouth.

Here’s the full transcript of the now-famous exchange between Brown and 65-year-old grandma (and previous lifelong Labour voter) Gillian Duffy. It was meant to be a run-of-the-mill photo-op. Brown was wired for sound, and had a seemingly cordial exchange with Duffy which included the following:

Duffy: But what I can’t understand is why I am still being taxed at 66 years old because my husband’s died and I have some of his pension tagged onto my pension?

Brown: Well we’re raising the threshold at which people start paying tax as pensioners, but yes if you’ve got an occupational pension you may have to pay some tax but you may be eligible for the pension credit as well, you should check ”“

Duffy: No, no, I’m not, I’ve checked and checked and they said I’m not

Brown: Well you should check it again just to be sure, to be absolutely sure…

Duffy: But how are you going to get us out of all this debt, Gordon?

Brown: We’ve got a deficit reduction plan, cut the debt by half over the next four years, we’ve got the plans that have been set out to do it – look, I was the person who came in and said –

Duffy: Look, the three main things that I had drummed in when I was a child was education, health service and looking after people who are vulnerable. There are too many people now who aren’t vulnerable but they can claim and people who are vulnerable can’t get claim.

Brown: But they shouldn’t be doing that, there is no life for people on the dole anymore, if you’re unemployed you’ve got to go back to work. At six months ”“

Duffy: You can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying you’re ”“ but all these eastern Europeans coming in, where are they flocking from?

Brown: A million people come in from Europe, but a million British people have gone into Europe, you do know there’s a lot of British people staying in Europe as well. So education, health and helping people, that’s what I’m about.

Duffy: I hope you keep to it.

So we have a woman who’s been a liberal all her life but is concerned because (a) she isn’t getting the money she feels she’s entitled to, while at the same time (b) others she feels aren’t entitled (such as, for example, recent immigrants from Eastern Europe who are now allowed into Britain with few or no restrictions because of the EU) are getting benefits ahead of her, and (c) the deficit is out of control. The entire discussion is about money and how to distribute it.

Brown still had a live mic on when he got into his car, where he was heard to say the following about Ms. Duffy, to whom he’d been so pleasant just a moment earlier:

[In car] That was a disaster. Should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?

Aide: I don’t know, I didn’t see.

Brown: Sue’s, I think. Just ridiculous.

Aide: Not sure if they’ll go with that one.

Brown: Oh they will.

Aide: What did she say?

Brown: Everything. She’s just this sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be a Labour voter. Ridiculous.

One can almost feel a certain sympathy for the hapless Mr. Brown. Who among us can say that he/she has never been polite to someone and then complained about them behind their back? But few of us are caught in the act, and then broadcast for all to see.

Anyone who thinks all politicians don’t do some version of this is hopelessly naive. But Brown was especially vulnerable because he was not the most likable guy to begin with, and this made it harder for people to ignore the evidence of his blatant two-faced hypocrisy recorded on tape. But I think it’s also interesting that Brown’s charge was that Duffy was a bigot.

I didn’t even know that Eastern Europeans immigrants now qualify as a race; when last I checked they were as white as Duffy herself. To me, her remarks read as a combination of Tea Party-like concerns about fiscal restraint, and an echo of the same sentiment that’s behind our own recent Arizona immigration law—only in her case the immigrants are legal, whom she sees as getting in line ahead of her in order to get benefits from a welfare system that she feels is unresponsive to her own needs.

All of these recent “racist/bigot” brouhahas (Harvard Law and Minow, the Arizona illegal immigrants bill, and Brown v. Duffy) demonstrate the new liberal definition of bigot: anyone who says anything non-PC about any ethnic group or national group that liberals consider disadvantaged.

Note that it’s not bigotry of racism if someone says something negative about an advantaged ethnic or national group. And truth is not a defense when you’re expressing concern about the actions of a disadvantaged group. One must be utterly racial-, national-, and color-blind, willing to give over every advantage to others, and not remark on it but be happy for it. The only people who can even take note of racial and/or national differences are those who do so in order to confer benefits on underprivileged racial and/or ethnic and/or national groups.

The readiness of Gordon Brown to call Ms. Duffy a bigot when he thought he was off-mic made me wonder whether it dovetailed with the Minow flap in still another way: does Brown have a background in academia, where this sort of kneejerk name-calling is not only prevalent but meets with approval? When I looked Brown up I discovered—somewhat to my surprise, I must say—that indeed he does, and a history as a journalist as well (another group where using the racist/bigot accusation is favored):

Brown graduated from Edinburgh with First Class Honours MA in 1972, and stayed on to complete his PhD (which he gained ten years later in 1982), titled The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland 1918”“29. In 1972, while still a student, Brown was elected Rector of the University of Edinburgh, the convener of the University Court…

From 1976 to 1980 Brown was employed as a lecturer in Politics at Glasgow College of Technology. In the 1979 general election, he stood for the Edinburgh South constituency, losing to the Conservative candidate, Michael Ancram. From 1980 he worked as a journalist at Scottish Television, later serving as current affairs editor until his election to parliament in 1983. He also worked as a tutor for the Open University.

Decades of relentless PC hammering on the evils of bigotry and racism have not only corrected many of the actual racist offenses that used to occur more frequently, but have sometimes over-corrected to the point of absurdity. It used to be that, in order to be a racist, you had to actually advocate discriminating against racial and/or ethnic groups. Now bigotry and racism are thought-crimes that are defined by the eye of the offended beholder: simply put, you’re a racist if a liberal says you are.

Those “incompetent” terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

The Times Square bomb was a dud as terrorist bombs go. But police say it might have had a significant death toll if it had not been spotted so early and rendered harmless.

So there’s no reason to be lulled into a false sense of security by the incompetence of the bomber[s] involved (see this for an earlier discussion of general terrorist ineptitude). Terrorists can learn from their mistakes, as they did from the failure of the first WTC bombing in 1993, which killed six people but was meant to bring down the building—and probably would have had it been placed just a bit differently. And note that this recent incident indicates some learning from earlier bombings, because apparently the serial number of the vehicle was removed.

Steve Coll at the New Yorker is of the opinion that such terrorist acts will remain minor and are merely attempts to frighten. I hope so, but I happen to think not. Coll also appeals to President Obama to talk tougher to terrorists in response to this bombing attempt. But I believe that Coll is showing how little he understands Obama’s nature and agenda; our president is only interested in talking tough to Israel, Tea Partiers, Honduran constitutionalists, and Republicans.

More on Minow and Harvard Law School’s treatment of Stephanie Grace

The New Neo Posted on by

Eugene Volokh, who was born in the Soviet Union and came to the United States as a child, reminicises about thought control in the country of his youth and relates the atmosphere there to what happened at Harvard Law School recently in the pursuit of PC thought about race:

Now I hasten to say that the controversy at Harvard is only a pale echo of Soviet Communism. With luck, this student won’t have her career ruined, or even much affected. I’ve seen a public call for her to be expelled (a call made by a professor at a different university), but I doubt that this will happen. And even if some of the best future jobs are closed off to her, at least for a while, a Harvard Law diploma will get you to plenty of places. She doesn’t have to worry, I suspect, about not being able to feed herself or her future family.

Yet the public revelation of a private conversation; the public condemnation by management; the obvious danger of serious career ramifications; the apology, which I take it came out of a fear of those ramifications ”” all for daring to say to friends something that simply represents a basic scientific principle (the need to be open to the possibility that there are racial differences in intelligence, as one is open to other possibilities on other scientific questions) ”” that just sounded a little too familiar to me.

It’s a pale echo, but of something so bad that we should be wary even of pale echoes.

i agree with his analysis, except for the fact that I’m not sure the echo is quite as pale as all that. Harvard’s action was not a governmental policy, it’s true, as it was in the USSR (nor was the penalty for Grace death, or exile to Siberia—except perhaps in the metaphoric sense). But it has become way too prevalent in this country that, to advance in academia or journalism or any number of professions, one must toe the party liberal line, with ostracism the penalty for violations.

The oil spill and risk management

The New Neo Posted on by

The Gulf oil spill is very disturbing in its scope. Not only did it kill eleven people, but it now threatens the huge fishing industry in the region, not to mention wildlife and beaches that are beautiful and drive the area’s economy.

We still don’t know the all-important details about exactly how it happened and how a repeat could be prevented. But one thing I do know from having observed energy accidents over the years—whether they be oil spills such as this one and the 1969 Santa Barbara incident, or nuclear power plant episodes like Three-Mile Island (or the far worse Chernobyl disaster)—is that they will happen sooner or later no matter what we do to prevent them. The best we can do is to make sure that they occur rarely and are containable.

It is somewhat ironic that, because of the fearful reaction in this country against nuclear power plants in the wake of Three Mile Island (reinforced by Chernobyl), we have become even more dependent on oil (as well as coal, which causes more localized loss of life of miners rather than spreading ecological problems, although proponents of AGW believe it is at least partly responsible for climate change as well).

There is no free lunch for our energy needs. We can talk all we want about wind and water power but they cannot provide more than a small fraction of what is required. Therefore, relative risks must be evaluated, and decisions must be made to develop the most efficient sources of energy for the least risk—knowing that risk there will always be.

I have long been a proponent of nuclear energy, even back in my liberal Democrat days. Europe seems to be of the same opinion, since nuclear power is used fairly extensively there. Three Mile Island was frightening to Americans, but it presented nothing like the danger that was hyped in the media, and you will note that although since Chernobyl there have been a number of nuclear accidents, none of them were particularly serious.

Of course, that does not mean a very serious accident could not happen; it could. But it does mean that safety has improved and is fairly good. Our reluctance to build more nuclear plants (and/or activate the ones we already have that have been shut down) has handicapped us tremendously in the energy quest, and reflects our desire to reduce risk to zero, which can never be done.

However, even if we expand nuclear energy it would not mean that we don’t need oil; the two sources of power are used for different purposes. But we urgently need to figure out what happened in the Gulf to cause this spill and to reduce the risk of future accidents even further. The modern world requires power to run, although many Luddites and environmentalists would like us to return to the days of sparse human populations with a light carbon footprint.

[ADDENDUM: Encouraging news?]

Academia, Harvard Law School, and freedom of speech

The New Neo Posted on by

Martha Minow, Dean of Harvard Law School, has put another PC nail in the coffin of free speech at that august institution, alma mater of our president.

The topic? A private email sent by third year Harvard Law student Stephanie Grace to two friends, in which she wrote:

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects.

One of the recipients of Grace’s note “arranged for the email to be sent out to the Harvard Black Law Student Association list-serv, including [her] name and the fact that after graduation, the author will be doing a federal clerkship.” The BLSA, up in arms, went to HLS authorities, and Dean Minow sprung into action, stating:

“Here at Harvard Law School, we are committed to preventing degradation of any individual or group, including race-based insensitivity or hostility’’…

Minow said she had met with leaders of Harvard’s Black Law Students Association on Wednesday to discuss the hurt caused by Grace’s e-mail….

As often is the case with PC campaigns against certain kinds of speech, it’s about the fact that the members of the BLSA were “hurt.” I have no doubt they were, but all Grace did was to speculate about a possible genetic cause for a phenomenon that is statistically demonstrable—the same as Larry Summers did about a similar circumstance related to women in the highest reaches of science.

Here’s the full text of Minow’s statement. Note that it begins with the following sentence:

I am writing this morning to address an email message in which one of our students suggested that black people are genetically inferior to white people.

In law school, one of the first tasks a student learns is to summarize the facts of the case. If I were a professor at Harvard Law and Minow was my student, I’d give her an “F” for that response. But that’s the sort of thing that passes for intellectual honesty at Harvard Law these days.

Minow goes on to state of Harvard Law that, “This is a community dedicated to intellectual pursuit and social justice.” I would humbly submit that not only is the latter a “progressive” buzzword that indicates Minow sees HLS’s mission as a leftist one, but that the two efforts are sometimes in opposition to each other.

To me, Minow’s official reaction is more disturbing than any speculation in which an HLS student engaged in a supposedly private email. But Ms. Grace has now made her public mea culpas, showing that she’s been sufficiently re-educated to take her place as a good soldier in the Harvard PC brigade:

I am heartbroken and devastated by the harm that has ensued. I would give anything to take it back…I understand why my words expressing even a doubt [that African-Americans are genetically inferior] were and are offensive.

As for me, I don’t happen to think that African Americans are genetically inferior in this arena. But I do think that banning speculation and/or research into the question is both intellectually dishonest and an affront to liberty. And I also believe that public excoriation of the private remarks of a student is a dangerous and very slippery slope—and that we’ve already slid at least halfway down that slope, with no end in sight.

[NOTE: As I noted, a related matter is the case of Larry Summers, who was forced to leave Harvard after his non-PC remarks about research into the paucity of women at high levels of science. I called one of my posts on that subject “Harvard in peril,” and I see no reason to retract that observation now. Other posts of mine on the subject are this and this.]

[ADDENDUM: Ann Althouse offers further reflections.]

Venezuela and the failure of socialism

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s no surprise that Hugo Chavez’s socialist state of Venezuela has fallen on hard times. They are well-deserved; Chavez had to work hard to achieve the decline in a nation that has rich natural resources on which to draw.

The following are perhaps the most important sentences in the article:

The reason Venezuela is contracting is because private activity is contracting,” Augusto de la Torre, the World Bank’s chief economist for Latin America, said in Washington last week. “What we’re seeing in Venezuela is a phenomenon where productivity, private activity and private business is falling.”…

Ché¡vez’s popularity has fallen below 50 percent, rare during his tenure and problematic for his followers as they gear up for parliamentary elections in September. Analysts say opposition could carve out space for itself in a Congress once wholly controlled by the president’s allies.

Socialism is an economic disaster, sometimes working its destruction slowly and sometimes quickly. But, as Margaret Thatcher once said, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. The welfare states of Europe are suffering from the same thing in more attenuated form, and our own economic troubles are being exacerbated by Obama’s desire to have us morph more and more into a European-style welfare state or even perhaps a Chavez-like socialist one.

Chavez consolidated his power in Venezuela partly because of a perception by the opposition that elections would be rigged, and a subsequent boycott in 2005. This allowed him to control the legislature so completely that he has had free reign to impose especially ruinous and restrictive policies in a country that once flourished compared to others in Latin America.

Now the opposition has realized what a enormous mistake their boycott was, and are feeling energized:

Foes of President Hugo Chavez have largely put their differences aside and come up with a unified lineup of candidates, hoping to win control of a congress that has done the socialist leader’s bidding for years.

Pro-democracy activists, jailed government opponents, journalists, businessmen and union leaders are among the diverse cast of opposition candidates who hope to increase their influence in the Sept. 26 voting for 165 seats in the National Assembly…

Jose Vicente Carrasquero, a political science professor at Simon Bolivar University, said the opposition’s chances have improved because they appear to be more united than ever before.

But he said the opposition’s cash-strapped parties have limited funds for campaigning while candidates backed by Chavez have “much more financial capacity than all of the opposition put together.”

Money is not everything, although it’s important. The outcome of the September elections really depends on two things: how much popular opposition there really is to Chavez, and how much he will be able to rig the elections to counter it if he needs to do so. I wish the people of Venezuela well in overthrowing him—and in resisting whatever moves Obama may make in an attempt to keep his buddy Chavez in power, as he tried in Honduras. It is particularly ironic that, as the failure of socialism is increasingly revealed, our own country is sliding into it.

Cub Scouts sure play a mean pinball

The New Neo Posted on by

The Scouts are now giving awards for video gaming expertise.

It’s not quite as bad as it sounds:

Apparently these new awards are geared toward making Scouts understand which games are appropriate for their age group, not just rewarding them for sitting around on their butts playing video games. Scouts also can work towards their pin by playing a video game that “helps you in your schoolwork.”

But it’s bad enough.

Mayday, mayday!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a reprint of a previous post.]

Today is Mayday.

As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”

That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.

But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féªte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun—weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.

Ah, the maypole. Who knew it was a phallic symbol? Or that maypoles were once considered so risque that they were banned in parts of England by certain Protestant groups bent on discouraging the mixed-gender dancing and drunkenness that seemed to go along with them (not in my elementary school, however; only girls were allowed to wind the maypole ribbons, and the mixed-gender dancing the rest of us had to do was decidedly devoid of frivolity)?

The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. It seems that Putin is nostalgic for those good old days, since apparently the quaint custom is being revived.

Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times—a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s. I’m not sure who in my family had such an early and prescient interest in movies, but the film features my paternal grandparents on their way to such a celebration.

They’d come to this country from pre-revolutionary Russia in the early years of the century. Like many such immigrants, my grandfather became a Soviet supporter who thought the Communists had a chance of making things better than they’d been in the Russia he’d left behind. Since he died rather young, only a few years after the film was made, I don’t know whether time and further revelations of the mess the Soviet Union became would have changed his point of view. In the film, however, the family goes to view the Mayday parade, which looks to be a very well-attended event with hopeful Communist banners held high and nary a maypole nor a Morris dancer in sight.

The footage of the parade seemed archaic even back when I saw it as a young girl, although it was fascinating to see the grandfather and grandmother I’d never known (not to mention my father as a handsome seventeen-year old). But the most puzzling sight of all was the attention paid to the Woolworth building. Whoever took the movie was fascinated by it; there were two slow pans up and down its length.

Why the Woolworth Building? Opened in 1913, it was a cool fifty-seven stories high, the tallest building in the world until 1930. It had an elaborate Gothic facade and was considered a monument to capitalism—the “Cathedral of Commerce,” although the Communist-sympathizing photographer of my Mayday movie didn’t seem to let those two offending words (cathedral, commerce) get in the way of his awe for the building.

I never noticed the Woolworth building myself until the day I went to see the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9/11. There were still huge crowds coming to pay homage, and so we had to wait in a long line that snaked around the nearby blocks.

And so it was that I found myself in front of a familiar sight, the Woolworth Building, still Gothic after all these years, and still standing (although it had lost electricity and telephone service for a few weeks after 9/11, the building itself sustained no damage). No longer dwarfed by the enormous towers of its successor—that new Cathedral of Commerce, the World Trade Center—the Woolworth Building even commanded a bit of its former dominance.

Although it’s still dwarfed from this angle:

woolworth_wfc_s.jpg

And to bring this hodgepodge of a post round full circle, there exists a book of photos of 9/11 with the title Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!: The Day the Towers Fell, a reference to the myriad distress calls phoned in by firefighters on that terrible day.