A Paradox called Katrina
Sep 2 2005 09:47
I lay no claim to orignality in this, I got it off an email list I'm on, but I think it's worth a read:
Isn't it amazing how quickly a modern city with its gleaming towers and
smoothly running commerce can turn into a hellhole? How quickly the
veneer of self-confident capitalist normality is scratched off? How naked the capitalist priorities appear at such a moment? They can conquer a
country in days. It's all shock and awe and perfect order. But to help the poor whom they left stranded in the inundated city, that takes weeks, and occurs in utter chaos. The shock and awe is now nature's, in response to
capitalism's rape of the planet.
From what is now really going on in New Orleans, among the people left
to fend for themselves to survive, we get only glimpses now and then in
the media. A lot of the focus is on the looting and the violence. In part
this is an attempt to blame the victims. There is a lot of anger about what
happened and there will be even more when the economic effects, as yet
another tsunami, ripple through the country. There will be a need for
scapegoats and for justifying the abandonment of people by associating
them with criminals. Implicitly, racism will be used as well. There are of
course criminals who use the opportunity to terrorize and rape, how could it be otherwise in this age of capitalist decadence. It's part of the horror
that people are desperate to flee. And it is inevitable when there is a
breakdown of capitalist normality, you could say it is business doing business in a new environment. The lust for profit continues. What is critical when such a situation arises (and it will arise more and more) is the degree of self-organization. A workers neighborhood that organizes itself would use force to defend itself against such entrepreneurs, as well as for other needs. As I said, we hear very little about that from the
media-business. I heard an NPR-reporter say that people stranded in the convention center in New Orleans were looting stores and distributing the booty among the others.
Apparently, there was some self-organization going on at the center.
I'd be very interested if others have heard similar things and to hear your
thoughts about the implications of this incredible event.
Sander
Sep 2 2005 15:09
#2
bigdave wrote:
Some clever bastard once said that any society, no matter how "advanced" is only three meals away from barbarism.
Listening to reports of armed mobs and gang rapes I'd tend to agree. The situation appears to have decended into a law of the jungle, 'every man for themselves' mentality. What I find amazing is that some people appear more interested in looting materialistic goods rather than finding food and water. Also, the authorities appear to be more interested in protecting said goods instead of saving lives!
Don't you just love our Capitalist society?
Sep 2 2005 23:47
#3
This made me laugh! You can clearly see that Bush has his priorities set out! 
Bush Meets Privately with Greenspan on Katrina's Economic Impact
President Bush said today that Hurricane Katrina will be a temporary setback for energy and the economy after having a private meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He had lunch with Greenspan and then briefed his economic team.
“In our judgment, we view this storm as a temporary disruption that is being addressed by the government and by the private sector,” Bush told reporters. [But] “it’s going to be hard to get gasoline to some markets,” he added.
Sep 2 2005 23:54
#4
Nagin: "Get off your asses" 1000's Dying In New Orleans Every Day
Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, blasted the government for the slow pace of relief efforts. Nagin wants to know why when the government was able to order $8b to go "lickety-quick" to Iraq after 911 they are unable to send relief to New Orleans?
Nagin claims the govt. lied about using sandbags to breach floodwater saying authorities told him 17 concrete structures had to be built but that he had flown over the area and there was nothing there: "they are feeding the public a line of bull."
Nagin says most of the looters in New Orleans are honest people looking for food and water. There are some knuckleheads causing chaos but there are: "thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day..Come on, man."
Sep 3 2005 00:00
#5
anyone else getting vague memories of the Hillsborough disaster. Initial moves to blame the victims with hysterical media coverage of depravity.
Sep 3 2005 01:15
#6
i've heard the cops are smashing glass on things so that people can loot them and so that the cops can help themselves.
but what really fucks me off is that from what i've read there wasn't buses or anything to get people out so it was the people with cars who could leave and nothing for people without cars.
but why does the email fuck me off too?
Quote:
There are of course criminals who use the opportunity to terrorize and rape, how could it be otherwise in this age of capitalist decadence. It's part of the horror
the majority of people are probably really seriously scared. seeing people die. thinking fucking hell this is the richest country in the world and suddenly you are alone with no state infrastructure. not the best conditions ever for helping each other. but an opportunity for a few people to start taking what they can get with the help allegedly of the cops. for the majority of looters, it doesn't make them criminals and for those who are terrorising other people and threatening rape, its a bit weak to say how could it be otherwise in this age of capitalist decadence. well duh. on that basis everyone should be behaving like this.
the whole situation is aggravated by the actions of the national guard. pulling guns on people to the point where some general told them to "put the weapons down, this is not iraq". Police are stationed on the top of police stations and actively using guns to control a situation where they have no control. where guns seem to be a point of first response not last, its hardly surprizing that its all going fucking crazy with escalating violence.
Quote:
What is critical when such a situation arises (and it will arise more and more) is the degree of self-organization. A workers neighborhood that organizes itself would use force to defend itself against such entrepreneurs, as well as for other needs.
the use of force in New Orleans appears to be worsening the situation and given that the majority of the population are simply desperate not "criminal entrepenuears", it hardly seems necessary to immediately jump to the most simplistic solutions.
Sep 6 2005 14:21
#7
Some interesting stuff on the disaster and capitalism and disaster.
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3909/bordiga/mtdtoc.html
Also, http://mgno.com has been up and running the whole time. In spite of dbious politics, there is some really amazing information here over the course of the disaster. The immense number of pictures from their area also show people mostly taking food, water and clothing.
AND (separately)
>Is Hurricane Katrina a natural disaster or a crisis in public policy?
>
>In the wake of this devastating Hurricane, when the thousands of
stranded people have finally been moved to dry ground, people will rightly
question how such a disaster could occur; they will wonder how my
hometown of New Orleans could simply fill up like a bowl and wash away almost our entire city. Some may point figures at government, blaming the Army Corps of Engineers for faulty construction. Others may attribute the disaster to the power of the storm that USA Today labeled the "160 mile/hr Monster." In reality a single cause cannot explain much of anything. If we wish to learn something from this nightmare, it makes sense to concentrate on those factors over which we can exert some influence: the human dimensions. And to do so, we need to evaluate
the social and historical conditions leading up to the disaster.
>
>Politicians, policy-makers, academics, and committed citizens have long
recognized this danger. President Carter created FEMA in 1979 to address the country's worst-case disaster scenarios, and New Orleans has been at
the top of that list ever since. In 1995 the International Panel on Climate
Change of the United Nations identified New Orleans as the North American city most vulnerable to global climate change, because the rising sea-level and elevating temperatures of the Gulf of Mexico intensify the frequency
and power of hurricanes. The recent destruction of human life, property and one of this nation's greatest historic and cultural treasures demands a critical assessment of how authorities prepared for and confronted a hurricane strike that was universally seen as inevitable. For the crisis of New Orleans is the quagmire of unsustainability - a problem the entire
nation faces. Sadly enough, after the realization of this worst-case scenario, it seems the best-case scenario might be that we pause, question
and actually learn something.
>
>From 2001-2003 I worked as a research assistant and independent
contractor for the Center For Hazards Assessment Response Technologies, a research center at the University of New Orleans committed to integrating social science into emergency management. Along with a number of other academics, and with the collaboration of active citizens and some dedicated policy-makers, I studied the social dynamics of flooding in southeast Louisiana. Our team of researchers drafted evacuation studies, participated in the construction of government reports, and wrote scholarly articles. While my limited experience does not represent a full insider's perspective into the larger policy-making machine of Louisiana, it hopefully conveys an appreciation for the central issues behind this catastrophic event. Media commentators treat Katrina as the
culmination of the bad idea called New Orleans: a city whose precarious
existence is the fault of poor site selection in 1699 by French explorers.
They have ignored the more recent history of dramatic landscape alterations, which exacerbated the city's susceptibility to floods. In the last
century, over 1.2 million acres of Louisiana's land have disappeared, in large part as a consequence of land-use that includes oil, gas, and
timber extraction; industrial, commercial, agricultural, and residential
development.
>
>These economic activities demanded erosion-causing modifications to
the landscape such as canals, levees, and drainage. Historically, these
wetlands provided invaluable flood protection by acting as a sponge to soak up the menace of storm surge. Now the open water, which sits
where land once stood, provides fuel to the fury of hurricanes. Additionally,
the developed land cannot absorb storm surge or torrential rains. The
compacted soils, pavement and concrete mean that all water must eventually go back to the Gulf. In effect, this combination constitutes a hydrological contradiction to the economy southeastern Louisiana: commercial, residential, and industrial development has reduced the regions capacity to weather storms. In other words, economic growth has translated into more water, more danger, and a greater catastrophe.
>
>For this reason, flood mitigation-not to be confused with the traditional
methods of flood protection, e.g., levees and pumps-largely took the
form of coastal restoration. Policy-makers acknowledged the only way to save southeast Louisiana and New Orleans was to rebuild the coastal
wetlands. Early initiatives began in the early 1980's, but a comprehensive framework and rational was laid out in 1998 in a plan called Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana (www.lacoast.gov/Programs/2050/MainReport/report1.pdf).
The plan marked a moment of inter-agency collaboration on federal, state, and local levels of government and constituted an attempt to devise a
"clear vision" for all management and restoration activities concerning the
Louisiana coastal zone. On a superficial level, all interest groups in the
state - including big oil - supported restoration, or at least the quest for 14
billion dollars of federal funds to finance restoration construction projects.
Shell Oil sponsored a public relations blitz to mobilize national support
called the "America's Wetlands Campaign" (www.americaswetland.com/). The president of one of the region's largest banks joined the Governor's task force to garner the necessary political will. An army of scientists and
engineers carried out the research and planning for what they thought might become the largest public works projects in U.S. history. To date, over a billion dollars have been spent on actual projects, such as the fresh water diversion projects which flood areas in a controlled fashion to replenish sediments (see www.lacoast.gov).
>
>Although the effectiveness of these projects is unclear, the hypocrisy of the coastal restoration euphoria is not. Despite the many people dedicated
to restoration who have worked tirelessly for this mission (e.g. Coalition
to Restore Coastal Louisiana), unsustainable development has continued
unabated and without public discourse. To compound the problem, the most critical government agency (i.e. Army Corps of Engineers) refused to correct previous mistakes that made erosion and flooding worse. By far, the most offensive example of this government hypocrisy-which also
reveals a total disregard for public safety on the part of business interests-involves a canal called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MR-GO). Eyewitness accounts, hydraulic models and newspaper reports suggest this waterway brought in the storm surge that broke the levee in eastern New Orleans. This water saturated the New Orleans 9th Ward, eastern New Orleans, and St. Barnard Parish. These areas have experienced the most severe flooding, including the destruction of at least 40,000 homes. At the time of this writing, nobody knows how many people have lost their lives.
>
>The MR-GO is a 70-mile ship channel that connects the Port of New
Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico in a route as straight as an engineer's ruler. It began as a bad idea to promote economic growth on the Port. At the behest of the Board of Commissioners of the Port of New Orleans, locally
known as the Dock Board, the Corps initiated construction in the late 1950s. Boosters for the Port claimed that the MR-GO would convert New Orleans into the next Rotterdam and encourage an "industrial renaissance" in St. Bernard Parish. These lofty ambitions never materialized: the canal excelled in generating controversy but failed to stimulate economic growth or draw much ship traffic. Although it cuts 40 miles off the trip by traversing the marshes of St. Bernard Parish, the Army Corps of Engineers' "improvement" attracted significantly less ships and cargo than the meandering Mississippi. The only growth locals witnessed occurred in the canal itself, which expanded from its original width of 500 feet to 2500 feet in some places because the wake of giant ships causes the canal's banks to collapse. Critics attributed over 40,000 acres of wetland loss to this "marsh-eating monster" and described it as a "hurricane superhighway" that would exacerbate the risk of deadly floods.
>
>In response, a number of committed individuals and organizations
demanded that the Corps close the MR-GO (e.g. Coalition to Close MR-GO, Gulf Restoration Network, Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, and St.
Bernard Sportsman's League). While the Corps preached the virtues restoration to Congress, it refused to correct its own deeds of environmental destruction. It ignored the public outcry; it failed to seriously take into account public safety; its policy protected not people but the
economic interest of port industry and steamship companies. Officials from the Dock Board and the Corps argued that a new lock system on the Mississippi River would allow for the closure of the MR-GO. This economically and ecologically nonsensical scheme would have cost $700-800 million and would not have been complete until 2017. Critics called these locks an unjustified waste and drew attention to social and ecological impacts (see Taxpayers for Common Sense and the National
Wildlife Federation report on the Army Corps of Engineers:
http://www.taxpayer.net/corpswatch/). After years of fighting, nothing changed and the worst predictions of catastrophic flooding have materialized.
>
>The MR-GO represents the most egregious tension between environmental protection and public safety with the money-making imperative of unfettered business interests. Despite the widely acknowledged problem of land loss with all its consequences for flooding, government agencies have made no real attempt to mediate this conflict. With all the attention on creating new land, government shirked its responsibility to protect what still existed. More vacation homes were constructed on the shores of the barrier island and in the marshes. Against citizen protest, plans were made to extend Interstate 49 through the southeast part of the state, which would stimulate sprawl further into flood-prone areas. Paradoxically, local politicians marketed a new highway to Port Fourchon, the nation's largest oil and gas port, as a restoration initiative. Subdivisions filled wetlands on the shores of Lake Ponchartrain; suburban houses replaced that invaluable - and irreplaceable - natural sponge. Today, that lake flows through my hometown.
>
>The break in the levees that has led to the inundation of the New Orleans
area constitutes more than an engineering failure. It signifies a failure of
our governing institutions to represent and serve the public interest; it
represents a failure in the promises of economic development to improve
the quality of life in our communities. On the national level, I think it
reveals a poverty of the American imagination, which refuses to dream of
workable solutions to our real ecological problems, and which is mindlessly
forced to seek salvation through the ostensibly free market and the promise of growth. It is impossible to say if even the most revolutionary
thinking in planning and environmental management could have quelled the destruction of Katrina, but it is certain that business as usual guaranteed it.
Sep 6 2005 14:35
#8
More on the disaster and capitalism's love of disasters...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/business/05build.html
How the Free Market Killed New Orleans
By Michael Parenti
The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Forewarned that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.
They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.
It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. Thus does the invisible hand work its wonders in mysterious ways.
In New Orleans there would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island in 2004, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.5 million people, more than 10 percent of the country’s population. The Cubans lost 20,000 homes to that hurricane---but not a single life was lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.
On Day One of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, it was already clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans had perished in New Orleans. Many people had “refused” to evacuate, media reporters explained, because they were just plain “stubborn.”
It was not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to call their own, they had to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not work so well for them.
Many of these people were low-income African Americans, along with fewer numbers of poor whites. It should be remembered that most of them had jobs before Katrina’s lethal visit. That’s what most poor people do in this country: they work, usually quite hard at dismally paying jobs, sometimes more than one job at a time. They are poor not because they’re lazy but because they have a hard time surviving on poverty wages while burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.
The free market played a role in other ways. Bush’s agenda is to cut government services to the bone and make people rely on the private sector for the things they might need. So he sliced $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction. Plans to fortify New Orleans levees and upgrade the system of pumping out water had to be shelved.
Army Corps of Engineer personnel had started work to build new levees several years ago but many of them were taken off such projects and sent to Iraq. In addition, the president cut $30 million in flood control appropriations.
Bush took to the airways (“Good Morning America” 1 September 2005) and said “I don’t think anyone anticipated that breach of the levees.” Just another untruth tumbling from his lips. The catastrophic flooding of New Orleans had been foreseen by storm experts, engineers, Louisiana journalists and state officials, and even some federal agencies. All sorts of people had been predicting disaster for years, pointing to the danger of rising water levels and the need to strengthen the levees and pumps, and fortify the entire coastland.
In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite reactionaries also allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands. Again, that old invisible hand of the free market
Sep 6 2005 16:31
#9
This was apparently posted on harlanellison.com although I can't find the original posting so it'll be a c&p. Gives an interesting account of the "armed gangs" in the convention centre:
Quote:
This was fowarded to me from Samuel R. Delany - Lisa C. Moore is a friend of his and the former editor of the Lambda Book Report ...
From: Lisa Moore
Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2005 10:13 AM
Subject: a survivor's story: Katrina in New Orleans
i heard from my aunt last night that my cousin Denise made it out of New Orleans; she's at her brother's in Baton Rouge. from what she told me: her mother, a licensed practical nurse, was called in to work on Sunday night at Memorial Hospital (historically known as Baptist Hospital to those of us from N.O.). Denise decided to stay with her mother, her niece and grandniece (who is 2 years old); she figured they'd be safe at the hospital. they went to Baptist, and had to wait hours to be assigned a room to sleep in; after they were finally assigned a room,two white nurses suddenly arrived after the cut-off time (time to be assigned a room), and Denise and her family were booted out; their room was given up to the new nurses. Denise was furious, and rather than stay at Baptist, decided to walk home (several blocks away )to ride out the storm at her mother's apartment. her mother stayed at the hospital.
she described it as the scariest time in her life. 3 of the rooms in the apartment (there are only 4) caved in. ceilings caved in, walls caved in. she huddled under a mattress in the hall. she thought she would die from either the storm or a heart attack. after the storm passed, she went back to Baptist to seek shelter (this was Monday). it was also scary at Baptist; the electricity was out, they were running on generators, there was no air conditioning. Tuesday the levees broke, and water began rising. they moved patients upstairs, saw boats pass by on what used to be streets. they were told that they would be evacuated, that buses were coming. then they were told they would have to walk to the nearest intersection, Napoleon and S. Claiborne, to await the buses. they waded out in hip-deep water, only to stand at the intersection, on the neutral ground (what y'all call the median) for 3 1/2 hours. the buses came and took them to the Ernest Morial Convention Center. (yes, the convention center you've all seen on TV.)
Denise said she thought she was in hell. they were there for 2 days, with no water, no food. no shelter. Denise, her mother (63 years old), her niece (21 years old), and 2-year-old grandniece. when they arrived, there were already thousands of people there. they were told that buses were coming. police drove by, windows rolled up, thumbs up signs. national guard trucks rolled by, completely empty, soldiers with guns cocked and aimed at them. nobody stopped to drop off water. a helicopter dropped a load of water, but all the bottles exploded on impact due to the height of the helicopter.
the first day (Wednesday) 4 people died next to her. the second day (Thursday) 6 people died next to her. Denise told me the people around her all thought they had been sent there to die. again, nobody stopped. the only buses that came were full; they dropped off more and more people, but nobody was being picked up and taken away. they found out that those being dropped off had been rescued from rooftops and attics; they got off the buses delirious from lack of water and food. completely dehydrated. the crowd tried to keep them all in one area; Denise said the new arrivals had mostly lost their minds. they had gone crazy.
inside the convention center, the place was one huge bathroom. in order to shit, you had to stand in other people's shit. the floors were black and slick with shit. most people stayed outside because the smell was so bad. but outside wasn't much better: between the heat, the humidity, the lack of water, the old and very young dying from dehydration... and there was no place to lay down, not even room on the sidewalk. they slept outside Wednesday night, under an overpass.
Denise said yes, there were young men with guns there.but they organized the crowd. they went to Canal Street and "looted," and brought back food and water for the old people and the babies, because nobody had eaten in days. when the police rolled down windows and yelled out "the buses are coming," the young men with guns organized the crowd in order: old people in front, women and children next, men in the back. just so that when the buses came, there would be priorities of who got out first.
Denise said the fights she saw between the young men with guns were fist fights. she saw them put their guns down and fight rather than shoot up the crowd. but she said that there were a handful of people shot in the convention center; their bodies were left inside, along with other dead babies and old people.
Denise said the people thought there were being sent there to die. lots of people being dropped off, nobody being picked up. cops passing by, speeding off. national guard rolling by with guns aimed at them. and yes, a few men shot at the police, because at a certain point all the people thought the cops were coming to hurt them, to kill them all. she saw a young man who had stolen a car speed past, cops in pursuit; he crashed the car, got out and ran, and the cops shot him in the back. in front of the whole crowd. she saw many groups of people decide that they were going to walk across the bridge to the west bank, and those same groups would return, saying that they were met at the top of the bridge by armed police ordering them to turn around, that they weren't allowed to leave.
so they all believed they were sent there to die.
Denise's niece found a pay phone, and kept trying to call her mother's boyfriend in Baton Rouge, and finally got through and told him where they were. the boyfriend, and Denise's brother, drove down from Baton Rouge and came and got them. they had to bribe a few cops, and talk a few into letting them into the city ("come on, man, my 2-year-old niece is at the Convention Center!"), then they took back roads to get to them.
after arriving at my other cousin's apartment in Baton Rouge, they saw the images on TV, and couldn't believe how the media was portraying the people of New Orleans. she kept repeating to me on the phone last night: make sure you tell everybody that they left us there to die. nobody came. those young men with guns were protecting us. if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have had the little water and food they had found.
that's Denise Moore's story.
Lisa C. Moore
Sep 6 2005 17:49
#10
when i wrote the last post, i was disturbed by the original emails apparent unquestioning acceptance of the mainstream medias terms of engagement - "criminals" raping, terrorising and looting. i'm sure some really bad shit has been going/is going on but its interesting to hear another perspective from inside the superdome.
the flooding of new orleans has become about race and class. no matter how many camera hugging trips george bush makes, i hope the ramifications of what happened really continues to make people fucking angry.
Sep 6 2005 17:53
#11
fwiw I think the account was from the convention centre rather than the superdome (my TV blew up last week, so the one time I'd actually want to switch it on I can't) - it looks like "armed gangs" has been a feature of coverage of both those places though.
Sep 6 2005 17:54
#12
These are all really good redtwister, please keep feeding us more stuff if you come across it.
edit:
Posted up the text of "Hurricane Katrina: A natural disaster or a failure of governance?" post on another forum, and someone told me off and came up with a link for it! here it is in case anyone wants it.
:> link
Sep 6 2005 18:48
#13
On a much smaller scale, it occurred to me that Hackney Marsh is to be concreted over for the olympics - it's about 1 1/2 miles down the road from me, along with a massive network of reservoirs. i've been cycling past the reservoirs to work, and it occurred to me it wouldn't take that much for them to get flooded, and that the Marsh would be essential to soaking up some of the flood water from the Lea River. Wouldn't be as effective if it was tarmac.
:> link
Sep 7 2005 15:29
#14
lucy82 wrote:
when i wrote the last post, i was disturbed by the original emails apparent unquestioning acceptance of the mainstream medias terms of engagement - "criminals" raping, terrorising and looting. i'm sure some really bad shit has been going/is going on but its interesting to hear another perspective from inside the superdome.the flooding of new orleans has become about race and class. no matter how many camera hugging trips george bush makes, i hope the ramifications of what happened really continues to make people fucking angry.
For me, the essential thing is to be clear that this is not about Bush. Bush is not the only one who mishandled this. The Democratic mayor and governor did too. the whole thing extends far beyond the kind of anti-Bush nonsense that is the core of opposition politics in this country.
The key to actually talking to people is to refuse to turn it into a Democrat-Republican thing. Many on both sides want to do exactly that, but in fact the failure is a failure of capitalism, from the whole state to market individualism to land development to putting property and profits before people (as that fantastic letter shows.)
To get caught up in the Dem-Repub fracas is to basically play into the dead-end politics this country is immersed in.
Cheers,
Chris
Some clever bastard once said that any society, no matter how "advanced" is only three meals away from barbarism.