Salon.com > David Weir

Everything’s broken

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:32:00 +0000

More than three months after Hurricane Katrina's jagged front edge tore into Mississippi's Gulf Coast like a runaway chainsaw, East Biloxi remains a shattered community of poor people living amid their ruins, facing an uncertain future.

Those who survived the mighty storm still talk about the roar of the wind, followed by a 30-foot-high wave that surged in from the Gulf of Mexico, only to crash head-on into a second wall of water rushing out of the Back Bay from behind.

They say that the two massive waves met with a force that turned this entire slender peninsula neighborhood inside out. It remains so today: piles of rubble, cracked trees, crushed houses, rusting cars, refrigerators, stoves and fishing boats, bits of plastic shredded into the bushes and trees.

"My house just exploded from the wind," says Biloxi City Councilman George Lawrence, who represents the hardest-hit ward in East Biloxi. "Then came the water, and it swept everything else away."

Stark remainders of death are still on display everywhere. On warm days, the stench of undiscovered pet carcasses still seeps out from under the ruins, and mud litters the landscape like dried lava flows. Sheets of plywood buckle over gashes in homes that stand split and crushed, their contents splayed about like guts from rotting bodies.

Bradley's lonely heart club

Mon, 24 Jan 2000 20:44:00 +0000

One day at lunch around 20 years ago, I felt a strange fluttering in my chest as if my heart had suddenly started bubbling, its normal, regular beat mixed up into a mishmash.

I panicked. Though only about 30 at the time, I feared this might be the start of a heart attack. Every story I'd ever read about a young person dropping dead came straight back into my feverishly racing mind. Soon, I started having trouble breathing, and I folded right over, my head on the table, weakly gesturing for help.

This hoary memory surfaced recently when I read that Bill Bradley has the same heart condition that I have, atrial fibrillation. Bradley said that on four occasions he has felt bad enough to cancel or delay his rigorous campaign schedule.

I can certainly relate: On that first occasion, my lunch mates drove me to a nearby emergency room, where a noticeably nonchalant M.D. listened through his stethoscope. "Your heart is beating out of rhythm a bit. Just try to relax. It should pass in a while."

Where silence is golden

Thu, 30 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

In the past year, this city has emerged as the nation's "most wired," in that it has the highest per capita Internet usage in North America. More people now work for the high-tech industry around here than for Uncle Sam.

But for those of us who live in the Washington area, it's easy to see certain contradictions between the two cultures represented by .gov and .com. If the web is home to individualist geeks and would-be entrepreneurs, Washington plays host to the two-degrees-of-separation-from-real-power crowd.

Those are the folks who are just that close to this or that senator or inhabitant of the White House or well-known media personality. The shared assumption inside the Beltway is that the exercise of power through these established channels still matters -- a lot.

Maybe so. But this faith in traditional, derived power adds an almost quaint air to the nation's capital at the millennial moment. Such beliefs evaporate the further away from Washington one travels, of course, and are downright rare by the time you reach Silicon Valley, where increasing numbers of congressmen seem to be showing up these days, hands outstretched. The irony in this is that the belief that government's day is coming to a close, that a rapid transformation of society is occurring via digital networks, has been an article of faith among the digerati for years.

The kingmaker speaks

Thu, 11 Nov 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Pat Buchanan's announcement Thursday that his Reform Party presidential campaign will be co-chaired by Bay Buchanan, Pat Choate and Lenora Fulani shows the party founded by Ross Perot is striving to build a "left-right-center" coalition, Pat Choate told Salon News.

The unlikely threesome came together in the belief that party members' agreement on economic nationalism can outweigh their disagreements over social issues like abortion and gay rights, Choate says.

In a wide-ranging interview, Choate also made it clear that they will not seek the assistance of Jesse Ventura, whom he criticizes for his controversial Playboy interview and also for seeking a "placeholder" candidate in 2000 so that Ventura himself can run in 2004.

By switching her faction's support from Ventura to the Choate/Buchanan alliance, the left-wing Fulani has helped build what now appears to be the dominant group within the Reform Party, Choate says.

Not just blowing smoke

Fri, 05 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Lowell Bergman has been one of journalism's better-kept secrets over the past 25
years as he's labored in the shadows to produce work for much more famous
figures such as Mike Wallace and Ed Bradley on CBS's "60 Minutes."
But within the business, he is known to be among the best of his breed -- an investigative reporter,
producer and researcher.

Bergman's relative anonymity is evaporating now with the release of "The Insider," which
may make him better known as "the character Al Pacino plays." The film dramatizes how CBS
News bowed to corporate pressures when it decided to pull a damning interview Mike Wallace
conducted with a whistle-blower from the tobacco giant Brown & Williamson.

In the film, Bergman is cast favorably as a man of his word, the moral force who eventually persuades Wallace to come around to the side of good -- a detail Wallace has
vociferously
challenged. But those of us who have worked closely with Bergman over the years know him as one of the premier
reporters of his time. (I've collaborated
with him on and off since 1972, at Rolling Stone magazine and the Center for Investigative Reporting,
as well as on televised reports for "20/20," "60 Minutes" and PBS, and also as co-lecturers
at the University of California).

Wenner's world

Tue, 20 Apr 1999 19:25:00 +0000

Just this much above the bustle of midtown Manhattan, feet
propped on a table, leaning back and grinning his infectious grin, Jann
Wenner is exactly where he wants -- and deserves -- to be: in the midst of
the bustle without necessarily having to rub any shoulders he doesn't want
to rub. In contrast, all around this room and the ones adjoining are photos
of him shoulder-to-shoulder with his crowd -- Jann with Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bob Dylan; Jann at the White House; Jann with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; Jann with the significantly taller Attorney General Janet Reno ("I had to do that one. She's such a star").

Beyond the door to his office suite stretches the bustling Wenner Media
headquarters ("almost the size of a football field," he says with characteristic immodesty), where the young,
the slender and the hip march about in platform shoes performing the
mundane tasks of running Jann's empire.

This is where the music went. It's strange, but if the entire cultural
explosion from the 1960s could be drawn down to just one guy, it would be this compact energy ball right here -- the quintessential baby boomer, our own Peter Pan, a chubby
adolescent who would never grow up.

The Politics Of Bad Faith

Tue, 16 Feb 1999 20:00:00 +0000

| In this oddly compelling little book, Salon columnist David Horowitz has combined essays and letters from the past decade with original pieces, in an attempt to elevate his central passion -- attacking the left -- to a new level. Horowitz has already recorded his personal odyssey (from red-diaper baby to New Left activist to conservative commentator) in earlier writings, most notably his autobiography, "Radical Son." In this book, he strengthens the intellectual underpinnings of his one-man jihad against leftists.
Horowitz asserts that while the left has lost most of the political battles since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has managed to attain cultural hegemony in the United States as it pursues a socialist future based on utopian premises. To make his case, he works his way along a somewhat obscure spectrum encompassing Hobsbawn, Heidegger, Kolakowski and Hayek. But when he turns to the more familiar terrain of the personal narrative -- in the form of several long appeals urging former comrades to join his crusade -- the book gains momentum.

House of adulterers

Fri, 18 Dec 1998 20:00:00 +0000

This is all getting too weird. Just when it seemed that the news coming out of the nation's capital could not possibly get any stranger, it did. Already reeling under the pressure of two huge news stories -- the bombing of Iraq and the impending impeachment of the president -- the nation learned Thursday from incoming Speaker of the House Bob Livingston, R-La., that he had carried on his own extramarital sexual affairs, and he offered to resign.

Livingston's GOP troops rallied to his defense, so he didn't have to resign, after all. Once again, throughout media spin land, there arose the theory that all this might be part of some grand "scorched-earth" policy, presumably coordinated by nefarious operatives in the White House.

This all has a familiar ring to us. After all, Salon broke the original stories that revealed that certain people in the Clinton camp were discussing such a strategy last summer.