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Old Galveston, which is the tourist area with the shops and museums and little train, is pretty much still all shut down, except for the Starbucks. Handfuls of tourists wander around, looking for something to go into.
The rugged modern buildings, like the 24/7 Kroger’s on the inland side of Seawall Boulevard, shrugged off Ike, but when I drove to the Kroger’s late one night for supplies, a storm had knocked out power in that part of town and the stock boys were idling at the front entrance waiting for it to come back on. One was saying that he’d looked out over the Gulf and was amazed at how quickly this storm came up. Another was discussing Hiroshima, which apparently he’d just seen a documentary on, and explaining how some victims were atomized while with others the clothing literally fused to the bodies. Ike figured in the conversation, I decided, as the unspoken context: these were people who’d reached a certain conversance with disaster. And of course Galveston had come through far worse: a handful of old people died in Ike, but the 1900 hurricane took some 6,000 lives, and it, like the 1871 fire to Chicago, had become central to the local creation myth. Although a visiting journalist might feel obliged to report that Galveston is “reeling,” the larger truth is that people do not “reel.” They get about their lives; and in tiny Galveston, just as in Madrid and London, that’s what I found people doing.
Ebert writes: “in less than a month Obama will be President. What a daunting situation he will face. How well can he possibly ‘succeed’ when so many of the problems, starting with the climate, cannot be cured by the actions of man? How can he lead the economy back from a pit of unbridled, unregulated greed–when we learn that CEOs protected their own $100 million bonuses as part of the bailout package we all paid for? How will he bring world peace between peoples who have hated each other for decades?”
