Narrative journalism can make some sense of humanity's senseless disasters

F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the Twentieth Century
By Mark Levine
Hyperion, 2007, 307 pp., $25.95

We know storms, we Southerners. Violent weather writes large in family Bibles.
Hurricane Gustav bears down on Breaux Bridge, La. as I write these words. We wait word our son’s family is safe there.
Our storm child once lived through the worst tornado outbreak in memory. He was 18 months old on that date, April 3, 1974 – in Hillsboro, Ala. for his doting grandmother’s birthday.
Today we’re swapping text messages to stay in touch. But 34 years ago I have to wait hours to learn the safety of my child and his mother, visiting the Lawrence County farmhouse she grew up in.
I suffer separation guilt even now, stuck as I was in Washington, D.C. as a correspondent. Finally I learn Granddaddy covers my little family with mattresses and pillows and stands watch as tornadoes dance their deadly hoedown.
Before the twisted ballet finishes 17 hours later, 148 funnels click their heels in 13 states and a province of Canada. Their paths add up to 2,584 miles. The dead number 335 souls, the injured 6,000 people and the damaged property $600 million for 25,000 families.
It all starts over my own family. But the most devastated Alabama region lies just to their north, across the Tennessee River, in Limestone County.
Mark Levine describes the devastation like a novelist. Or with the quality of Sebastian Junger’s Perfect Storm. Or Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. Narrative journalism makes sense of disaster, roughly a Greek derivation for “losing your lucky star,” Levine writes.
He pursues his story of the “superoutbreak” through the memories of survivors: In a moment your life changes. It’s that sudden…You don’t know why it happened to you and not someone else. And since it happened to you, why did you survive it? Others didn’t.
The Alabamians who fill his book are people you know. They are people you care about. They are people of the whole family of humankind, more subject to disaster than we care to think about.
The science of severe weather grounds the narrative, told through the quirky tale of a Japanese physicist, Tatsuya Fujita. As an immigrant to the young science of meteorology in America, “Mr. Tornado” creates our “Richter Scale” for storms. So “F5” means winds above 261 miles per hour on “The Fujita Scale” of intensity.
Fujita determines Limestone suffered “incredible” winds up to 318 mph.
The year 1974, Levine reminds us, produces streaking at the Oscars when The Sting wins. Evel Knievel plans a rocket ride across a mile-wide canyon in Idaho. A French daredevil crosses twin towers of the new World Trade Center on a cable.
It’s odd the author omits the context of legislation the storm system inspires. Since I covered Kentucky issues for The Courier-Journal, I stand in the Oval Office when the also star-crossed President Nixon signs the Disaster Relief Act of 1974.
Louisville took terrible hits from nature’s April 4 attack, backgrounding my story.
My own family stories of storm survival still ground me as a Southerner. As an American. As a human.

There's a simple way to shape political coverage on Oval Office qualifications

Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard. First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.

The President ought to be as smart as the cabinet.
Now that’s a proposition The Press could use to focus election year coverage.
No more teen mother angst or fighter pilot claim to superiority or community organizing theory or Delaware do-righteousness.
The person who appoints the heads of our governmental departments should be on a par with them.
Besides selecting the best and the brightest, the Chief Executive then has to monitor and manage and motivate them.
Oh, the President doesn’t have to out-lawyer the Attorney General. But a feel for the Constitution and the rule of law would be nice.
Contrary to GOP candidate John McCain’s emphasis, there’s more to the presidency that serving as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces.
So it’s not necessary to hold a driver’s license for an aircraft carrier or a permit to carry a howitzer or a flight plan for a stealth bomber.
Sufficient unto the day is the sure and certain knowledge that it’s the duty of every soldier to kill the enemy. The how can be left up to the Secretary of Defense.
What the president needs is the judgment to know when to unleash those dogs of war.
And it’s pretty important to have the analytical ability to maintain our tradition of civilian control of the military.
The Secretary of Agriculture may know a lot about crops and markets. But to carry on a conversation about farmers, the President needs to grasp the nuances. For instance we don’t have food stamps merely to feed the poor. The program is foremost an Ag subsidy program.
The Treasury is not a place we keep money. It’s the control room for keeping the dollar sound despite our debtor nation status.
Interior is not about raping the land but extracting its resources soundly.
Education isn’t about enforcing ideology but planting our seed corn for the smart nation we must be to compete in the world.
Commerce isn’t all census and weights and measures – not when we’re killing off our fisheries and can’t get trade policy to work right.
Labor is about fair pay for fair work instead of this seesaw between the rights of unions vs. the prerogatives of corporations.
And what does the President need to know about the State Department to monitor that Secretary?
This: State is the sum of all the other Departments, because we make our way in the world by projecting our good name with justice, intelligence, respect for full bellies and sound minds, caution against bullies and confidence in a Yankee sensibility about trade and money.
Barack Obama has a good idea about appointing a technology chief for the government. There’s a better claim for making that a Cabinet job compared with Veteran Affairs, which could be folded into the Pentagon.
How alienating toward the future and futurists – every person on the Internet – when McCain patronizingly said he doesn't do computers. His implication was we who appreciate the digital world are eccentric.
Technology actually is a way of making science work for us…of causing the future to happen now…of compensating America in the global prosperity race where others enjoy advantages over us.
That sort of thinking and a keenly organized mind would make the President an equal with any Cabinet.
Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard.
First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.
It’s always intelligent to elevate the national conversation and to focus.

Political platforms and weather shelters are OK but we need foreign affairs coverage too

It’s like taking Gov. Sarah Palin at her word that she is Alaska’s Snow White gift to the nation instead of really being as politically pure as the driven slush upon revelation by reporter scrutiny.

The Press should be more like the Pentagon. Russia shows why.
World peace depends just as much on understanding international conflict as shooting the globe up.
Military planners classically prepare to wage two American wars at once with enough assets left to meet a third emergency.
It’s the attention span as much as anything. But our Information Industry can’t meet the same standard.
Well, come to think of it, neither can the admirals and generals. But they at least try in theory.
Media are concentrating on politics. ’Tis the season.
With some effort they also are monitoring the machine gun-like rat-a-tat of ferocious storms strafing from the weather-Atlantic air war.
Yet for a long time journalism has lost sight of the shooting war that never quits giving hell between Israel and the Palestinian people.
Lebanon lies abandoned between bombings.
Iraq may be a success story. But we haven’t looked at it with the critical consideration of what happens to a corner crime scene when the beat cop moves on.
Iran was the subject of much Press speculation about our possible invasion. Too little real reporting is going on now that our government hasn’t pulled that trigger.
Military Intelligence – that cliché of an oxymoron – lacks analysts who can speak Farsi. Media lack sufficient folks who even know adequately the difference between the Persian culture of Iran vs. the Arab rest of the Middle East.
Food, fuel and water shortages portend more resource wars, especially in Africa.
North Korea seems to have backslid – as the preacher would say – on nuclear disarmament. But just try to find a coherent news story explaining independently the American role.
The news consumer is thrown on too much dependence of our own self-serving government for explanations of worldviews, especially in the gaze toward Russia.
That’s the same Administration reinventing the Cold War.
Missiles in Poland, NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, patronizing attitudes toward Russian self-esteem – all got fashioned into a new containment policy.
But the bear doesn’t want to go into that cage. It even got restive, invading Georgian territory that leans toward Moscow anyway.
Now we have Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and his oddly subordinate president of Russia, looking at the real prize, The Ukraine.
The new czars can cut off gas and oil to Europe on whim as a strategic weapon. That potential is akin to terrorists or rogue states shutting down the flow of Middle Eastern oil through the Straits of Hormuz – a crippling but real potential.
President Bush has made bear trainer threats he can’t enforce, because he has our diplomatic and economic and military assets stretched too thin.
Vice President Cheney castigated Russia from a Tbilisi pulpit on an aid trip as though he were a two-bit Ronald Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, bring down that wall.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cut her academic teeth on the Cold War. She quaintly denounced the Russian moves as unacceptable in the 21st Century. Yet it’s her Administration’s leadership that fails to move out of the Reagan era into realistic foreign affairs of this time.
Without intense, systematic, independent reporting and analysis on front page and prime time, those government pronouncements stand unchallenged by the benefits of journalism.
It’s like taking Gov. Sarah Palin at her word that she is Alaska’s Snow White gift to the nation instead of really being as politically pure as the driven slush upon revelation by reporter scrutiny.
Or it’s like depending on the National Weather service as the sole source of hurricane coverage instead of the animated maps, on-scene reports and progress updates by the energized Media.
American foreign affairs deteriorate badly and rapidly while The Media deploy their assets to other stories. The winning presidential candidate is going to have a greater problem than the drain of jobs, housing and affordable fuel.
We’re in for shock about world affairs.
And all because self-imposed cutbacks of resources and interest prevent The Media from providing the independent information democracy needs as much as it needs political platforms and weather shelters.