August 27, 2003
In This Issue
I WAS IN the Great East Coast Blackout of 2003, and I don't have any real exciting stories to tell.
The truth is, I was on an island in the St. Lawrence River, in an area where the power goes off all the time anyway, so we didn't realize that most of the East Coast had lost power until the whole thing was almost over. Everyone else on the island was well prepared: the cottages (except ours) all seemed to have backup generators and plenty of bottled water. No power for a while? No big deal.
But (as lots and lots of commuters in New York found out) most places are utterly unprepared for the power to go off. We're a fully electrified society, and without the juice, we're paralyzed. And that's only going to be more dramatic in the future.
Which is why the blackout made it very clear that you can't have private, for-profit companies controlling something as important as the nation's power grid. Electricity transmission crosses state lines, requires massive infrastructure investment, and is absolutely essential to our lives. And private companies have absolutely no financial incentive to keep it from falling apart.
It's amazing that none of the presidential candidates are saying the obvious: The grid needs to be nationalized. Set up a special federal agency to manage the system. Charge the utilities a stiff fee to fund it. This is at least as pressing an issue as airport security. What are we waiting for?
A final note: Matt Smith, the neocon SF Weekly columnist, is generally annoying, and that's hardly worth note, but I can't let last week's offering pass without comment.
In one of the least insightful political comments of the year, Smith noted that straight, single women seem to like Sup. Matt Gonzalez. (Brilliant. Whatever.) In the course of that otherwise pointless and relatively harmless screed, however, he tossed off the following:
"To politely paraphrase James Carville, leftist political gatherings don't generally draw attractive women."
Even by SF Weekly standards, that's a pretty demeaning, sexist remark. It also suggests that Mr. Smith might have a rather warped definition of attractive. But most of all, it suggests that maybe he hasn't been to that many actual "leftist political gatherings." You need to get out more, Matt; you're making a fool of yourself.