Austin Bay Blog

I got a report earlier this morning from a family member that the 150 mile trip from Houston to Austin now takes ten hours. The Houston Chronicle website says the travel time is eleven hours.

When Santa Anna took the Alamo, Texas settlers between San Antonio and Harrisburg fled east. This great bug-out became known as “The Runaway Scrape.” I’ve always thought that would be a great name for a jazz band– perhaps some day I’ll use it. The Galveston-Houston evacuation is far less chaotic than the Runaway Scrape, though listening to Houston talk radio shows (such as KTRH, 740 AM) demonstrates that nerves are fried. As the traffic creeps along tempers flare. Several motorists say they’re running out of gasoline.

Perhaps this Texas evacuation should be called “The Crawl-Away Scrape.” “Stop and Go Scrape” works, too.

The Chronicle’s lede:

Sixteen hours to San Antonio and Dallas. Eleven hours to Austin. With over a million people trying to flee vulnerable parts of the Houston area, Hurricane Rita has already become a nightmare even for those who left last night.

Traffic is only occasionally moving on freeways, and on Interstate 45, the main route, the drive just from Friendswood to Conroe was taking up to 13 hours.

Hoping to speed the evacuation ahead of Hurricane Rita’s arrival, authorities decided to open the incoming lanes of two Houston freeways to outbound traffic for the first time ever. Plans to reverse the traffic flow U.S. 290 were abandoned because of traffic problems it would create in Brenham and Giddings.

When all lanes of I-45 became outbound lanes north of Conroe early this afternoon, traffic immediately sped up.

Remember, the Interstate Highways are also Civil Defense highways– at least that’s how they were sold as super-federal highways after WWII. In the event of an enemy air attack on US cities, the highways would be used as evacuation routes. Planners pointed out that running all traffic in one direction automatically doubled capacity. In WWII the Germans used this “one way traffic” trick on their autobahns to move military units back and forth between the Eastern and Western Fronts.

Here are a couple of roadside vignettes from the Houston Chronicle:

With traffic at a dead halt on some highways, fathers and sons got out of their cars and played catch on freeway medians. Others stood next to their cars, videotaping the scene, or walked between vehicles, chatting with people along the way. Tow trucks tried to wend their way along the shoulders, pulling stalled cars out of the way.

It took Tiffany Heikkila 11 hours to drive with her 5-year-old son from Sugar Land to Austin. She left at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday and saw packed hotel parking lots and gas station lines backed up all the way to the exit ramps.

“All along the way, cars were pulled off on the shoulder with drivers sleeping. They had their doors open with one foot hanging out of the car..”

Here’s a link to a short essay on The Runaway Scrape.

The Texas Handbook On-Line has a decent account. It includes this graf:

The flight was marked by lack of preparation and by panic caused by fear both of the Mexican Army and of the Indians. The people used any means of transportation or none at all. Added to the discomforts of travel were all kinds of diseases, intensified by cold, rain, and hunger. Many persons died and were buried where they fell. The flight continued until news came of the victory in the battle of San Jacinto. At first no credence was put in this news because so many false rumors had been circulated, but gradually the refugees began to reverse their steps and turn back toward home, many toward homes that no longer existed.

According to this AP report (via the Boston Globe ) Mexico’s Public Safety Secretary Ramon Martin Huerta died in a helicopter crash September 21. Mexican President Vicente Fox created the Public Safety Department (PSD) as part of his anti-corruption program. The PSD would help implement reforms in Mexican police and security forces. All reports say the crash was an accident. However, Mexico is in the middle of a major drug war and Huerta made enemies. Sudanese leader John Garang’s death in a Ugandan helicopter accident ignited conspiracy theories and led to accusations of murder. Huerta’s death will probably lead to the similar allegations.

Last night in the University of Texas honors seminar I teach, I used a column I wrote in November 1991 to illustrate a “course of action analysis.” The subject was Yugoslavia’s war of disintegration and I specifically focused on the fighting around Dubrovnik. (For what it’s worth, Jim Dunnigan and I later published this column as an appendix to our Balkan chapter in the 1996 edition of A Quick and Dirty Guide to War.)

A couple of students responded to one line with very curious expressions. Here’s the line: “It is time for the members of “next year’s superpower,” the European Economic Community, to start to quench through collective political action those terrible ethnic fires that are the threat to peace in the common European home.”

One problem was “the European Economic Community.” Most of the students in this class were five or six years old in 1991. I told them the EEC is the European Union. But it was the wisecrack (next year’s superpower) that was a bit puzzling. I told them”EU advocates made that claim, and made it vociferously in the heady post-Cold War years of 1990 and 1991. The past fourteen years have not only failed to produce a super-power, they have revealed extensive, embedded problems. I briefly discussed the French and Dutch rejection of the EU constitution and moved on to discuss ex-Yugoslavia. (I should have mentioned that “next year’s superpower” is a term often applied to Brazil, but I didn’t.)

The French and Dutch “no votes” actually make me more optimistic about Western Europe. The French “non” tells me that in some buried cerebral zone even the pompous brats in Paris know they confront fundamental economic changes. The Dutch value their liberal democratic traditions and don’t want to cede power to an imperial bureaucracy.

I think the recent German election was also on the minds of two or three students. Germany’s political gridlock –as displayed in the recent election– delays reform. It also reveals the leadership vacuum we all knew existed.

Timothy Garton Ash addresses the German election in a column appearing in today’s Guardian. His lede:

The Indian restaurant owner in Berlin said this kind of post-election confusion was quite normal where he came from. The politicians would sort it out eventually and form some kind of coalition government, he reassured the German television reporter. His smile implied: relax, and have another drink. “Well, that’s interesting … Indian conditions!” commented the fiercely competent German studio anchor, with unconscious ethnic condescension. And her tone implied: have we really sunk so low? Indian conditions, here, in Germany?

To which I would say: “If only…” If only Germany had anything like the economic dynamism of the world’s largest democracy - a democracy, incidentally, slightly older than that of the Federal Republic of Germany. Just to remind you, India’s growth rate over the past 12 months was 7%, while Germany’s was 0.6%.
The result of the German election - if one can call it a result - will not help to close that gap, or address the chronic problems of stagnation and mass unemployment in what is still Europe’s largest economy. We are in uncharted territory, with the leaders of both main parliamentary parties, Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schröder, staking their claims to lead a coalition government as federal chancellor. (Schröder has broken with established political precedent, which calls for the leader of the largest parliamentary group to have the first crack at putting together the parliamentary coalition needed to be chancellor.)

Ash hopes for new elections. A coalition government, in his estimation, wastes time:

The results in economic and social policy - and probably in foreign policy - will be more of that soft fudge in which German attempts at reform have been suffocating for more than a decade. This will be bad for Germany, bad for Europe and bad for the world economy.

As for the leadership vacuum:

The last time there was a grand coalition, in 1966-69, it prompted a strengthening of the left- and right-wing extremes, since the established mass parties were both in government. Harold James, a distinguished historian of modern Germany, argues that the time before that when Germany had something that might be described as a grand coalition was in 1928-30. This had the disastrous effect, under the impact of the great depression, of sending voters off in herds to the communists and Nazis, hastening the end of the Weimar Republic. If one accepts his interpretation then, it would seem that Germany has an impulse to reach for a grand coalition roughly once every 35 years. But few people are suggesting this one would have anything like the same disastrous consequences. More likely, it would represent an unstable transition period between one reasonably stable coalition government and another, as it did in the 60s. In which case, better to shorten the agony with new elections.

I think these grafs do a good job of describing France and Germany’s current paralysis, and echoes the wry “next year’s superpower” line from my 1991 column:

The French communist newspaper L’Humanité crowed that the Germans have shown a red card to neoliberalism. Just as the French did in the referendum that killed Europe’s constitutional treaty earlier this year. Nein and non to neo-liberalism, to any radical change to the old “social market economy” that they feel has served them so well; nein and non to innovation, risk, immigration and Turkey’s membership of the European Union; nein and non to America, or what they take for America. That is the characteristic Franco-German refrain today.

Between them, these two nations central to any version of the European project have achieved one great thing: they have made a war between France and Germany, and hence in western and northern Europe, unthinkable. (I would not be quite so confident about eastern or southern Europe.) And for half a century, France and Germany have together been the motor of European integration. Now, however, the Franco-German motor has become the Franco-German brakes.

This election is just one more proof of what we have seen for some time. Instead of the new start hoped for in London, Warsaw and Jose Manuel Barroso’s Brussels, with a “black-yellow” coalition between a reforming chancellor in Merkel and the free-marketeering Free Democrats, followed in 2007 by a like-minded French president in Nicolas Sarkozy, we face a further period of stagnation and confusion. The so-called Lisbon agenda of economic reform will continue to be stalled. The EU’s always vainglorious claim that it will become the world’s most competitive economy by 2010 will look ever more absurd.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Neo-neocon has additional thoughts on the German elections.