235 posts from 2008

OXFORD, Miss. — This quaint Southern college town is known as a literary oasis, a reputation it gained as the home of William Faulkner for a majority of his life. For much of its existence, theUniversity of Mississippi’s football program has led its own tale of Southern toil, trying mostly in vain to catch up with its peers in the Southeastern Conference.

So it is only fitting that with Mississippi preparing to play Texas Tech in the Cotton Bowl on Friday, one of the linchpins behind the Rebels’ storybook turnaround is a literary star himself.

Michael Oher, Ole Miss’s left tackle, was profiled in Michael Lewis’s best-selling book “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game,” a riveting tale of Oher’s climb from one of Memphis’s worst ghettos to stardom.

On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he makes Thomas Pynchon seem like a gadabout.

Mr. Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. “Nine Stories,” published two years later, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.

The breadth of the South's football culture creates a fanaticism that crosses all lines. People who didn't attend the schools, or go to college at all, still support them, and will even make donations. It's a group that insiders call "dirt-road alumni." After his business was damaged in Hurricane Katrina, Joe Yargo, a trucker from Hammond, La., who did not attend LSU, says he told his wife "I might lose my house, but I won't lose my season tickets."

"Half the people in that stadium can't spell LSU," says political consultant James Carville, an LSU alumnus. "It doesn't matter. They identify with it. It's culturally such a big deal."

Now Maleny goes to school because her mother is enrolled in Oportunidades. Solís gets $61 a month from the Mexican government on the condition that Maleny goes and maintains good attendance. (If she worked in the fields and earned a typical salary, she would be paid $7.40 for an eight-hour day.) Such grants start for students in third grade, increase for each year of school and are higher for girls, which gives families added incentive to send them.

Solís also receives money for the family’s food — again, subject to certain requirements. She gets a $27-a-month basic food grant if she takes her family to regular preventive health checkups at Paso de Coyutla’s clinic, which provides vaccinations, pap smears and the like. She must also attend a monthly workshop on a health topic, like purifying drinking water. In total, the grants the family receives for food and the oldest three children’s educations come to almost as much as Hernández earns farming.

...

Oportunidades is now one of the most-studied social programs on the planet. The program has its own research unit and publishes all the data it generates. In addition, a wide variety of the program’s features have been examined in hundreds of surveys and papers by independent academics. The results are put to work. When research showed, for example, that many children receiving a nutritional supplement still had anemia, the supplement was changed to one with a more absorbable form of iron.

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Yet in general, Oportunidades is, in many respects, an astonishing success. Though it is still too early to know its impact on the adult life of the children who have grown up in the program, the poverty indicators speak to the effects of Oportunidades today. In 1994, before the peso crisis, 21.2 percent of Mexicans lived in extreme poverty. In 1996, just after the crash, 37.4 percent did. But that figure had dropped to 13.8 percent by 2006. Mexico’s economic growth during the decade averaged an unspectacular 3 percent, which would not by itself have produced such gains for the poor. And these statistics underestimate the program’s true influence, as its greatest effects were concentrated on the very poorest.

Fellow militia member Wayne Janak, 60, a carpenter and contractor, is more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he tells me, laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink structure on a corner about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three of them got hit right here in this intersection with a riot gun," he says, motioning toward the streets outside his home. Janak tells me he assumed the shooting victims, who were African-American, were looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball caps with them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot gun"--a shotgun--"on them. We chased them down."

Janak, who was carrying a pistol, says he grabbed one of the suspected looters and considered killing him, but decided to be merciful. "I rolled him over in the grass and saw that he'd been hit in the back with the riot gun," he tells me. "I thought that was good enough. I said, 'Go back to your neighborhood so people will know Algiers Point is not a place you go for a vacation. We're not doing tours right now.'"

He's equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

Documentary film, Welcome to New Orleans, here: