Ideologies of Destruction

Which has killed more Texans: Muslim extremism or libertarianism?

Photo: LM Otero/AP

This week marked the one-year anniversary of two deadly bombings, both ultimately the result of deadly ideologies. The best-known of these was the cowardly detonation of two home-made devices at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and grievously injuring many more. As with most people in my region, I was stunned and offended, have followed the case closely, and have contributed to the fund for victims.

Two days after the bombing in Boston, a much larger explosion took place in the town of West, Texas (located in central Texas). As with any story from Texas, Wade Goodwyn best tells the story of the explosion and of the rollercoaster year that followed. Nearly 20 years after Timothy McVeigh destroyed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City with 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate, Don and Wanda Adair stored 100 times that amount of the bomb-making material in a wooden shed. As his report makes clear, ideology may prevent the prevention of future such disasters. Even residents of the town victimized by the explosion are loathe to blame the couple who put them at risk.

Back in Boston, the anniversary of the West explosion was recognized in a report on Here & Now that asked What's Being Done to Prevent Another Fertilizer Plant Explosion? Sadly, the answer is very little. Perhaps if the Adairs were from another religion, the response would have been more decisive, but free-market fetishism continues to thrive, and will continue to kill.

April, by the way, is a very tough month for ammonium nitrate explosions in Texas and Oklahoma:

April 16, 1947: Texas City, Texas -- 581 killed, including most of the fire department
April 19, 1985: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma -- 168 killed, including most of a preschool
April 17, 2013: West, Texas -- 15 killed, including 13 firefighters

Behind the Citgo Sign

One benefit of the extreme traffic delays caused by Winter Storm Saturn on a Friday back in March was that I had a lot of time to listen to the radio in our own trusty Saturn as I alternately slid, slogged, and sat between our home and our daughter's school. I now write in October, as I discover this article in my "draft" folder. I was prompted to look for it as I read an excellent student paper on Venezuela. It is a coincidence that world attention will soon be on a stadium that sits just below the Citgo sign in Boston!

In addition to a lovely story about the Iditarod, I heard this thought-provoking piece about the recently departed and scarcely mourned president of Venezuela.


Whenever I think about Venezuela, my first thought is of a friend we had in college, with whom my future wife Pam was able to visit the country in 1986, when its economy was prospering and its politics were of no great interest. Unlike many of its neighbors, Venezuela had tilted neither very far left nor very far right at that time, so I actually knew very little about it at the time. I often wonder what our friend's middle-class family thinks of all the changes since Chavez came to power in 1999, and whether they are even still in Venezuela.

My second thought about Venezuela is always of Jimmy Stewart mispronouncing its name in the 1946 classic It's a Wonderful Life. As he thumbs through a stack of notices for possible adventures abroad, he mentions Ven-zuh-WHALE-uh oil fields.

A Boston Icon, based
in Caracas

Pam's visit to Venezuela came four decades after this cinematic nugget, and we hardly even noticed the country's purchase of a 50-percent stake in Citgo that year. In between, Venezuela had helped to found OPEC as a way to gain some influence over the rate at which oil was being exploited, and thereby increase its share of the wealth in the core that was being built by the depletion of oil in the periphery. Its purchase of a retail network allowed for vertical integration to capture an even greater portion of the wealth generated by its oil. In  2000, one of the first achievements of the newly elected Chavez was to purchase the remaining shares of Citgo, making a familiar U.S. brand part of Venezuela's national patrimony.

This January, I was in Nicaragua in the days leading up to Chavez' latest inauguration, and speculation about his longevity -- including the possibility that he was already dead -- intensified. It was during this time that Julia Sweig wrote a cogent analysis of the Chavez period for The Atlantic, in which she observes that:

The 14 years of his tenure coincided with a consensus across the continent favoring socially inclusive economic growth, democratic representation, and independence from the U.S. national security and foreign policy priorities of the previous century. 

In the United States, opposition to Chavez at the highest levels of government was thoroughly bipartisan, further evidence that in their acceptance of the status quo in the world economic order that was established at a hotel in New Hampshire so long ago.

Flood Guide

In the cold of winter in 1919, the North End of Boston experienced a deadly flood of molasses. I first heard about it when we moved to the area a decade ago, and I thought it was some kind of joke, then at best an oddity. It was, in fact, a horrific event that had much in common with such disasters as the Bhopal gas leak and the Gulf of Mexico BP/Halliburton spill.

Historian Stephen Puleo's Dark Tide is a compelling account that includes several topics that are all-too relevant today, including reckless pursuit of corporate profits, government regulators who are too close to the industries they regulate, and cruel bias against immigrant workers.

Because the book is also instructive about many aspects of the urban geography of Boston, I am adopting it for my teacher-preparation course in the spring 2011 semester, as part of Bridgewater's One Book One Community program. To support community members, faculty, and students who are interested in learning more about the Molasses Flood and related topics, librarian Pamela Hayes-Bohanan has created the Great Molasses Flood Maxguide.