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If you think it’s hell reading The Sheet, imagine writing it. Thanks to Christopher Wiles (pictured) of West Hills, Calif. who snapped this shot in Grand Cayman. (Photo courtesy Wiles)

A “hopeful” Rebecca Solnit visited Mammoth (Photo courtesy Penguin)

“Come, ye philosophers, who cry, ‘All’s well,’ and contemplate this ruin of a world.” –Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, from “Candide”

This year’s California Reads program focuses on both Disaster and Democracy, and nowhere is either topic better illustrated than in author Rebecca Solnit’s new book, “A Paradise Built In Hell.”

Subtitled “The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster,” Solnit, a prize-winning journalist and writer, visited libraries in Mammoth and Bridgeport this past week, sharing her perspective with community members on how disasters are managed (or mismanaged) by the powers that be. She described how everyday people come together to weather both the disaster itself and the bureaucratic one that is typically generated in its aftermath.

She examines a variety of disasters, both natural and manmade to one extent or another. Breaking the book into sections, Solnit starts with one of the best known catastrophes, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She then progresses through the WWI era explosion of a munitions cargo ship in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan at the end of WWII, the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, the events of 9/11 in New York City and finally Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

Solnit does fascinating work dissecting and examining the flaws inherent in authoritarian forms of government intervention on the heels of disasters, which can in some cases actually end up costing more lives than the actual cataclysms. The other half of her book’s thesis, however, is more hopeful, documenting the sense of community that tends to rise from the ruins of such horrific occasions.

The book has so far been presented in more metropolitan areas, but Solnit said it’s uniquely suited to the Eastern Sierra. “Rural people rely on each other more,” she posited. Solnit, who’s spent time in the area previously helping with research at Mono Lake, said the area has a peculiar kind of insularity, with often very divergent viewpoints finding ways to get along in a smaller living arrangement.

“This is about real democracy,” she said. “We’re good, smart people, and capable of enough to govern ourselves.” Our core beliefs, she thinks, are built on basic human nature.

Conversely, sociologists who have studied disasters post-WWII, she indicated, say there’s no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster. Who gets injured and who gets helped are functions or failures of community, and decisions made are often cascading. For want of a nail, the [horse’s] shoe was lost, and so on, she illustrated.

The actual death toll from Hurricane Katrina, for example, was due in large part to a cascading series of events following the storm. The hurricane, she observed, was the least of it.

Authoritarianism is pessimistic, thinking that “only the heavy hand of government” can prevent pillaging, rape, murder and other atrocities. “Its view is that we’ll revert to some barbaric state,” our original nature. “Do we even have one?” she asked rhetorically.

Solnit discusses the bonds that are formed during disasters

By contrast, she wonders whether “war zones” created by the military, police and other authoritarian agencies weren’t actually creating the conditions for perceived hysteria. “Looting,” which she said can also be interpreted as getting what’s needed for survival the only way possible given a total lack of commerce, was given the “death penalty,” with shoot to kill orders. Everyone, she said, was seen as a criminal, including tourists trapped in the Ninth Ward and even a convention of paramedics. Similar orders were given in San Francisco in 1906 and in Haiti following its most recent earthquake.

Poor or otherwise sloppy media reporting, she added, feeds the frenzy and hypes the real story to ridiculous proportions. False information and misinterpreted data manages to get out, giving the rest of us misleading impressions of what is really taking place. Some of that error-ridden reporting even affects government. In one instance, she cited the case of a Federal Emergency Management Agency refrigerated truck sent to the Super Dome to remove hundreds of bodies, reportedly mass murder victims. The truck arrived to find only six dead, four of those from natural causes.

Panic, she suggested, is wrongly used to describe a situation that more resembles survival instinct, such as running from the collapsing Twin Towers on 9/11. And “elite” panic, often employed by authoritarians, implies that “the rest of us are going to behave badly.” That, she said, often leads to prioritizing preservation of property over human life.

One reason for this could be the threat to authority from the community at large, which after such events seeks understanding of them, or some form of change or other things. Authority, on the other hand, wants to get back to how things were before.

“Who’s going to rescue you?” she asked. “Mostly you are.” Most of us, she thinks, will have banded together with family and other familiars long before any “first responders” arrive to lend assistance.

“People behave well,” she emphasized. “We’re good at improvising; we want membership, belonging, a voice, participation … things having nothing to do with consumerism.”

At first, she said, there is shock at the suddenness, the rupture of continuity. “But we find deeply meaningful moments in disasters. Our sense of mortality and priorities changes, the clutter of everyday life drops away.”

She listed numerous accounts of public sharing and caring. After its 1985 quake, Mexico City was a “society reborn.” The people triumphed. They overturned the country’s one-party system of government, and rallied around a masked wrestling superhero figure, Super Barrio, who championed the voices of those living in the lower-income parts of the city.

In New Orleans, the volunteer Made With Love Kitchen included one man from Boston, who said he was “filled with joy” at being able to help his fellow countrymen. And in the days after 9/11, an unofficial “commissary” made up of volunteers and donated services from local eateries sent tons of food to those laboring day and night over the wreckage at Ground Zero.

One of the best summaries of Solnit’s book came from young Dorothy Day, who was not quite nine years old during

the 1906 San Francisco quake. “While the crisis lasted, people loved each other,” she is recorded as having said.

Such, Solnit said, illustrates who we really are: people who come together when things are being torn apart. Far more often than not, compassion and empathy trumps fear. “Disasters are the hell you go through; paradise is what you find in the community that emerges on the other side.”

During the discussion that followed her presentation, more circumstances were discussed, touching on other types of “disasters” on a social level, such as racism, which led to the fallout from the Rodney King beatings in the 1990s, and even the combination of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl drought crisis of the early 20th century, that brought a large influx of migrants to California from other parts of the country.

Originally an essay for Harper’s that was bourne out of a college lecture series, the real stories of both disaster and humanity were, she said, ones that needed to get out.

Disasters will continue to present themselves, as climatic conditions and vulnerable population centers leave us open to peril. Still, local government that is both responsible and has good preparedness, she insists, will meet the peoples’ needs, including cohesive local efforts, such as Mammoth’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). Solnit is working on returning to address the team later this summer.

You can blame Wall Street for the decline of journalism, too!

In the news business, there has always been that natural tension between the editorial side and the business side.

There is the news, and what impact the news might have on an existing client.

Like when we talk about, say, a lift ticket tax in Mammoth Lakes. (Ha ha. Settle down, 4th floor).

In this internet age, with competitive pressures coming from all angles, this tension in the news business has been heightened considerably. And much to the dismay of journalists everywhere, the business side is the gold mine, and the editorial side has gotten the shaft (apologies to Jerry Reed).

In his new book “The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers,” former Los Angeles Times editor James O’Shea writes about the corporatization of the news business which has decimated both the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune in the past decade.

As O’Shea describes it, many of the most influential American newspapers were, until recently, owned and controlled by individual families and managed by family members (Otis Chandler in L.A., Katharine Graham in Washington, D.C., the Bancroft family at the Wall Street Journal, the Sulzbergers still at the New York Times).

But families have a tendency to spawn descendants, and descendants of the wealthy have a tendency to spawn ever-increasing appetites for money they’ve never had to work for.

In the case of the L.A. Times, the Chandlers sold its Times-Mirror chain, of which the Los Angeles Times was the crown jewel, to the Tribune Company in 2000.

The Tribune Company was eventually acquired by mogul Sam Zell in a highly leveraged deal in 2007.

Toppling under the weight of the debt used to finance the purchase, the company declared bankruptcy a year later.

But not before a number of lawyers and investment bankers had made off with hundreds of millions of dollars in commissions.

As part of the initial deal in 2000, Chandlers took seats on the Tribune Board. And then pressured the Tribune to deliver the profit margins required to maintain the lifestyles of farflung family members.

With big metro newspapers facing increasing competition from the internet in terms of content (particularly in areas like national news coverage, where news aggregators like Yahoo! can deliver up to the minute meat-and potatoes coverage), and websites like craigslist utterly destroying newspapers’ stranglehold on classified advertising, newspaper weren’t seeing a lot of revenue growth.

So the way they met their margins was through cost-cutting.

And what better place to start than in the newsroom. People are expensive.

So they cut. And they cut. And as O’Shea describes, when an editor finally had enough and took a stand for newsroom integrity … they’d find someone to replace him or her who would follow orders.

And as the integrity of the newsroom diminished, people from outside the news pipeline were promoted.

At the Chicago Tribune for example, a Clear Channel television executive, Randy Michaels, was promoted to the editorship of the newspaper by Sam Zell.

In turn, Michaels promoted Jane Hirt to be his Managing Editor (top lieutenant).

According to O’Shea, Hirt had been the editor of the Tribune’s youth paper. Before her promotion, one of her editorial suggestions was to create a “Second Life for Cats feature wherein the feline pets of readers could ‘live out lives online, have alter egos, get married, run businesses, etc.’”

One of the biggest consequences of the corporate push for “synergy” is that it reduces the number of independent perspectives.

Whereas in the past, papers like the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune might each send a reporter to cover an important national story, “synergy” dictates that the combined company share a reporter to cover it.

Editor’s wiseass note: Locally, “synergy” tends to mean The Sheet sends a reporter to write the story and the Fifty synthesizes the copy for its readers.

Now consider that even the gutted journalism ranks still produce virtually all news content.

O’Shea quotes a Pew Research Center study performed in 2009 in Baltimore which analyzed news generated by 53 outlets, from newspapers to blogs to talk radio.

“The investigation winnowed the reports studied down to six major narrative threads that dominated the news, and tracked down the actual source for the six narratives. Even though the city had more news outlets thajn in previous years, eight of ten stories produced relied on information picked up from other sources. Indeed, 95% of the stories came from traditional media, mainly newspapers.”

The Baltimore Sun, while accounting for nearly half the stories, had cut its newsroom 60% during the previous six years and in 2009, produced 32% less stories than it produced in 1999.

Why is journalism important? As O’Shea concludes, “The internet is flooding the world with raw information … but raw information also incubates rumor, disinformation and propaganda.”

In short, good journalism helps us sift through the noise.

As the News of the World scandal aptly demonstrates, when the integrity of an institution is compromised, some terribly poor decisions can result.