The Uses of Disaster (Harpers.org)
September 9th, 2005The Uses of Disaster (Harpers.org)
We should not be surprised, then, that what transpires in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is nothing like the popular version. People rarely panic or stampede, nor do they often immediately engage in looting or other acts of opportunism. The Scottish-born mathematician Eric Temple Bell, who witnessed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, saw “no running around the streets, or shrieking, or anything of that sort” but instead people who “walked calmly from place to place, and watched the fire with almost indifference, and then with jokes, that were not forced either, but wholly spontaneous.” Another survivor, San Francisco editor Charles B. Sedgwick, noted-perhaps somewhat hyperbolically-that “even the selfish, the sordid and the greedy became transformed that day-and, indeed, throughout that trying period-and true humanity reigned.” This phenomenon of “surprising” human kindness and good sense is replicated time and again.
Many official disaster-preparedness scenarios nonetheless presume that human beings are prone to panic and in need of policing. A sort of Hobbesian true human nature emerges, according to this version, and people trample one another to flee, or loot and pillage, or they haplessly await rescue. In the movie version, this is the necessary precondition for John Wayne, Harrison Ford, or one of their shovel-jawed brethren to save the day and focus the narrative. In the government version, this is why we need the government. In 1906, for example, no one quite declared martial law, but soldiers, policemen, and some armed college students patrolled the streets of San Francisco looking for looters, with orders to shoot on sight. Even taking food from buildings about to burn down was treated as a crime: property and order were prized above survival or even reason. But “the authorities” are too few and too centralized to respond to the dispersed and numerous emergencies of a disaster. Instead, the people classified as victims generally do what can be done to save themselves and one another. In doing so, they discover not only the potential power of civil society but also the fragility of existing structures of authority.
Yes – this is what gets me about the right-wing mindset. They simply can’t get their heads around the idea that everyone is not just out for themselves and prone to panic the way they themselves seem to be. The stories that came out about looting were not, as Karen Hughes seems to believe, what hurts the image of the United States. It was seeing what claims to be the most advanced country unable to care for its own people in the face of a disaster. Third world countries do a better job.
Our infant mortality rate now ranks with that of Malaysia, for goodness sake. We simply have got to end the selfishness of the winger era and get back to taking care of our people again.
Americans work more hours now than anyone else in the industrialized world. They also work far more than they themselves did as recently as a few decades ago. This shift is economic—call it Reaganomics or Chicago-style “liberalism” or “globalization”—but it is cultural too, part of an odd backlash against unions, social safety nets, the New Deal and the Great Society, against the idea that we should take care of one another, against the idea of community. The proponents of this shift celebrate the frontier ideals of “independence” and the Protestant work ethic and the Horatio Alger notion that it’s all up to you.
In this light, we can regard the notion of “privatization” as a social phenomenon far broader than a process by which government contracts are granted. Citizens are redefined as consumers. Public participation in electoral politics falters, and with it any sense of collective or individual political power. Public space itself—the site for the First Amendment’s “right of the people peaceably to assemble”—withers away. Free association is aptly termed, for there is no profit in it. And since there is no profit in it, we are instead encouraged by our great media and advertising id to fear one another and regard public life as a danger and a nuisance, to live in secured spaces, communicate by electronic means, and acquire our information from that self-same media rather than from one another. The barkers touting our disastrous “ownership society” refuse to acknowledge that it is what we own in common that makes us strong. But disaster makes it clear that our interdependence is not only an inescapable fact but a fact worth celebrating—that the production of civil society is a work of love, indeed the work that many of us desire most.
People, listen – your neighbors are not dangerous. Even in a “bad” neighborhood, most of the neighbors are pretty darn good people. What makes people dangerous is one thing – selfishness. People who care more for themselves than others are dangerous. I’ve been ostracized at times for doing this myself, and it’s a lesson I’ve learned well. Right now, Republicans are not simply people with different ideas – they are dangerous people. They don’t even seem to care what they are doing to the country. They are people who care only about their own pocketbook, their “right” and “entitlement” to live better than everyone else does. If you aren’t rich, you have no business being or supporting Republicans.
It’s gotta stop. If Republicans want to return to their more traditional REAL values of smaller effective government, great – but right now, their party has been hijacked by a lunatic fringe. The sooner ordinary people’s attitudes change, the better. And the rest of us have got to shame them into doing so. It’s time to make them feel the one thing they truly fear most of all – SHAME. Shame on you, Bush, for failing New Orleans. Shame on you for destroying FEMA’s effectiveness, an organization James Witt and Bill Clinotn worked so hard to make truly effective.
And shame on anyone, anyone at all, who supports these people or enables them. It has to stop – BEFORE there is another Katrina.
These are dangerous people. And they don’t give a damn about you, really.
At stake in stories of disaster is what version of human nature we will accept, and at stake in that choice is how will we govern, and how we will cope with future disasters. By now, more than a week after New Orleans has been destroyed, we have heard the stories of poor, mostly black people who were “out of control.” We were told of “riots” and babies being murdered, of instances of cannibalism. And we were provided an image of authority, of control—of power as a necessary counter not to threats to human life but to unauthorized shopping, as though free TVs were the core of the crisis. “This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brigadier General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told the Army Times. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”
New Orleans, of course, has long been a violent place. Its homicide rate is among the highest in the nation. The Associated Press reports that last year “university researchers conducted an experiment in which police fired 700 blank rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood in a single afternoon. No one called to report the gunfire.” That is a real disaster. As I write this, however, it is becoming clear that many of the stories of post-disaster Hobbesian carnage were little more than rumor. “I live in the N.O. area and got back into my house on Saturday,” one resident wrote to Harry Shearer’s website. “We know that the looting was blown out of proportion and that much of it was just people getting food and water, or batteries and other emergency supplies. That is not to say that some actual looting did not go on. There was, indeed, some of that. But it was pretty isolated. As was the shooting and other violence in the streets.”
And here is the kicker:
Disasters are almost by definition about the failure of authority, in part because the powers that be are supposed to protect us from them, in part also because the thousand dispersed needs of a disaster overwhelm even the best governments, and because the government version of governing often arrives at the point of a gun. But the authorities don’t usually fail so spectacularly. Failure at this level requires sustained effort. The deepening of the divide between the haves and have nots, the stripping away of social services, the defunding of the infrastructure, mean that this disaster—not of weather but of policy—has been more or less what was intended to happen, if not so starkly in plain sight.
The most hellish image in New Orleans was not the battering waves of Lake Pontchartrain or even the homeless children wandering on raised highways. It was the forgotten thousands crammed into the fetid depths of the Superdome. And what most news outlets failed to report was that those infernos were not designed by the people within, nor did they represent the spontaneous eruption of nature red in tooth and claw. They were created by the authorities. The people within were not allowed to leave. The Convention Center and the Superdome became open prisons. “They won’t let them walk out,” reported Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, in a radical departure from the script. “They got locked in there. And anyone who walks up out of that city now is turned around. You are not allowed to go to Gretna, Louisiana, from New Orleans, Louisiana. Over there, there’s hope. Over there, there’s electricity. Over there, there is food and water. But you cannot go from here to there. The government will not allow you to do it. It’s a fact.”
Dangerous, people. If you aren’t rich, THEY WILL NOT PROTECT YOU _ THEY WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE HELL. All you poor southern white folk – you, too. They aren’t gonna help you out. But if you’re of a different race in this country, it’s even worse for you. You had better make darn sure to register and vote. This is no longer Republican and Democratic. This is now a class war, for real. And New Orleans is the first casualty.
This is the disaster our society has been working to realize for a quarter century, ever since Ronald Reagan rode into town on promises of massive tax cuts. Many of the stories we hear about sudden natural disasters are about the brutally selfish human nature of the survivors, predicated on the notion that survival is, like the marketplace, a matter of competition, not cooperation. Cooperation flourishes anyway. (Slonsky and Bradshaw were part of a large group that had set up a civilized, independent camp.) And when we look back at Katrina, we may see that the greatest savagery was that of our public officials, who not only failed to provide the infrastructure, social services, and opportunities that would have significantly decreased the vulnerability of pre-hurricane New Orleans but who also, when disaster did occur, put their ideology before their people.
And guess what? Even if you think you are one of the people they will help – you’re wrong. They don’t care about you. They are dangerous, dangerous people who want only two things – your money, and your ignorance.
