New Orleans Calamity
It is not often that one sees a city destroyed. While the flooding of New Orleans is supposedly a natural disaster and perhaps a foretaste of the implications of climate change, it is also a disaster made by people, institutions and a nation which failed to maintain levees and could not muster the imagination to foresee the ways in which risk would translate into calamity. There is no question of blaming the victims: disaster is meeted out unequally between classes, races and neighbourhoods. The ones to suffer in one of the New World’s historic black cultural capitals were those least equipped to flee such as the frail, the ill, the illiterate, and those with so little they had nothing to loose. In America’s ‘risk-society’, contra the social science wisdom, ‘risk’ is not democratic.
The media-manipulation which attempts to portray those who had to be evacuated as culpable or criminal is breathtaking in real time. Hence television images mix looting with the much larger humanitarian spectacle of refugees fighting for water bottles thrown to them out of helicopters by frightened relief workers.
If there were orders to evacuate, why weren’t hospital wards emptied ahead of the storm? Some have raised questions about the intersection of Hurricane Katrina and the occupation of Iraq. Only the most jingoistic would doubt that the scale of devastation in Louisiana not only exposes failures in public institutions and leadership but opens a new front in the struggle to maintain sunny ideologies of manifest destiny and a right to empire. This is a loss of historic proportions, not only of loved ones but of an urban culture which was part of what defined American culture.
It remains to be seen, however, what the middle and longer term response of the American public will be. Events raise questions, they move us to think, to critique. Whereas the stress in public institutions is to manage debate and attempt to deflect criticism, it is significant to notice the expressions of humiliation, disgust and genuine puzzlement expressed across the United States. The only national-scale institutions able to carry forward this popular rethinking, however, would seem to be the media and there are questions about whether commercially-focused media would rise to this political challenge. Outside of the these corporations, civil-rights and environmental groups would seem to face a key opportunity, although relatively few voices seem to make themselves heard. This seems to call for further thought on the intersections of environmental disaster, global warming, urban calamity, governance, risk and technological failure. We need to ask some hard questions about the demonization of black victims and from the city in media images - and their usage in internal government power struggles. If this urban death has social as well as natural causes, it has a cultural and political fallout.
And what about the power of grassroots images and commentary? Unbowed says and shows it all.