The Story of New Orleans

Part 1

The aftermath of Katrina has been, and still is, awful and humiliating. It has exposed inadequacies in the way the United States works, highlighting real dangers to us, the people, in our powerlessness against the forces of nature, government, society, and neglect.

It is also a tremendous drama for most of us that are not directly involved. It is unfolding on the television and in the newspapers. This is not to say that we do not take it seriously, or are unaware of the fact that it is real, and not in any way fictional. But it does mean that it unfolds in our minds at a psychological pace, and with gradual steps that obey narrative forces. Each day brings not just new information, and unexpected events, but reflections upon the news and thoughts of the previous day. As in a novel, or in a movie, each stage must be absorbed and entered into before the next one can emerge and be believed. We, who are not there, work our way through the events and understanding of what happened on the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans with the slow pace of an operatic act, or a 3-hour movie, in which each state of the plot must be savored and thought about before it has the power to become the basis of the next. The protagonists must meet before they fall in love. There must be seeds of discontent before unrest can lead to betrayal and recrimination.

The novelist Iris Murdoch held the view that storytelling is one of the ultimate, basic ways of thinking. The disaster in the southeast has been a slowly evolving story - there is really no other equipment we have for understanding it. And in trying to understand it, we react much as humans have for generations - we look for the invisible powerful forces that direct events, be they ancient Gods, inexorable physical processes like global warming, selfish princes, or diabolically evil tyrants.

One of the more futile examples of this, in my view, is seeing priests, pastors, and even the Dalai Lama being asked on TV, “how could God let this happen?” and then proceeding to give garbage answers!

The crucial difference between being alive and not being alive is the capability to effect our future. Rocks cannot do that. We can. All animals can. They search for food. Seek shelter. Breed. Plants can, too. They grow towards the light, release seeds and spores. Being alive, we are able to make the future (our intentions, desires, plans, needs) become the cause of our present actions.

Life enables the future to become the cause of the past.

Lifelessness cannot do that, and so always threatens our ability to do it ourselves. A hurricane cannot decide to turn away, any more than it can maliciously decide to hit us dead on. And so, if more powerful than us, it mindlessly threatens our ability to live. A building cannot feed, and must be sustained and repaired by us. The terror of the hurricane victims was the loss of their ability to control their future. No food. No water. No shelter. Loss of family. Loss of pets. Loss of life.

Since everything in our life is in the future-making business, we have a deeply vested interest in seeing the universe as working that way too. Powerless over the past, we can at least plan for a better tomorrow. We need to feel we are at home in the universe; that the universe is a place where our future-building is welcome and natural. (Boy, does W cash in on that one!)

So peoples of all centuries have taken an animistic view. The world is as it is because of Zeus, the love of Christ, the requirements of Allah, the compact with Jehovah, confusion about illusion and reality, the spirits of ancestors, or the demands of karma. We anthropomorphize the world, and see it as alive, since it is the blind forces of decay and corruption and entropy that we are here to fight against. If the world is nothing but the mechanistic outcome of the past, then we are doomed. Of course, we know that we are doomed. We all die. Corruption wins in the end. But not yet. We cannot live if we take that as the only thing that is true.

Tension between seeing the world as the working out of blind causality (a parody view of science) and the world as a beautiful place here for a reason and with a purpose (a parody version of religion) underlies the dispute between evolution and creationism. Creationism has only this going for it: it grants a Faustian relief for those terrified that science might be right.

This dichotomy between the world as nothing more than the consequence of the past, and the world as something with reasons for what happens; reasons of the sort life uses; purposes, goals - this dichotomy we strive to resolve by storytelling. We contemplate the physical situation and the attitudes and behaviors of the people in it, and try to work out what the intentions and purposes were that brought it about. What the desires of the people involved will be for the future. What is going to happen next. Then we move on to “next” with all the added surprises that reality unexpectedly provides.

We tell stories to understand events in terms of life.

What has this to do with New Orleans?
Watching the television and reading the papers, we ask natural questions as we try to construct a story. Why were the levees not stronger? Who planned their weakness? What diabolical goal did they have? Why would people do nothing and let poor people die? What is wrong with our government? Who broke it? Why did they want to do that?

We draw absurd conclusions. Usually we hold ourselves in check. But some whackos come right out with it, showing the desire to understand everything, as if it were the result of a deliberate decision, is way off the mark.

Does anybody really think Bush or any of his people thought “Oh Goodee! There’s a nice big hurricane coming that will kill loads and loads of pesky black people.”? I suppose that’s no sillier than “It is not God’s fault. It is our punishment for not following his commandments.” But if a lot of people believe the second bit of contemptible claptrap, then probably people believe the first as well.

For many troubling, hypnotizing questions, the only answer is that we do not know. The universe is not alive. We are, but it isn’t. And so, since we are a part of it, there are a lot of things that we do, and that happen to us, which happen for no reason, in pursuit of no purpose, adding to no grand design. Moreover, our actions always have extra unintended consequences. Unknown forces do things no-one ever anticipated.

We aspire to create the future, but we always get it wrong. We may know the future we want, but we never get it. It cannot be got. So blaming God or a President's evil intent for frustrating us is not just silly, it is a blunder.

Believe me, this is not a preamble to denying the reality of evil and psychotic people, to defending Bush or FEMA or the Republican Party or the corrupt politics of Louisiana, but I think we should throw away theories that fit well into storytelling but have nothing more than that to recommend them. A conspiracy theory that explains everything is the only sort that you can be absolutely certain about. It will be false, since nothing ever goes according to plan.

So let’s first stipulate that George Bush did not cause the hurricane. (Even if he doesn’t take global warming seriously, the warm seas were not his to create or prevent in a mere five years). FEMA did not plot to kill black people in a sort of modern pogrom. Things are not OK now that W has done his little "glorious-future" speech in front of a floodlit cathedral.

Let’s set to one side the idea that these terrible things happened because people (of a different political persuasion to oneself) wanted these things to happen and planned to make them happen, or even merely siezed the opportunity when it came. It's much more likely that they just didn't care.

There are more interesting and fearful things to look at as we dig for understanding. More fearful because, if it had been just a matter of bad thoughts by bad people, all we would have to do is change minds and change staff. But if the problems are of a more non-life type, more like rocks and laws of physics - things that have no care for the future, and are powerful and overwhelming just because they are powerful and overwhelming - then we are threatened by things that are going to be much more difficult to confound.


My Web Home Page
My "pondering music" blog
My Agent
©ajm 2005

NOLA

I had been too paralyzed to string thoughts together this week, initially because of sadness about the beautiful city I lived in for six years, where my children were born, then by mounting horror. But I saw a panel discussion with David Brooks, who gave some unsettling context.

He is furious at Bush. But he sees a bigger pattern. In an article he shows how often major political upheavals have followed disasters like these. They tear the skin away from the flesh of society, and reveal the sinew and bone underneath. They rip off the veneer and expose the rot.

This, to Brooks, is the "anti-9/11."

On 9/11 we were hit, and Giuliani stepped forth. There was resolution. The US was the wounded party, and the whole thing generated, as well as shock, a gritty sense of pride in the USA.

This time it was clear that, in a comparable disaster, all systems and structures of government failed. Government itself did not work. The Feds did nothing. The New Orleans Local and Louisiana State Government, having known the levees would not stand a cat-5 hurricane, nonetheless had no plan at all about what to do if one happened - no plan except to blame the weakness of the levees on Congress's withholding money for improvements. There was no plan for evacuating the poor, the car-less, the sick. Our system broke the crucial social contract - it failed to protect the weakest and powerless first, and did it in the most graphic, televisable, way. The helpless were all but abandoned as the system protected only the privileged. That may often be true, but on television this week, it was inescapable and deadly.

Evacuation = Own a car.

It revealed, said Brooks, that for decades and decades all layers of elected government have been working against the public interest. Unlike the solidarity and pride after 9/11, Americans look on this, see the TV pictures, and are ashamed.

This is the USA? Reporters compare it to Haiti and Baghdad. Is this the best that can be done by the new, hideously expensive, department of homeland security? Priorities are clear. O'Reilly shouts at Sharpden, but the dead and dying and starving and dehydrated and dispossessed are overwhelmingly not just poor, but black.

Government has been in service to the principle of protecting private interests rather than public interests. Republicans claim that protecting private interests IS protecting the public interest. It is axiomatic Republican Doctrine that the welfare of the country is identical to the welfare of the unbridled business class, the unrestricted business institutions and corporations. - "What's good for General Motors is good for America". - The Democrats deserve blame as much as the Republicans, since the Democrats straightened the Mississippi when that should not have been done, damaged the crucial protective wetlands, and participated in all the institutional injustices so starkly revealed by this disaster.

Brooks felt Katrina was going to prove as crucial a watershed in American history as the earlier floods he mentioned, and that although he cannot say what form it will take, this event will precipitate major, major political and governmental change. Our leaders display a combination of indifference and incompetence. The USA, as it has been revealed to the USA, will not be tolerated by the USA.

Another panelist soberly concluded by pointing out that we have had two disasters so far - the hurricane, and then the unexpected flood. But there are three more to come. The first will be the death-toll; the body count, compounding the shame we all feel already. The second, though it seems shameful even to mention it in the same paragraph, is the cost. The billions of dollars it will cost to recover and repair, not just the physical fabric, but the lives of an entire large cityfull of people. And the third is the slow revelation of the huge disruption it has caused to a major section, and essential component, of our country.

The only emerging object of admiration is the state of Texas; the unaffected close neighbor state, with the enterprising and generous people of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio.

My Web Home Page is to be found here.
My pondering music blog is to be found here.

©ajm 2005