Brooks Landon wants to make t-shirts that say "New Orleans: From the People Who Brought You Baghdad." As phrases go, I think often as well of the subhead to David Perry's lost blog, something very much like "Slo-Mo Mega-Mogadishu," which I take to be a description of the current unfolding state of affairs in Iraq, as apt as it is sonically tense.
It has seemed as well like a useful caption for New Orleans, for the particular revelatory unconcealing of the way that, within the First World which is the United States, Third World spaces are folded in; what is the Convention Center but a "weak state" in a bell jar, its "chaos" simply the name for having been abandoned as irrelevant by the administrative superpower?
The Third World imagery is powerful; aside from style of dress depicted, the photos of refugees trudging along a train track with their possessions slung over shoulders might as well come from Ethiopia under famine, Cambodia under carpet-bombing, Izmit under the earthquake. But it may be a mistake to leap to such comparisons, as if this were a new reality for "us," the unheraled arrival of an image-fact from a foreign world indicating a domestic state of exception.
New Orleans (and it is these images I am thinking of, by which I don't mean to ignore the devastation of Biloxi and Gulfport, and the rest) may look like nothing we've seen in the U.S. before. But this would simply be to think that a film on fast-foward is unrelated to the real-time version. The reality of New Orleans is neither new nor exceptional; it is an ongoing American reality, merely amplified by the speed at which the horror has unfolded.
It is neither a singular, implacable natural disaster nor a failure of the Bush administration (the false binary currently on offer). Or, rather, it's both those things — and both those things are relatively predictable, even familiar elements of a present history. Cynical political regimes and "natural disasters" happen, regularly.
They are morphemes of an American narrative already in the middle of being told all over the place; the images of the last week are, to say it another way, the tip of an image-iceberg which perhaps we might now recognize as a way-things-are. The city-moment that the New Orleans flood most resembles is not some far-flung disaster zone, not some it-can't-happen-here happpening, against all odds, here. What we are watching is not slo-mo mega-Mogadishu, but time-lapse Detroit.
The precondition is radical stratification of wealth in the urban area, in part caused by deregulation and union failure. Then the "disaster" starts: first comes the destruction and abandonment of the urban center's infrastructure; the relocation of massive portions of the remaining population to single, enclosed structures for more efficient state management; then comes departure for those who can afford it (at speed, this is called evacuation; over years it's known as white flight); the abandonment of the urban center to the inevitable results of food shortages, absolute social alienation, and despair; the not-quite-speakable consideration of making official the unofficial policy of letting the city rot and vanish from the face of the world; the contravening plan to recapitalize the city on massive scale, featuring tax abatements and other subsidies for corporate developers, which will reintegrate the races and classes downtown in a humanitarian fashion by promising economic benefits in the traditional format (jobs for the poor, profits for the wealthy), all the while ignoring the fact that even in the best case, the economics of reconstruction are only possible because of the initial, sanctioned obliteration.
It's an economy based on the planned obsolescence of cities, with each cycle benefitting those who operate the turning wheel's mechanism, while immiserating those who are born and broken on it. Why interfere with anything that speeds the cycle? But again, that logic leads to a demonology of the current President, and that would be a convenient, emotionally understandable mistake. It involves misunderestimating the whole by fixing on a part. Perhaps it is also a kind of wishful thinking, an attempt at patience and optimism: like a given natural disaster, a given presidency ends. Either way, it is a consciousness defined by a blindness to the systemic conditions which have determined Detroit and New Orleans equally.
This current cycle will not end with this president, any more than Detroit's cycle ended with Reagan's departure. Administrations are indeed expressions of cycles, not causes. Aid now; change at a structural level; one more try if you want to be citizens.
Posted by jane at September 6, 2005 09:24 AM | TrackBack