After the Storm: A Primer of American Politics from the Isle of Denial

1
Looking at America from the rubble of New Orleans, the post-Katrina world. Does it give us a new perspective, or is our vision just clouded by the huge piles of debris and scum?

2
New Orleans as the "banana republic of the United States." Our "third world" status and all the cliché'd imagery of the dark and concupiscent city. Sultry black women with beads of sweat on their breasts propositioning young farm boys on Bourbon Street. Streetcars named desire and all those luscious fantasies of working class sensuality. What upstanding evangelical hasn't jerked off in the closet thinking about it?

And so of course when tragedy comes it is our fault, judgement from on high.

We are drawn irresistably toward becoming their fantasy of us. In fact, our aid package is based on it. If we act out their fantasies, they respond and pay. We are hired monkeys in a travelling sideshow.

3
Schwarzenegger's refusal to commute the death sentence of Tookie Williams, as well as the hoopla and the opportunity for grandstanding the last-minute appeals provided, confirm the true nature of capital punishment in America to be theatrical. Gone are even the remotest claims that capital punishment serves as a deterrent, or that the penitentiary system strives toward reform and rehabilitation. These arguments have given way to a discourse on "victim's rights," which consist entirely of the right to see the perpetrator-- or any scapegoat-- punished, sadistically and publicly. It makes absolutely no difference if the punished one is guilty or innocent, reformed or insane, penitent or not-- this is proven by the prosecutorial mandate to fight all evidence of innocence.

The process, then, smacks of religous sacrifice.

The early Puritans burned their witches alive, apparently, in the process, expiating some violent poison from the community. But like orgasm these ceremonies are short lived-- and habit forming.
What a boon this storm has provided to the viewing public.


4
During the days immediately following the levee breaks, there was only one radio station on the air, run by Clear Channel. Very little information was posted on this station. Instead, the two talk-jocks took calls from listeners. People called in from their attics or their roofs, or stuck in their houses with no way out. In every instance these people were found to be at fault. "What did you think was going to happen?" "Didn't you hear the evacuation order?" "Let me get this straight, you knew about the evacuation order, you knew it was going to flood, you can't swim, and still you didn't evacuate?" "Get on your roof, make a flag out of a shirt, wave it at the helicopters. That's all you can do. You made your decision."

5
When I walked by Sewell Cadillac on the Wednesday after the storm, I noticed the big windows broken out, but didn't know at the time the cars had all been stolen by police. Next door, a group of black teenagers was trying to get a car out of a parking garage, putting down boards so they could get the car over the treadle in the wrong direction. The car they were stealing was 70's era El Camino. At first I wondered why they were stealing such an old car (it was barely running), but then I realized that you can hotwire old cars, and you can't newer ones. The police had keys to the Cadillacs; the poor blacks had only their ingenuity. The class divisions held as order supposedly broke down.

6
The "breakdown of social order" that occurred in the wake of the storm was almost entirely fantasized. It's telling that one of President Bush's first comments on the disaster was that there should be zero tolerance for looting (because of course it is better to let the food rot on the shelves while people starve than to violate the sacred code of property.)

Most of the incidents of looting were limited to necessities, and perishables. As no stores were open, it was impossible to buy anything, so “looting” was the only alternative.

Among my own friends, I noticed that they "looted" the same stores they normally frequent. The uptown yuppies went to Whole Food. Bywater artistes went for the coffee shops. And in mid city we just kept on going to the Sav-A-Center. In fact, it is quite arguable that what actually happened was a profound strengthening of the social order, that everyone kept doing the same thing, with the same orderly class divisions, in the utter absence of enforcement from the police or the state. I was no more afraid rowing down Canal Street than I am driving it.

It's also true that the fantasy of wholesale orgy that pertains to New Orleans in normal times was accentuated during the storm, but this, too, is merely another example of the normality that prevailed.


7
The services the police provide to us, keeping us simple citizens safe from burglary and mugging, are like the community services corporations provide for public relations. Just as Ronald McDonald house is nothing more than an advertising ploy for the fast food machine, and Bill Gates' charity contributions are efforts to make the whole world safe for Windows, the function of the cop on the street is to provide PR for the police state. No doubt there were administrators who worked for the gestapo and were very nice people, friendly, helpful, and efficient.


8
Can we imagine a world without police? Like John Lennon said, it's easy if you try. What would this world be like? I once knew a preacher and he told me if he didn't believe in god he didn't know what he would do. I pressed him on it and asked him how he would behave differently, and he said, "well, I'd sell cocaine on the street corner- I'd go to orgies- I would rob and pillage."

I said to him, "no you wouldn't. You wouldn't behave substantially differently from the way you behave now. The ethical basis of your life has nothing to do with god but is entirely social. And I'll tell you one better-- you don't even believe in god now, and you never have. The fact that you use god as a theoretical prop for your social practice proves he's a McGuffin. In your heart of hearts you're the most cynical man imaginable."

Likewise, the police are our McGuffin. Like the pastor's god, they are the anti-fantasy, the shield we throw up between ourselves and our bloodthirsty dreams. But the dreams erupt in the shield itself.


9
Dialectical materialism fails to predict the current structure of the world because it relies on a single human tendency, which is to seek advantage, the will to power, or simple greed. Marxism assumes that everyone seeks the course of activity that is most advantageous or most profitable to themselves. It fails to take into account that often people behave simply for the worsening of their neighbor's situation, and even according to a death-wish. The most obvious example of this is the suicide bomber, but we can also see it in political and corporate behavior.

Had the oil and auto companies been striving for what was best for them in the long run, they would have been developing hybrid technologies and economical cars, instead of gas guzzlers. Instead, they have plundered their own markets by substituting short term hype for long term planning.

We can also see the death-wish playing out in the Bush administration. When the Bush machine told the lies that led to popular support for the attack of Iraq, they knew the truth would one day come out. They didn't care. In fact they welcome this obloquy. Do we think they are saints? Heh heh heh (sly wink).
Likewise, the administration is now proposing more tax cuts, even as they propose to spend more on the war and something on rebuilding New Orleans. The determination here is not to stimulate business (since there is no economic evidence, anywhere in history, that tax cuts stimulate business) but simply to bankrupt the federal government, a suicide tactic.

As the suicide bomber stands, now, as a special, and holy, member of Islamic society, so people like Bush and Cheney stand to evangelical America. Theirs is the ecstacy of a sublime destruction, a fantasy come true. They are our martyrs in the holy war.

10
The unfairness of the police system is part, maybe even the most important part, of its allure. The wrongful conviction is one of our narratives, one that gives us comfort and blessed expiation. In justice is injustice (see the brand new sitcom, inJustice).

11
When shots were fired on Danziger Bridge on Sept 4, cheers rang out on the police radio. The story circulated that an officer had been down and that six of the bad guys had been killed. It turned out only two people were shot, a mentally ill older man-- with multiple bullets in the back-- and a 19 year old boy. No police were injured.

We want so badly to believe that shooting someone will solve the problem, that there is someone to shoot, that there is an "us" and a "them" and that they are not the same thing.

12
On NPR this morning a story about one city (Santa Clara) which is instituting a program of separating juvenile offenders with mental illness from the rest in the court/police/prison system. The indication is that by treating the mentally ill offenders instead of punishing them, recidivism is reduced to about ten percent (as opposed to about 90 percent in the general population). Some kids, they said, were left hallucinating in isolation. The story also noted that the program cost nothing; ie, it costs no more, per subject, to treat them than it does to punish them.

But the logical step the story refused to take is that if we treated all criminals instead of punishing them, we would have the same result. Recidivism, costs, and overall crime rates would all go down. But that would deny us our theatre of cruelty, our pantheon of punishment, revenge, and sacrifice.

13
"There are no accidents."

If only the sheet pilings had been driven deeper. If only that barge hadn't been moored in the Industrial Canal. If only FEMA had responded in hours rather than days. If only Bush had behaved like Lyndon Johnson when Betsy hit (Johnson was on the ground in New Orleans five hours after the storm.)

We should view these events as Freudian slips that reveal the repressed, or simply unspoken, wish. What lives in the dark secret heart of America now is a fidgeting desire to see it all burn. Jefferson's America, Whitman's America, even Ginsberg's America-- where are these visions now? Who among us can muster the optimism (much less the literacy) for a romantic vision of the nation and its possibilities?

But then again wouldn't it be cool to watch the water rise, first New Orleans and then Miami and then LA and New York slipping under, till there's nothing left but a handful of survivalists on top of a building in Denver, surrounded by floating debris and bloated corpses, stashing their MRE's and loading their guns.

Does it give us a new perspective, or is our vision just clouded?

We are drawn irresistably toward becoming their fantasy of us.

The class divisions held as order supposedly broke down.