Reflections on Hurricane Rita-2

September 26, 2005

[ Katrina 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Rita 1 | 2 ]

In the latest post devoted to Hurricane Katrina, my thoughts were with the aftermath of the calamity, and how ideology emerged from our industrial system. As usual, it was a stream-of-consciousness essay; exploiting the weblog format to the fullest (to say nothing of the indulgence of my readers) I wandered from the first hiccoughs of our industrial complacency (1973-1983, 1986-1991), to the infiltration of our political class by corporate management, to the [narrowly political] triumph of public choice theory. As summaries go, it was a very dry one. Now I turn to the subsequent, lesser, calamity that struck the Gulf Coast. What major observations need I make about it?

Initially, of course, I wanted to observe the conflict among rival narratives explaining the evacuation procedures. The "Texas-efficient/Louisiana-subhuman" narrative, rather to my relief, seems to have not caught on much as I had feared it would. The extreme invective and assumptions of quite literally subhuman ineptitude on the part of any official who happens to be a Democrat at that precise moment, seem to have smacked too much of the sort of invective against the USA generally that the Katrina disaster inspired abroad.¹

In view of how favorable it would have been to so many of the ideological narratives I outlined in my last Katrina post, one would expect many observers to point out that there's a very compelling proximate reason why a forced evacuation like that which occurred in the Netherlands in 1995,² would be impossible here. Essentially, the most prominent difference between urban African American populations and the population of Limburg Province, NL, is that the latter trust the authorities and the former do not. This can be interpreted in many different ways. The conservative Usonian nationalist can declare that this "proves" the African American underclass, by willfully refusing to assimilate into the rest of society, endangers himself and those obligated to live with him (I have heard this argument made in the past, in different contexts). The liberal can point out this shows a more comprehensive effort needs to be made to reach out to underprivileged minorities, and indeed, this does some like an obvious conclusion to draw. The leftist can argue this proves the Usonian state is not, to all intents and purposes, a legitimate one; it is rather a class-state: of, by, and for the bourgeoisie and their adjutants. The rightist can argue this proves either the genetic inferiority or else the cultural irredemption of the African American community. The European chauvinist can argue this proves that US pretensions of democracy are a joke, since such a large cohort regard the state created through our democratic institutions as a force of occupation.

For the most, none of this actually was discussed. The few exceptions amounted to racist diatribes (on the part of the far right) or totally aimless nihilism.

African Americans, of course, already knew what sort of relationship they had with the Usonian state, and have nothing to prove. The ones with whom I spoke were surprised by nothing: the media hyperbole in regards to the lawless conduct of refugees, the scramble of neighboring White-majority communities to "defend" themselves from fellow humans fleeing for their lives, and all the rest. This is no bonanza for them.

In fact, just as apologists for the Bush Administration "overlooked" the mistrustful relationship of African Americans to the state as an impediment to the sort of orderly evacuation that is said to have occurred in the wake of Rita, so too did our most strident critics in Europe. As a category of ideological critics of the Usonian state, the Western European commentariat was happy to observe that Usonians are racist; but, like most Whites who observe racist behavior of other Whites, they tend to imagine racism is a personal vice, irrelevant to one's objective conditions. Nor are Western Europeans uniquely guilty of this; on the contrary, your California-born correspondent was totally guilty of self-righteous condescension towards the White Southeastern population. Ironically, it was not until the former Confederacy won undisputed mastery of the federal government they once fought to liquidate, then I finally was forced to face the fact that the Southerners were merely hosts to the elites that now ruled the USA, and not privileged neighbors.

The comparative mercy of Rita, next to Katrina, has tended to blur this: that the White Southerner's very lack of privilege was the thing that made the military the best opportunity for dignity and career security, and hence a sacred pillar of society; that the White Southerner's lack of privilege, relative to the Yankee, made intellectual curiosity an invidious sign of nihilism; made the feeblest radical person an intolerable present threat; and made of every free Black an objective enemy. This led to a peculiar conflict in the colonial society, in which the privileged invader—most likely regarded as canaille in the metropole—finds friendly interaction with the subject class excessively dangerous. A friendship across racial lines, in a racial society, eventually exposes the privileged friend to the obligation that he risk his standing for his honor as a friend; and exposes his sense of social harmony to the reccurring race wars that are prone to erupt in his community. So the privileged person, even if his breeding and class-prestige rejects the egregiously racist behavior of, say, a redneck or a racialist fanatic, will nonetheless crave the civil tranquility that only racial homogeneity seems to promise.

The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's brilliant movie about the Algerian War of Independence, begins with the pre-dawn raid on a block of apartments in the Kasbah. There, the entire adult male population is rounded up and marched out into black marias. Only then do we flash back to the main character's radicalization in the FLN.

The rounding up of the "rival" race is a classic dread experienced by the subject group in imperialism. For hundreds of thousands of US citizens, being rounded up in bloc is not merely a dreaded, fantastical outcome of centuries of White cruelty; it is actually part of the living collective memory of African American adults. That an African American community would be difficult to evacuate, en masse, should hardly come as a surprise to any honest and self-aware White person.

My bizarre preoccupation with the attitudes of European commentaria exists for two reasons: one, I regard the USA as an economic and political "march" of Europe. Both in accomplishment and in wickedness, in brilliance and in villainy, the two entities are of a piece. Since 1492, there have been few monstrosities in the history of either land that did not have antecedents or stimulating forces in the other. As an ecological actor, the Atlantic Ocean has been a highway as well as a heat engine for the hurricanes that periodically thrash the Gulf. Second, including the point of view of Europeans allows us to see both sides of collective guilt. Americans who identify with the South, but regard themselves as civilized and cultured, are routinely outraged to learn they are indiscriminantly lumped together with a history of lynching, slavery, and oppression. Those who, like myself, hail from states that pride themselves on "harmonious" race relations (e.g., California, Massachusetts), are likely to do the lumping, and be on the receiving end of it—from European visitors, who may in the next breath attribute this to the racial mongrelization of our country. And one can only guess at the abject horror a European reader of Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth may feel, seeing himself herded with the Yanks into a sort of moral superfund site.

This is an almost-randomly contrived hierarchy of mob-dom, in which the emergence of the mob as a response to public desperation (about, perhaps, a threat to employment or pulbic order) is more likely, the closer one gets to a racial frontier, or the less the state responds instead. In the case of the hurricane zones, the authorities, left alone by the federal authorites, became a mob themselves—an orderly mob, retaining martial discipline, but facing down their neighbors, naked and afraid, with a mailed fist.

NOTE: 1 Many of the essays and commentary I read tended to insist that Hurricane Katrina exposes the abject failure of all things Usonian (I alone use the word "Usonian" as the adjectival form of USA, though). That's a reasonable attitude to take, given a rather superficial Weltanschaung. However, if one is Usonian, and if one does not already believe that the USA is messed up in a particular way, then the sanctimonious chortling one encountered in much of the EU press would be quite irritating. And mark you, that the EU press is feeling vindicated in quite the opposite direction from the "it's the Louisiana Democrat's fault" crowd. The latter has the additional burden of directing its attitude of haughty non-compassion towards the voters of New Orleans, and cannot claim that it is really criticizing institutions.

It must be noted, moreover, that the outburst of "Katrina proves Americans are uniquely racist, callous, idiotic, contemptible yahoos" was more feared than real. Even the Guardian's Polly Toynbee surprised me (again) by warning her readers that smugness towards the USA was misplaced. Being Polly Toynbee, though, she does indulge in an impressive amount of it in the very same essay. The only caveat she happens to have, is that the UK is not Scandanavia.

2 "Adapting to climate change: A case study on riverine flood risks in The Netherlands" (PDF), Tola, van der Grijpa, Olsthoorna, & van der Werffa (USA-NL institutions 1999; for a brief allusion to the evacuation, see War & Piece, via Hollandaise. The Barcelona Field Studies Centre (BFSC) carries an article on the 1995 flooding that relates more directly to the issues raised by Mr. Tiggelaar.

On 31 January 1995, at Lobith, where the Rhine enters the Netherlands from Germany, the level had risen to 13.48 metres above sea level.

In the Netherlands, at least 4 people were killed , some 250,000 had to be evacuated and large tracts of cities were submerged between 30 January and 1 February 1995 – mostly from the Limburg region south of Nijmegen and from Zeeland, around Rotterdam, Europe's largest port...

See also "Geographical Eye: River Floods" (PDF), Channel 4 (UK), 2000; and "European Research on Flood Risk Management" (PDF), Kortenhaus, & Samuels; FLOODsite, 2004. The latter includes a photo of the flash floods at Vaison-la-Romaine, France (1992).