|
New
Orleans and the Death of the Common Good
By CHRIS FLOYD
(Counterpunch, September 1,
2005)
"The river rose all day, The river rose all night.
Some people got lost in the flood, Some people
got away all right. The river have busted through
clear down to Plaquemine: Six feet of water in the
streets of Evangeline.
"Louisiana, Louisiana, They're trying to wash us
away, They're trying to wash us away."
--Randy Newman, Louisiana 1927
The destruction of New Orleans represents a
confluence of many of the most pernicious trends in
American politics and culture: poverty, racism,
militarism, elitist greed, environmental abuse,
public corruption and the decay of democracy at
every level.
Much of this is embodied in the odd phrasing that
even the most circumspect mainstream media sources
have been using to describe the hardest-hit victims
of the storm and its devastating aftermath: "those
who chose to stay behind." Instantly, the situation
has been framed with language to flatter the
prejudices of the comfortable and deny the reality
of the most vulnerable.
It is obvious that the vast majority of those who
failed to evacuate are poor: they had nowhere else
to go, no way to get there, no means to sustain
themselves and their families on strange ground.
While there were certainly people who stayed behind
by choice, most stayed behind because they had no y
and many have paid the price with their lives.
Yet across the media spectrum, the faint hint of
disapproval drips from the affluent observers, the
clear implication that the victims were just too
lazy and shiftless to get out of harm's way. There
is simply no understanding not even an attempt at
understanding the destitution, the isolation, the
immobility of the poor and the sick and the broken
among us.
This is from the "respectable" media; the great
right-wing echo chamber was even less restrained, of
course, leaping straight into giddy convulsions of
racism at the first reports of looting in the
devastated city. In the pinched-gonad squeals of
Rush Limbaugh and his fellow hatemongers, the hard-right
media immediately conjured up images of wild-eyed
darkies rampaging through the streets in an orgy of
violence and thievery.
Not that the mainstreamers ignored the racist angle.
There was the already infamous juxtaposition of
captions for wire service photos, where depictions
of essentially the same scene desperate people
wading through flood waters, clutching plastic bags
full of groceries were given markedly different
spins. In one picture, a white couple are described
as struggling along after finding bread and soda at
a grocery store. But beneath an almost identical
photo of a young black man with a bag of groceries,
we are told that a "looter" wades through the
streets after robbing a grocery store. In the photo
I saw, this evil miscreant also had a gasp! pack of
diapers under his arm.
Almost all of the early "looting" was like this:
desperate people of all colors stranded by the
floodwaters broke into abandoned stores and carried
off food, clean water, medicine, clothes. Perhaps
they should have left a check on the counter, but
then again what exactly was going to appen to all
those perishables and consumer goods, sitting around
in fetid, diseased water for weeks on end? (The
mayor now says it could be up to 16 weeks before
people can return to their homes and businesses.)
Obviously, most if not all of it would have been
thrown away or written off in any case. Later, of
course, there was more organized looting by criminal
gangs, the type of lawless element of every hue, in
every society whose chief victims are, of course,
the poor and vulnerable. These criminal operations
were quickly conflated with the earlier pilferage to
paint a single seamless picture of the American
media's favorite horror story: Black Folk Gone Wild.
But here again another question was left unasked:
Where were the resources the money, manpower,
materiel, transport that could have removed all
those forced to stay behind, and given them
someplace safe and sustaining to take shelter? Where,
indeed, were the resources that could have bolstered
the city's defenses and shored up its levees? Where
were the National Guard troops that could have
secured the streets and directed survivors to food
and aid? Where were the public resources the
physical manifestation of the citizenry's commitment
to the common good that could have greatly mitigated
the brutal effects of this natural disaster?
"President Coolidge came down here in a railroad
train, With a little fat man with a notebook in his
hand.
The president say, "Little fat man, isn't it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker's land?"
Well, we all know what happened to those vital
resources. They had been cut back, stripped down,
gutted, pilfered looted to pay for a war of
aggression, to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest,
safest, most protected Americans, to gorge the
coffers of a small number of private and corporate
fortunes, while letting the public sector the common
good wither and die on the vine. These were all
specific actions of the Bush Administration
including the devastating budget cuts on projects
specifically designed to bolster New Orleans'
defenses against a catastrophic hurricane. Bush even
cut money for strengthening the very levees that
broke and delivered the deathblow to the city. All
this, in the face of specific warnings of what would
happen if these measures were neglected: the city
would go down "under 20 feet of water," one expert
predicted just a few weeks ago.
But Bush said there was no money for this kind of
folderol anymore. The federal budget had been busted
by his tax cuts and his war. And this was a
deliberate policy: as Bush's mentor Grover Norquist
famously put it, the whole Bushist ethos was to
starve the federal government of funds, shrinking it
down so "we can drown it in the bathtub." As it
turned out, the bathtub wasn't quite big enough --
so they drowned it in the streets of New Orleans
instead.
But as culpable, criminal and loathsome as the Bush
Administration is, it is only the apotheosis of an
overarching trend in American society that has been
gathering force for decades: the destruction of the
idea of a common good, a public sector whose
benefits and responsibilities are shared by all, and
directed by the consent of the governed. For more
than 30 years, the corporate Right has waged a
relentless and highly focused campaign against the
common good, seeking to atomize individuals into
isolated "consumer units" whose political energies
kept deliberately underinformed by the ubiquitous
corporate media can be diverted into emotionalized
"hot button" issues (gay marriage, school prayer,
intelligent design, flag burning, welfare queens,
drugs, porn, abortion, teen sex, commie subversion,
terrorist threats, etc., etc.) that never threaten
Big Money's bottom line.
Again deliberately, with smear, spin and sham, they
have sought and succeeded in poisoning the well of
the democratic process, turning it into a tabloid
melee where only "character counts" while the
rapacious policies of Big Money's bought-and-sold
candidates are completely ignored.
As Big Money solidified its ascendancy over
government, pouring billions over and under the
table into campaign coffers, politicians could
ignore larger and larger swathes of the people. If
you can't hook yourself up to a well-funded, coffer-filling
interest group, if you can't hire a big-time Beltway
player to lobby your cause and get you "a seat at
the table," then your voice goes unheard, your
concerns are shunted aside. (Apart from a few
cynical gestures around election-time, of course.)
The poor, the sick, the weak, the vulnerable have
become invisible in the media, in the corporate
boardroom, "at the table" of the power players in
national, state and local governments. The
increasingly marginalized and unstable middle class
is also fading from the consciousness of the rulers,
whose servicing of the elite goes more brazen and
frantic all the time.
When unbridled commercial development of delicately
balanced environments like the Mississippi Delta is
bruited "at the table," whose voice is heard?
Not the poor, who, as we have seen this week, will
overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the overstressed
environment. And not the middle class, who might opt
for the security of safer, saner development
policies to protect their hard-won homes and
businesses. No, the only voice that matters is that
of the developers themselves, and the elite
investors who stand behind them.
"Louisiana, Louisiana, They're trying to wash us
away"
The destruction of New Orleans was a work of nature
but a nature that has been worked upon by human
hands and human policies. As global climate change
continues its deadly symbiosis with unbridled
commercial development for elite profit, we will see
more such destruction, far more, on an even more
devastating scale. As the harsh, aggressive
militarism and brutal corporate ethos that Bush has
injected into the mainstream of American society
continues to spread its poison, we will see fewer
and fewer resources available to nurture the common
good. As the political process becomes more and more
corrupt, ever more a creation of elite puppetmasters
and their craven bagmen, we will see the poor and
the weak and even the middle class driven further
and further into the low ground of society, where
every passing storm economic, political, natural
will threaten their homes, their livelihoods, their
very existence.
"Louisiana, Louisiana,
They're trying to wash us
away
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away"
|
