Missing from the Party

The impending catastrophic landfall of Hurricane Gustav has suddenly reminded us of Hurricane Katrina. More to the point, it's reminded the Republican and Democratic parties.

This is striking, considering that those parties' presidential conventions frame the first hurricane's anniversary, though neither actually falls on it. Three years before the Democrats left Denver, tens of thousands of people were streaming out of New Orleans (while thousands more were stubbornly, helplessly, staying put, partly because Mayor Ray Nagin had downplayed the severity of the approaching storm and partly because many of them lacked the means to get out).

The Republican convention in St. Paul is scheduled to begin three years after the evacuation of the Superdome. The anniversary of the hurricane’s landfall—of the breaching of the levees and the disappearance of the Lower Ninth Ward beneath a fetid gumbo of contaminated water lies between the two conventions like a no-man’s land between two hostile armies.

As I write this, both parties are scrambling to adapt to the probability that New Orleans will be the scene of a second disaster. John McCain has done everything short of put on a yellow Sou'wester. This is a good thing.

But is it churlish to point out that neither convention had, or is scheduled to have, among its dozens of featured guests and speakers, a survivor of Katrina? (There may have been a few on hand at the “New Orleans All Star Jam-Balaya” the Democrats threw for their delegates, and maybe the Republicans were reserving a seat for former Mississippi Senator Trent Lott. You may remember that Lott lost his beach house in the hurricane: one of President Bush’s earliest recorded responses to the disaster was his promise to build him a better one.)

The absence of such persons seems like an odd omission, given that at previous gatherings both parties made prominent use of emblematic tragedies—9/11, the Iraq war, the AIDS epidemic—and their survivors. The Republicans alone had Mary Fisher’s “Whisper of AIDS” speech in Houston in 1992 and Deena Burnett in New York in 2004, as well as along with a TV ad in which Ashley Faulkner, whose mother had died at the World Trade Center, was shown being hugged by the President and telling viewers, “He’s the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe.”

Of course it makes sense that no Katrina survivors will be speaking for the Republicans. A The Republican president had no interest in keeping them safe. At the height of the crisis, Bush was seen clowning with a guitar given him by the visiting president of Mexico. (Just before that, he had been seen giving John McCain a birthday hug.)

The reason the political parties showcase certain kinds of sufferers at their conventions is to signify their compassion for victims of war or terrorism or disease, their solidarity with their suffering, their determination that others shall not suffer as they did. That pretty much rules out the GOP’s reserving a speaking slot for a former resident of Gentilly who now lives in a FEMA trailer.

But what about the Democrats? Given their reputation as the party of compassion—not to mention the advantages attendant upon reminding the viewing public of the opposition’s most glaring failure after since the invasion of Iraq—you’d think they’d have jumped at giving the podium to someone who lived through Katrina. Ideally, someone from New Orleans - , a Terence Blanchard or a Mac Rebennec - or any one of the hitherto unknown men and women interviewed in Spike Lee’s epic documentary When the Levees Broke, whose stories of loss, humiliation, and endurance burn the heart like brands. Imagine how one of those stories would sound if it were told on prime-time television, before to 50,000 rapt conventioneers and millions of Americans.

The problem lies with the stigma that clings to Katrina’s survivors—that is, to its poor, black survivors. For all the indignation their plight aroused in the American media, there are still the lingering suspicions as to why so many of New Orleans’s (African-American) residents failed to get out before the storm hit. There are the persistent slanders (the appropriate word for a story that continues to be circulated long after it’s been proved untrue) about snipers shooting at rescue helicopters and perverts raping babies in the Superdome. There are still folks who nodded approvingly when Bill O’Reilly shook a finger at African-American youth and told them that the lesson of Katrina is “if you don’t get educated, if you don’t develop a skill and force yourself to work hard, you’ll most likely be poor, and sooner or later you’ll be standing on a symbolic rooftop waiting for help. Chances are that help will not be quick in coming.”

If the victims of 9/11 were exceptional sufferers, the victims of Katrina are designated ones, designated in the sense that their suffering is to a certain degree taken for granted. This is confirmed by the lack of coverage given New Orleans before August 2005, the years in which 23 percent of its people lived below the poverty line; when more than half of its elders were disabled; when the city’s murder rate was ten times the national average, with some of the killing attributable to rogue police officers.

What made the survivors of 9/11 exceptional is that, in the popular imagination, they weren’t supposed to suffer. That is no more than most Americans think of themselves. The corollary is that a designated sufferer is supposed to suffer, his suffering being something that he brought on himself. The origins of this conceptual division are bound up with race and class, but the division itself has an almost mystical character. It is beyond the reach of empirical evidence or reason. This is simply how it is. This is simply what’s supposed to happen, and who it’s supposed to happen to.

In a year in which an African-American man stands a good chance of becoming our next president, some things still haven’t changed.

Open to Interpretation

Take away the "L" from Palin and you get "Pain."

Serves Us Right

One of the blights of American politics is the way it conceals considerations of utility and power behind a screen of ethics. Or, really, "ethics."

A case in point would be the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was undertaken in the interest of
a) obtaining a cheap and reliable supply of oil, or
b) creating an artificial island of (pro-American) democracy in the Arab Middle East, or
c) resolving the 43rd president's Oedipal entanglement with the 41st

but was presented to the American public as a moral gesture on a par with the entry into World War II.

Hence Senator John McCain's characterization of that war-- Iraq not WWII-- as "transcendent."

tran·scen·dent
Pronunciation: \-dənt\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin transcendent-, transcendens, present participle of transcendere
Date: 15th century
1 a: exceeding usual limits : surpassing b: extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience cin Kantian philosophy : being beyond the limits of all possible experience and knowledge
2: being beyond comprehension
3: transcending the universe or material existence — compare immanent 2
4: universally applicable or significant


The fact is that politics and ethics are two separate realms that occasionally overlap.

For the moment, I will not comment on the politics of the current presidential contest. If I start, it will take a dart from a trank-gun to shut me up.

I will talk about ethics.

From an ethical perspective, any political contest ought to be viewed in terms of its likely effects on suffering, the suffering it causes, the suffering it relieves.

At other times in American history, the ethical variations between the two competing candidates-- or between the policies which, if elected, they were likely to enact-- was fairly small. It is now great.

One of the candidates is committed to the continuing death of foreign civilians and American soldiers in a war he endorsed as "transcendent" but that most experts view as contingent to the real and unavoidable conflict with Islamic, or Islamically-inspired, terrorism. One of the war's earliest consequences was the introduction of religious terror into a country from which it had previously been absent. Prior to March 2003, there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq. This is not to say that Iraq was paradise. It was a hell with only one devil.

One of the candidates would continue giving carte blanche to an industry that has exploited American natural resources, manipulated the country's foreign policy, and degraded the global environment, the last to such an extent as to threaten the continuing existence of hundreds? -- thousands?-- of life forms and even of land masses.

One of the candidates endorses lowering taxes for the rich and raising them for the middle-class and working poor.

One wants to cut more strands of the social safety net, health care in particular.

One promotes expanding the reach of government into the private lives of American citizens. And into the bodies of American women. His justification for the latter would be to protect other, hypothetical, beings from suffering.

This is not the place to attempt to define suffering. I will simply give examples of it.




The suffering of a father who has seen his son killed while playing football in the street.

The suffering of a strong young man who comes home from a foreign war unable to sleep or hold a job or, really, do much of anything but crouch on the floor of his trailer, from where he can keep an eye on the doors and windows, and keep the TV on to drown out the clamor in his head. For this debility the VA gives him a small stipend and some pills that don't work.

The suffering of a naively devout young man who went to a foreign country to do unspecified "volunteer" work and shortly found himself seized by mercenaries, sold to an invading army, and then delivered, shackled and hooded, to a prison on the other side of the world on suspicion of being an "enemy combatant." Here he is deprived of sleep, occasionally beaten, and driven to such a state of despair that he has tried to kill himself. His captors call this "asymmetrical warfare."

The suffering of a $20-an-hour factory worker now forced to support three children as a $7.50-an-hour checker at a WalMart, the factory having closed. She lives in terror of falling ill because, of course, she has no health insurance.

The suffering of the faceless millions whose small plots will cease to support crops, from whose waters the fish will vanish, whose huts will be swept away by storms more savage than any in their memory or in the memories of the generations before them.

Hell, the After-Party

Please don't think that I spend my free time dreaming up inventive punishments for others. (It's true that I did this as a boy, especially between the ages of 11 and 14, after which I discovered drugs.) In a second challenge, I invite readers to think of the punishments that they themselves might expect to undergo in hell.

St. Ignatius Loyola recommended something like this in his "Spiritual Exercises":

First prelude: This is the representation of place. Here it will be to see in imagination the length, breadth, and depth of Hell.
Second prelude: I will ask for what I desire. Here it will be to ask for a deep awareness of the pain suffered by the damned, so that if I should forget the love of the Eternal Lord, at least the fear of punishment will help me to avoid falling into sin.
First point: To see in imagination the great fires, and the souls enveloped, as it were, in bodies of fire.
Second point: To hear the wailing, the screaming, cries, and blasphemies against Christ our Lord and all His saints.
Third point: To smell the smoke, the brimstone, the corruption, and rottenness.
Fourth point: To taste bitter things, as tears, sadness, and remorse of conscience.
Fifth point: With the sense of touch to feel how the flames surround and burn souls.
Colloquy: Enter into a colloquy with Christ our Lord. Recall to mind the souls in hell. . . . Conclude with an ‘Our Father.’ (Anthony Mottola, trans. New York: Doubleday, 1964. pp. 59-60.)

Please note that the restrictions in the previous post apply.

A season in hell

Going back to the impunity question, what would the opposite of impunity look like? What would the appropriate penalties for the executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, especially in view of reports that the latter company's CEO brushed off internal warnings that it was buying too many bad loans? (The officer who gave the warnings testified that the executive, Richard F. Syron, "said we couldn’t afford to say no to anyone.")

What penalties should be imposed on people who took out mortgages they had no realistic hope of ever paying? What should happen to the companies that not only sold such mortgages to such buyers, but shamelessly trolled for them?

What punishment would be adequate to the officials who authorized a policy of torture?

Or for the ones who ginned up the evidence justifying the invasion of Iraq?

A few years ago, I had the idea of updating the Inferno with a view to providing circles for crimes that Dante hadn't thought of-- and, to be frank, for the pleasure of depicting my enemies blistering on the devil's tanning bed.

I imagined one circle in which George Bush and Dick Cheney and all their subalterns are made to crawl eternally across a desert that might be the desert of Iraq, an infinity of white-hot sand and white-hot sky in which the only landmark were the charred carcasses of automobiles, tanks, and Humvees. They are crawling because on their backs and around their necks they are bearing corpses. They are hung or bedizened with them like ancient dowagers hung with pearls. There are the corpses of American soldiers and the corpses of Iraqi ones, the corpses of terrorists and insurgents, of unlucky motorists who drove too close to an armored vehicle or failed to stop at a checkpoint. There are the corpses of old women and children.

It's a little known fact that the corpses of children weigh much more than those of adults. At least this is true in hell.

Part of the war-makers' punishment is that the bodies that hang from them talk. Actually, they won't stop talking. This is true even of those bodies that no longer have anything recognizable as a mouth or head.

And what they say is "Why am I being hurt?" They say it over and over. Although their killers explain to them, sometimes brusquely, sometimes shamefacedly, why they had to be killed, although they offer the same explanations they once gave us, their patsies and accomplices, still the dead ask, "Why am I being hurt?"

This may be because they don't believe the killers' explanations. Or simply because they cannot hear them. Who, after all, expects the dead to hear?

Of course, this is my fantasy of punishment. In the spirit of participatory blogging, I invite guests to contribute their own ideas of appropriate punishment, for these or other crimes, public or private. In the interest of humanity-- and in accordance with the Bybee memo (see previous post) punishments that cause death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions are not permissable.