The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (37 page)

A.C. uncovered a story no one in the media had touched—the police killing of Henry Glover, first reported on in
The Nation
on January 5, 2009. He also joined forces with
New Orleans Times-Picayune
reporter Laura
Maggi, who reopened the Danziger Bridge case, in which police shot several unarmed African Americans after the storm, including a middle-aged mother who had her forearm blown off, a mentally disabled man who was shot in the back and killed, and a teenage boy, also killed. (Several others were wounded.)

Justice Department officials have charged eleven policemen for the Danziger Bridge case and five for the Glover case, and most recently sent warning letters to two more for the post-Katrina case in which Danny Brumfield was shot in the back and killed. In total they’ve opened up six civil rights cases for New Orleans police crimes post-Katrina, and a federal probe of the department is under way. With any luck, it’s the foundation of the real story of what went down after the storm, as well as reform of what A.C. tells me is the most corrupt and incompetent police department in the country.

TRUTH EMERGENCIES

Truth may be the first casualty of war; it’s certainly the most important equipment to have on hand in a disaster. There’s the practical truth about what’s going on: Is the city on fire? Is there an evacuation effort on the other side of town? And then there’s the larger truth: What goes on in disasters? Who falls apart and who behaves well? Whom should you trust? Most ordinary people behave remarkably well when their city is ripped apart by disaster. They did in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake; in New Orleans during Hurricane Betsy in 1965; in Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake; in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11; and in most disasters in most times and places.

Those in power, on the other hand, often run amok. They did in San Francisco in 1906, when an obsessive fear that private property would be misappropriated led to the mayor’s shoot-to-kill proclamation; a massive military and national guard on the streets; and the death of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of civilians. Much like New Orleans ninety-nine years later, those who claimed to be protecting society were themselves the ones who were terrorizing and shooting. Earlier in 2010, Haitians were subjected to a similar rampage of what the disaster sociologists Lee Clarke and Caron
Chess call “elite panic.” For example, fifteen-year-old Fabienne Cherisma was shot to death in late January in Port-au-Prince for taking some small paintings from a shop in ruins, one of many casualties of the institutional obsession with protecting property instead of rescuing the trapped, the suffering, and the needy.

Surviving the new era in which climate change is already causing more, and more intense, disasters means being prepared—with the truth. The truth is that in a disaster, ordinary people behave well overall; your chances of surviving a major disaster depend in part on the health and strength of your society going into it. Even so, countless individuals under corrupt governments—in New Orleans, in Mexico City, in Port-au-Prince—often rise to the occasion with deeply altruistic, creative, and brave responses. These are the norm. The savagery of elite panic is the exception but one that costs lives.

After Hurricane Katrina, neoliberals and Bush provided a near-perfect example of Naomi Klein’s theory of disaster capitalism. Everything from supplying buses for evacuation to tarps for torn-up roofs became an opportunity for Bush supporters to reap financial rewards. The city’s public housing was torn down; the schools became charter schools, many along military lines. Told this way, what happened was pure loss, for the left as well as for the poor (though the schools before Katrina had been a mess). But that’s not all that Katrina triggered.

During the storm and its aftermath, far more people did heroic things, and these, perhaps even more than the crimes Thompson reported on, are the key missing stories of the storm. Before he was shot, Herrington was one of hundreds who got into boats and commenced rescuing people stranded in the floodwater. Some in surrounding communities sneaked past authorities to start rescuing people in the drowned city. Young gang members kept mothers of small children and babies and elderly people provisioned. People banded together in schools and other surviving structures and formed improvisational communities whose members watched out for one another.

As days turned into weeks and then months, volunteers from around the country came to feed the displaced and rebuild the city. Others took evacuees into their homes and helped them start new lives. Middle-aged
Mennonites, young anarchists, musicians, members of the Rainbow Family of hippie communards, environmentalists, Baptists, Catholics, college students on spring break, ex–Black Panthers, movie stars, Habitat for Humanity carpenters, nurses, and nearly every other kind of citizen showed up to save New Orleans. The outpouring of generosity and empathy was extraordinary. New Orleans was saved by love.

I first visited the city post-Katrina six months after the storm, and it looked as though almost nothing had happened since. The place was wrecked. Houses were smashed or shoved by floodwater into the middle of the street; many had the spray-painted markings of search-and-rescue teams, some reporting bodies or pets found inside. Cars were flipped over or propped up on fences and trees. Whole neighborhoods were abandoned and pitch-black at night, because even the streetlights were dead; and in places like the Lower Ninth Ward, returning residents had to make street signs by hand.

The place could have died; its fate was up in the air. It still is—with coastal erosion and rising seas, the petroleum industry’s poisons, the troubled economy, and corroded political system that were the city’s problems before Katrina hit. Crime has risen, and New Orleans is a violent place. But it’s also a vibrant place again. By some estimates more than a million volunteers have come through the city. Some who intended to come for weeks found they couldn’t leave: they’d fallen in love with the gregarious sweetness of so many Orleanians and with the chance to make a difference. They’ve added their commitment to altruism and civil society to the city’s mix. New Orleans always had a flourishing public sphere of festivals and street life and a private sphere of social organizations, but there has been a rise in civic engagement, in public meetings, neighborhood groups, and focused organizations dealing with housing, the environment, immigrants’ rights, and more. Housing is scarcer and more expensive, but wages have risen since the labor pool shrank. New environmental initiatives are on the table or being realized.

Then there’s the catastrophe’s impact on national politics. The Bush administration’s outrageous incompetence and indifference prompted a hitherto intimidated press and nation to begin criticizing not just the
failed response but the Iraq War and the administration overall. The levees broke and so did the bulwarks that protected the president. As Bush’s own pollster put it, “Katrina to me was the tipping point. The president broke his bond with the public. . . . I knew when Katrina—I was like, Man, you know, this is it, man. We’re done.” The racism and poverty that the catastrophe revealed laid the groundwork for newcomer Barack Obama to ride to victory in 2008. Which is how we got Eric Holder, the attorney general who’s taken a direct role in some of the federal indictments in New Orleans this summer.

The very subject of recovery is a complicated one for New Orleans. After 9/11 New York pretty much wanted to get back to where it had been—a thriving, functioning city (albeit one with plenty of poverty and injustice). No one thought New Orleans should get back to what it had been, and the disaster became an opportunity for the city to reinvent itself in various ways. That process continues, and where it goes is anyone’s guess. It still depends on the dedication of volunteers and citizens, some of whom are returning, putting their lives back together in what may be, by some intangible measures of joy and belonging, America’s richest city, even if it’s the poorest by others.

A disaster unfolds a little like a revolution. No one is in charge, and anything is possible. The efforts of elites, often portrayed as rescue or protection, are often geared more toward preserving the status quo or seizing power. Sometimes they win; sometimes they don’t. Katrina brought many kinds of destruction and a little rebirth, including the spread of green construction projects, new community organizations, and perhaps soon, thanks to the work of Thompson and others, some long overdue justice for police crimes. It’s too soon to tell what it will all mean in a hundred years, but it’s high time to start telling the real story of what happened in those terrible first days and weeks.

2010

WE WON’T BOW DOWN

Carnival and Resistance in New Orleans

One day last July I sat next to the musician David Molina on a long bus ride. He showed me his pictures of Carnival in Paucartambo in the Peruvian Andes, and when he was done, I showed him mine of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The indigenous town at nearly 10,000 feet holds a raucous celebration with fireworks, costumes, people throwing stuff, playing with fire, kidnapping strangers and keeping them hostage at feasts, drinking in quantity, kids staying up into the small hours—the rules are all broken, and the first rule is the one of shyness and separation. New Orleans is about as different from Paucartambo as could be, starting with the fact that parts of it are below sea level, but it too keeps alive the old tradition of Carnival—not just on Mardi Gras, the last day of Carnival season, before Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, but all through the weeks from Twelfth Night, January 5, when it begins. What happens in Carnival is complicated. But let me send another float through this parade of ideas first.

Some years ago I wrote a book about hope. A few years later I went to look at the worst things that happen to people and found some more hope in the resilience, the inventiveness, the bravery, and occasionally the long-term subversion with which people respond. It culminated in another fairly hopeful book, based on the surprising evidence of what actually happens in disaster. Civil society happens, and sometimes joy in that society; institutional failure often also transpires. Sometimes a power struggle to re-establish the status quo follows, and sometimes the status quo wins, sometimes it doesn’t. Which is to say, sometimes we win, though that’s far from inevitable. This is grounds to be hopeful. Now, being hopeful seems to me like it’s preferable to being hopeless, but for six years I’ve been talking about these books in public. This means I’ve also been running into people
at readings, talks and interviews who are furiously attached to hopelessness, to narratives of despair and decline, to belief in an omniscient them who always wins and a feeble us who always loses. To keep hold of this complex, they have to skew the evidence, and they do. They cherry-pick. They turn complex facts into simple stories. They constitute a significant sector of the left.

I don’t believe that they represent the whole left; rather, it seems the self-appointed spokespeople for the left are both more privileged than the left as such and more attached to defeat. Defeat for the privileged means cynicism and an excuse for doing little or nothing; defeat for the oppressed means surrender to hideous or fatal conditions, which might be why hope has of late come from people like the members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the incredible undocumented-immigrant farmworkers organization that forced Taco Bell and then McDonald’s into negotiations. Hope, in the myth of Pandora’s box, is what is left behind after everything else has fled; those who hang on to everything else seem to give up or overlook hope. So they often say we always lose.

Always
is the key word here, because many leftists are also smitten with sweeping generalizations—and they are oddly willing to accept generalizations that everything is awful, while if you point out that not everything is awful they will believe you’ve said everything is wonderful and try to shoot that down. Attachment to despair and defeatism is often portrayed as realism, though it flies in the face of our history, in which, though corporations have continued their T-Rex march, a host of liberations—from colonialism and age-old discriminations—have proceeded apace, so much so that our society is pretty unrecognizable from a 1965 perspective, wilder than anything in the science fiction of the time in terms of changed roles for women, people of color, and unstraight people; in terms of changed ideas about nature, religion, power, justice, and more. And corporate capital has been far from the only force at work in this era that has seen the World Trade Organization diminished into near irrelevance, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) defeated, and NAFTA almost universally reviled.

I think of these naysayers as the Eeyore chorus, after the dismal donkey
in
Winnie-the-Pooh
, and I run into them a lot. It may be that for those coming from the mainstream to the left the chance to tell the underside of the official version—that it’s corrupt and destructive—seems like the work at hand. I come from the left, and my task is clearly telling the other, overlooked histories of hope, popular power, subversion, and possibility. Which elicits a lot of grumbling from Eeyore’s many reps.

I got a dose of one of the really common axioms of defeat from a well-spoken young academic woman early on my book tour. I’d been comparing disaster to Carnival in its disruptiveness and subversion of everyday roles. With some irritation at my invitation to consider a more open world, she raised the old bugbear that Carnival is not subversive because it reconciles people to the status quo. (It’s a dimming-down of Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous writings on Carnival in his book on Rabelais.) First of all, what is Carnival? I’ve only been to one, a couple of times, but it was in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and it consisted of a host of phenomena tending in all kinds of political directions.