Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

About Disconnecting (September 2005)

SOMETIMES IT HAPPENS that a question is for a moment more pertinent than answers or explanations. I'm not sure that the question I want to ask is of this order, for it has the air of being naive. Nevertheless I'll share it with you.

During the month of September, as a consequence of the catastrophe that occurred in New Orleans whose effects and pain will continue for years, people in the USA and throughout the world have started to re-examine the record of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove et al., who are the present leaders of the first world superpower.

A shift in opinion has taken place almost overnight. History, throwing us all back into our seats, suddenly opened its throttle. Whilst at the same time in New Orleans 20,000 people were desperately stranded and trapped in the Superdome.

Katrina — everyone refers to the hurricane by her name, as if she were some kind of avatar — revealed that there is dire and increasing poverty in the US, that blacks are typically treated as unwanted second-class citizens, that the systematic cutting of government investment in public institutions has produced widespread social disequilibrium and destitution (40 million Americans live without any aid if they fall ill or are hurt), that the so-called war against terrorism is creating administrative chaos, and that within and against all this, voices of protest are being raised loud and clear.

All this, though, was evident before Katrina to those living it, and to those who wanted to know. What she changed was that the media were there for once, showing what was actually happening, and the fury of those to whom it was happening. With her terrible gesture she wiped for a little while the opaque screens clean.

In some gnomic way the as yet innumerable dead on the Gulf Coast spoke not for, but with, the hundred thousand Iraqis who have died as a consequence of the ongoing disastrous and criminal war. Time and again in the US press Katrina and Iraq are being mentioned together. Yet Katrina was regular. She belonged to the familiar weather conditions which affect the Mexican Gulf. She was not hiding in Afghanistan. And merciless as she was, she did not belong to any Axis of Evil. She was simply a natural threat to American lives and property and she was heading for Louisiana.

It was in the self-interest (as well as the national interest) of the President and his chosen colleagues to meet the challenge she threw down, to foresee the needs of her victims and to reduce the ensuing pain and panic to the minimum possible. If they, the government, happened to fail to do this, they would be able to blame nobody else, and they themselves would be blamed. A child could foresee this. And they failed utterly. Their failure was technical, political and emotional.‘Stuff happens,' murmurs Donald Rumsfeld.

Is it possible that this administration is mad? This is my naive question. Wait. Let us try to define the variant of madness, for it may be that it has never occurred before. It has very little to do, for example, with Nero when he fiddled whilst Rome burnt. Any madness, however, implies a severe disconnection with reality, or, to put it more precisely, with the existent.

The variant we are considering touches upon the relationship between fear and confidence, between being threatened and being supreme. There is no negotiation between the two. Their ‘madness' operates like a switch which instantly turns one off and the other on. And what is grave about this is that it is in the long periods of negotiating between fear and confidence that the existent is normally surveyed and observed in its multitudinous complexity. It is there one learns about what one is facing. A binary ‘madness' excludes this.

On the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln President Bush announced two years ago: Mission accomplished in Iraq!

In some ways this binary affliction echoes the mechanism of a stock market, wherein there is only buying or selling and the two poles of bull and bear, and the rest of what exists, and how and where, barely impinges.

On Wall Street, the financial analysts are predicting increased profits for the Texan oil corporations as a result of the petrol shortages caused by the Gulf catastrophe.

Five days after Katrina had struck, when President Bush finally visited the devastated city, he astounded journalists by saying: ‘I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.'

On the same day, in the wrecked small town of Biloxi, the President's flying visit was preceded by a team who quickly cleared the rubble and corpses from the route his cortege would take. Two hours later the team vanished, leaving everything else in the town exactly as it was. The rest of what exists barely impinges.

To consider this heartless or cynical is to miss the diagnosis. His visits were a planned operation serving as a prelude to the assertion that: ‘We'll once again show the world that the worst adversities bring out the best in America.' Switch turned.

The calculations of the present US government are closely related to the global interests of the corporations and what has been termed the survival of the richest, who today also vacillate constantly and abruptly between fear and confidence.

The economist Grover Norquist, who is a talking head for corporate interests and to whom Bush and Co. listened when planning their tax reforms for the benefit of the rich, is on record as saying:‘I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.'

An ignorance about most of what exists, and an abdication from the very minimum of what can be expected of government — are we not approaching disconnections which amount to what can be called madness when found in the minds of those who believe they can rule the planet?

All political leaders sometimes parry with the truth, but here the disconnections are systematic and crop up not only in their announcements but in their every strategic calculation. Hence their ineptness. Their operation in Afghanistan failed, their war in Iraq has been won (as the saying goes) by Iran, Katrina was allowed to produce the worst natural disaster in US history and terrorist activities are increasing.

On my mobile I received a text message from Orange. It proposed that if I wanted to help the homeless and stranded in Louisiana, I could tap in the word FLOOD to a given number, and the equivalent of five dollars, debited to my account, would immediately be transferred to an aid organization.

I'd like to tap in now some more words to be sent between all of us: HOW MUCH LONGER GLOBAL POWER IN D NUMB HAND OF DOSE WHO KNOW NUTHIN?