Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Stephen Smith is a regular Webdiarist. His last piece was The migration bill – edge of the human rights precipice. The following piece is a follow up to Is New Orleans the beginning of the end of the war in Iraq?

By Stephen Smith

“Envy is what disenchanted systems that have lost their intensity feel in the presence of high-intensity cultures.” - Jean Baudrillard, “The Despair of Having Everything” (2002)

“This is the story of a crime – of the murder of reality.” - Jean Baudrillard, “The Perfect Crime” (1996)

America suffers an excess of the ‘real’. No one admits to any limit to impunity. From natural disaster in New Orleans to military disaster in Iraq, there is no reappraisal. The answer, it seems, is to create a new reality – add a new layer of illusion. In short, to further the state of self-delusion. Why are there gates and fences around Disney World? It is the only way to set it apart from the rest of the ‘real’ America.

As the latest illustration of ‘real life’, consider the Maine National Guard’s ‘flat daddy’ and ‘flat mummy’. These are substitutes for guard members posted to Iraq and Afghanistan. They are cutouts made from photos stuck to cardboard, to ride in cars, sit at the dinner table and even go to church.

“I prop him up in a chair, or sometimes put him on the couch and cover him up with a blanket”, one spouse told The Boston Globe. “The cat will curl up on the blanket, and it looks kind of weird. I’ve tricked several people by that. They think he’s home again.”

In New Orleans, George W Bush could try cutouts to replace some of the thousands of citizens who have not returned – and may never return. From a passing cable car we might glimpse the silhouette of a sax player frozen in time to the tune of “Walking to New Orleans”.

Already we feel uneasy. Something is missing from the wash up after Cyclone Katrina. We tend to overlook the forsaken culture and heritage of New Orleans that may prove to be the greatest loss of all.

The bare stats are scary enough. More than 1,800 people died in the flooding of New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. A year later, 700 people are still missing. New Orleans itself has shrunk from close to half a million people before the storm to a population now of about 230,000.

A congressional report called the response to Katrina “a failure of initiative”. But suspicion remains that it was more a case of deliberate oversight. It set out not only to leave the streets unfit for living, but also perish a sense of shared culture. Rising in its place would be a vastly different city. If proven, this would amount to a cultural genocide never before witnessed on the scale of an entire US city.

Evidence – or yet more questions – may to be found in Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees Broke. He accuses the Bush administration of using the Katrina disaster to rid New Orleans of much of its black population. Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot set out to ask Katrina’s 25 Biggest Questions. Here, they trace the ‘rivers’ of power and influence. As they report:

“Locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect – the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.”

The murder of a great city. We might compare it to the haunting history of the Deep South. But still Katrina remains an ugly event beyond analysis of race and class. A more telling comparison might be with the Third World where we find a ‘bare life’ existence (such as the refugee camp) that mirrors the fate of the poorer residents of New Orleans.

In this respect, Bush might well view the ‘melting pot’ that is New Orleans as an alien enclave on home soil. On this point we find past descriptions of New Orleans to be most compelling. As A J Liebling discovered:

“New Orleans resembles Genoa or Marseilles, or Beirut or the Egyptian Alexandria more than it does New York... Like Havana and Port-au-Prince, New Orleans is within the orbit of a Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic. The Mediterranean, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico form a homogeneous, though interrupted, sea.”

New Orleans, then, has much in common with the culture of ’the other’. What we need is a framework to help us understand how this fits in with US global power.

French critic Jean Baudrillard gives us a theoretical model for just such a purpose. In his article, Our Society’s Judgment and Punishment (and alternative translation), his main argument is that:

“It is the mission of the West to make the world's many cultures interchangeable and subordinate to the global order. A culture bereft of values, is now taking revenge on the values of other cultures.”

Baudrillard goes on to develop this theme.

“The rise of the globalised system has been powered by the furious envy of an indifferent, low-definition culture faced with the reality of high-definition cultures. Envy is what disenchanted systems that have lost their intensity feel in the presence of high-intensity cultures... This is a violent expression of repressed feeling about lives in captivity, about sheltered existence, about, in fact, having far too much of existence.”

By “too much of existence” we include what is bombarded at us by the media. By “high-definition” cultures we refer to the way New Orleans has sought to retain its Creolised character in the face of the ever more fictionalised nation of George W Bush. To his mind the crooked path of the ‘Crescent City’ may as well be lost to Voodoo.

As Spike Lee and Mike Davis warn us, reconstruction is poised to remodel New Orleans forever. Its blueprint is one that we recognise from Dubai and the Gold Coast to Florida.

To suggest such copying from place to place is to imply that all cultures are interchangeable. This in turn draws us into Baudrillard’s theory of simulation. Here too, a number of parallels emerge with the fate of New Orleans.

As Baudrillard says, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced. The hyperreal. In this concept, reality is preceded by models of it.

In an eerie way, this fits the Katrina story. The breaking of the levees was preceded by a computer model, “Pam”, that predicted the full force of the storm. The images of Katrina also fit our concept of the hyperreal. For the TV screen images showed what software on the computer screen had already visualised. The end was pre-destined and this might help to explain the official “failure of initiative”.

Bush’s flyover of New Orleans in Air Force One gave the hyperreal its most vivid display. As Geoff Elliott recalls, “Bush peered down on the city, at a safe distance. It was an awful image.”

Bush’s birds-eye overhead view now seems so Google Earth-like. What more striking image can there be of Katrina and its ‘reality’?

Bush’s Potemkin village is a wall of images that dissolves as soon as his road show and its TV crews roll on. Thus when Bush did finally visit New Orleans, Laura Rozen of War and Piece noted:

“There was a striking discrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans... and reports of the same event by German TV. ZDF News reported that the President’s visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the President and the herd of ‘news people’ had left.”

Mercifully, all this simulation has its funny side. In a new jape by the Yes Men, one of them posed as a HUD official at a talkfest attended by Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco. The imposter then announced a major shift in housing policy in New Orleans. The hoax of course served to highlight the opposite state of real life. Much of the public housing that existed before Katrina is to be demolished and its low-income tenants dispersed elsewhere. You can view a video of the prank at the Yes Men website.

As we have seen, the response to Katrina threatens to dowse the aura of New Orleans. Its culture is one that permeates through its buildings, rather than strictly along its streets and bridges. Saving the city requires more than reinforcing the physical levees against future storms. The greater task is to ‘build a levee’ deep inside – to protect cultural identity and find the fire in the belly needed for the coming battle of New Orleans.

In this climate of change we need to be wary of the aftermath of disaster. For those who have designs on the urban landscape also harbour designs on our culture.

“Now when I was just a little girl my mamma said to me
Beware of the devil my child but if by chance you should meet
Beware his cold dark eyes full of bold and unholy deceit.
He'll tempt you with a whirling pool of lies
And promises he'll deny or that he will never keep.
You gotta build yourself a levee deep inside.
Build yourself a levee girl when the waters run high.”

- Natalie Merchant, “Build a Levee”