Category Archives: New Orleans

The Cold After the Storm

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After Katrina, it was hot, freakishly hot. After Sandy, it is cold, ridiculously cold. There’s six inches of snow on the ground, howling winds. In Spike Lee’s classic When the Levees Broke, there’s a montage in act one of people saying over and over “it was hot.” Most people in New York and New Jersey who lost housing will be indoors tonight, so we may not get a parallel montage. But we’re only just beginning to understand what we’ve been through and are continuing to go through.

During MSNBC’s broadcast of the election results last night, a poll showed that 15% of voters rated the response to Hurricane Sandy as the top reason behind their vote. Of those people, 70% voted Obama and 30% Romney. It seems odd until you realize how little has been done because the scale is so much greater than we have fully realized. If you go to this link, you can see before and after aerial photographs of the coastline taken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that make it clear that rebuilding is not a serious option.

NBC has been pushing the issue in its news partly because their anchor Brian Williams grew up on the Jersey shore and is still very attached to it. Over and again, middle-aged white men like Williams and Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, have been evoking their loss and nostalgia for a past that was in any case long gone. Obama toured with the crown prince of Jersey nostalgia, Bruce Springsteen, whose Jersey classic Asbury Park 4th July (Sandy), usually called just Sandy, has acquired an entirely new meaning.

This combination of a sense that Sandy indicated both what we now need to do, and what it is that we have lost, gave Obama his winning margin.

What will be done with it? Last night before tuning in to the results, I watched last week’s episode of Treme. By coincidence, it featured the documentary film maker Kimberly Rivers-Roberts, whose work in Trouble The Water was nominated for an Academy award. In a complex interplay of experience and fiction, the episode showed a group of the characters being drawn into watching Rivers-Roberts’ extraordinary footage of the waters rising in the Lower Ninth Ward during Katrina.

We then cut to her husband recreating the moment when they led a group of survivors to dry land only to be shot at by National Guard troops. These soldiers were nominated for bravery medals. In Treme, people who experienced Katrina play characters who also went through the storm, like Phyllis Montana-Leblanc, who came to national attention in Spike Lee’s film and has now become a Treme regular.

What such moments suggest is that there is no outside to the climate-changed biosphere, no retreat into a world of superhero make-believe. In his acceptance speech, Obama presented himself as a “champion” of those in need. Our system currently works that way. Today I called my re-elected congressional representative to complain that after ten days, my house had not been restored to electric power. A few hours later, the current was flowing.

But on the ground, moments of heroism are rare, and champions hard to find. As the new ice storm blew into New York, this was what people in Staten Island saw at the FEMA office

As crazy as this seems, the makeshift shelters are no good against the driving snow of a Nor’easter. We’ve yet to recognize that as well as the broken roller coasters and carousels, the space shuttle Enterprise in New York was damaged, thousands of artworks in studios in Chelsea and Red Hook were destroyed, and so on and on.

We don’t need a champion in all this. We need to hear that the press release put out today by Keystone XL to the effect that they are “confident” that the northern sector of their pipeline to extract tarsands will be confirmed in January was wrong. We can’t wait and see how the new administration chooses to decide because for us, shivering in Sandy’s cold, there is no choice. From now on, no more nostalgia, no heroes or champions. It’s time for direct action.

Why Aren’t You Watching Treme?

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The third and last full season of Treme opened last night. You probably didn’t watch it because only about 500,000 people do. If you’re reading this, you should (and if you’re about to say “I don’t get HBO,” that’s very sweet, try googling ‘watch Treme‘). It’s about how to survive disaster and celebrate life, it’s about mutual aid, it’s about how to have difference in urban space. And it’s about the violence, poverty and state-sponsored oppression that is modern America.

Sunday’s premiere opened with a scene all too familiar to any protestor of recent years. A group of musicians assemble outside for a memorial parade to Kerwin James, a trumpeter who died of post-Katrina medical issues in 2007. Before they can move off, a police car descends and arrests those at the front of the line, although musical parades are a long-standing tradition in New Orleans. Antoine (Wendell Pierce) gets arrested as well for flipping off a cop as he walks away. The march reconvenes later with the protection of the National Lawyers Guild green hats, making it clear that the marchers are there on suffrance that the police can revoke at any moment.

Those plot moments aren’t really why you should watch. This is one of the few dramas that’s actually set in a modern America that resembles the U S in which most of us have to live. It does so by depicting complex and imperfect characters, who do the best they can in a society where the odds are stacked against them. It’s a drama where most of the characters are African American–but not gangsters, drug dealers, whores or pimps. It depicts a post-disaster New Orleans–the opening title for series three says simply “Twenty-Five Months After”–but doesn’t blame the people who live there for it.

Here’s the difference with The Wire, also directed by David Simon, which is everyone’s favorite TV show now but was watched by less than a million viewers when broadcast, even in the last series. Now I hear British acquaintances holding forth about the city, even though they cannot identify in which state it is located.The Wire was relentlessly dystopic, presenting Baltimore as a Hobbesian nightmare of what happens when Leviathan no longer rules.

Treme is not a commercial success because it tries to keep multiple stories going in divergent ways. Viewers are expected to be familiar with jump-cuts, serial narration, flash-backs and fragmentary references to local culture. Luckily the New Orleans Times-Picayune publishes a full breakdown of all such references for geeks the next day. The complaint is that the lives we follow “don’t go anywhere.” Where should they go? This is about people staying on, not leaving, continuing to occupy a city that they believe in against all the odds.

If this sounds romantic, and it is, bad things happen to good people in Treme against the usual show-biz logic. Leading characters have committed suicide, one has been murdered and one raped. The last in particular was very hard to watch but I always prefer depictions of the reality of violence, rather than the sanitized cop-show murder. Why is New Orleans the city with the highest murder rate in the country, is the difficult question that Treme asks? Increasingly, it has come to focus on systemic police violence and police corruption in refreshing contrast to the Law And Order exaltation of all law enforcement.

I’m going to suggest that Occupy’s movement of movements is a similar effort to sustain multiple narratives in one overall conversation. Sometimes that conversation breaks down, sometimes you lose the thread, but it’s never less than fascinating. And Treme gives us the metaphor to understand that conversation as American popular music. The New Orleans brass band is a way to have a set of “voices” in conversation at the same moment. By setting that conversation over a funk beat, that conversation takes on an edge–it represents. It represents the popular voices that are not usually heard, outdoors, in public space that is reappropriated for the purpose. (Video below: may not be visible in Chrome)

HBO are cheap about this and post the music videos from the series to iTunes at $1.49 each. So this is the Treme Sidewalk Steppers with the Rebirth Brass Band from 2009, a few months after the setting of the current series. It shows the interaction between brass bands, the Mardi Gras Indians and hip-hop styles. The whole ensemble is about Rebirth, the revival of the flooded city. All our cities are drowning in debt, enmired in violence and swamped with police repression. Step out into the second line.

The Beloved Community After the Disaster Of Capitalism

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I led a workshop at the Free University of New York City on Strike Debt and one of the participants was an African American woman who had been active in the civil rights movement. She exhorted us to remember Dr King’s idea of “the beloved community” and to follow the lead of groups like the Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee. Then yesterday the activist and writer Rebecca Solnit proposed that Occupy was precisely a form of beloved community, one that came together in response to disaster.

In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit offered a stunning reversal of the fundamental neo-liberal worldview. As Mitt Romney so disastrously confirmed in his 47% video, neo-liberalism believes people to be fundamentally “brutish.” The term comes from the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose distate for the “multitude” has been much noted of late. Hobbes argued that only a centralized, authoritarian state could mitigate the fundamental violence of the human animal.

Solnit shows how this presumption structures official responses to disaster and catastrophe, such as the wildly inaccurate claims of mass looting, murder and rape in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Solnit describes how, not only are such charges wrong, but what actually transpires after disasters are remarkable instances of mutual aid. At her teach-in yesterday, she proposed that OWS was one such instance of this response. There had been a disaster, in this case, a financial one. People responded by providing shelter, food, clothing, medical care and other fundamentals, free of charge and in a collective fashion. It was clear to all that such provision was a direct challenge to the normative capitalist economy, leading to the evictions on the (spurious) grounds of “brutish” dirt and disease.

Illuminating NYU

In her book, Solnit develops this contrast into a theoretical distinction that she borrows from the apparently unlikely source of William James. In his lectures on Pragmatism, James asked:

What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?

Solnit applies this to disaster and reformulates it:

What difference would it make if we were blasé about property and passionate about human life?

That’s a great way to pose Occupy’s challenge to neo-liberalism. Its radicalism was the palpable sight of all kinds of people placing the beloved community as a higher value than material goods, not in the name of a renunciation of the world, but of a radical change to it.

It might also suggest that the local and small-scale nature of Occupy is in fact an apposite response to the disaster of capitalism. As an Oxfam report on Cuban responses to disaster put it, there is a:

distinct possibility that life-line structures (concrete, practical measures to save lives) might ultimately depend more on the intangibles of relationship, training and education

than the wealth so beloved by neo-liberals.

So small-scale organizing centered on community, training and teach-ins is not a utopian alternative to capitalism but the best available response to its disaster. Lessons to be learned here by Strike Debt as it moves from being a campaign to a movement.

Revenge of the Water Spirits: The Drowning of Capitalism

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There’s an amazing moment in Spike Lee’s film about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Break. Labor organizer Fred Johnston recalls a conversation with a friend in which they agree that Katrina was caused by spirits angry about the loss of African lives during the Middle Passage. The simbi (water spirits) are getting their revenge all right: they’re going to drown capitalism.

Johnston was referring to the “many thousands gone” who died or self-killed during the hellish journey from Africa to slavery. There were infamous moments like the voyage of the Zong, during which the captain threw 138 enslaved people overboard to lighten his load during a storm. And then claimed insurance on them. Turner rendered the scene in his classic painting usually known as The Slave Ship, just after the abolition of slavery.

You can see the presence of the formerly enslaved suspended in the water in the foreground, caught between life and death, between freedom and slavery. The painting suspends realism (because a person weighted with iron thrown into the sea will sink immediately) in order to give proper weight to the moment. At the far right you can see a curious water monster approaching, Turner’s intuitive understanding of the simbi.

For African diaspora cultures have visualized the world as a cosmogram in which the living are separated from the spirits by the ocean. The ocean is a barrier we cross twice, once at birth and again at death, in a cycle that continues. Thus a child’s birth would be celebrated on the eighth day of life, once the spirit had made the decision to remain in the world of the living. For the enslaved, self-killing was a rational choice because it entailed the return of the spirit and its subsequent rebirth in Africa.

On the island of Martinique, the sculptor Laurent Valère has created a powerful monument to three hundred Africans drowned with their slave ship in a storm after they had led a successful revolt.

Laurent Valère, Monument at Anse Cafard, Martinique

The hunched figures are arranged in a triangle evoking the Atlantic triangle created by slavery, looking across the sea in the direction of Africa. They are white, the color of death and of mourning. They have not been sleeping. They have been biding their time.

Now the economic system that sent the slave ships is set to drown in its turn. It is no coincidence that the spirits sent Isaac seven years to the day after Katrina.

Flooding in New Orleans

The point with these Anthropocene hurricanes is not the wind but the water. Like Katrina, Isaac is bringing huge amounts of water with it. As global warming develops, the warm air holds more water vapor. As the ice-caps melt, there is more water in the ocean. As the oceans warm, there is more energy for a storm system to draw on. Put these three together and you have the new once-a-year “storm of the century.”

By 3pm, there had already been nearly ten inches of rain in New Orleans. The storm surge was twelve and a half feet in Plaquemines Parish and some people have had to be rescued off the rooftops. In New York, half-an-inch of rain leads untreated sewage to be flushed directly into the rivers and oceans. We learned last year that a storm surge of five feet would flood much of Manhattan. When–not if–that happens, it’s not going to matter who is in charge of Zuccotti Park–it will belong to the water spirits.

Despite the levee overtoppings, the floods and the massive loss of power, New Orleans is surviving Isaac. But only because $14.5 billion was spent defending it in the last seven years, on top of a century of levee building. What will it take to defend the entire Eastern seaboard? It doesn’t matter, no one will spend it.

Capitalism has been blithely indifferent to climate change. Why? Look at this diagram. On top, the world mapped by quantity of emissions. On the bottom, the world mapped by likely consequences of climate change.

The Lancet, 2009

So it’s easy to see the calculation: the US, Europe and Japan get off lightly, Africa and Asia pay the price, who cares? Only this was made on the basis of the now evidently conservative IPCC reports. This summer has shown a far more accelerated melting of the Arctic ice than anyone has previously predicted. The total disappearance of Arctic ice in summer is now expected by 2030, far sooner than ever imagined. No one really knows what the consequences will be but they will not be good. It’s going to mean flooding becomes the new normal, rain for months on end for some, and drought for others. Just like we’ve been seeing this summer, in fact, with 63% of the U.S. in drought, while other places have flooded.

And what are our lords and masters doing? Debating how to divide the drilling rights in the Arctic. George Monbiot reports:

The companies which caused this disaster are scrambling to profit from it. On Sunday, Shell requested an extension to its exploratory drilling period in the Chukchi Sea, off the north-west coast of Alaska. This would push its operations hard against the moment when the ice re-forms and any spills they cause are locked in. The Russian oil company Gazprom is using the great melt to try to drill in the Pechora Sea, north-east of Murmansk.

The revenge of the spirits is devastating but in a certain way beautiful. Just as the enslaved were driven to choose drowning over slavery, the death of life over social death, so now capitalism is choosing to drown itself rather than die.

Unless we choose to do something about it. S17. S stands for survival. Sorry about that.

 

 

Occupy Godot

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The signs posted to evict Occupy Pittsburgh were simple white board with black lettering. They reminded me of something and it bugged me all day. Then I remembered:

"Waiting for Godot" in New Orleans

It’s the stage directions for Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as staged by Paul Chan in New Orleans after Katrina. His 2007 production was prompted by Chan’s own sense that the devastated city reminded him of something. When he remembered the scenario for Godot, the New Orleans streets now seemed to him to call for a production of the play. Audiences flocked to see it and the endless waiting of the “tramps” made sense to people in post-Katrina New Orleans because of their own interminable delays with FEMA and other governmental authority.

The Lower Ninth Ward

The play was performed first in the Lower Ninth Ward and then in Gentilly. The board above is now placed in the street by what are known as “the Brad Pitt houses,” a series of modern, flood-resistant buildings that constitute a permanent architectural exhibition by the banks of the Industrial Canal that flooded so disastrously in 2005. Tourists go by in buses and gaze on the scene. We wandered about and took photos. No one seemed to mind.

The three rivers that meet in Pittsburgh run into the Ohio river and from there into the Mississippi, down on to New Orleans. There’s a connection at work here. We could play with this is in a number of registers. Perhaps the “tramps” that have nowhere else to go have been evicted by Godot, who no longer wants them to wait. Perhaps Vladimir and Estragon have decided that they have had enough of being tramps and have occupied the country road: Occupy Godot. Perhaps Lucky disrupts their General Assembly.

Chain of associations: in the original French production of En Attendant Godot, Lucky was played by Jean Martin, a former member of the French Resistance, as indeed was Beckett.

Left Jean Martin as Lucky

A decade later, Martin would play the paratroop colonel Mathieu in the classic revolutionary film The Battle of Algiers (1966). The only professional actor in the film, Martin had been blacklisted for signing the petition of the Cent Vingt et Un (121) in 1960, a statement by artists and intellectuals protesting the Algerian war.

Think of this:

Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!

We are paused, vehemently.

Pausing is to dwell in the moment, to extend the moment. That is what Occupy is: an extension of the moment in which it has been possible to challenge authority, to claim autonomy and to refuse to “move on.”

Pause.