Despite the paltry sum I threw at the Red Cross the other day, my overwhelming response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has been one of impotent anger. Despite the quite justified anger that has been directed here towards Bush, it is sometimes difficult for me to know precisely
who to be angry at: Bush, whose callous indifference and sluggish response speaks of an almost pathological disconnect from human suffering; the media, which (despite some amazingly truthful journalism) sees fit to fall back on the kind of judgements and excuses about minority sloth and looting that do
not befit an enlightented society in the year 2005; the conservative movement, for having built an America that since 1968 has been systematically dismantling the very kind of modern welfare state that could respond to all this; or the consumption habits of contemporary America, which are no doubt hastening the environmental degredation that could give us many more Katrinas.
More on the flip.
Add to my feeling of panic and despair the new movie based upon John LeCarre's book
The Constant Gardener, a political thriller starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, which seeks to present us -- in no uncertain terms -- with a global analogue for the neglect of Katrina's victims.
In the movie, Fiennes plays a diplomat stationed in Kenya, whose new wife (Weisz) is an outspoken political dissident investigating, behind the scenes, a sinister arrangement made between Big Pharma and the impoverished villages making use of their 'discounted' drugs. What is immediately striking about the movie -- and wholly relevant to its politics -- is the staggering visual audacity and beauty of the movie's cinematography, directed by 'City of God' director Fernando Meirelles. The movie's aesthetics are relevant because they underscore one of the movie's main polemics: that the West sees the people of Africa as a disposable population, a people that even before birth are assumed to be already in the antechamber to death, and who can therefore be treated accordingly.
The director accomplishes this by amazing juxtapositions: after the romantic backstory that unites Fiennes and Weisz, the movie plows us into a visually and sonically explosive sequence that introduces the Kenyan villages at the core of Weisz's investigations. The eye-popping color reveals a shantytown that is at once desperately impoverished and furiously alive, with rivers of raw sewage chock-a-block with the brilliant clothing of the Masai. In a scene that establishes the antagonism between Weisz's dissident and the leaders of Big Pharma, Feirelles moves from the dynamism of the kitchen staff to the sterile elegence of the five star restaurant where the meeting is taking place. He uses this same contrast to separate the cold modernity of London from the vitality of Kenya, a vitality that persists in the face of subhuman conditions of life.
The reason that I focus upon the aesthetic is that the biggest contribution that the director makes here is to assert that Africa is still here, is vitally present, that its citizens are alive and consequently deserving of human dignity. He would not accomplish this if the Kenyan scenes were shot in tones of brown and grey, or black and white -- the kinds of photography used in ads for famine relief, which consign their subjects to hopeless death even as they plead for assistance.
This got me thinking so much about the desparate situation in New Orleans. What has been striking about the most powerful journalism that we've scene is its insistence upon making the situation in New Orleans visible, of senior and erstwhile sanguine journalists screaming obscenities at the camera to make people aware of the situation. What is striking too is that Bush has been unable to stage manage this particular catastrophe; the journalists are not embedded in anything but six feet of water, mud and sewage, and so every time a grouping of cranes, trucks and helicopters is picture fixing a levee, we see the same scene the following day, with the fake assistance gone and the water pouring through unheeded.
What I believe history will record about Katrina is a situation that serves as a microcosm of the West's attitude towards the so-called Third World, that expendable population whose suffering has gone unheeded by the media. In the same way that a permanent state of emergency exists in this nation's inner cities -- from which we have retracted the protective arm of the rule of law -- we also tacitly endorse the systemic erosion of human life and digity in Africa, which has been groaning under debt, corruption, and civil wars which -- despite their staggering casualties -- go largely ignored.
What the more powerful media coverage of Katrina has in common with the aesthetics of 'The Constant Gardiner' is its refusal to deny the affirmation of life that gives the situation urgency. For every report that attempts to sweep things under the rug, to reestablish the 'normalcy' that sustains American consumerist narcissism, there is a report that breaks through the cracks: an aid director bursting into tears over his mother's death; a rapper cutting through the 'we are the world' bullshit of a charity concert to assert that Bush doesn't care about black people; a conservative journalist setting aside his poll-driven banalities to assail a politician for back-slapping while the emergency persists.
I am angry, upset, and in depair over this situation. But these moments of truth give me hope. They speak of a world where the urgency of genuine problems might break through the surface. They speak of the kind of world envisioned by the blogosphere, where stories of human beings arrive at public consciousness unmediated by the filters of cynical resignation, fear, and manipulation. They speak, in other words, of a world that is still alive.