Ghost in the Wire

The popular revulsion that attended the deformation of New Orleans, its metamorphosis from an icon of Americana to a figural African country, led, not surprisingly, to a desire to account for who was responsible, a desire to point a figure somewhere, specifically at someone.

The obvious target of blame was George Bush, whose addled response and various vacation activities angered many, who thought a more proactive stance and a more reverent appreciation for the disaster was warranted. Kanye West linked the blame to questions of race, noting, simply, that “George Bush doesn't care about black people.” Bush was also primarily responsible for Michael Brown ascending to the head of FEMA, the organization tasked with responding to emergencies, despite Brown's lack of any relevant, non-equine-related experience. Brown was, without question, a disaster unto himself, and so Bush was tarred and feathered, quite rightly, along with his employee, a judgment many thought deserved after Bush absurdly proclaimed that Michael “Brownie” was “doing a heck of a job.”

State and local officials were in turn put on the spit as Republican pundits attempted to shift attention away from Bush, Brown, and Chertoff, and onto those officials more proximate to the disaster. The first responders, so the story went, are the ones who govern the disaster area at a local level, and they failed miserably. Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, and recently famous for his assessment of the chocolateness of the Big Easy, had not ordered an evacuation in time. Kathleen Blanco was engaged in an ego-driven tug of war over who would control the national guard, a tug of war that sewed confusion and led to costly delays.

Others blamed the victims themselves. Those too poor to get out of town were castigated for their inherent stupidity and laziness. Bill O'Reilly offered this nugget on September 7th: “If you refuse to learn, if you refuse to work hard, if you become addicted, if you live a gangsta-life, you will be poor and powerless just like many of those in New Orleans.” And conservative Reverend Jesse Lee Patterson explained: “75 percent of New Orleans residents had left the city, it was primarily immoral, welfare-pampered blacks that stayed behind and waited for the government to bail them out.” If the victims weren't poor or lazy, they were criminals, looters, even animals. Engaged in all sorts of activities that distracted from search and rescue operations, shooting at police and disrupting or stealing needed relief supplies, these stories of “subjects supposed to loot and rape” as Slavoj Zizek insightfully described them, revealed a blame-the-victim gambit structured by alarming prejudice, one that believed that the poor, black population reverted to their savage nature when the veneer of civilization was washed away.

Others blamed sin. David Crowe, Executive Director of the homophobic Restore America, artfully blamed it on the gays, of course, noting “The hurricane was an act of God upon a sin-loving and rebellious nation. It's a warning—and a call to repent.” Joe Scarborough even devoted an entire show to the question of whether or not God was punishing his wayward children.

And then there were the environmentalists, who cited convincing evidence that global warming meant warmer Gulf waters, and that warmer waters meant more fuel for hurricanes, thus increasing their intensity. Some pundits redirected this blame to Bush, as if the last five years of lax pollution standards were responsible for this particular temperature increase.

So what are we left with? A bulky federal government, mismanaged by political appointees and headed by an incompetent and uncaring executive? Less than expert state and local politicians, more concerned with ego than policy? Local residentss who just didn't understand how bad the storm would be? Criminals who thwarted relief efforts with their violence, who transformed a disaster into a lawless zone of looting and raping, who chose to stay in order to take advantage of the weak and old? A city destined to be destroyed by an act of God, a just punishment for decades of sin? Or the revenge of mother nature? So many causes, so many accusations. This was the structure of the blame game that followed Katrina, a game that was (and is) ultimately undecidable. There would be no single causa mortis, no lone explanation for the deaths brought on by lack of preparation or response.

Deciding on accountability is important. Apportioning blame has its place. But I am not interested in doing so, not here. Some of these accusations are absurd, others are more reasonable, and blame may turn out to be a complicated burden, one shared by many, in ways that may never be fully comprehended. What is remarkable about any of these proffered explanations, though, is that none of them are particularly exceptional. In other words, despite all the fuss regarding the overwhelming perfection of Katrina, the warrants that underwrite all the various acts of finger-pointing are entirely banal, endemic to either institutional politics or one's ideological predisposition.

When placed in the context of such an exceptional storm, of course, such a profound level of governmental incompetency makes easy, intuitive sense, but we need to appreciate that the failures here are not constituted by the perfect storm, but rather are common, almost banal explanations in turn supplemented by the profundity of the storm—the stress of the exception exaggerating the already massive fault lines in the response-ability of our liberal democratic government. Even in the absence of the storm, those fault lines would remain, and the conclusion that is thus drawn, the narrative thus produced, is that our lumbering government, with its states rights and local control and bulky federal agencies and the problems of environment and citizenry, is simply incapable of dealing with emergencies of an exceptional nature. (As if any other kind of emergency exists!) The lesson could not be more obvious: the normal pathways of government cannot guarantee order.

Here I return to both the signifiers of fascism and the relation to populism, because we have here the formation of a demand – a desire for order, accountability, and competency – that precisely because of the attempts to determine who is to blame for the lack of those things, cannot be met. Laclau's words: "in a situation of radical disorder, the demand is for some kind of order, and the concrete social arrangement that will meet that request is a secondary consideration..."

This demand, not coincidentally, is one of the historical theoretical predicates for fascism. In no instance did a fascist movement even begin to emerge without a preceding and corresponding challenge to the viability of liberal democratic governance. These challenges were both what we think of as material (the currency crisis of the late 19th century, the duration and brutality of the first world war, the discontent in Germany's Po Valley) and rhetorical. Intellectuals, like Carl Schmitt, the crown jurist and political theorist of the National Socialists who I will return to in a moment, spent much of the 20s joining other German intellectuals in writing about the crisis and failure of the liberal democratic order. We can conclude this section then with a proper amount of concern: the desire to challenge liberal democracy, to declare its mechanisms weak and incapable, provides a signifying strategy that, when juxtaposed with or complicit with the demand for order, encourages a rhetorical climate properly thought as fascist.