Week of the Living Dead
A splinter in the eye is the best magnifying glass.
—Theodor Adorno
"Future historians can debate the exact moment when the freewheeling coverage of Hurricane Katrina gave way to media martial law. Was it when Fox News, after days of unlikely fairness and balance, began suggesting that the relief effort was now going well? When NBC blocked West Coast viewers from seeing Kanye West tell a fund-raiser’s viewers that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”? Or when perma-chipper David Brooks beamed that the New Orleans debacle had really boosted Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential hopes?
For me, the turning point came on Saturday night when The Cryptkeeper sprung Larry King from his suspendered sarcophagus to host a three-hour broadcast with such fabled disaster experts as Eric Clapton and Magic Johnson. The show built to the appearance of Celine Dion, whose galloping emotionalism for once found a worthy cause. The Québecois diva launched into a teary, arm-waving, heartfelt speech about her sadness and frustration at what she’d seen in New Orleans, but King, eager to squelch such a display of true feeling — you could hear him impatiently gargling his phlegm — didn’t acknowledge Dion’s anger. Instead he praised Dion for contributing a million dollars to the relief effort (she deftly swatted aside the compliment) and then asked her to sing. Yes, the mangy old hack was trying to recapture the celebrity-driven America of just one week earlier.
Although Katrina’s devastation was centered along the Gulf Coast, her saga became a bleak snapshot of our national soul. “It defies comprehension that the United States can look like this,” said CNN’s Jeanne Meserve on Wednesday, an idea that became the week’s mantra. The chaos in New Orleans was like something you’d see in Liberia or Sierra Leone, observed CNN’s undervalued Jeff Koinange, one of the rare black reporters on our screens, not something you expect in the richest country in the world. Put simply: This couldn’t be America.
The problem, of course, is that it was. Not only did Hurricane Katrina shatter our illusions of exceptionalism — no god singled out the U.S. for exemption from disaster — it challenged our belief in the fairness and efficiency of our social order. When the 17th Street Canal was breached, another levee burst in our national consciousness. What poured in were truths normally ignored by our national media and, let’s be honest, most of us in our daily lives.
Within hours, even the dimmest viewer couldn’t fail to notice that those trapped in hellish conditions were precisely the people who routinely remain invisible in this country — the poor, sick, aged and uneducated, most of them black. The ones Michael Harrington famously dubbed The Other America.
Suddenly, the Others were right in front of our noses, and the major media — predominantly white and pretty well-off — were talking about race and class. Newspapers ran front-page articles noting that nearly six million people have fallen into poverty since President Bush took office — a nifty 20 percent increase to accompany the greatest tax cuts in world history. Feisty columnists rightly fulminated that, even as tens of thousands suffered in hellish conditions, the buses first rescued people inside the Hyatt Hotel. Of course, such bigotry was already inscribed in the very layout of New Orleans. One reason the Superdome became a de facto island is that, like the city’s prosperous business district, it was carefully constructed so it would be easy to protect from the disenfranchised (30 percent of New Orleans lives below the poverty line)..."
- John Powers, LA Weekly, Sep 9 2005
LA Weekly: Week of the Living Dead
—Theodor Adorno
"Future historians can debate the exact moment when the freewheeling coverage of Hurricane Katrina gave way to media martial law. Was it when Fox News, after days of unlikely fairness and balance, began suggesting that the relief effort was now going well? When NBC blocked West Coast viewers from seeing Kanye West tell a fund-raiser’s viewers that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”? Or when perma-chipper David Brooks beamed that the New Orleans debacle had really boosted Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential hopes?
For me, the turning point came on Saturday night when The Cryptkeeper sprung Larry King from his suspendered sarcophagus to host a three-hour broadcast with such fabled disaster experts as Eric Clapton and Magic Johnson. The show built to the appearance of Celine Dion, whose galloping emotionalism for once found a worthy cause. The Québecois diva launched into a teary, arm-waving, heartfelt speech about her sadness and frustration at what she’d seen in New Orleans, but King, eager to squelch such a display of true feeling — you could hear him impatiently gargling his phlegm — didn’t acknowledge Dion’s anger. Instead he praised Dion for contributing a million dollars to the relief effort (she deftly swatted aside the compliment) and then asked her to sing. Yes, the mangy old hack was trying to recapture the celebrity-driven America of just one week earlier.
Although Katrina’s devastation was centered along the Gulf Coast, her saga became a bleak snapshot of our national soul. “It defies comprehension that the United States can look like this,” said CNN’s Jeanne Meserve on Wednesday, an idea that became the week’s mantra. The chaos in New Orleans was like something you’d see in Liberia or Sierra Leone, observed CNN’s undervalued Jeff Koinange, one of the rare black reporters on our screens, not something you expect in the richest country in the world. Put simply: This couldn’t be America.
The problem, of course, is that it was. Not only did Hurricane Katrina shatter our illusions of exceptionalism — no god singled out the U.S. for exemption from disaster — it challenged our belief in the fairness and efficiency of our social order. When the 17th Street Canal was breached, another levee burst in our national consciousness. What poured in were truths normally ignored by our national media and, let’s be honest, most of us in our daily lives.
Within hours, even the dimmest viewer couldn’t fail to notice that those trapped in hellish conditions were precisely the people who routinely remain invisible in this country — the poor, sick, aged and uneducated, most of them black. The ones Michael Harrington famously dubbed The Other America.
Suddenly, the Others were right in front of our noses, and the major media — predominantly white and pretty well-off — were talking about race and class. Newspapers ran front-page articles noting that nearly six million people have fallen into poverty since President Bush took office — a nifty 20 percent increase to accompany the greatest tax cuts in world history. Feisty columnists rightly fulminated that, even as tens of thousands suffered in hellish conditions, the buses first rescued people inside the Hyatt Hotel. Of course, such bigotry was already inscribed in the very layout of New Orleans. One reason the Superdome became a de facto island is that, like the city’s prosperous business district, it was carefully constructed so it would be easy to protect from the disenfranchised (30 percent of New Orleans lives below the poverty line)..."
- John Powers, LA Weekly, Sep 9 2005
LA Weekly: Week of the Living Dead
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