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September 2

The bodies float by as a reporter stands agape.

Just back in the country after a few months in some of the most

frustrating places on the planet, I have ignored Katrina for the last

week or so. I ignored the warnings leading up to it. I watched no news

as it hit. I ignored it because there wasnt one goddamn part of me

that could stand to think about anything more pressing than what time

Die Hard 2 was going to be on TV.

Yes, I ignored the shit out of that little storm and all the miserable

filth that it was kicking up. Ignorance was bliss and I wanted it. The

only ripple in my pristine little pond was when the Mayor of Biloxi

said This is our Tsunami. I called it as I saw it - typical

invidious comparative rhetorical bullshit - and got back to moving my

apartment.

Yet here we are, something like four fucking days later and today I was

proven wrong. Wrong in my quick dismissal of that comparison and even

more wrong in my silly supposition that I might be able to bury my headin the deep Illinois sand and slink out of this one without choking and

coughing on the lines were being fed.

This is, it seems now, the worst thing to happen in America for avery

long time. And yes, I mean the implication. And so I, too, am guilty of

that sort of silly intellectual hubris which tells us that we can

compare tragedy, weigh lives on some sick scale, punch horror into a

computer and get out rankings.

But despite this, I cant help but feel as though the absurd and

vicious (non)response of virtuallyeverypolitical person or body with

any sort of potential power or jurisdiction in a crisis like this turns

what would already be a horrible national tragedy of proportions

unknown in the privileged world, into a depraved domestic and

international scandal. It is nothing less than a clear unraveling of

our own national hubris, of our sense of politics and justice and

reality. It is an insight into the chaotic fault lines of this New

American Century and an ugly gash on whatever shattered pieces and

hopes we still cling to as the remnants of our American Dream.

To watch television news today is to see a world entirely beyond our

own reckoning of ourselves. It is to see an entirely different

potential reality the potential, that is, that we Americans may just

be liable to the same insanities, impulses, brutalities, and tragedies

that afflict the rest of our seething world that there is something

beyond us (call it Nature, God, or whatever youd like) that does not

care what our gross domestic anything is or indeed, how much freedom wehave. It is to see a reality which we have been trying desperately (and

with much success) to bury under our own mythology for centuries.

The twohundred and whatever million of us unaffected sit on our couches

watching something that cant possibly, cant fathomably be happening

here. Reporters who choke up as they seebodies float by; rescue

workers uncovering heating ducts and finding suffocating old women;

rape gangs and twitching drug addicts roaming lawless streets; phone

calls from people up to their necks in rising water saying they just

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might not be able to make it home any more; looters (or is it

desperately hungry human beings?) breaking into any store that might

conceivably have some sort of provisions; tens of thousands of people

stuffed into a football stadium without water or food waiting for the

cavalry that got caught up in something else and a government that

dithers. We watch an entire government system which, at every level it

seems, simply cannot do what is needed. They cannot evensaywhat is

needed.

I have spent the last three years or so studying the viciousness of

this modern world. I have been fascinated by the dark and terrible

underbelly of a modernity that has been so kind to me. I have read

about, thought about, talked about, war, genocide, natural disasters,

militaries, humanitarians, governments, and refugees. I have been to

Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo,

Uganda, Rwanda just lookingto rub my nose in this perpetual misery

that seems to afflict our species, and throughout it all have been

buoyed by the sense that maybe people were just people and that a place

like America, so ripe with potential, so pure in its ideals if woefully

tainted in its history, might provide some sort of hope or vision or

somethingfor all those that are otherwise simply collateral damagein all of it.

Yet here I am, here we are, and we dither. We do not send the troops

where they are called for. We do not call on the provisions of our laws

and history which give our leaders extreme power intrulydesperate

situations. We cannot, even in this moment when we are laid at our most

bare, the moment when every politicians rhetoric falls short by

definition, when a huge number of our own cease to be Americans first

and are forced to survive, to desperately cling to life and family and

hope by whatever means necessary even in this moment we cannot let

ourselves for a secondbelieve that when it comes down to it we are

just the same as everyone else that the worms do not care where we

were born.

As the bodies float by, the reporters stand agape. The politicians,

conservative, liberal, red, blue, green, pink, brown, whatever, cannot

bring themselves to say words like refugee. There are troops now,

finally, and a truck or two as well. But how many more than necessary

died because of delays and planning and squibbling, squabbling

stupidity? The citizens of this great nation, the place that Old Abe

once called the last best hope for the world, stare with disbelief.

We are called into confrontation with ourselves and who knows, now,

what it means to be American? Hunter S. Thompson once wrote that the

Kentucky Derby was a jaded, atavistic freak out with nothing to

recommend it but a very saleable tradition, and I cant help but

wonder, now, if it isnt the same with our unyielding Faith in America.

I cant imagine how the bodiesfeel.