pissing while

“Many people use their social activities to mark time rather than the other way around. In parts of Madagascar, questions about how long something takes might receive an answer like "the time of a rice cooking" (about half an hour) or "the frying of a locust" (a quick moment). Similarly, natives of the Cross River in Nigeria have been quoted as saying "the man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted" (less than fifteen minutes). Closer to home, not too many years ago the New English Dictionary included a listing for the term "pissing while"—not a particularly exact measurement, perhaps, but one with a certain cross-cultural translatability.” – Robert Levine.


It is no news that the President was not born the twin of industriousness. But blaming Bush’s indolence doesn’t really get us too far in understanding the culture that allowed New Orleans to drown, and the cornered class to either fight or starve; nor does it explain the spectacle of seeing the governing class and its thugs in the press jeering at drowning wheelchair victims for “not getting out when they were told” while waiting for their “welfare checks” (which is apparently what a social security payment has become).

That culture – the Bush culture – precedes, of course, its namesake. But Bush, a garbage fly in human form, is as wonderfully implicative of the American governing class as the garbage fly is of a garbage can: if one is buzzing around a can, you can guess there is rotting meat in it. Similarly, the buzzing of the President’s men tells us a lot about the decaying assumptions that are embedded, over the last thirty years, in those circles that have money and power.

How to approach the thing we have all seen, and still can’t comprehend?

Here’s one small approach. The latest issue of Social Research is devoted to busyness. This is one aspect of that culture which we saw, in appalling living color, last week, fail at every juncture. An understanding of busyness is essential to understanding how “Brownie” did an outstanding job last week in helping to kill ten people in the Civic Center, one hundred in Chalmette, and so on.

We think that you should start with Robert Levine’s article, “A Geography of Busyness.” Levine, who teaches at California State University, Fresno, has been studying cultural differences in the perception of time – and his researchers have gone so far as to clock the speed of your average walker in cities in Brazil, Germany, the U.S., etc., to understand the use of time, under the sign of busyness, in two respects:

“I propose that the subjective experience of feeling busy has two main components: speed and activity.

Speed refers to the rate at which an activity is performed. It is the amount of activity per unit of time. The speed may be measured over brief and immediate periods of time, as when one experiences rapidly oncoming traffic or an upcoming deadline; or over longer, more sustained intervals, such as when we speak of the accelerating tempo of modem life.

The second component of busyness, activity, is the absence of unscheduled time. It is the amount of time that is consumed with activity; or, the ratio of doing things to doing nothing.”

Levine hypothesized that walking would be faster in European countries than in Brazil and the middle range of developing countries, and faster still in the U.S. He found that “pedestrians in Rio de Janeiro walk only two-thirds as fast as do pedestrians in Zurich, Switzerland,” for instance. This was important, insofar as walking is emblematic of speed as a measure of busyness. It is also exemplary of one variety of the emptiness entailed by busyness. The value of that walk is purely in its being completed with speed from the perspective of busyness. It is, in a sense, clipped out of life. It is dead time.

In another sense, nothing can be clipped out of life, which is made up of all of its parts. Of course.

Now, LI’s feeling is that the men around Bush are busy men. The Homeland Security Secretary, the director of FEMA, they are of that quality that no one could deny them busyness. It is also our feeling that their busyness is at the root of their incompetence. And that they reflect a kind of incompetence-in-busyness endemic to the managerial class.

Levine makes an interesting observation, contrasting event time with scheduled time:

“Keeping time by natural events has become increasingly less useful, or even impossible, in most contemporary urban cultures. There is, however, a variation on this type of timekeeping, what we might call "event time," that continues to be dominant in much of the world. In clock-time cultures, the hour on the timepiece governs the beginning and ending of activities. When event time predominates, scheduling is determined by activities. Events begin and end when, by mutual
consensus, participants "feel" the time is right. The distinction between clock and event time deeply divides cultures. Sociologist Robert Lauer (1981) conducted an intensive review ofthe literature concerning the meaning of time throughout history. The most fundamental difference,
he found, has been between people operating by the clock versus those who measure time by social events.”

In a previous post, we noted the interesting coincidence of two functions that give us the two faces of the “then:” the logical then, which moves from a possible condition to an entailment; and the narrative then, which sequences events. Busyness complicates this relationship, and might explain why planning has become a lost art, in the Bush culture. We will expand on this in a later post. Meanwhile, we recommend the issue of Social Research, if you can get ahold of it.

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Another account

Read this account of the escape from New Orleans, and the escape from the government’s idea of a refugee center (hint: they seem to have gotten their plans for it from Buchenwald)for the escapees from New Orleans, by Michael Homan. Let’s not let these histories go down the drain. Even if nothing changes, even if the monsters still rule us and the thugs in the press still ritually praise them and the whole mill grinds inevitably forward, making bonemeal of our bones, we can still preserve a record of how things really were in the U.S.A., circa 2005:


Here’s an excerpt:

“But then in the end I left. I learned that my father-in-law was flying to Jackson Saturday, and Friday those guys in the airboat showed up. I was very worried because I had heard that they were not letting people evacuate with their animals. But these guys said that had changed, and so I put my computer and a few papers in my backpack, loaded the dogs, let the birds go, and put Oot the sugar glider with food and water in Kalypso's room to await my return, much like Napoleon leaving for Elba I suppose. We drove in the boat all over the city looking for people. It was so surreal with the helicopters and all the boats up and down Canal Street amidst all the devastation. Towards dusk on Friday I arrived at I-10 and Banks Street, not far from my house. There they packed all of us pet owners from Mid City into a cargo truck and drove us away. They promised they would take us to Baton Rouge, and from there it would be relatively easy for me to get a cab or bus and meet the family in Jackson.

But then everything went to hell. They instead locked up the truck and drove us to the refugee camp on I-10 and Causeway and dropped us off. Many refused to get out of the van but they were forced. The van drove away as quickly as it could, as the drivers appeared to be terrified, and we were suddenly in the middle of 20,000 people. I would estimate that 98% of them were African Americans and the most impoverished people in the state. It was like something out of a Kafka novel. Nobody knew how to get out. People said they had been there 5 days, and that on that day only 3 buses had shown up. I saw murdered bodies, and elderly people who had died because they had been left in the sun with no water for such a long time. I’ve traveled quite a bit, and I have never seen the despair and tragedy that I saw at this refugee camp. It was the saddest think I have ever seen in my life. I am still so upset that there were not hundreds of buses immediately sent to get these people to shelters.”

Also, see this report from a Green Party member, Malik Rahim, who has remained in Algiers. The whole report is interesting, since it emphasizes one thing that should be made obvious:
1. the state not only abandoned New Orleans, but expended a lot of energy trying to keep a self-organizing population from rescuing each other, even as they allowed gangbangers and vigilantes to run wild.

"My son and his family -- his wife and kids, ages
1, 5 and 8 -- were flooded out of their home when
the levee broke. They had to swim out until they
found an abandoned building with two rooms above
water level.

There were 21 people in those two rooms for a day
and a half. A guy in a boat who just said "I'm
going to help regardless" rescued them and took
them to Highway I-10 and dropped them there.

They sat on the freeway for about three hours,
because someone said they'd be rescued and taken
to the Superdome. Finally they just started
walking, had to walk six and a half miles.

When they got to the Superdome, my son wasn't
allowed in -- I don't know why -- so his wife and
kids wouldn't go in. They kept walking, and they
happened to run across a guy with a tow truck
that they knew, and he gave them his own personal
truck.

When they got here, they had no gas, so I had to
punch a hole in my gas tank to give them some
gas, and now I'm trapped. I'm getting around by
bicycle.

People from Placquemine Parish were rescued on a
ferry and dropped off on a dock near here. All
day they were sitting on the dock in the hot sun
with no food, no water. Many were in a daze;
they've lost everything."

no comment

“I am glad the President has nominated someone already familiar with FEMA's mission to become Deputy Director. Mr. Brown is currently General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer of the agency, a position he has held since February of 2001. Before joining the Bush Administration, I note from his resume, he served as executive director of the Independent Electrical Contractors in Denver. In the early 1980s, Mr. Brown served as staff director of the Oklahoma Senate's Finance Committee, while serving on the Edmund, Oklahoma, City Council.

He ran for Congress in the sixth district, and, in what I think is
particularly useful experience, early in his career, was assistant city manager in Edmond, with responsibility for police, fire and emergency services.”

-- Senator Joe Lieberman (D), HEARING before the COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS UNITED STATES SENATE,ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS ON THE NOMINATION OF MICHAEL D. BROWN TO BE DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY

Via The Left Coaster.

Population of Edmond, Oklahoma: (year 2000): 68,315.

Being and the Wack

History is the superstition of intellectuals. They are always trawling among the time’s Rorschach blots for analogies, and for the determinants among the innumerable skirmishes of the night's ignorant armies, and for our particular future in the past, which contains all futures except one: the one where before and after are abolished. That future annihilates itself.

LI is as superstition as any of them. We do cling to the “then.” The then is where logic ( the possibilities encoded in the if/then) crosses temporality (the then that sequences the narrative). We do believe that we can create modest structures around the then, and imagine that history is coordinate with event, and that events are real. The then is my repository for what Santayana called animal faith. And so I am led down the path that led up to this week, and will lead from this week. Before we endorse any ideology whatsoever, we want to have a lucid sense of the then.

We have been thinking about this because we have been thinking about agency and structure. During the vacation, we read a lot of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. This time, we did not read it with that undertone of Derridean derision we brought to our last reading of it. Sartre’s rewiring of the whole notion of transcendence, putting it in terms that resonate with the double face of the then, struck us as a pretty good project, even if the notion of liberty on which it is grounded is peculiar and unconvincing.

Which brings us by way of the backdoor to two comments about the drowning of New Orleans. Harry, in our comments section, objects to our instant personalization of the event in terms of Bush. Harry sees structure, here, as the overriding issue. My sense that Bush has made a difference – that there is a specific Bush signature to what we have seen happening – seems to him to be a bit naïve:

“Whoever comes after him [Bush] as the sockpuppet for his class and culture will fit that description too.”

The other comment is by Jim Henley at Unqualified offerings, who writes sarcastically that the drowning of New Orleans, like 9/11, has so far confirmed the liberal in his view, the conservative in his, and the libertarian in hers:

“From what I can tell in the last couple days’ reading, Katrina has chiefly served to confirm people in their previously held views. Liberals proclaim it proof of the need for a robust federal government (shades of Bill Moyers in September 2001), conservatives find themselves confirmed in their belief in the overriding importance of social order vigorously enforced, and libertarians regard the disaster and its aftermath as an exemplary failure of government. (Anarchists see government failing at even its core functions. State-accepting libertarians see government as having ignored its core functions for inappropriate pursuits.)”

Henley’s point is that the structure of the ideologies so determines the response as to make ideology an unfalsifiable structure – a thing no test can dent. It thus removes liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism from any real situation.

I grant that both of these points are valid, insofar as agency is largely determined by the background of the sense one makes of the world through structures one has neither created nor had any choice in assimilating. You can’t pull yourself out of your culture by the hair on your head. But I also think that they over-rely on the imperviousness and determinateness of structures which, to my mind, are always slightly out of equilibrium due to acts and events. Acts and events are the wack dimension (I would substitute wack for liberty in Sartre).

For instance: the liberal belief in a robust federal government doesn’t automatically translate into a liberal belief that we needed Homeland Security. LI, a liberal if there ever was one, for instance, thought it was a stupid idea when the Dems came up with it, and a scary idea when the GOP adopted it. That the increase in Government spending on Homeland security has gone up something like 22 percent per year since the boondoggle was started showed simply that the conservative critique of the robust federal roll stopped at its traditional limits, which are, not coincidentally, the limits of the economic interests of the conservative constituency. Like the robust Federal War Department, the robust Homeland Security department served to siphon off government money to a multitude of very GOP-ish military industrial corporations. Which is another way of saying that ideological structures aren’t necessarily homogenous and don’t necessarily serve as predictors of social action.

Those discrepancies and breaks create the Wack, which is where agency comes into play. And this is where I would have to protest against the idea that Bush is a sock puppet. Of course, we can trace a certain learning curve in Bush’s career and see how it corresponds to the culture he grew up in, but it is a mistake to think that you could put any man or woman from Bush’s class in that curve and come out with the same result.

the counted and the uncounted

One expects that the clearance of the Convention Center, since it is administered by thieves and murderers, will probably encompass hiding a number of corpses. This is evidence, after all, and you want to burn or bury evidence. So LI hopes that all those who knew the victims – the parents, or children, or friends – will not give up when the victims turn up in the “missing” list – will point the finger and make as much noise as possible. That the murderers Chertoff and Brown are directing efforts in NOLA means that men who have the motive for covering up their crimes are directing efforts in NOLA. There is a new chapter in the black book of the African-American massacres, and it will be curious to see how the media ignores it, and how it is swept under the rug all the way around.

John Barry’s article in the NYT (I wrote about Barry in an earlier post) includes this graf:

“The scope of the 1927 devastation also resembled today's. No one knows the death toll. The official government figures said 500, but one disaster expert said more than 1,000 in Mississippi alone. The homes of roughly one million people, nearly 1 percent of the entire population of the country, were flooded. The Red Cross fed 667,000 people for months, some for a year; 325,000 lived in tents, some sharing an eight-foot-wide levee crown with cattle, hogs and mules, with the river on one side and the flood on the other.”

Here’s an editorial from the Times-Pic, which has been one of the most reactionary papers in the U.S. for years:

"OUR OPINIONS: An open letter to the President
Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."

That’s unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud."

perhaps not

Ann Rice’s op ed in the NYT was an exercise in perfectly controlled anger and despair – which is not something we can reproduce at LI, where we are at the mercy of the portals of the senses and those rumors of the heart that we can’t quell with antacids.


“But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.”

I don’t know about the “Sin City” part – the worst people in the world, who are the great honchos of American politics and media, advocated shooting people who loot directly, while conniving at the great lynching of the city, and I don’t think it was Sin City they were thinking of as much as getting the Soweto massacre right this time. These people are the true descendents of the slave traders, in them runs the blood of everything treacherous and vile, they sweated through exotic fevers in jungle just to massacre Indians and strip them of their bangles, they scalphunted, union-busted, Red-scared and peculated because they are built that way, they are instinct with every trick that will produce a bogus product and a quick buck, and they keep weighing us down with their failures and they will until the country buckles. We are ruled by thugs, whose actions are then praised by other thugs, who call themselves journalists. That is how the system works – the bad Cesars are here.

But I do like the almost childish promise in the last graf. There is always life stirring among the catacombs. Because the more I read about it, the more I think that NOLA is not down for the count. The more I think that this disaster is as much about the government, all levels of it, operating to stifle the one thing that could have saved thousands this week – the self-organized population, the one that could have had boats and buses at the Civic Center five days ago, the one that almost managed an armada out of New Orleans for 45 dollars a seat from the Monteleone Hotel.

They will screw up pumping out the water. They will screw up getting clean water to drink. They will screw up re-building. They will screw up the levies again. They will screw up relief for the refugees. They will screw up the gas. They will screw up and screw up, but I am beginning to think that the belief that the city is gone is their belief, their triumph, and – like all of their triumphs – a lie.