America’s Disaster Culture: The Production of Natural Disasters in Literature and Pop Culture 9781628924619, 9781501396212, 9781628924633

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AMERICA’S DISASTER CULTURE

AMERICA’S DISASTER CULTURE

The Production of Natural Disasters in Literature and Pop Culture

Robert C. Bell and Robert M. Ficociello

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2017 Paperback edition published 2019 Copyright © Robert C. Bell and Robert M. Ficociello, 2017 Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2461-9 PB: 978-1-5013-5199-0 ePub: 978-1-6289-2462-6 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2463-3 Names: Bell, Robert C., author. | Ficociello, Robert, author. Title: America’s disaster culture : the production of natural disasters in literature and pop culture / Robert C. Bell and Robert M. Ficociello. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017010662 (print) | LCCN 2017036868 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628924626 (ePub) | ISBN 9781628924633 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781628924619 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Natural disasters–Social aspects–United States. | United States–Social life and customs. | Disasters in literature. Classification: LCC GB5014 (ebook) | LCC GB5014 .B455 2017 (print) | DDC 303.48/50973–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010662 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Robert M. Ficociello would like to dedicate this text to Alison, Lucia, Marcus, Veronica, and Salvatore. Robert C. Bell would like to dedicate this text to Brody and Wendy.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION: THE DEATH OF THE NATURAL DISASTER AND THE BIRTH OF DISASTER CULTURE

viii

1

TROUBLE WHEN THE DUST SETTLES: NARRATIVE AUTHORITY AND KEN BURNS

15

DISCOURSE DISASTER: SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKES IN 1906 AND 1989

39

NATURAL DISASTER: SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

65

GULF WARS: THE NARRATIVES OF IRAQ AND NEW ORLEANS

87

SANDY: SUBJECTIVITY, CELEBRITY, AND SOCIAL MEDIA

113

THE END OF DISASTER CAPITALISM: (A)BJECTION TO (Z)OMBIES OF FINAL DISASTERS

141

Bibliography Index

173 187

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Robert M. Ficociello The process of writing this book has been a rewarding challenge. I am not sure what else I expected, but in retrospect, this process could have been a lot easier. For the next book project, I hope that I employ what I have learned and that I avoid the obstacles. I wish I had a person who could have provided sagacious advice, but what fun would that be? I would be happy, by the way, to offer advice to anyone. Thanks to the Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association for providing a national and regional forum for individuals to work on and work through their intellectual ideas. If you have not attended one of the conferences, you should. Holy Family University has provided support for me to attend conferences that contributed to several ideas in this book. Thanks to the Holy Family Library Staff, especially Debby Kramer, for tracking down via interlibrary loan the many books I used in the research of this book. The editorial group at Bloomsbury, Haaris Naqvi and Katherine De Chant, thanks for sticking with us. They have been patient with us and integral to the project. To my coauthor, Robert Bell, we think alike, until we don’t. I hope you have enjoyed this intellectual process, in spite of your curses and BOLD TEXT comments. Thanks to my lovely family, Todd, Erin, Sam, and Kelsey, for support and fun family times. Immense appreciation and love to my parents, Veronica and Salvatore, who have supported me forever. Literally forever. They are a model of strength and an inspiration to me. To my son Marcus, when you can read someday, I hope you are not bored by this book and have questions for me. I will tell you stories about how you slept behind me in the bed while I typed during your afternoon naps. Miss Lucia, I will tell you stories, too, about how many times you came to my desk to ask, “Watcha doing?” Just like your brother, I hope you enjoy learning something about disasters. Those children’s books I analyzed are now yours and his. My wife, Alison, who I have dragged around the country: Gulf Coast, No Coast, East Coast. I thought I was patient and understanding, until I met her. By this I mean she is the standard of patience and understanding, and I am far below that. I love you, and I love our life.

Acknowledgments

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Robert C. Bell I would like to thank the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, especially Ann Larabee and Bruce Drushel for allowing us the opportunity to be or surrounded with scholars and like-minded individuals with whom we could share our ideas and learn from. Also, I would like to thank Loyola University New Orleans for its support. Especially, I would like to acknowledge Dr. Mary McCay, Dr. Brad Petitfils, Nancy Rowe, and Mary Waguespack for their good humor and many conversations. They have been true colleagues. Our editors at Bloomsbury, Harris and Katherine, who championed this project and allowed us the time to see it to completion. The city of New Orleans has provided multiple opportunities to be an oftenunwilling observer participant in the study of disasters. A great city that is perpetually on the precipice. My coauthor, Robert Ficociello, we have been arguing for over fifteen years, and I look forward to many more years of intense, yet fun, argument. My extended family and friends, who have tolerated my expostulations that I’m sure have oftentimes made them feel uncomfortable and confused. My mother and father, I wish they were here to hold this book in their hands. Most of all, I acknowledge Wendy Romero for her patience and understanding, without which this project would not have seen completion. I know she’s ready for this book to be done. Finally, my number one, Brody. Hopefully the grown-ups will have the issues discussed in this book resolved so that you and your generation can live in a beautiful, just, and fair world. We can hope.

1 I N T R O D U C T IO N : T H E D E AT H O F T H E NAT U R A L D I S A ST E R A N D T H E B I RT H O F D I S A S T E R C U LT U R E

On September 16, 2004, Hurricane Ivan made landfall on the Alabama/Florida coast. On Garcon Point, across Escambia Bay from Pensacola, Florida, only two houses were left standing. This massive hurricane eventually caused $18 billion in damage. Of course, this was a rare event. Less than a year later on August 29, after initially crossing Florida four days earlier, Hurricane Katrina made landfall below New Orleans and went on to become the costliest hurricane in US history. Obviously, this proved an even rarer event, where within a year two major catastrophic storms hit the Gulf Coast. However, let us not forget that Katrina was followed by hurricanes Rita and Wilma, both of which were rated as stronger storms. The areas affected by all of these storms of the record-breaking 2005 hurricane season are still “recovering” after a decade. In January 2010, Haiti was struck with a 7.0 earthquake that killed over 300,000 and left over one million people homeless. As of January 2012, two years after the event, Oxfam reported that 500,000 people still remained homeless.1 Japan is still “recovering” from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that occurred in March 2011. Reports are now emerging about polystyrene, containers of petroleum liquids, and even asbestos debris reaching North America. A 2012 Frontline episode reported that cleanup of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor will take decades to complete, and the presence of tainted milk and fish are affecting Japan’s food supply.2 Reading about or viewing each of these disasters from the safe comfort of living rooms and recliners, one must inhale a deep breath and thank God it did not happen to us. Living and dealing with hurricanes in New Orleans, we began wondering specifically about all the other hurricanes and dominant weather events.3 1. Donovan Webster, “Haiti Earthquake: Two Years Later, Where Did The Money Go?” The Huffington Post, January 22, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2012/01/11/haiti-earthquake-funds_n_1200229.html. 2. “Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown,” Frontline, written, produced, and directed by Dan Edge (2012; Lincoln: PBS), Television. 3. Robert Bell was born and lives in New Orleans. Robert Ficociello lived in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina.

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There are numerous hurricanes, but a select few—in particular, those natural disasters where media coverage and images construct narratives for us— become part of our culture. Those stories, which feature language such as “the destructive wrath of Mother Nature,” “in spite of the overwhelming odds,” and “no one could have predicted,” earn their importance and enter the cultural discourse of disasters. Stories resonate when a reporter grimly tells an audience that “nothing could be done,” “nature always wins,” and “you can’t fight Mother Nature,” yet these are the same tired phrases that accompany all stories of this kind, as though a script is being followed rather than what we consider a weather report. However, the wrath of nature can take on many interesting guises in the construction of disaster narratives. After the Japan earthquake, through an online headline for the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail, an intrepid reporter or anonymous headline writer created this teaser: “Is the Japanese Earthquake the Latest Natural Disaster to Have Been Caused by a ‘Supermoon’?”4 What is a Supermoon? Does the author of this headline really believe this Supermoon caused the earthquake? Probably not, for at the end of the story, a sidebar actually explains that the cause of the earthquake was the “Pacific Plate … plunging deep underneath Japan.”5 The hypothetical has become more newsworthy than the real cause. The Gulf Coast, since Katrina, is now a source of endless hypothetical disaster narratives. Since 2005, hurricane activity on the Gulf Coast has been minimal, and nothing above a Cat 2 has made landfall. We remember evacuating for Hurricane Gustav in August 2008 with the trauma of Katrina still fresh. Mayor Ray Nagin issued stern warnings and doomsday scenarios, calling it “the storm of the century” in a press conference. He went on to tell the audience: “Anyone who decides to stay, I’ll say it like I said it before Katrina: make sure you have an axe, because you will be carving your way, or busting your way out of your attic to get on your roof with waters that you will be surrounded with in this event.”6 After this buildup and the chronological proximity to Katrina, who could refuse watching Geraldo Rivera on Fox News as water splashed over the top of newly constructed levee walls the Army Corps of Engineers built after Katrina? The real drama resided in Geraldo’s fate as a death-defying reporter and away from any larger focus on New Orleans. Hurricane Isaac hit the mouth of the Mississippi River on August 28, 2012, almost seven years to the day after Katrina, but due to improved levees, the 4. “Is the Japanese Earthquake the Latest Natural Disaster to Have Been Caused by a ‘Supermoon’?” Daily Mail, March 11, 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ article-1365225/Japan-earthquake-tsunami-Did-supermoon-cause-todays-naturaldisaster.html. 5. Ibid. 6. “CNN Sunday Morning,” CNN.com, last modified August 31, 2008, http://www. cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0808/31/sm.01.html.

Introduction

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New Orleans area fared well. However, arguably due to the levee upgrades, the parishes that are located outside of New Orleans and the federal levee system flooded severely. These parishes receive a short and cursory treatment from the national media. The Katrina narrative has set a high bar for newsworthy storms, and media attention focused on Isaac read more like a success story for those in New Orleans rather than tragedy for those outside the city. However, hurricanes have been spinning around in the open Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean forever without attention. So we started to wonder, where are the “natural” disasters? Where is the “natural disaster” when a giant hurricane rotates off the US coast and over the Atlantic Ocean? Fires, tornados, floods, and tropical storms occur all the time. Sometimes they even make the news, but really, the only time we hear about them is when people become involved and disasters evolve into media events. So, we started doing research on “natural disasters.” Flipping through the 2010 book, The Illustrated History of Natural Disasters, one must be struck by the fact that most all of the illustrations of the “natural” disasters involve people. We began to think that people were the disaster. Nature, or that which is natural, is not really the issue. Lebbeus Woods’s 2001 monograph Earthquake! A Post-Biblical View addresses news headlines. “‘Earthquake Kills Thousands!’ ‘Killer Quake Strikes!’ ‘Earthquake Levels Town!’” are typical aftermath headlines.7 What they should say is this: “‘Falling Buildings Kill Thousands’ ‘Killer Buildings Strike’ ‘Inadequately Designed Town Levels Itself!’” These could sound hyperbolic, but we contend that these headlines would be highly accurate. However, these headlines would not sell advertising time, newspapers, or documentaries. In addition, the dichotomy between nature and society would be precarious, and the dynamic between victim and victimizer would be shifted from Mother Nature versus human into a human versus human relationship. Instead of natural disasters, we would be dealing with crimes against each other, possibly humans versus capitalism. In Ted Steinberg’s 2006 Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, he discusses the 1993 flood of Hannibal, Missouri. A flood protection system had been proposed for the city in 1962 that would have protected everything from Mark Twain’s house to the poor sections of town, which stand segregated from the gaze of the tourists’ cameras. However, the plan was rejected—too much money and part of the population objected because it looked like an ugly wall. Yet, when the town was flooded again in 1973, the city asked the Corps of Engineers to revisit the plan and make it, according to Steinberg, “more budget-oriented, not to mention class-conscious.”8 In the early 1990s, that plan was executed to withstand a 500-year flood. Of course,

7. Lebbeus Woods, Earthquake! A Post-Biblical View (New York: Springer, 2001), 4. 8. Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), xvii.

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within a month of the project’s completion came the 500-year flood. The wall worked, but it was not designed to protect everyone, and the 1993 flood only affected the poorer residents of the town. Steinberg comments, “There are indeed always winners and losers in the struggle to combat natural disaster, this much is true. But there is nothing natural or inevitable about this fact … Hannibal’s trial by flood was certainly no act of God.”9 What is an act of God? According to Black’s Law Dictionary, it is “an act occasioned exclusively by violence of nature without the interference of any human agency. A natural necessity proceeding from physical causes alone without the intervention of man. It is an accident which could not have been occasioned by human agency but preceded from physical causes alone.”10 This seems like what one may call a natural disaster, where nature beats itself up “without the intervention of man.” But we know that to some what is normally described as a “natural disaster” is often also an “act of God.” After Katrina, Michael Marcavage, director of Repent America, stated that “this act of God destroyed a wicked city. … From ‘Girls Gone Wild’ to ‘Southern Decadence,’ New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. From the devastation may a city full of righteousness emerge.”11 Many of us would find an easy task in discounting this type of logic. What is actually more insidious than the “act of God” label is that major catastrophes are labeled “natural” disasters. Which seems innocuous, but is it? After all, it is just a title. However, as we will show, controlling the language of disaster means guiding policies, capital, and people before, during, and after disasters. Natural Disasters: Acts of Man or Acts of God? by Wijkman and Timberlake, in 1984, is concerned primarily with policy issues, especially in the “third world,” which New Orleans looked like in the aftermath of Katrina. The authors state from the outset that “humans are playing too large a role in natural disasters for us to go on calling them ‘natural.’”12 We often invite suspicion when hearing that something is common sense or natural. More often than not the word “natural,” like all language, contains ideological connotations. After all, isn’t the role of ideology to make sure that things “seem obviously true, natural, or even universally applicable”?13 Timothy Morton, writing in his book The Ecological Thought, states: “Ideologies are commands pretending

9. Ibid. 10. Black’s Law Dictionary, 9th ed., s.v. “Act of god.” 11. “Hurricane Katrina Destroys New Orleans Days Before ‘Southern Decadence’,” Repent America, accessed May 13, 2013, http://www.repentamerica.com/pr_ hurricanekatrina.html. 12. Anders Timberlake and Lloyd Wijkman, Natural Disasters: Acts of Man or Acts of God? (Washington, DC: International Institute for Environment and Development, 1984), 11. 13. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, 2nd ed., s.v. “Ideology.”

Introduction

5

to be descriptions.”14 Alison Anderson, in her book Media, Culture and the Environment, writes, “‘Nature’ is culturally and historically constructed since our perceptions are inextricably bound up with particular models of society that are dominant at any one period in time.”15 The dominant cultural model of American society, and most on this globe, is capitalism. Hence, what we think of as a “natural disaster” is integral to our form of capitalism. Of course, linking “natural” with disaster implies that the disaster is based in the environment; however, we can make the assertion that “natural” also means something that just happens—something we humans have no control over. It is natural for boys to like blue and for girls to like pink. It is natural for individuals in other countries to want American goods because those goods represent freedom. Likewise, one must consider that any rhetoric or action against capitalist motives would be unnatural. Thus, we must recognize the policy implications at work with the phrase “natural disaster.” In fact, Steinberg, in the epilogue of his book, states that “it is almost as if a giant magnet is rolled out after natural calamities, drawing people in power like so many iron filings into normalizing these phenomena.”16 So what we have with “natural disasters” is that they somehow proceed from the environment, or “nature,” and just happen. We are overwhelmed and cannot do anything about the force. These events are normal elements that happen because we sit at the mercy of our environments. Alexander Wilson, in The Culture of Nature, writes: “When our physical surroundings are sold to us as ‘natural’ … we should pay close attention. Our experience with the natural world is always mediated.”17 That also means our “natural” disasters are mediated events and not actually “natural” and, thus, not “normal.” These active events are not merely happening to those of us who wait passively for nature to attack like an evil enemy. In fact, inside capitalism, we are sold, both literally and ideologically, these ideals. This offers us a clue as to why the term “natural disaster” is employed to describe certain catastrophic events. Obviously, in terms of policy, the government is usually looked upon to protect us from natural disasters, just as we trust our governments to protect us now from terrorists, during the Cold War from communists, and always from hostile nations. Steinberg’s book continually details that the reasons for these natural disasters, for the human and fiscal damages that occur, tend to be the lack of political willpower to effectively deal with known, and manufactured, environmental issues. 14. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 131. 15. Alison Anderson, Media, Culture, and the Environment (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 5. 16. Steinberg, Acts of God, 201. 17. Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 12.

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This was definitely the case with Katrina. For years, it was known that the levee system was inadequate. After the storm, investigations revealed that the levees were never properly inspected. A 2005 story by Gordon Russell in the Times-Picayune found that the Orleans Parish Levee Board and Corps of Engineers usually spent less than five hours annually inspecting over 100 miles of area levees.18 Regarding the outfall canals that breached after the storm, the Levee Board chief engineer admitted, “There wasn’t any lengthy up-an-down (inspection) on the canals.”19 This political problem is not limited to New Orleans. Building code revision proved difficult to get in place after the great San Francisco earthquake. Soil conservation and changes in farming practices shifted reluctantly during and after the Dust Bowl. On the other hand, the US government created the cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security about a year after September 11 and allocated to it a budget of $19.5 billion, which has since tripled. Steinberg, while discussing hurricanes in Florida, states, “In the postwar period, the federal government emerged as a major player in the political economy of risk.”20 Yet, here is the important issue to consider: What is the relationship of the government’s role in evaluating risk policy and its role in promoting free enterprise? If governments are to be seen as existing for the service of “free enterprise,” which is the “natural” economic order, then our critical stance to the word “natural” as a modifier begins to make more sense. We can now see that the ideological function of “natural” is designed to allow politicians to evade “moral responsibility.”21 Is it far-fetched then to claim that “natural” disasters are produced by our sociopolitical structures and that to think of them as local events is inadequate and incomplete? Brian Massumi, writing in the essay “Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear,” makes an interesting observation: “What society looks toward is no longer a return to the promised land but to a general disaster that is already upon us, woven into the fabric of day-to-day life.”22 The “general disaster” is an integral component of our social system. Obviously, the trigger event may not be caused by the social structure of our daily lives, but because disaster is something that is an intimate part of our life, we should think about why this is the case. What benefit is disaster to this system? If the disaster is integral to the system, then the forged relationship is necessary. Massumi 18. Gordon Russell, “Levee Inspections Only Scratch the Surface,” The TimesPicayune, November 25, 2005, http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2005/11/levee_ inspections_only_scratch.html. 19. Ibid. 20. Steinberg, Acts of God, 80. 21. Ibid., 201. 22. Brian Massumi, “Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear,” in The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 11.

Introduction

7

continues, “The accident and its avoidance have come to be interchangeable.”23 The accident or the natural disaster is part of late capitalism. Massumi writes later, “[Late Capitalism] has become an unbounded space—in other words, a space coextensive with its own inside and outside. It has become a field of immanence.”24 Capitalism is a totalizing structure; as capitalism relates to disaster, Massumi writes, “The trick is instead to figure out how to make money off the crisis.”25 Timothy Morton writes that the lasting legacy of capitalism will be, along with global warming, “hyperobjects.”26 Hyperobjects are things like Styrofoam or plutonium—creations that will last for hundreds of generations. Our world has been shaped by capitalism and its colonialist enterprises. Global warming, which can be seen as being man-made and a relatively recent invention of man, can be considered a hyperobject. Morton claims that 25 percent of the effects of global warming will be around for 30,000 years.27 What, then, is the structural relationship between disasters and capitalism? In the essay “Romantic Disaster Ecology: Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth,” Morton writes, “The disaster of disaster is that disaster is everywhere, all the time: while on the one hand it appears obvious that disaster should be the exception that proves the rule of a generally non-disastrous world, in actuality no non-disastrous moment arrives.”28 If the disaster illustrates a failure of our capitalist system, then who or what do we blame? Do we blame the disaster on the failure of those individuals who fail to properly manage the system, or, is failure an intended and even integral component of the system? Morton writes, “Two things that seem distinct—human society and Nature—are two different angles of the same thing.”29 Society and nature are connected to such an intimate degree that the effort to distinguish between the two elements takes enormous amounts of capitalist energy: films, media outlets, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and government. Natural disasters afflict those in vulnerable locations, which often parallel socioeconomic and racial lines. Just as capitalism relies upon differences between nature and society, it depends on differences between classes, genders, and races, all of which are socially constructed but appear natural. The authors of “Towards

23. Ibid., 12. 24. Ibid., 18. 25. Ibid., 18–19. 26. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 130. 27. Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects” (lecture, Loyola University, New Orleans, November 2, 2010). 28. Timothy Morton, “Romantic Disaster Ecology: Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth,” Romantic Circles Blog, January 2012, https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/disaster/HTML/ praxis.2012.morton.html. 29. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 133.

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a Transformative View of Race: The Crisis and Opportunity of Katrina” write that racism is a structural creation,30 and Michael Lewis asserts in his book The Culture of Inequality that poverty is a structurally necessary condition for capitalism to flourish.31 Most media reports of disasters attempt to individualize blame and effect—human interest stories—and mask sociopolitical distinctions. The natural disaster exists within the created and the naturalized, conditions of capitalism. This is the lesson of Steinberg’s book when he writes about the 1997 flooding of the town of McKinneysberg, Kentucky: This tendency to naturalize, to focus on nature and exaggerate its role in the destruction, amounts to one great exercise in moral hand washing. Even worse, by disavowing moral responsibility for disaster, we are rationalizing the kinds of economic oppression that explain why some people have steam gauges and others do not, why some people get adequate protection from floods and others cannot, why some people live and some die.32

In The Ecological Thought, Morton makes a grand pronouncement: “Capitalism ultimately can’t sort things out. It’s reactive; what we need is proactive.”33 However, in the twentieth century, capitalism has been quite adept at incorporating inequalities of race, class, and gender because the system needs individuals to recognize, believe, and uphold these differentiations. In plain terms, capitalism needs individuals to think of themselves as part of an “us” or a “them” ethos. Race, class, and gender become part of our identity, and that identity is reinforced daily through consumer transactions, popular culture, and media events. For example, the Boston Marathon bombings created a Boston Strong campaign, which signified a tight version of “us.” Whenever a professional sports team from Boston visited an opponent, the crowd became an “us.” Suddenly, New York Yankee fans were Boston Strong. Yankee fans shifted, albeit briefly, from a “them” to an “us.” The September 11 attacks emblematized the hard and dangerous distinction of being “us” or “them.” Disaster culture needs these distinctions as well, and capitalism has efficiently and rapidly included natural disasters into its ethos. In other words, despite the destructiveness of disasters, capitalism’s operational modes maintain productivity.

30. John A. Powell, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Daniel Newhart, and Eric Stiens, “Towards a Transformative View of Race: The Crisis and Opportunity of Katrina,” Progressive Planning Magazine, April 26, 2006, http://www.plannersnetwork.org/2006/04/towardsa-transformative-view-of-race-the-crisis-and-opportunity-of-katrina/. 31. Michael Lewis, The Culture of Inequality, 2nd ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). 32. Steinberg, Acts of God, 201. 33. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 121.

Introduction

9

In his essay “Censorship Today: Violence, or … Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses,” Slavoj Žižek writes: No wonder, then, that the by far predominant version of ecology is the ecology of fear, fear of catastrophe—human-made or natural—that may deeply perturb, destroy even, the human civilization, fear that pushes us to plan measures that would protect our safety. This ecology of fear has all the chances of developing into the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing the declining religion: it takes over the old religion’s fundamental function, that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits.34

Thus, the natural disaster is a component of capitalism, a way to expand late capitalism and open new markets based on the permanent fear of the natural disaster. The next disaster is always waiting for us, and just like the military industrial complex that keeps us safe from hostile nations, a very small number of American business interests record corporate profits never before seen. In light of this, we should consider, as Morton does: “[L]et’s use this moment to imagine what sort of noncapitalistic society we want.”35 How would disaster capitalism be delimited? We offer potential scenarios. In the 2009 feature film, Zombieland, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Columbus and Woody Harrelson as Tallahassee, the characters are reduced to identities associated with their locale. Not only have the people been afflicted by a virus that induces a zombie state and renders them driven only by hunger, but capitalism has been affected as well. Columbus and Tallahassee roam the country taking whatever they need or want: SUVs, guns, fuel. Columbus declares, “Oh, America. I wish I could tell you that this was still America, but I’ve come to realize that you can’t have a country without people. And there are no people here. No, my friends. This is now the United States of Zombieland.”36 However, capitalism will not be able to replenish the resources, and this fact is parodied in Tallahassee’s fear that he will never find another Hostess Twinkie and his obsessive quest for those “spongy, yellow, delicious bastards.”37 He stands in a parking lot and tells Columbus, “There’s a box of Twinkies in that grocery store. Not just any box of Twinkies, the last box of Twinkies that anyone will enjoy in the whole universe. Believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date. Some

34. Slavoj Žižek, “Censorship Today: Violence, or … Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses,” accessed May 23, 2013, http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm. 35. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 133. 36. Zombieland, directed by Reuben Fleischer (2009; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2010), DVD. 37. Ibid.

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day very soon, Life’s little Twinkie gauge is gonna go … empty.”38 Not only will Twinkies be exhausted, but capitalism will cease to exist. The miraculous restocking of supermarket shelves will not occur. Another event, although a gradual disaster, is global warming. Climate change, because of its scope and relationship to the global economy, appears to be a realistic but still intangible threat to global capitalism. The majority of scientists argue that the accumulation of greenhouse gases must be reduced by severely limiting waste-gas emissions. However, as stewards of the planet, we are no less hopeful that technology will solve rising terrestrial and oceanic temperatures, and we hope that these imagined advances in technology will reduce severe weather events. Therefore, in this narrative of progress, we can maintain our current emission levels and prevent inhibiting economic growth. Profit margins for corporations who advocate deregulated environmental enforcement can be preserved like a national treasure. Americans, in particular, have faith that capitalism will heal itself, and, subsequently, “nature” will mend our environment as well. The United States and multinational geoengineering corporations form and offer opportunities for venture capitalists to profit and help solve climate change. Enormous swaths of ocean surfaces become unregulated laboratories. For example, two projects have attracted attention of investors. In November 2012, The Guardian reported, “One of Britain’s leading marine engineers, Stephen Salter, emeritus professor of engineering design at Edinburgh university and a global pioneer of wave power research, has patented with Microsoft billionaires Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold the idea of using thousands of tyres lashed together to support giant plastic tubes which extend 100m deep into the ocean.”39 Theoretically, colder, deep water would upwell to warmer surface waters and reduced the surface temperature. Thereby, hurricanes coming over the Atlantic would be denied the warm water that fuels their destructive growth as they approach the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. Simple. Profitable. In July 2012, Forbes (and several other publications) reported the scientific acceptance of geoengineering possibilities in a feature titled “The Cheap Way to Deal With Climate Change: Iron Fertilisation of the Oceans.” The contributing author prefaces his argument with this: “And it is by no means certain that reducing emissions is the cheapest and thus best manner of dealing with climate change.”40 Hence, iron fertilization of naturally iron38. Ibid. 39. John Vidal, “The Man Who Would Stop Hurricanes with Car Tyres,” The Guardian, November 3, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/nov/04/ stephen-salter-tyre-hurricane-sandy. 40. Tim Worstall, “The Cheap Way to Deal with Climate Change: Iron Fertilisation of the Oceans,” Forbes, July 19, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/ nov/04/stephen-salter-tyre-hurricane-sandy.

Introduction

11

deficient sections of ocean water is very cheap and thus best. The process would enrich sections of ocean water, and then algal blooms would flourish and use atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2, a dominant greenhouse gas) until the iron is depleted. The algae trap the carbon, sink to the ocean floors, and sequester the carbon for centuries. The author asks, Is this a complete solution to anything? No, not at all: there’s not enough of the ocean which is iron poor for us to fertilize to absorb all emissions. However, it is helpful: which is the first part of the equation… But it will help and my goodness it’s cheap. Which leaves us with the only interesting question left: why isn’t everyone crying out for this to be done pronto?41

The unfortunate answer to the author’s question is that all decisions should not be made purely on economics. Cheapest is not always best, and scientists have risen to question the unbridled and unregulated experimentation in global waters. The Huffington Post reported in October 2012, “A controversial experiment in which more than 200,000 pounds of iron sulfate were dumped into the Pacific Ocean west of Canada has scientists calling for more transparency in geo-engineering.”42 However, the corporation that conducted the dumping contends that they did not cross any legal barriers. In other and related legal matters, the gradual process of climate change in the United States precludes federal disaster relief to individuals or communities affected by global warming—it is not considered legally a natural disaster. We propose that natural disasters are not “natural,” but they are in fact inevitable and “things that happen” as events in capitalist culture. They are fuel and discharge for capitalism, and one must wonder if we can eliminate natural disasters by getting rid of the form of capitalism that is currently promulgated by the far right of the American political spectrum. However, this seems unlikely in the near future because of capitalism’s and the (inseparable) nation-state’s efficacy to manage and use disasters for profit. Although these two entities possess the adroit ability to interact within popular culture as well, popular culture has an advantage of speed in responding to disasters and providing critical opportunities of citizens. To get to this point, we looked back at major disasters that garnered the attention of popular culture and literature. Although the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s does not occur chronologically before the San Francisco earthquake and fires of 1906, in first chapter we look at the Dust Bowl as an unpaired event. By this, we mean that the Dust Bowl is presented as

41. Ibid. 42. Stephanie Pappas, “Iron Dumping in the Pacific Ocean Stirs Controversy over Geoengineering,” The Huffington Post, October 19, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2012/10/19/pacific-ocean-iron-dumping-geoengineering_n_1986517.html.

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a historically significant event in itself. The drought as a disaster event is unprecedented with the Dust Bowl, despite us knowing serious drought conditions have occurred and are occurring now, and it serves as an ecological coordinate. This chapter examines the Dust Bowl as an event with a distinguished name, narrative, and authorship. With an event with limited textual and visual resources available in which to build a narrative, the chapter looks at Ken Burns’s ability to reauthorize the Dust Bowl in his immensely popular PBS production The Dust Bowl. Burns gathers and reproduces existing Dust Bowl material, and he manages to both revive this disaster and kill its complexity. Burns’s efforts should lead us to consider the naming rights, the commercial influences, and the ethos of authorship connected to present and future disasters. The second chapter expands that discussion to a larger question about disaster discourse—how language is used to guide the way in which we contextualize disasters and the practices American culture puts into action before, during, and after disasters. In other words, how does language influence our collective consciousness of natural disasters? This chapter begins with critical readings of children’s books about the San Francisco earthquake and fires of 1906. We then draw comparisons and contrasts with the Loma Prieta earthquake that shook California during the 1989 World Series. The 1989 earthquake represented a technological shift in disaster discourse with the evolution of twenty-four-hour news, hand-held video devices, and satellite communications; however, this event continued a line from prior events by creating our hunger for ceaseless information, swelling the greedy bellies of media conglomerates, and starving our curiosity and ability to question how disaster events are presented. Although the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, do not seem to fall under the auspice of natural disaster, the narrative of these catastrophes do. The third chapter investigates the dynamic relationship between what is natural and what disrupts the natural. We consider the assertion that September 11 “changed everything.” Where in earlier chapters we argue that natural disasters are part and parcel of our discourse, technology, and media, capitalism is also an ecological context that is subjected to similar alliances. In other terms, much as we plan and predict natural disasters, the events of September 11 were likewise planned and predicted in the same way. Katrina, in the fourth chapter, offers an opportunity to retheorize the mediation of disaster events. Even more so than the 1989 World Series live earthquake, Katrina’s appearance in 2005 came to a table already set, but who could predict that the world would be able to watch the start of disaster TV? At unparalleled levels, the US government invested in disaster discourse because of its link to capitalist interests. Nevertheless, we also saw the emergence of alternative media and its contrast to dominating discursive efforts. This hostility revealed an underrepresented, or at worst hidden, nation that was divided, if not ignorant, about poverty, race, and

Introduction

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vulnerability. However, Katrina betrays an avenue of possibility as to why and how these issues appeared. Our hypermediated relationship with American interests abroad, such as the wars in the Middle East, is superimposed to an event within our national boundaries. Disaster capitalism washes upon the shores of our own Gulf. The fifth chapter draws attention to Superstorm Sandy, an event entrenched in traditional media, and, in addition, it is a disaster infused with social media. The speed of disaster narration is witnessed like never before. Information technology and its associated metrics during Sandy resulted in the digitization of disaster, and the emerging techno-demographic—those individuals born into the social-media world—could be auguring an equally disturbing trend. Not only is the world around us hypermediated, but, simultaneously, we should be questioning the mediation of our own selves. Is the techno-demographic becoming filmmakers of a life they are not even living? And, in the context of a catastrophic event in which a person is involved, should not this be a situation where one is reminded, it is “me” who is here? Finally, in the sixth chapter, we theorize whether or not a catastrophic event—actual or fictional—can provide sufficient impact upon our ways of thinking so that individuals will call for a change in the current disastrous trajectory. Perhaps, we feel as though we should be excused from realizing that the impingement of local and regional disaster events is something bigger. There will always be an “us” and a “them.” However, if the totalizing effects of climate change have not resulted in a consensus, then what event will? Correspondingly, in popular culture the zombie apocalypse and alien invasion have captured our gaze. The figure of the zombie and alien in all their variations provide a rich opportunity to analyze our cultural fears, desires, and practices: our “us” to a zombie or alien “them.” Notwithstanding, what if the dynamic of “us” and “them” is shifting toward another model? Could we be on the edge of a moment where “us” is fading into the technological “progress” of visual and social media, and consequently, we are entering a period that exhibits a conclusion to the war between “us” and “them”?

2 T R O U B L E W H E N T H E DU ST SE T T L E S : NA R R AT I V E AU T HO R I T Y A N D K E N BU R N S

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, chronicles Jay Gatsby’s obsession with accumulating wealth in the service of winning back the love of Daisy Buchanan. Set during the aftermath of the First World War in the American Roaring Twenties, Jay Gatsby loses Daisy to the wealthy Tom Buchanan when Gatsby serves in the US military. At the end of the first chapter, Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, is out walking late at night when he sees Gatsby “[stretch] out his arms in toward the dark water in a curious way, and, as far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling.”1 The “single green light” across the water that represents Gatsby’s hope, idealism, and flaw also functions as a point, or pole, for his obsession. The opposing end of the spectrum, where Nick sits, is “the unquiet darkness,” and illustrates Nick’s relative detachment and distance from Gatsby’s focus.2 In between these two poles, the novel unfolds for Gatsby, Nick, Tom, and Daisy. However, Gatsby appears to be the character most aware of the liminal quality of his station. He is occupying a transitional position of his life. He is not the person he had been, nor is he the person he wants to be. Gatsby’s “trembling” is the physical manifestation of his liminality and his residence being the middle of all the nightlife action provides its figurative manifestation.3 Nick and Daisy also operate in the liminal zone, but they are both restrained and repressed in their manifestations. Tom possesses the highest degree of self-certainty, as he claims to never want to depart the East, questions anyone who might want to leave, and feels secure with his family’s unity. However, all four characters occupy spaces of fluidity as the novel progresses. Each character, whether cognizant or not, is not at a stable point but rather in the midst of a conversion. The characters’ liminal spaces, which are their individual uncertainties, evolve out of physical and abstract binaries that Fitzgerald creates throughout The Great Gatsby: rich and poor, old money and new money, West Egg and East Egg, Manhattan and Long Island, legal and illegal, married and single, and 1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, [1925] 1974), 22. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid.

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cash and credit. One of these physical binaries offers a liminal space within the novel and a connection to a Depression-era text, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.4 This important liminal space is introduced when Nick narrates the start of his afternoon with Tom at the beginning of the second chapter of The Great Gatsby: About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is the valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash–gray men who move dimly and already crumbling though the powdery air.5

Here, Fitzgerald illustrates the gray, transitory space between residential West Egg and industrious New York City. The “valley of ashes” is shrouded for those passing through, but otherwise hidden from both New York City and West Egg, between capitalism and its rewards. Occasionally, commuters are forced to endure an extended layover, but this occurs only when boats or other trains are also required to stop for unloading or a drawbridge rising— slight pauses to allow commerce to intersect. Consequently, this space proves to be a generative area as well as an endpoint for commerce. Industrial capitalism, no longer producing munitions, clothing, and warfare machinery in the post–First World War period, instead manufactures consumer goods. However, industrial capitalism also compiles environmental waste that grows, via Fitzgerald’s descriptions, like panoramas of fields filled with crops of food, creates geometries of shelter, and builds shadows of laboring men. In addition, the novel itself provides a historical marker for readers because of its historical position before the Great Depression. Although Fitzgerald’s novel was not written in clairvoyance, his portrayal of Gatsby’s spectacular rise, climax, and fall does serve as a premonition for the Stock Market Crash of 1929. One must note that the subsequent and popular film adaptations of The Great Gatsby appear in American popular culture at auspicious times of cultural shifts. In 1974, an adaptation written by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Jack Clayton stars Robert Redford (Gatsby), Mia Farrow (Daisy), Bruce Dern (Tom), and Sam Waterston (Nick). The 1974 adaptation grossed over $26 million and landed sixteenth for all films that year.6 In 2013, another adaptation written by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce stars Leonardo DiCaprio (Gatsby), Carey Mulligan

4. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: The Viking Press, [1939] 2002). 5. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 23. 6. “Box Office/Business Info for The Great Gatsby (1974).” Internet Movie Database, accessed May 31, 2016, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071577/business?ref_=tt_ql_dt_4.

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(Daisy), Joel Edgerton (Tom), and Toby Maguire (Nick). This adaptation grossed over $144 million and placed eighteenth for all films in the year.7 Both Redford and DiCaprio headline these films at high trajectories of their respective careers, and no doubt this contributes to the success of each film. Nevertheless, America in the mid-1970s experienced severe inflation, a recession, global oil crisis, and the first significant economic downturn since the end of the Second World War. Gatsby, as a timeless allegorical figure for America’s idealism, works for a rapidly amassed fortune, displays it grandly and publicly, and tragically experiences a grinding halt. Gatsby’s unbridled idealism and subsequent crash must have resonated with the country during this period, much as it did in 2013 as the nation still held onto the memory of the 2008 economic recession. Much like the adaptations of Fitzgerald, the 1940 cinematic release of The Grapes of Wrath held the nation’s attention because of the recent economic depression and drought. And, like the careers of the stars of The Great Gatsby films, Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay adaptation and John Ford’s direction served as a touchstone for Henry Fonda’s career. Fonda earned an Academy Award nomination in the Best Actor category, and the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards overall and won two Oscars.8 Although the film was released just a year after Steinbeck’s novel was published, both the film and the novel arrived in the American cultural landscape at the tail end of the Depression era, during New Deal policy results, and near the onset of American involvement in the Second World War. Much like Tom Joad’s isolationist philosophy in the beginning of the novel (and the film), which evolves into his progressive, revolutionary action after a fight with authorities, the United States abandoned its isolationist stance and entered the Pacific and European conflict after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Tom’s development of character begins in Chapter 2 of The Grapes of Wrath with an established isolationist approach of “tryin’ to get along without shoving nobody around,” because he is on parole for homicide.9 His crime occurred at a dance when Herb stabbed Tom with a knife, and Tom hit him with a shovel and killed him. As Tom walks the road, he wants to get home, see his family, and get to work on the family farm without incident or conflict. However, Tom’s isolationist plan and its outcome are foreshadowed in the first interaction with another character in the second chapter of the novel. Tom seeks a ride from a delivery driver at a roadside café after his release from the Oklahoma penitentiary. Tom is attempting to get back to his family’s farm more efficiently than walking the distance. The driver agrees

7. “The Great Gatsby (2013).” Box Office Mojo, accessed May 31, 2016, http://www. boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=greatgatsby2012.htm. 8. John Ford won an Oscar for best director and Jane Darwell as Ma Joad won an Oscar for best actress. 9. Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 9.

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after Tom prods him, and once inside the cab, the driver asks Tom a series of questions about his clothing, shoes, and work. Tom realizes that the driver seems aware of his status as a recently release convict. Tom tells the driver, “You know where I come from,” and the driver responds, “Well—sure. That is—maybe. But it ain’t none of my business. I mind my own yard…I don’t stick my nose in nobody’s business.”10 Because they are trapped in the cab of the truck and forced to interact, neither character has the option to isolate their respective selves. Before exiting the truck’s cab, Tom finally explains to the driver where and why he had been imprisoned. Toward the end of the novel, Tom finds himself again trapped in a social situation where he cannot maintain a distance between himself and his family and what is happening around them. The Joads desire a seemingly simple lifestyle, such as farming their land, camping peacefully on their trek, and earning enough money to feed themselves, but the social order around them impinges upon these basic desires. Tom, along with the preacher Jim Casy, is ultimately drawn into the labor movement’s war against subhuman working and living conditions, as the family continues its transitory existence in California. Steinbeck’s narrative ends with the Joads stuck in an abandoned railway car, which, in obvious irony, begins filling with water from heavy rains, and the rising water chases them to a barn filled with rusty farm equipment. Unused people, static transportation, sleeping farm equipment, and, perhaps the most disheartening, excessive water. The Joads, who moved from their home because of drought, are now coerced by water. Steinbeck, like Fitzgerald’s “valley of ashes” in The Great Gatsby, illustrates the power of liminal spaces through his imagery of the dust rolling over the plains. Steinbeck’s personification of the Oklahoma weather parallels the agency given by Fitzgerald to the industrial waste and ashes. In the first chapter of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck gives the environment an initially sympathetic voice toward the crops, where “the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth [and] lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover.”11 However, the plowing upsets the balance, and Steinbeck’s tone and language to describe the weather shifts: “Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air. … The dust was long in settling back again.”12 As the short introductory chapter progresses, the wind turns harsh and obdurate in its purpose, where it “grew stronger, whisked under stones, carried up straws and old leaves, and even little clods, marking its course as it sailed across the fields.”13 The farmers and their families endure a night of a dust storm, and they emerge 10. Ibid., 12. 11. Ibid., 1. 12. Ibid., 2. 13. Ibid.

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from houses to find their ruined crops. After two days of the dust sifting down from the sky, “an even blanket covered the earth.”14 The weather and its will cannot be escaped. The wind and its force cannot be avoided. The dust creeps into houses, under roots, and into the eyes, lungs, and ears of humans and animals. The dust proved consequential not only to the heart of the Dust Bowl in north Texas and the Oklahoma Panhandle, but on two occasions, May 1934 and March 1935, the major dust storms rolled all the way to the East Coast and even extended out to Atlantic Ocean reaching offshore water crafts. Each author, Fitzgerald using ashes and Steinbeck using dust, employs personified symbols that give and take of their characters in liminal spaces. The Great Gatsby portrays the area between residences and commerce. The Grapes of Wrath portrays the area between American coasts, a space that fed the world during the First World War but now generates enormous clouds of abused topsoil. With both authors and their novels, the richness of each text lay in both their definitiveness and ambiguity, to exemplify historical times and events with apparent essence, but simultaneously offering layers of interpretation to be mined decade after decade following their initial appearance in American culture. Fitzgerald and his illustration of excessive greed and industrial wealth have had longevity in the American twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Fitzgerald’s representation of unbridled capitalism presents a before picture to accompany the coming global economic disaster. Steinbeck and his humanization of the Dust Bowl’s impact on a fictitious, but palpable, Joad family also provides a narrative of economic disaster. Although Steinbeck’s narrative nucleus is the Joads’ transition from Oklahoma to the West Coast, the ecological disaster that is foreshadowed by capitalistic greed (the accompanying waste generated) in The Great Gatsby reaches it full power in The Grapes of Wrath. But unlike the swelling and withering of a national economy, natural disaster does not shrink and knows only one trajectory: to increase in frequency, to enlarge in impact, and to reach for everything. As Fitzgerald proves to be an observer and critic of America in the aftermath of the First World War period, the timing of the two major adaptation related to Fitzgerald and Steinbeck illustrates a reflection of larger cultural concerns in America. At the forefront are environmental, class, and political issues that are framed in the wake of the lengthy 2008 recession. On April 11, 2012, a press release from PBS states that a four-hour, two-part documentary directed by Ken Burns and titled The Dust Bowl will air later in November: The film chronicles the environmental catastrophe that, throughout the 1930s, destroyed the farmlands of the Great Plains, turned prairies into deserts and unleashed a pattern of massive, deadly dust storms that for many 14. Ibid., 3.

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America’s Disaster Culture seemed to herald the end of the world. It was the worst manmade ecological disaster in American history.15

One has to ask documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, “Why the Dust Bowl?” What else do we need to know about the Dust Bowl disaster in terms of ecology, economics, literature, and people that we do not already know? Americans already have a literary landscape and Hollywood face for the Dust Bowl. Tom Joad, the protagonist of John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath, was played by Henry Fonda in the John Ford film by the same title in 1940.16 Steinbeck’s epic novel illustrates the extreme toll people encountered during the Dust Bowl and the desperate lengths they went to escape its reach. Woody Guthrie provided a timeless voice to the peoples’ heart, soul, and despair. Plus, we all should know the facts of what happened: homesteading, First World War boom, technological advances and mechanization of farming techniques, the Great Plow Up, drought, government intervention in farming practices and subsidies, irrigation progress, and, finally, success. Why not just go online and find a succinct refresher with a few more details? Most teachers, students, and scholars are familiar with Wikipedia. The “collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation”17 ranks typically between 5 and 8 on Alexa’s Top 500 websites list worldwide and in America.18 Part of Wikipedia’s governing ethos asserts, “Older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced; newer articles may contain misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Awareness of this helps the reader to obtain valid information and avoid recently added misinformation.”19 In Wikipedia’s effort to maintain a dialogue with history, they

15. PBS, Ken Burns’s THE DUST BOWL Explores the Largest Manmade Ecological Disaster in History Airing November 18 and 19 on PBS, April 10, 2012, accessed June 5, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/about/blogs/news/ken-burnss-the-dust-bowl-explores-thelargest-manmade-ecological-disaster-in-history-airing-november-18-and-19-on-pbs/. 16. The Dust Bowl could gain a new face, however. In July 2013, according to Variety.com, “DreamWorks is in early talks with John Steinbeck’s estate to acquire the rights to the author’s classic novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ which Fox had previously turned into a film in 1940.” 17. “Wikipedia,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, September 5, 2013, accessed September 11, 2013, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia. 18. “Top Sites,” Alexa, The Information Company, monthly, accessed September 11, 2013, http://www.alexa.com/topsites. 19. “Wikipedia:About,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed September 11, 2013, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About.

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strive for articles that document and explain the major points of view in a balanced and impartial manner. We avoid advocacy and we characterize information and issues rather than debate them. In some areas there may be just one well-recognized point of view; in others, we describe multiple points of view, presenting each accurately and in context rather than as “the truth” or “the best view.” All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy, citing reliable, authoritative sources, especially when the topic is controversial or a living person. Editors’ personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions do not belong.20

But what are the differences between Burns’s The Dust Bowl ethos and Wikipedia’s ethos in relation to its Dust Bowl? How does each of these contribute to the Dust Bowl narrative? The first sentence in the Wikipedia entry for the Dust Bowl states: The Dust Bowl, also known as the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the US and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion (the Aeolian processes) caused the phenomenon.21

As users and contributors to Wikipedia know, it is both a source and a depository for information. As a result, Wikipedia is never definitive. Instead, it is a fluid and evolving space of informational ontology. For example, from April 2015 to April 2016, Wikipedia registered almost 491 million edits to English-language articles.22 On the other hand, the Ken Burns’s ethos strives toward a product (a documentary) that is conclusive about his chosen topic and aimed toward a specific viewership. Perhaps this recognizable difference is illustrated in Burns’s discussion with Paula Zahn during Lessons from the Dust Bowl w/ Ken Burns (Live YouTube Event) a few days prior to the PBS’s premier of Burns’s documentary.23 At the opening of the program, Zahn asks him why The Dust Bowl now? He

20. Ibid. 21. “Dust Bowl,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed September 13, 2013, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl. 22. Erik Zachte, “Wikipedia Statistics: Saturday April 30, 2016,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed June 7, 2016, https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ TablesCurrentStatusVerbose.htm. 23. Lessons from the Dust Bowl w/ Ken Burns (Live YouTube Event). YouTube video, 1:07:44, posted by PBS, November 15, 2012, accessed March 11, 2013, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=g9GkNQa5of8.

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answers, “William Faulkner said, ‘History is not was, but is.’24 And at those great moments, if you’re trying to make history, the past comes alive, and it’s not past but present, and you feel it,” and further into the program, Burns continues, “We realized we had this vast, almost Russian novel, of complexity, of individual family travails over the course of this thing. And that it was possible, through maps and through the interweaving of the testimony to tell the top down story of this great ecological disaster, but to have these real experiences.”25 We must remember that Burns is not a historian, and his reference to narrative, via Faulkner (although apparently inaccurate) and Russian literature, is what he knows as a documentary film maker. However, he does not answer Zahn’s question regarding the timing of his The Dust Bowl, but Burns does seem to be saying to Zahn that the Dust Bowl is a good story because, as a disaster event, it has key elements of narrative. Burns says in an April 2012 interview, “One thing you learn after a while in this history business is you think that the past is really far away, and in many cases it is. … But memory, the thing that recalls the past, is present.”26 He is a director of film in “this history business,” which he implies is really about storytelling, but one should also reference historian Hayden White when he asks in The Content of the Form, “What would a non-narrative representation of historical reality look like? In answering this question, one begins to catch a glimpse of the basis for the appeal of narrativity as a form for the representation of events construed to be real rather than imaginary.”27 For Burns, narrative history makes good “history business” when his project possesses a perception of “historical reality” supporting it. However, in the interview with Zahn and various other interviews referenced here, Burns never says that he is aiming for, as White notes above, “historical reality” with his documentary form as much as narratives that are good for his “history business.” Although published before Burns’s The Dust Bowl, Gary Edgerton’s Ken Burns’s America analyzes Burns’s major works up to 2001, and Edgerton provides insight into Burns’s relationship with historiography, particularly following the viewing and public success of The Civil War. Burns “emerges as a national celebrity as a result of the widespread public reaction and attention,

24. The source of this quotation could not be established other than that it is a repetition and that it is a “famous” Faulkner quotation. The quotation might be a paraphrase of a line from Faulkner’s novel, Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 25. Lessons from the Dust Bowl w/ Ken Burns (Live YouTube Event). 26. Ken Raymond, “Ken Burns Brings ‘The Dust Bowl’ to Life,” The Oklahoman, April 10, 2012, accessed March 15, 2013, http://newsok.com/article/3664910. 27. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 4.

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which helps his subsequent television career but noticeably strains his relations with the historical community.”28 The Civil War reached television blockbuster level when viewership “[averaged] 12 million viewers at any given moment”29 during the initial eleven-hour, five-night broadcast on PBS in 1990. Burns’s success with The Civil War “asserts in one fell swoop that history is no longer the principle domain of specialists, as it had been for nearly a half-century, but now is relevant and compelling for everyone—only this time on TV.”30 And, this is why Burns’s relationship with historians becomes tenuous, and as his career progresses, he shies away from claims of “historical reality” and leans toward characterizing himself as a storyteller, which by trade, he is. White might not have imagined a Wikipedia page as an answer to his question about what non-narrative history might look like. But, for “500 million people each month,”31 White32 and everyone else who has access to a search engine, like Google, can find out. Dry facts would be displayed. A recognizable form of White’s “non-narrative representation of historical reality” would be a Wikipedia article.33 Wikipedia’s articles begin as empty shells with set spaces for information waiting to be filled in with content. Articles are blank forms occupied with user-supplied information. Nevertheless, the Wikipedia ethos appears to be quite transparent, though shifting slightly in its language because of its editorial and contributory processes, and surprisingly consistent. Hence, with the historical event of the Dust Bowl, a desire for pure statistics would steer a curious person to Wikipedia for his or her Dust Bowl information. But one must ask whether or not a Wikipedia page holds enough “narrativity” to be a source of information about historical events, or are we already within an era of immediate and concise web-based information that lacks “narrativity”? According to a 2012 USA Today interview between Carol Memmott and Burns, “The bedrock of any of his films, The Civil War to Baseball, says Burns, is ‘emotional archeology. … We weren’t just interested in excavating dry dates and facts and events, but looking for some other emotional glue that would make all those date and times and events stick together and coalesce.’” He adds, “Like any other boom-and-bust tale, the Dust Bowl is a complicated one, about human nature and mother nature colliding. ‘It’s at its root a

28. Gary R. Edgerton, Ken Burns’s America (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 4. 29. Ibid., 5. 30. Ibid., 4. 31. “Wikipedia:Statistics,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed September 13, 2013, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics. 32. Hayden White has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_ White. 33. For a blank (sandbox) Wikipedia article page, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox

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story of hubris and the inevitable greed,’ says Burns.”34 Here, we begin to find a connection between Burns’s efforts in documentary and the literary timelessness of Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. Beside this connection, and relating it to an epic Russian novel and a modernist novelist, Burns also calls the Dust Bowl a morality tale, and the important information one can take from him about the Dust Bowl and his The Dust Bowl is that he has documented a narrativized version of the Dust Bowl. Burns’s narrativized interpretation includes a built-in distance from the facts as “emotional glue”—or his elevation of the human subjective responses to the facts—and history, but as Burns contends, and often contradicts himself, he has, as a number of reviewers declare, brought “‘The Dust Bowl’ to life.”35, 36, 37 Perhaps an appropriate assessment would be that the Dust Bowl has been brought back to pop culture life just like Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. One of Burns’s “characters” in his film is Timothy Egan, who wrote The Worst Hard Time.38 This strategy is not new to Burns, where his “historical documentaries, in fact, are modeled after existing research and designed to bridge public interest in the subjects he chooses with the finding of the scholarly community.”39 In The Civil War, Burns used famous historian Shelby Foote, who wrote narrative histories, and Ed Bearss, a former Marine and military historian. Both, however, are not degreed as academic historians. Also, seen as characters in The Civil War series are two academic historians, Barbara Fields and Stephen B. Oates. Egan, a journalist by training, won the 2006 National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time. The New York Times reviewed Egan’s book in December 2005 and titled the review “The AntiJoads.” Elizabeth Royte’s review opens with the following claims: TIMOTHY EGAN’S new book, “The Worst Hard Time,” takes the shape of a classic disaster tale. We meet the central characters (the “nesters” who farmed around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles); dire warnings (against plowing) are voiced but ignored; and then all hell breaks loose. Ten-thousand-

34. Carol Memmott, “Ken Burns’ ‘Dust Bowl’ is Far From Dry History,” USA Today, November 13, 2012, accessed March 17, 2013, http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/ tv/2012/11/13/the-dust-bowl-and-ken-burns/1702991/. 35. Ellen Gray, “Ken Burns’ Latest Film Brings ‘Dust Bowl’ to Life,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 16, 2013, accessed September 14, 2013, http://www.philly.com/ philly/columnists/ellen_gray/20121116_Ellen_Gray__Ken_Burns__latest_film_ brings__Dust_Bowl__to_life.html. 36. Raymond, “Ken Burns brings ‘The Dust Bowl’ to life,”. 37. Alex Strachan, “Burns Brings the Dust Bowl Years to Life,” The Windsor Star, November 17, 2012, accessed September 13, 2013, http://www.pressreader.com/ canada/windsor-star/20121117/282003259705070. 38. Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time (New York: Mariner, 2006). 39. Edgerton, Ken Burns’s America, 155.

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foot-high dust storms whip across the landscape, choking people and animals, and eventually laying waste to one of the richest ecosystems on earth.40

Egan’s book follows a genre of nonfiction novel or “faction,” and when one starts watching Burns’s The Dust Bowl, parallels between Egan’s and Burns’s Dust Bowls emerge immediately. However, a major distinction between these Dust Bowls is Egan’s title. He clearly states an acknowledgment of narrative parameters: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. He displays modesty and accuracy. On the other hand, Burns’s title is The Dust Bowl. The title is bigger, as is the expectation, to be epic. Egan wants to reveal the deeper untold story of the people who owned land and tried to ride out the dust storms, unlike the fictional Joads that Steinbeck portrays as tenant farmers who were driven from their land and migrated to the West. Egan adds content to the Dust Bowl metanarrative. And if Egan’s book is, as Royte claims, a “classic disaster tale,” then how might one categorize Burns’s documentary? Another “classic disaster tale”? After all, Burns’s The Dust Bowl covers the same ground as Egan’s book. So, the short answer would be,“Yes,” Burns provides a cinematic version of a “classic disaster tale,” but an apt retitling of his documentary should be The Worst Hard Time: The Retold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Even if one accepts that Egan and Burns have each created their own “classic disaster tale,” then one should be able to recognize the characteristics of a genre about disaster events. Royte’s “classic disaster tale” is structured in four parts. First, “we meet the central characters.” Next, “dire warnings are voiced but ignored.” A “High Noon” is reached. And finally, “all hell breaks loose.”41 These elements should be familiar as major structural plot points of any traditional narrative arc. However, the logical relationship between a disaster event and a disaster narrative, classic or otherwise (modern, postmodern?), proves to be dynamic and tenuous. Since both Egan and Burns cover similar, if not identical, events told in narrative form, then we should be led to question the events behind the narrative form or “tale.” By “question,” we could look to find the accuracy or authenticity of the events discussed in the book by Egan or the documentary by Burns. We should be inclined to ask what we learn about a historical event from the narrative we read or see, which, in this case, are the Dust Bowls of Egan and Burns. How is a historical event shaped in some way by the narratives that appear only after the event? We must admit that The Great

40. Elizabeth Royte, “ The Anti-Joads,” The New York Times, December 2005, accessed February 23, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/books/review/ the-antijoads.html. 41. Ibid.

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Gatsby shapes how one looks at the American 1920s and the subsequent stock market crash. Likewise, The Grapes of Wrath shapes how one sees the Dust Bowl, farm labor conditions, and the Great Depression. Although written decades after the Dust Bowl, Egan’s book brings more elements to the Dust Bowl disaster, so those who want to learn about the Dust Bowl will comprehend the complexity of the Dust Bowl eco-disaster. Egan’s book delimits the existing parameters of the Dust Bowl—opens and expands the Dust Bowl for us. His book furnishes both depth and breadth. Most would agree, in a common sense manner, that a disaster is a richly layered event, due to a disaster event’s scope, depth, and temporal characteristics. Therefore, the relationship between a disaster and narrative about a disaster is, perhaps counterintuitively, complex. One strategy for explaining the relationship between a disaster and its narratives is through a model of description. In other words, a disaster narrative—a formal and external characteristic—is used to describe an actual disaster event. If we subscribe to this kind of descriptive model, then a disaster event determines or sets the parameters for its subsequent and resultant disaster narrative. In the case of the Dust Bowl, one must begin to find parameters of the event, however, in order to create a narrative: When does the Dust Bowl begin and end? We use these facts to establish a beginning to a disaster narrative. What are the geographical boundaries of the Dust Bowl disaster? We use these facts to register a setting for a disaster narrative. We use a historical event, such as the Dust Bowl, and allow its disaster (Dust Bowl) narrative to evolve from historical facts. However, these questions can be translated into a discursive approach to disaster narrative, or a prescriptive model. Because disaster events are inextricably linked into a matrix of context, a prescriptive model of disaster narrative indicates that the narrative forms determine how and what is told about a disaster event. The formal elements of narrative determine the content of a disaster event. The narrative questions and resulting answers become, instead, authorial quandaries. What is the setting of the Dust Bowl? Who are the main characters? What are the major plot points? In what sequence should the plot points be arranged? In other words, when constructing a disaster narrative, an author must make conscious narrative decisions while considering a disaster event’s rich context and facts. Due to the vastness of a disaster event, such as the Dust Bowl, the pivotal decision an author (this of course includes any person or group creating a narrative textually, cinematically, or musically) needs to make revolves around a seemingly basic core question: What to include and what to discard about an event? In a paradox of film, where a visual set of qualities is provided to viewers, a prescriptive model of disaster narrative based upon a disaster event appears to be more like “life,” but even documentaries are narratives that are staged, edited, and produced to reach an end product. What is not being constructed is historical fact but rather a narrative, and, importantly, a narrative put together with “emotional glue.”

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With new forms of narrative available beyond traditional photography and print text, a disaster like the Dust Bowl had the benefit of film technology to capture moving images of dust storms, people, and the effect on the landscape. However, these technologies still need to be put into a form of narrative. Yes, photography and film capture something, but viewers must be told a narrative to obtain meaning. Moving images or static images need to be paired with narrative to complete the meaning making. The narrative can be a metanarrative related to a culture or a narrative related to a particular event, such as a disaster. Narrative form dictates the content, and the prescriptive model determines meaning for viewers. Egan’s choice of nonfiction narrative form distinguishes how and what he tells readers about the Dust Bowl, and likewise for documentary film in Burns’s The Dust Bowl. Therefore, we can conclude that the formal elements of narratives shape and determine the meaning of a disaster event. A disaster even does not exist, in terms of meaning making, without narrative. Some of those who have been through a disaster event might object to the view where their experience includes choices they have made regarding their retelling of their event. As fellow humans, we respond viscerally, emotionally, financially, and, often, venerably to their experience. We need only think about recently honored disaster events and their respective homages in America: National September 11 Memorial & Museum, retirement of the Hurricane Katrina name, and 2011 Joplin, Missouri Tornado Memorial. Donations for the September 11th Fund42 and the US government compensation for 9/11 victims and their families43 amounted to almost $9 billion, and these are derived from public empathy and sympathy for those involved in this disaster. In fact, New York Community Trust’s 103-page “The September 11th Fund: Final Report” is not merely a review of bookkeeping. The document contains testimonials from victims, friends, and families involved in the World Trade Center attacks and the September 11th Fund’s effect on them. As stated, “This report is dedicated to the memory of those who died on September 11, 2001 and their families.”44 The stories involved in the report are affective snippets, well edited and supplemented with photographs. Longer narratives from people who witnessed or experienced disasters is a genre into itself, and with major national disaster events, the disaster becomes an icon. And in America, the disaster becomes a genre itself. Both Katrina and September 11th have blossomed into, respectively, a Katrina genre and a 42. “September 11th Fund: Final Report,” New York Community Trust, accessed June 9, 2016, http://www.nycommunitytrust.org/Portals/0/Uploads/Documents/ September11thFundFinal.pdf. 43. “September 11th Victims Compensation Fund: FAQ,” September 11th Victims Compensation Fund, accessed June 10, 2016, http://www.vcf.gov/pdf/ ReauthorizationFAQs.pdf 44. “The September 11th Fund: Final Report,” 2.

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9/11 genre that include books, films, pop culture, and art. These come in the forms of autobiography, biography, and with the advent of digitized content, multimedia—feature films, documentaries, art, and a variety of online content. Although the structure of a narrative remains traditional, the witness accounts of personal experience have changed because of a medium’s evolutions, such as hand-held digital video recorders and cell phone technology. However, authors (witnesses with first-hand relationships with the disaster event) have “my disaster event,” which is their original experience with the disaster event. Subsequently, the witness recalls “my disaster story,” and this recollection is structured as a narrative. Due to the subjective nature of this situation, most readers may be agreeable to this proposition. With such vast natural disasters like the Dust Bowl and Katrina, even a geographically narrow terrorist attack like September 11, doubting an author’s credibility might seem distasteful because one would be calling into question the author’s personal (subjective) perspective, and likely traumatic experience. Could one be so bold as to question a person’s feelings and the veracity of their narrative in their response to trauma? Hayden White’s The Practical Past addresses the question of asking, “Is it true?” about perhaps the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, the Holocaust.45 White is not asking if the Holocaust happened, if a genocide occurred, or if a Final Solution had been set in motion by Nazi leadership. Instead, White is opening up Holocaust discourse—narratives, art, historiography—to wonder if one can question the veracity of Holocaust narratives and accounts. White states, “If [the Holocaust] is a new kind of event, an event peculiar to our modernity, then this would account for our unease in the face of conventional historiographical treatments of this event.”46 In addition, is the Holocaust an exceptional event that is outside of rigorous inquiry in a non“historiographical” discourse? Of the Holocaust, can we question truthfulness in a discourse composed of “artistic and specifically literary treatments”?47 White writes, “An example of a text, although manifestly about the real world and specifically the world of Auschwitz, to which a response cast in form, ‘Is it (historically) true?’ would be tactless, is Primo Levi’s memoir [Se questo è un uomo]48 of his time in Auschwitz in the late months of World War II.”49 Levi’s text “adds nothing in the way of factual information that could not be had in any reference book.”50 Consequently, White claims, “Instead of telling us ‘what

45. Hayden White, The Practical Past (Evanston: University of Illinois Press, 2014). 46. Ibid., 38. 47. Ibid., 27. 48. If This Is a Man. 49. White, The Practical Past, 35. 50. Ibid., 37.

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happened,’ [Levi] tells us ‘what it felt like’ and what it took in self-humiliation to ‘survive in Auschwitz.’”51 White, however significantly, never claims that Levi’s text is definitive or representative of Holocaust experience. The exceptional qualities of the Holocaust, according to White, classify this event as “unique to history and therefore incomparable to (or incommensurate with) other events of similar kind.”52 White continues his view of historically “unique” events, and he asks if the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, can also be deemed as “an utterly new kind of event, indeed emblematic of a new epoch and paradigmatic therefore of a category of historical events hitherto unimaginable and requiring, consequently, a search for new principle of explanation for its contextualization?”53 The uniqueness of a historical event comes not from its relation to prior exception historical events. White is not comparing the Holocaust to the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers to seek a category of historical event. Instead, he categorizes events that require us to consider “the scope and intensity of its impact, and its meaning and what it reveals about the society in which it took place.”54 He offers a broad and retrospective definition of a historical event. The Dust Bowl would appear to fit both into White’s idea of a “historical event” and also be outside of a “historical event” as a “natural event.” Perhaps, the proper treatment of the Dust Bowl is as a disaster event, and in a disaster event, as we have argued, it is both man-made and incumbent upon nature’s actions. The link between “historical event” and “natural event” is supplemental, not exclusive. A disaster event is both private and public, personal and historical. Essentially, with a disaster event, there is an acceptance of this autobiographic approach to representing a disaster event, as White claims, and what is explained to us from an author is feelings not facts. How can we doubt an individual’s traumatic experience when narrated autobiographically? However, what do we do, as readers, about biography? Egan’s nonfiction book stretches readers’ acceptance of veracity further. Egan is telling readers what staying in the heart of the Dust Bowl felt like through the real-life survivors who he portrays as characters in his narrative, but he also describes to readers what happened as facts. Egan narrates the intimate lives of “people who lived through those dark years,” as he states.55 Egan’s third-person omniscient narrator tells their “story of survival, of perseverance, of the

51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 46. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. “A Conversation with Timothy Egan,” Readers’ Guides, Houghtonmifflin.com, accessed August 27, 2013, http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/egan_ worst.shtml.

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most corrosive poverty,”56 and Burns adds another layer to this story through repetition and through using Egan and Egan’s characters from The Worst Hard Time for Burns’s own The Dust Bowl. Therefore, we are considering another narrative connection, with Egan and Burns. What is the narrative connection between a subjective historical event, like Egan’s text, Burns’s documentary, and White’s definition, and historical facts? We should find precariousness in this connection between subjective and objective history. Otherwise, the logic of disaster events can become a product of pure subjectivity. Facts would fade in place of feelings. If a subjective historical event is provided through narrative, then the subjective cannot equal the objective facts of a disaster event. If a disaster event verges on the unrepresentable through narrative (including cinema), then a disaster event must rely upon some alternative form of representation—the only representation available to us would be pure facts, which is an ideal never to be realized. The core of a disaster event would be empty, and narratives of a disaster event would surround the disaster event itself—always close but never filling the void. The ontological status of a disaster event would be forever unrealized. If on the other hand, one would believe that a disaster event can be represented, then a representation of a disaster event would be always mediated by a narrator who employs conventions of narration. One would have faith in the kernel of reality that is waiting for a narrative to come into relief for an audience. Therefore, a disaster event’s ontological status becomes static and dependent upon a narrative to bring it to life—to allow the disaster event to express itself. The conclusive narrative would appear and represent a disaster event in its historical essence. On the other hand, a continual metanarrative would be always expanding, much like the ethos of Wikipedia’s fluid topics, as versions of a disaster event are contributed to a metanarrative. As viewers, readers, and learners, do we desire a disaster event that is evolving and/or a disaster event that is shrinking or static via narrative or historiography? In popular culture, America is inundated by “definitive” labeling about music, eras, TV, and film. No one argues with musicians Rod Stewart, Steely Dan, or Def Leppard when each constructs their definitive musical, and now visual, oeuvre. One assumes that artists have authority over their artistic production. Record labels with legal authority over musical rights also release essential collections of artists who have died or artists’ estates where musical rights have been sold. Again, one assumes that an estate or will commands additional authoritative input to these decisions of definitiveness. But, what about artists whose greatness depends on depth and breadth? Ken Burns is an individual who has made his own definitive style from defining events, people, and eras. His expansive Jazz spawned definitive musical collections of jazz legends, such as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and 56. Ibid.

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nineteen other musicians. He becomes the literal stamp of authority for these artists’ definitive collections. Each of these definitive collections has “Ken Burns Jazz” overlaid with a mock stamp on the respective covers, and the “Ken Burns Jazz” competes with “definitive” collections from a particular artist or label. Burns does not shy away from applying definitive titles to his films about epic and vast events: The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The War, Prohibition, The Dust Bowl, and Vietnam. Burns’s contribution to the Dust Bowl’s narrative and his established authority as a documentarian appears to define the scope of the Dust Bowl as a disaster event. Now, everyone can view Burns’s The Dust Bowl to know the Dust Bowl, and with his stature as a documentarian, who else would attempt a competing narrative? Or, more accurately, who would be able to secure funding for a competing narrative? The Dust Bowl is now the property of Ken Burns. He holds the narrative rights to the Dust Bowl despite an incomplete treatment of the disaster event. But even with a seemingly low-stakes disaster event, an event that has minimal economic value, social interest, and lacks sexiness, one must look toward recent and future disaster events to observe evolving trends in narrative rights, such as Burns and The Dust Bowl. This trend focuses on the right to name disaster events with higher commercial interests and profit motives. Institutions, such as the National Hurricane Center and the Weather Channel, hold the authority to name weather events. In the fall of 2012, an announcement was issued: “The Weather Channel will name noteworthy winter storms. Our goal is to better communicate the threat and the timing of the significant impacts that accompany these events. The fact is, a storm with a name is easier to follow, which will mean fewer surprises and more preparation.”57 However, it does address the question regarding the authority of naming a disaster event—even an event like the Dust Bowl that has arguably ended. According to many sources, the term “Dust Bowl” is attributed to Associated Press journalist Robert Geiger in April 1935.58 The drought began in 1932, so we see a retroactive labeling and, hence, an attempt to begin defining this evolving disaster event. Up until 1935, the Dust Bowl had not happened and existed as a mere drought. The end of the Dust Bowl, on the other hand, presents far greater ambiguity. Rains returned in 1939, but drought-resistant farming practices and soil conservation had already been under way since the

57. Tom Niziol, “Why the Weather Channel Is Naming Winter Storms,” Weather. com, last modified November 11, 2012, accessed April 1, 2016, https://weather.com/ news/why-we-name-winter-storms-20121001. 58. We have not been able to track down the text of original article, but the term caught on right away and began its repetition thereafter by news outlets and the Weather Bureau.

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mid-1930s. The Second World War’s demands increased global appetites for grain, prices rose, and farming again became a profitable business venture. Due to its scale and scope, framing the Dust Bowl with facts proves difficult. Contemporary disaster events, however, are authoritative media events. Disasters become identities. In October 2012, Sandy’s landfall on the coast of New Jersey and near Manhattan proved significant, but Sandy downgraded below hurricane status. She did not warrant “hurricane” headlines. Notwithstanding, she became a “super” star, and in her narrative “hurricane” appeal, she maintained commercial appeal. Language was needed to prop her up in the media. In a year-end NPR segment, “Let’s Double Down on a Superstorm of Malarkey: Picking 2012’s Word of the Year,” about popular language in 2012, the subject of Sandy’s unofficial naming is discussed: Some words captured public attention for sadder reasons, like superstorm, coined to describe Hurricane Sandy. “Someone from the National Weather Service actually suggested frankenstorm, because it was a hybrid of different weather systems, like Frankenstein’s monster, and it was also going to hit around Halloween,” Zimmer says. But many news organizations considered Frankenstorm too lighthearted in the wake of the disaster, so the consensus settled on superstorm.59

The ability of information to spread through a nation (and globally) simultaneously via twenty-four-hour news and weather, social media, and YouTube for disaster events, such as Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, seems to present a stark difference between twenty-first-century disasters and a static retrospective of the Dust Bowl. But are these new narrative forms mere tools in which to describe a disaster event? Or, do these new narrative tools create vastly different disaster events? If one begins with Hayden White’s narrative perspective on historical reality, then the form can define the disaster event. He views narrative as “far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrative is a meta-code, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted.”60 In other words, all that a disaster event can be depends upon narratives that surround a disaster event. Form dictates the content and, in White’s terminology, endows meaning. What a disaster event means will depend upon the narrative, and the veracity of the narrative depends upon 59. “Let’s Double Down on a Superstorm of Malarkey: Picking 2012’s Word of the Year,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, December 28, 2012, accessed September 16, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2012/12/28/167719016/lets-double-down-ona-superstorm-of-malarkey-picking-2012s-word-of-the-year. 60. White, The Content of the Form, 1.

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commercial interests for a project to be funded initially and then the project’s return in profit. Therefore, with Burns’s critical reputation to historical events and his unprecedented commercial success, is his The Dust Bowl the definitive Dust Bowl? Is the Dust Bowl now authored by Ken Burns? One would have to say, “Yes.” The Dust Bowl has been packaged and formed by Burns despite the fact that he has not covered the Dust Bowl—he stops at a climactic point of the Dust Bowl, Black Sunday in 1935—but when the dust settles, Ken Burns will still be standing, as well as moving on to Vietnam. The form has defined the content, and the form will continue to define “a shared reality”61 of the Dust Bowl. Burns has brought the Dust Bowl back to life and simultaneously killed it. The Dust Bowl event will no longer be a living document that expands our understanding, but instead the Dust Bowl is a commercial success and fundraising strategy for PBS. However, some critics might suggest otherwise. According to one 2012 review of Burns’s The Dust Bowl, Given how long it takes Ken Burns to finance, assemble and promote his documentaries, the timing of ‘The Dust Bowl’ is eerily appropriate. It arrives on Sunday on PBS in the middle of a spate of quickly produced programs about Hurricane Sandy and climate change, as if Mr. Burns knew that this would be just the right moment for a cautionary story about human interference with the environment.62

Likewise, according to the Oxford American, “In the wake of last summer’s drought and this fall’s Superstorm Sandy, Ken Burns’s harrowingly absorbing new two-part, four-hour documentary, The Dust Bowl, feels particularly urgent.”63 But this contextualization is both auspicious and feckless. In fact, if one wanted to focus exclusively on droughts, the US Drought Monitor will always provide a context.64 The context is timely because fear sells, and the context is useless because Burns’s documentary can be associated with any natural disaster event to acquire urgent status and, in turn, sell more fear. In fact, the Dust Bowl appears like an aged movie actor paired with Burns, a young, hot star, who resurrects the older actor’s career. But, Burns’s The Dust 61. Ibid. 62. Mile Hale, “When the Great Plains Dried Up and Blew Away: ‘The Dust Bowl,’ by Ken Burns, on PBS,” November 16, 2012, accessed March 10, 2013, http://www.nytimes. com/2012/11/17/arts/television/the-dust-bowl-by-ken-burns-on-pbs.html. 63. Alexander C. Kafka, “FILM REVIEW: The Dust Bowl,” Oxford American, November 15, 2012, accessed March 10, 2013, http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2012/nov/15/ film-review-dust-bowl/. 64. For a weekly update to the areas experiencing various levels of drought conditions, see http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/.

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Bowl could be contextualized to any mediated weather event since Katrina. How can one not foresee the proper naming of droughts in our future? But, will these races for labeling fizzle out? The Weather Channel and other media outlets should act like talent scouts, take the risk, and name every potential weather event. The next big Dust Bowl, superstorm, or flood could be coming with the next (television) season. The Dust Bowl’s well-managed relationship with current weather events helps to keep it alive—keep its career afloat, and, as source of comparison, helps create new careers for future disasters. In the same Oxford American review, a more prescient and gloomy contextualization of Burns’s The Dust Bowl occurs: In subsequent decades, plains farmers started irrigating, sucking up the shallow water table of the Ogallala Aquifer. Problem solved? Not for long. That 174,000-square-mile source provides not just about a third of the nation’s irrigation water but also drinking water for eighty-two percent of the population within its eight-state boundaries. Specialists expect the aquifer, which took millions of years to accumulate, to be gone within twenty years. Last summer saw the worst Midwestern drought in half a century, and experts fear it could be a harbinger of times to come—a Dust Bowl redux.65

One has to admire the dramatic “Dust Bowl redux” phrase. A titillating rumor of a sequel. Burns echoes this sentiment of fear in the YouTube event with Paula Zahn: “Human nature remains the same and that we tend to make the same mistakes over and over again, and to engage in active history, it might help to have the future.”66 The circularity of his statement parallels the logical circularity of disaster events.67 However, when does “history repeats itself ” become a wornout excuse? Because, if history did repeat itself, then we would already have the future and, hence, would stop the circularity and prevent the repetition. But, in this logical fallacy, the trappings of narrative technique and form disallow our escape. We are caught in a circular narrative, but we could argue that we are not making the same mistakes. We either admit that we are stupidly rewriting identical narratives or the mistakes are new, and we are creating new mistakes. In other words, history is not repeating itself; those that are making the narratives of history and profiting are repeating the same narratives. Urbanist and cultural theorist Paul Virilio, author of The Original Accident, moves toward a potential egress from this logical circumnavigation, but one that is still a narrative: “[It] would seem only logical that the 21st

65. Kafka, “FILM REVIEW: The Dust Bowl.” 66. Lessons from the Dust Bowl w/ Ken Burns (Live YouTube Event). 67. For example, why build levees in New Orleans that are of the same quality that failed during Katrina, other than to invite another disaster event?

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century reap the harvest of this hidden production constituted by the most diverse disasters, to the very extent that their repetition has become a clearly recognized historical phenomenon.”68 Instead of circularity, “we” experience an exponential plot progression of accidents. Our optimism follows this trajectory while we hope that a climax is endlessly deferred, and that our superhero, Technology, saves us yet again at the last moment. Because, when American culture improves itself through scientific and commercial advances, it also creates accompanying accidents that appear like tragic flaws that our protagonist seeks to overcome. In our history of Technology, for example, train travel allows people to traverse geographic expanses efficiently, but this efficiency comes with the supplemental component of train crashes. Urban cohabitation allows compact housing structures but creates plagues and epidemics. Offshore drilling provides domestic oil production but creates oil spills. We should come to expect, at some point, that Technology exorcizes these ghosts of progress. This is the promise narrativized and peddled to the public by capitalism’s titans, think tanks, and politicians. However, a fatal train crash in Philadelphia occurred in 2015,69 as well as another freight train accident in 2016 just outside Philadelphia which injured four individuals.70 The solution: more technology along the rails in the Northeast corridor. Train travel has been with us for 200 years, but more technology will eliminate accidents? Homesteading encouraged adventurous individuals and families to grab a piece of America’s geography, but it created the Great Plow Up. The Great Plow Up bestowed the agricultural industry with efficient and profitable farming methods, but it loosened the top soil for it to blow from the middle of America out to the Atlantic Ocean. Improved farming techniques needed advanced pumping and irrigation technology. Unrestricted access to the Ogallala Aquifer tempered the drought, and a nation’s fearful expectation of another Dust Bowl receded. Success. Technological progress simultaneously births and kills natural disasters, and as a result, disasters are serial, not circular. The “history repeats itself ” cliché should be retired alongside Katrina and Sandy. Again in The Original Accident, Virilio states, “[In the 20th century] serial production of the most diverse catastrophes has dogged the great discoveries and the great technological inventions like a shadow, and, unless we accept the unacceptable,

68. Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, trans. Julie Rose (Boston, MA: Polity, 2007), 5. 69. Rene Marsh, “Feds: Amtrak 188 Engineer Distracted Prior to Derailment,” May 17, 2016, accessed December 27, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/16/politics/ amtrak-188-derailment-engineer-distracted/. 70. Amanda Johncola, “Officials: Four Injured in Head-On Train Crash,” NBCPhiladelphia.com, October 28, 2016, accessed December 27, 2016, http:// www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Officials-Two-Injured-Head-On-TrainCrash-399027561.html.

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meaning allow the accident in turn to become automatic.”71 However, in this escalator of accidents, the solutions should bring the requisite illusions of safety and protection, partnered with a neoliberal logic based on properly distributed governmental resources. If only money had been spent better, a disaster event would have been avoided, one could argue. But in the reality of capitalism, the solutions should always create an expectation of disaster events that amaze the public and outperform their predecessor’s horror, donations, and ratings. Disaster discourse will eventually need new language; the 100-year storm has already happened with Katrina and Sandy. We should start expecting the 500- or 1,000-year event. But our belief in science and free markets exceed, or mask, our fear and willingness to make radical adjustments to this metanarrative arc that is headed toward a climactic plot point and, in the case of the Dust Bowl, climatological plot point. Or, we have, as Virilio warns, “[accepted] the unacceptable” not only with technological progress, but with economic progress and climate change as well. With each accident and disaster, a solution is inserted—a prevention for the next accident—with an injection of collective hope. More often than not, these solutions come wrapped in the language of prophylaxis, insurance, or even a public guarantee of protection. And when the next accident or disaster occurs, shock and outrage power the collective American response. A disaster event, one that will initiate a national and global gasp because of its “unforeseen” magnitude, seethes and boils just below our veneer of technological faith and climatological ignorance. The headlines and copy have already been written and are already part of the “history repeats itself ” cycle. How could this have been prevented? Who is to blame? The answer is that it could not have been prevented because it had previously been created as a part of the solution. This is the living narrative of disasters, and after all, narratives, as dictated by form, have endings. Ken Burns has killed the Dust Bowl with his The Dust Bowl, but the sequel has already been created. All we are waiting for is its snappy name to be bandied about across a table at The Weather Channel or a neologism to be agreed by consensus on social media that captures its essence. Dust Bowl Redux just won’t do. But perhaps Steven Spielberg will offer the Dust Bowl renewed life. According to an April 4, 2016, news release, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Steinbeck’s heirs are litigating over the literary rights of a new adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath “potentially starring Daniel DayLewis.”72 If the legal logjam gets resolved, we have to be curious about the

71. Ibid., 6 72. Eriq Gardner, “John Steinbeck Heirs Now Feuding Over Steven Spielberg ‘Grapes of Wrath’ Adaptation,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 4, 2016, accessed May 30, 2016, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/john-steinbeck-heirs-feudingsteven-880410.

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Joads and their contemporary treatment by Dreamworks. Day-Lewis, born in 1957, would play twenty-something Tom Joad? His notorious method acting rituals could prove interesting when one considers the various conditions the Joads experience in Oklahoma, on the road West, and in California. If he looks at an updated drought monitor map73 or current migrant farm labor statistics,74 he will have no shortage of locations in which to prepare himself for the part. The larger question is whether or not the star power of Spielberg and “potentially” Day-Lewis is enough to shake us away from overused and impotent “history repeats itself ” phrase relied upon by Ken Burns. This is the cliché that offers us a closed loop of disaster event logic—a cycle of excuses— and keeps Burns relevant in the entertainment business. Or, will Spielberg’s Dreamworks awaken an awareness to the progression of eco-disasters we set up for ourselves each time we think we have found a solution? Maybe, he will remind us that water is not a renewable natural resource and that water is still tied to issues of class. Besides being requisite reading for high school and college students across the nation, what should be made of the continued popularity of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in film and print? The novel is, according to Deirdre Donahue’s USA Today article in 2013, “Scribner’s most popular title” annually, and upon the 2013 release of the film adaptation of the novel starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Fitzgerald’s work made best-seller lists and garnered a movie tie-in edition from Scribner.75 One major thematic thread running through The Great Gatsby is a wide class division, where the upper class possesses a vacuous and dismissive view of the lower class. The lower class is a resource to be exploited and used, and bottom classes are those most affected by the accidents of technological and economic progress. Related to this theme, another thread Fitzgerald illustrates is a disintegration of hope at grasping onto the American Dream. The timing, then, of the 1974 and 2013 adaptations should be no coincidence. Domestic civic unrest during and after Vietnam and the Oil Crisis dominated the nation’s nightly broadcast news. Severe inflation and high unemployment caused two historical spikes near or above 20 percent in the US Misery Index.76 Faith in achieving the American Dream was supplanted by just getting by. The Great Recession of the late 2000s, which contained sharp decreases in stock values (especially in relation to retirement accounts) and home values, eroded two elements of the

73. Drought monitor map is available at http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/. 74. Seasonal farm labor information can be found at https://www.dol.gov/general/ topic/training/migrantfarmworkers. 75. Deirdre Donahue, “‘The Great Gatsby’ by the Numbers,” USA Today, May 7, 2013, accessed July 8, 2016, http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/05/07/thegreat-gatsby-is-a-bestseller-this-week/2133269/. 76. See http://inflationdata.com/articles/misery-index/

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American Dream: retirement and a home. The Occupy Wall Street movement focused in economic inequality brought protesting into our newsfeeds, in social media, and on TV. Unfortunately, the themes of The Great Gatsby appear cyclically, as opposed to serially. The novel and its adaptations might be more enchanting to us for catharsis rather than for agency. Gatsby’s death at the hand of mechanic George Wilson serves as misdirected blame and revenge, instead of the call to action for those living with the serial accidents of progress.

3 D I S C O U R SE D I S A S T E R : S A N F R A N C I S C O E A RT HQUA K E S I N 1 9 0 6 A N D 1 9 8 9

Scholastic, Inc. holds a presence in presecondary education and entertainment (games, videos, and social media) that is palpable and noticeable. If you have a child under thirteen, then the bookshelves at home will mostly likely have books or magazines published by Scholastic. A stroll through any public library’s children’s book and media section also reveals Scholastic’s market share. Scholastic’s brands include Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Goosebumps, I SPY, Harry Potter, and Hunger Games. According to their “Our Business” web page, Scholastic, Inc. “sells approximately one out of every two children’s books purchased in the U.S.” and “operates in countries around the world with original publishing of trade books and educational materials, distribution through Book Clubs and Book Fairs, instructional materials for schools, and exports to more than 165 countries.”1 One of Scholastic’s series is based on the premise, “If you…” “lived,” “sailed,” “traveled,” or “grew up” in various historical times or places, as well as a variety of peoples in America’s past history. The series is geared toward Grades 2–5. For example, in individual books a third grader could learn what living during the time of the American Revolution, the time of the American Civil War, or the time of the Declaration of Independence signing could have been like. A fourth grader could learn in separate books what living with the Iroquois, the Hopi, or the Cherokee might have been like. The series contains over twenty titles, but only one of the books focuses upon a natural disaster: If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake.2 For the book about the 1906 earthquake, the introduction provides an overview of San Francisco, communication technology, and the magnitude of the earthquake: “This book tells what it was like to live through all the shaking, rumbling, and burning of one of the biggest earthquakes the United States has ever known.”3 The series is designed as though a child is asking questions 1. Scholastic, Inc., “Our Business,” last modified 2016, accessed October 31, 2016, http://www.scholastic.com/aboutscholastic/our-businesses.htm. 2. Ellen Levine and Pat GrantPat Grant Porter, If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake (New York: Scholastic, 1992). 3. Ibid., 4.

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about an event or place, and, occasionally, a second-person point of view is used in the responses. Each chapter in If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake answers a particular question, and the questions, twenty-four in total, are arranged in a narrative arc—before, during, and after the earthquake—except for a short attention-getting earthquake scene. Each chapter is accompanied by representational watercolor images. Most of the questions (chapters) are distinctly formulated to simulate a child’s perspective: “Who was up at the time of the quake?” (chapter 2), “What did the earthquake feel like?” (chapter 7), and “Did anyone send help to the people of San Francisco?” (chapter 18). However, a few questions feel incongruous: “How many people died?” (chapter 4); “How did people keep their spirits up?” (chapter 23); and “How long did it take San Francisco to recover?” (chapter 24, the final chapter). What fourth graders would be prompted to ask these questions? The answers to each of the chapter questions form the text below in the structure of narrative responses. The details of the earthquake’s dates and time are well known, and these are provided to the reader with historical context and vignettes. The devastating earthquake occurred just after 5 a.m. on April 18. “San Francisco was the biggest city on the West Coast [and nearly] half a million people live there.”4 The absence of information technology at the time would be incomprehensible to a child in the twenty-first century: no television, no radios, no Internet. Though far from being live broadcasted for the world to witness, days after the earthquake the aftermath was recorded on silent film. Short-form film was an evolving medium at this time, but it was by no means common or accessible to the general public. The visuals are not even broadcasted as a newsreel, which did not evolve until the 1920s in America. The 1906 earthquake’s aftermath on film was shown in the genre of “actualities” at nickelodeons, a precursor to movie theaters. Essentially, print newspapers were the exclusive mode in which to obtain knowledge about current events, and public transportation provided people access to work, shopping, and leisure around San Francisco. Newspapers dominated the spread of information at the time, which again seems impossible now in the day of declining readerships and folding publications, never mind the profusion of Internet and mobile app news outlets. In the early twentieth century, reporters phoned in their information on location to be edited for print, or they went back to the office with a notepad in which to transcribe and type up their stories. Information between publishers could be shared over wire with news agencies. Hence, in 1906, as one would travel home from work in the trolley or train, and many people walked, newspaper hawkers would stand strategically in high foot traffic locations throughout the city calling out newspaper headlines to pedestrians before and after workers commuted

4. Ibid., 4.

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in the mornings and evenings. In the case of San Francisco’s early morning earthquake, an “EXTRA” edition would be printed to sell during the evening commute. A surprising aspect of the 1906 earthquake is the absence of radio transmission, which was in its inchoate stages and did not arrive commercially until about 1920. Even now, most of us might find that receiving our news through radio transmission to be quaint or at best a bridge medium until we get access to a medium with a visual component like a mobile device, television, or computer. The flow of information at the turn of the twentieth century seems primitive by today’s standards. So, for contemporary fourth graders, this historical context would be difficult to imagine. The first chapter of If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake opens with further overview of San Francisco, but the city is first described after the earthquake: “Everything was a mess!” followed by wreckages of trolley tracks, buildings, and public utilities.5 In the second-to-last paragraph of the chapter, the spreading fires and ubiquitous smoke are mentioned, which will be important in the analysis of this narrative targeted toward a young audience. The final paragraph, only one sentence long, injects increased gravity to the scene: “Saddest of all was the sight of wounded or dead people and animals lying in the streets.”6 The watercolor image on the page shows two families. One woman is holding a baby in her arms while her husband (presumably) is carted on a stretcher by two medics. In the foreground, a different man lay on the ground, and a kneeling woman (presumably his wife) has one of her hands placed on his arm in comfort or consolation. Her other arm is around a toddler, who looks down with a blank expression (disbelief?) upon the man. This chapter shows the only visual representations of death in the book, but the subject of death is touched upon in future chapters. Disassociated from the visual components of the book, death is approached textually. In chapter 22, Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan dies because of the earthquake. Chapter 4, “How many people died?” addresses the volume of lives lost as a result of the earthquake and fires. The chapter claims that “city officials believed that 500 people died”7 at the time of earthquake and subsequent fires, but archivist Gladys Hansen’s “list of the dead now has more than 3000 names”8 due to her work as a librarian and San Francisco archivist.9 On the surface, the de-emphasizing of death in the book, much

5. Ibid., 7. 6. Ibid., 9. 7. Ibid., 14. 8. Ibid., 15. 9. For the work of the real Gladys Hansen, see: Neal Conan, January 26, 2005, “Interview: Gladys Hansen discusses the major adjustment in the official death toll from the earthquake of 1906 in California,” Talk of the Nation (NPR)Newspaper Source Plus, EBSCOhost (accessed July 14, 2016).

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less the Scholastic series, would appear to be an obvious avoidance for the target audience. However, when compared to other children’s books with death content, If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake deviates in terms of content and how the death content functions in the disaster. Poling and Hupp analyze forty children’s books for death-themed content that were published between 1986 and 2004. If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake is published within the window but not included in Poling and Hupp’s study.10 The books selected for their analysis were chosen so that “all books in the study were readily available to the local community and could realistically be used by grief counselors or parents in a small Midwestern city.”11 Poling and Hupp categorize three types of death content: biological facts, “including irreversibility (dead things do not come back to life), nonfunctionality (bodily functions cease after death), inevitability or universality (death is unavoidable for all life), and causality of death (e.g., illness)”; sociocultural practices, which include “predominant cultural practices in the United States regarding death (e.g., funerals, memorial services) and after-death beliefs that are generally consistent with those of adults in the U.S. culture”; and emotional responses, which “[reflect] a range of emotional responses associated with the grieving process: sadness, anger, longing, guilt, denial, shock, and confusion.”12 If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake approaches none of these categories with significance considering the historical significance of this disaster. The book notes one biological fact about death when the fire chief “was badly hurt during the earthquake and died a few days later.”13 Poling and Hupp find that 55 percent of children’s books in their survey “listed at least one cause of death, the most common being illness or old age (45% of books), followed by accident (15% of books).”14 The single emotional response to human death is coupled with injury and animals in one sentence of chapter 1: “Saddest of all was the sight of wounded or dead people or animals.”15 Poling and Hupp find that 90 percent of children’s book with death content contained emotional responses, and “a higher percentage of books included emotional content than sociocultural or biological information.”16 However, in chapter 1 the emotional response is delocalized and unattributed to a character or group in the book; 10. Devereaux A. Poling and Julie M. Hupp, “Death Sentences: A Content Analysis of Children’s Death Literature,” Journal of Genetic Psychology, 169, no. 2 (June 2008): 165–176. 11. Ibid., 167. 12. Ibid., 168. 13. Levine and Porter, If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, 54. 14. Poling and Hupp, “Death Sentences,” 170. 15. Levine and Porter, If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, 9. 16. Poling and Hupp, “Death Sentences,” 170.

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the reader is not experiencing the sadness in second-person point of view (You would be saddened by…) like other parts of the book where this point of view is employed as a technique for reader involvement or even limited third-person point of view (Families were saddened by…), which is used to offer sympathetic or empathic connections for readers in subsequent chapters. Another emotional response, although also contextualized with animals, occurs in chapter 22 (How did animals act when the quake hit?). The chapter begins with a simile: “In some ways, they acted like people. Horses screamed, dogs and cats cried, and many animals shivered in terror.”17 However, readers do not have the base of the simile in the text of the book, and therefore, the simile is presented in reverse. The human characters in the book never display this type of behavior in which to draw upon for the simile. The only sociocultural practice, framed within a natural disaster, revolves around social organization in chapter 22 (Why did it take so long to put out the fires?): “It was hard to figure out what to do when [Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan] was dead.”18 However, this link is tangential and expands generously on the categorical definition forwarded by Poling and Hupp. More so, the chapter shows the organizational and leadership breakdown among authorities: “Different people began giving orders, sometimes an Army general, or the police chief, or the mayor, or the new fire chief,” in efforts to extinguish and control the spreading fires.19 Readers can take from this chapter that emergency response can be difficult under circumstances previously not experienced by first responders, especially if leadership dies or fails to become established during an event or designated before a disaster escalates. Although Poling and Hupp focus on death-themed content for children, adult viewers of disaster-themed content must recognize the connection between disaster and death for the same target audience whose ages are between four and twelve. We see that for a natural disaster to gain cultural significance, the event is required to include one or more of the following in terms of content, deaths high in number, cultural importance of the victim or victims, or unexpectedness of tragedy and resulting deaths. Children’s books with death content “may also educate children about basic facts regarding life and death and cultural mourning rituals [and] researchers have found that death-themed media influence adults’ concepts of death.”20 In addition, “children’s storybooks have been implicated as an influence in other developing concepts.”21 The decoupling of death and natural disaster

17. Levine and Porter, If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, 24. 18. Ibid., 54. 19. Ibid. 20. Poling and Hupp, “Death Sentences,” 166. 21. Ibid.

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in If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake should be disconcerting if young readers are learning disaster discourse, where death can either become an element of a disaster, death can be de-emphasized as a component of disaster, or death can be precluded from a disaster. Specifically, if death-themed content is used for counseling and educating, then what is the use of disaster-themed content? Another decoupling of content in Levine and Porter’s text can be noticed with the earthquake and subsequent fires. A large majority of historical books, media, and web sources are titled using the terms “earthquake” and “fire.” However, most material with children as the target audience do not contain “fire” in the titles. For example, a search on amazon.com22 for “1906 San Francisco earthquake” brings up thirty titles, but only four of those titles (13 percent) included the word “fire.” On the other hand, a search on google.com, which is the world’s top search engine,23 reveals fifteen of the first thirty (50 percent) websites included “fire” in the web page title.24 The google.com search did not return any listings for any children’s books. If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake is a book that should reflect if not the impact the fires had on lives but at a minimum the presence of fire during the disaster for the purpose of presenting an accurate historical introduction to young readers. Only chapter 22 (“Why did it take so long to put out the fires?”) mentions the blaze in its title. The introduction notes that “the worst was still to come. For three days and nights, fires burned the city. … When it was over, there was little left of San Francisco. The city lay in ashes.”25 These sentences from the introduction should lead readers to anticipate the fires, as “the worst was still to come,” would figure prominently into the 1906 natural disaster narrative. In other words, a young reader would await and then read and see depictions of fire to support the “worst was still to come” claim about this disaster event. Subsequent mentions about the fires occur seven times on pages 9, 26, 35, 36, 51, 53, 57, and 59, but two of those textual occurrences, pages 51 and 57, note that the fires had been extinguished, and these mentions are used merely as markers of time in the narrative arc to register that the disaster has ended. The effect of the fires upon residents is described twice: discomfort to eyes and throat due to smoke26 and neighborhood evacuated for safety concerns.27 Neither of these instances depicts an imminent threat of life, or in other words, these scenes lack drama for young readers. The story has only one 22. Amazon.com search done July 18, 2016. 23. “Top Sites,” Alexa, The Information Company, monthly, accessed December 28, 2016, http://www.alexa.com/topsites. 24. Google.com search done July 18, 2016. 25. Levine and Porter, If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, 5. 26. Ibid., 9. 27. Ibid., 26.

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illustration of fire and smoke on page 53, and this illustration does not involve any human figures. Otherwise, the fire’s direct impact falls upon public and private property or goods, such as a flag collection, city documents, plants, animals, and (of course) money in banks. In comparison to the human effects from the fires, the threats on property are narrated with richly detailed, if not lighthearted at times, vignettes. The tone is dramatic, but hardly threatening, and at times, it is comedic. In chapter 11 (“Were there any exciting rescue stories?”), some government books and papers are preserved using “barrels of beer from nearby stores,”28 and in chapter 31 (“What things in your house would you try to save?”), men saved their hats by wearing hats “sometimes five high.”29 This language of the 1906 natural disaster in this children’s book is important when mapping how the discourse of natural disasters evolves. Scholastic publishes another disaster series, I Survived…, and one of the books in the series does focus upon the 1906 earthquake. Other topics of natural disaster in the Scholastic series are Pompeii in AD 79, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Japanese Tsunami in 2011, Children’s Blizzard in 1888, and Henryville Tornado in 2012.30 I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906, written by Lauren Tarshis and illustrated by Scott Dawson, is also titled without “fires,” and its target audience is slightly older than If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906 is considered historical fiction in public library searches and catalogues, but it does not follow the question and answer format until a brief section of paratextual material concluding the book. Instead, the narrative is told from a third-person limited point of view. Young readers are placed in the point of view of the protagonist, eleven-year-old Leo Ross, who is a newspaper hawker. The narrative arc begins in media res, similar to If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, and chapter 1 has Leo being hit by falling bricks and dropping to the floor. The chapter ends ominously: “He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. Soon he would be buried alive.”31 Chapter 2 brings the reader back in time to see how Leo finds himself in this precarious situation. Leo is an orphan, and he has one prized possession, a nugget of gold from the gold rush that had been handed down from his Grandpop to his Papa and then to Leo. Two bullies rob Leo of his morning newspaper earnings and the nugget, and the bullies beat up Leo when he mulishly resists their attempts. He returns to his rooming house, and another orphaned boy, Morris, befriends the distressed Leo. Morris and Leo concoct a plan to scare the gold from the bullies using a neighborhood ghost 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 32. 30. Other topics in the series include Nazi Germany, Hindenburg, Gettysburg, Titanic, Shark Attacks, September 11, and others. 31. Lauren Tarshis and Scott Dawson, I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906 (New York: Scholastic, 2012), 3.

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story. The bullies figure out this plan and get ready to deliver another beating. However, the earthquake begins, and all four boys scatter. Morris avoids the falling building, and we find out that he is the person who bravely rescues Leo from the avalanche of bricks. The entire story is 88 pages, and the earthquake happens on page 40. This is well into the narrative arc’s progression, and the earthquake serves as a plot point of the rising action. The presence of fires begins shortly thereafter, on page 46, and also functions as a rising-action plot point. Leo and Morris save one of the bullies, Wilkie, who is trapped beneath part of a fallen building. Wilkie’s near-death experience and gratefulness for being saved causes him to have a change of character. Wilkie aids Morris and Leo in retrieving the gold nugget and exacting revenge on his fellow bully for abandoning him in favor of keeping the gold nugget for himself. His pal chose gold over life. The three characters battle through and around fires and rubble from pages 46 to 80, and they finally reacquire Leo’s gold nugget. Although only 38 percent of the text is set during the disaster, the presence of fires forms a significant hazard in the narrative. However, this hazard exists because the three boys are trying to retrieve Leo’s stolen gold nugget and to gain retribution against the bully. Otherwise, the narrative implies that the fire is an avoidable obstacle. The narrative ends with Leo selling his gold nugget and buying train tickets for himself, Wilkie, and Morris to leave San Francisco forever. I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906 does not contain any death content. However, the danger of the fires following the earthquake in I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906 is more balanced than in If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, but neither title reflects the historical accounts of this disaster event. Despite this omission in the title, I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906 does provide readers with a small amount of indirect historical information. In dramatic narration, the earth moves, buildings crumble, fires rage, and people suffer to a degree because of property loss, but the scope and scale of the damage is localized through Leo’s perspective. The book is presented as a biography of Leo and a lesson in morality. Addendums (though not titled as such) are presented at the conclusion of Leo’s narrative and provide curious readers with a small amount of direct historical content. This paratextual section, “Questions and Answers about Earthquakes,” includes four questions with responses, but only one question focuses upon 1906: “How strong was the San Francisco earthquake?” The magnitude of the earthquake is discussed, but the response turns toward the fires in the last sentence: “However, in San Francisco, the fires caused more damage than the earthquake itself.”32 Though added on in what reads like a footnote to an addendum, I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906 does represent a shift in discourse about the 1906 earthquake and fires. The

32. Ibid., 94.

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earthquake is reunited with the fires, but the component of death is exorcised in the process. We might be tempted to dismiss this as mere children’s literature and as a coincidence. However, the identical elements of this triad—earthquake, fires, and death—in terms of blames, causes, and effects form the base of the 1906 disaster’s discursive construction and meaning, which has shifted in emphasis since the 1906 earthquake quieted and the fires smoldered out. Efforts to establish and control the discourse of this disaster event began almost immediately after the fires burned out. In what should be unsurprising to us in the twenty-first century, where wars, disasters, and pandemics serve as profit streams for American and multinational corporations, even back in 1906, capitalist interests fueled a discursive race for narrative construction about the earthquake. In The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, Kevin Rozario claims that “disasters, and discourses of disaster, have played a long and influential role in the construction of American identities, power relations, economic systems, and environmental practices.”33 In terms of the San Francisco earthquake and fires, when news of the disaster reached New York City, Wall Street took notice and slumped for three days only.34 Therefore, investing time, money, and resources into shaping disaster discourse has lasting effects to vital and established economic, social, and communication structures in America. At this point, because the concept of discourse is integral to the argument, what discourse is needs to be established. First, we want to put aside our Dictionary.com “communication of thought by words; talk; conversation” or “a formal discussion of a subject in speech or writing, as a dissertation, treatise, sermon, etc.”35 Next, we will look at discourse as a system in which language works under particular contexts and its connection to power and knowledge. According to Michel Foucault, “discourse is the power which is to be seized.”36 In our case of history and disasters, we find “that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.”37 Discourse is a system that wants to be influential, but also discourse wants to be unnoticed by those involved 33. Kevin Rozario, The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3. 34. Ibid., 87. 35. “Discourse,” Dictionary.com, accessed December 28, 2016, http://www.dictionary. com/browse/discourse?s=t. 36. Michel Foucault, “ The Order of Discourse,” in Untying the Text: A PostStructuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 53. 37. Ibid., 52.

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in it. Discourse is language put into action upon individuals and groups (“procedures”). The “procedures” of discourse exist both interior and exterior to a particular discourse, and discourses do interact and affect other discourses. We have seen this interaction of discourses in our discussion of how some of the businesses of San Francisco wanted to discourage broadcasting the details of the disaster and journalists sought to report what happened during and after the disaster. “Procedures” take the forms of language, practices (actions of individuals and institutions), and concepts, and these are used by discourse to produce methods of constituting knowledge. Discourse regulates not only what can be said and done, but discourse governs what language can be used and what actions can be performed and practiced. One constitution of knowledge is our culture’s idea of true and false, and this is evident in our discussion of disaster discourse, thus far, in relation to children’s books and historical accounts. We see, and will continue to see, that some information is included or excluded as true and false from this disaster discourse, and in addition, how this information (what is true) is used in language and practice. Here, again, we need to defamiliarize ourselves from a common definition or concept of truth that paints it as something objective. For Foucault, truth is not something outside of ourselves to be discovered or described, not something we are still unaware of, not a “fact” yet found. For Foucault, The important thing here … is that truth isn’t outside power or lacking in power. … Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.38

The power of discourses lay in procedures exterior to a discourse and interior to a discourse. Exterior procedures, such as those that differentiate between true and false, function through exclusion and inclusion. What can be constituted as true is included in a discourse, whereas, what can be constituted as false is excluded from a discourse. This will to truth … rests on an institutional support: it is both reinforced and renewed by a whole strata of practices, such as pedagogy, of course; and the system of books, publishing, libraries; learned societies in the past

38. Michel Foucault, “ Truth and Power,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1994), 131.

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and laboratories new. But it is also renewed, no doubt more profoundly, by the way in which knowledge is put to work, valorised, distributed, and in a sense attributed, in a society.39

Foucault also identifies interior procedures—rules, language, practices—that govern the discourse from within: these are “procedures which function rather as principles of classification, or ordering, of distribution.”40, 41 In other words, what can be said, done, and given meaning within a discourse. Foucault’s statement serves as an important bridge between the seemingly abstract nature of disaster discourse and disaster discourse’s materiality, presented as children’s books by a dominant distributor of children’s educational materials in this chapter thus far. Scholastic’s books about the 1906 earthquake have an interior discourse: what to publish in each of its texts about this disaster. Scholastic’s books also participate in external discourse whereby its books interact with other discourses, such as historical discourse and disaster discourses. Simply put, a children’s book is not just a children’s book. The challenge to formulate a plan of how San Francisco would evolve out of the earthquake wreckage and piles of ash and harness the power of disaster discourse needed to be influenced by not only what topics were included (and excluded) when talked about publicly but also how the disaster was presented linguistically and visually to the nation. According to Rozario, “Although some prospective investors were concerned about future earthquakes, there was general agreement that San Francisco would recover because it was a ‘natural metropolis,’ destined for a glorious future by virtue of its location.”42 However, “more sophisticated observers recognized that it was a combination of geography and artificial enhancements such as railroad connections, credit flows, and trade networks that ensured the continued prosperity of the city.”43 The land could change minimally because of the earthquake, but the “artificial enhancements” laid over and around that land would have needed to be reestablished physically and culturally. At the core of, and motivation behind, the decisions about proper public topics discussed and visuals represented is a strategic decoupling of the earthquake and fires (and death from each element as well), much like what is seen in If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and

39. Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” 55. 40. Ibid., 56. 41. Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964) illustrates that madness and sanity are elements divided by internal procedures of the same discourse and psychology, and to enter into this discourse, an individual needs to be authorized by those already inside the discourse or be excluded by the procedures of this discourse. 42. Rozario, The Culture of Calamity, 88. 43. Ibid.

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I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906. The idea that disasters and the cultural meaning attributed to them help facilitate progress for a culture is not new. Rozario terms this “creative destruction,” where disasters provide a unique kind of tabula rasa opportunity to metamorphose a city or geographical area.44 But this idea has matured further into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Journalist Naomi Klein uses “disaster capitalism,” which has caught on due to the popularity of her book The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, to show a distinct effort by elite global corporations to facilitate and manufacture conditions for disasters to occur.45 The rise of multinational megaconglomerates and their ideology not only take advantage of disaster situations but also influence settings for disasters to unfold. For progress to make significant and efficient strides forward, disasters are required, desired, and accommodated. Both Rozario and Klein illustrate that capital investment and profit, though significant, are a major motivation, but just below a veneer of investment and profit are the ideologies, policies, and regulations that grant and encourage what is seen on the surface: disaster discourse. Yes, there is infrastructure to put into place, but there are also economic, social, and political systems to install, in order to insure a steady foundation for profit. And there lay the underdisclosed relationship of disaster and capital. And, perhaps, we can locate a deeper level of relationship or an alternative structural form next to, under, or within disaster discourse? Otherwise, we find ourselves in cyclical blame game (and perpetual solution game) that keeps the battle over disaster discourse unwinnable, as is the yearning of those who invest, profit, and install. After the earthquake and fires in San Francisco, the recovery and reconstruction strategies became of immediate concern, naturally, for the various citizens of San Francisco. Though one might quickly turn to pragmatic matters of feeding, housing, and clothing the displaced residents, as well as those people who visited the city to spectate and those people who came to engage in disaster relief, how this would or should happen proved to be an issue much larger than simply routing supplies to those in need. This would also affect what the disaster event meant to various San Franciscans in the aftermath of the disaster, but in addition, what the disaster event meant to those outside of a witness radius. In “Smoke and Mirrors: The San Francisco Earthquake and Seismic Denial,” Ted Steinberg claims the San Francisco earthquake “stands out as [an] archetype [that] exists in an interpretive void of sorts.”46 In postmodern fashion, he continues by saying that “the [San 44. Ibid. 45. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007). 46. Ted Steinberg, “Smoke and Mirrors: The San Francisco Earthquake and Seismic Denial,” in American Disasters, ed. Steven Biel (New York: University of New York Press, 2001), 103–104.

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Francisco] disaster has both tremendous meaning and no meaning at all—at least no meaning in terms of its impact on reducing seismic risk throughout the Bay Area.”47 The fight over the disaster’s meaning “began even before the smoke had cleared,” where the “struggle pitted those seeking to capitalize on the disaster’s entertainment value against California’s business class, which expressed deep reservations about the adverse impact all the publicity might have on the city’s commercial prospects.”48 Rozario points to another discursive contest within San Francisco’s business class. On the one hand, progressive business leaders planned for “a more rational and efficient city that would facilitate the conduct of business, elevate the moral character of the inhabitants, and bring an end to the chronic instability and conflict,”49 such as those between labor and employer, ethnicities, and economic strata, and these businessmen harbored “Imperial ambitions”50 to monumentalize San Francisco in similar fashion as the Parisian model in the 1850s and 1860s. On the other hand, businessmen in opposition to the above plan were “‘rapid reconstructionists,’ keen to throw up new warehouses, factories, and offices as quickly as possible in order to get back to trading and making money,” and these businessmen “would be able to raise the money necessary to rebuild by drawing on savings, insurance claims, bank loans, and Eastern capital.”51 The ability to bring outside capital to San Francisco was predicated on the discursive construction of meaning for the San Francisco earthquake and fires—to assess blame, cause, and effect for this disaster. According to Steinberg, “Less than one week after the disaster, The New York Times reported the preparation of a hundred ‘distinct and separate books telling the complete story of the San Francisco earthquake and fire.’ In fact, at least eighty-two popular accounts of the calamity, often lavishly illustrated, were published in 1906 alone.”52 In addition, “many newspaper and magazine accounts [were] published in book form,” as well as “a huge number of separate photographs and postcards that circulated throughout the country.”53 Although the motivation for some of these productions centered on short-term profits based upon sensational narratives and alarming photos—the spectacle of the disaster—the discourse began to take shape in this form of turn-of-the-century pop culture. Not only did the business class, including publishers, of San Francisco want to limit the broadcasting of this spectacle, but they sought to divorce the earthquake from the fires in order to minimize the seismic fears of 47. Ibid., 104. 48. Ibid. 49. Rozario, The Culture of Calamity, 90. 50. Ibid., 94. 51. Ibid., 92. 52. Steinberg, “Smoke and Mirrors,” 104. 53. Ibid.

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investors: “And at nothing did [the businessmen of San Francisco] work harder than shaping the way the calamity would be understood.”54 Theoretically, building policies and urban planning to prevent another devastating fire could be implemented55 in order to assuage the worries of wary investors. What stood above ground alongside the “artificial enhancements”56 and existing infrastructure could be, or imply that it would be the case, constructed in a manner to grant investors a satisfactory level of risk so that capital would gravitate toward San Francisco. The seismic unknown, however, needed to be managed through language choices and the dissemination of this language. Therefore, the parties who controlled this discursive process could captain the physical recovery of the city. According to Steinberg, railroads, newspapers, and state government promoted a separation of the 1906 disaster into distinct causes. Earthquake, as a cause, was suppressed through state committees, San Francisco Chronicle pieces, and promotional literature. However, as an alternative primary cause, the fire rose as the sole unexpurgated culprit of the entire disaster. This use of language worked for “protecting the prevailing social order” and “[depoliticizing] the calamity, to drain it of meaning, to encourage people to forget the disaster in the hopes of hiding the explicit nature of the act of interpreting it as a fire.”57 In other words, intense effort was expended to de-nature this natural disaster, and the speed with which the discourse is established and set proves extremely important as well. Narrativizing the disaster would be instrumental at determining and directing the flow of capital into San Francisco and toward specific business interests. The goal of dislocating, or relocating, the cause of the disaster still leaves a logical circularity about what we should fear into the future, what we learn from the 1906 disaster event (and, in turn, any natural disaster event), and how disaster events are discursively structured. Details like separating death, earthquake, and fires from the 1906 San Francisco natural disaster in children’s books might seem insignificant, and we might be tempted to dismiss the content of children’s books about natural disasters. However, if the point of the If You… series, and the 1906 earthquake instalment in particular, is to be informative about historical times, places, and events, then the children must also be learning what questions to ask in order to find information. In other words, what are the proper questions to ask when a natural disaster occurs, what is the language to use when asking, and what is the language used when a particular question is answered.

54. Ibid., 105. 55. For example, after the Chicago Fire of 1871, buildings made of brick and mortar and terra-cotta contributed to Chicago’s resistance to future widespread conflagrations. 56. Rozario, The Culture of Calamity, 88. 57. Steinberg, “Smoke and Mirrors,” 109.

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These are effective and functioning aspects of discourse—teach the proper questions to ask, and discourse can govern not just the content to fill in for the answers, but also the actions and practices based on answers. So, when we analyze If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, we find information as “facts” in the answers to questions, but alongside I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906, we also discover in those answers what actions to take before, during, and after a natural disaster. In both children’s books, one action to be pursued is that personal and public property should be a priority to be saved, and these objects are even worth the risk of personal safety. One can find other procedures that require attention. Animals should be observed for signs of an impending natural disaster. Natural disasters should be separated into “natural” elements and man-made elements when assessing blame. Victims should wait patiently for governmental and institutional assistance. Reestablishing commerce is equated to “getting back to normal” and should be a priority. Male figures are the people who take charge and rescue others. Finally, during a natural disaster, people should be generous and nice to each other despite deplorable conditions. Scholastic publishes yet another series based on disasters called Disaster Strikes, which addresses four categories of natural disasters, but this series does not have a book whose topic is the San Francisco disaster of 1906. However, the series does have a title based on an earthquake, Disaster Strikes: Earthquake Shock.58 The additional categories address a blizzard, a volcano, and a tornado. All four books in the series are published after 2014, and as a group, offer a distinctly contemporary look and feel. None of the disaster narratives are based explicitly on historical natural disasters, and each book has a young male protagonist, which is consistent with Scholastic’s I Survived… series. All of the books in the series are set in the contemporary times of their publication dates. However, the shadows and echoes of past actual disasters are apparent. Since 2012, winter storms are named in advance of the upcoming winter season, and the corresponding book is set in Michigan. Tornados have garnered intense media coverage in the Midwest, and the series book is set in Oklahoma and titled Tornado Alley, in reference to the unofficial name for tornado-prone swaths of flat plains in the Midwest. Volcanos seem to be perennially attractive to children, but volcanic activity has seen an uptick in media attention in recent years as well. The volcano is set in Alaska, but the male protagonist travels there from Hawaii, a volcanically formed set of islands in the Pacific Ocean. Unsurprisingly, Disaster Strikes: Earthquake Shock is set in the Bay Area.

58. Marlene Kennedy and Erwin Madrid, Disaster Strikes: Earthquake Shock (New York: Scholastic, 2014).

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The narrative arc is similar to I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906. The young male protagonist, Joey Flores, faces a challenge related to a male antagonist, and the disaster strikes. Joey is stranded, but he saves another character, a bully, who then feels indebted. They wander among the rubble, and finally, they reach their home. Joey is ten, loves to skateboard, and lives in an apartment complex with his overprotective stay-at-home mother. His father is hardworking, and his infant sister, Allie, is both a pest and adorable. One detail that places the narrative in contemporary times presents itself in very first paragraph of chapter 1: “Ten-year-old Joey Flores stood on top of the ramp. He took a deep breath, adjusted the strap of his helmet, and motioned to Kevin Chen to begin filming.”59 The group is performing in front of a handheld digital video device. The final chapter frames the narrative with a return to visual technology. Joey and his friends at the skate park “gathered around a laptop in Joey’s room. Kevin was finally going to upload the video he had shot at the skate park so they could see it.”60 The group watches skate tricks, and then the scenery suddenly changed. … They solemnly watched what Kevin had documented: the mountain of concrete from the collapsed overpass, homes and buildings utterly destroyed, people in shock, neighbors helping one another. They saw the horrible glow of the house on fire and felt relief all over again when the fire truck showed up. Then came the clip of Little Emma waving goodbye to them from the safety of her mother’s arms.61

The language used by the authors, “had documented,” proves interesting because at no other point in the aftermath of the earthquake do any of the characters discuss their experience. Their experience is “documented” visually before it becomes available for the characters to associate with this disaster event and for them to assign meaning to their experience. One detail in the setting of the narrative provides a connection to a past Bay Area earthquake. Dylan, the bully, is picking on Joey as they skate home, and then the group feels rumbling. The narrative is told from Joey’s thirdperson point of view: “Joey had lived through several minor ones, but this one felt different. They had to get out from beneath the highway.”62 The group make it out and to the other side. “Slowly, Joey and Fiona turned, looking in the direction they had just come from. Only a few feet away the rubble was thick and deep with enormous concrete slabs rising at odd angles—a small mountain before them. Three cars had fallen when the overpass

59. Ibid., 1. 60. Ibid., 101. 61. Ibid., 105–106. 62. Ibid., 18–19.

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had collapsed.”63 This description should resonate with baseball fans and earthquake fans alike. During the 1989 World Series between the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants, sports announcers Tim McCarver and Al Michaels awaited the beginning of Game 3 and discussed highlights of the two previous games. However, as the video feed scrambled and bounced, Al Michaels spoke, “We’re having an earth—” and the television connection terminated. That initiated a brief blackout period, and the nation awaited information. After a short audio return with Michaels, ABC began airing two popular sitcoms of the time, Rosanne and The Wonder Years. The lack of network feed is a situation that appeared impossible in the late 1980s and would now seem incomprehensible to us in the twenty-first century.64 In particular, this plight seems counterintuitive when one considers that this would be the first major earthquake nationally broadcasted live. Ted Koppel, in Washington DC, eventually started a broadcast with Al Michaels serving as a reporter rather than as a sports commentator. The Loma Prieta Earthquake, though producing less damage, both structurally and economically, generated a larger volume of visual material, due to media technology, than the enormous 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires. Damage estimates for the Loma Prieta disaster are placed at $6 billion along with 63 fatalities and 3,757 injuries, according to the US Geological Survey.65 The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake event was quilted together through print, live video, and the new twenty-fourhour-cable network news, such as CNN. Hand-held video cameras became available to the general public in the mid- to late-1980s, so that ordinary citizens could capture video images of disaster events. A search of “Loma Prieta Earthquake” at youtube.com will produce a variety of videos, which includes news broadcasts post-earthquake and a clip of Al Michaels discussing the World Series when the earthquake hits. Also available are video clips (converted to digital media of course) of citizens who had been videotaping personal events as the earthquake hits. One can see the raw fear and reactions of people, and one can see the earthquake’s effect on surrounding structures. The estimates for the economic effects of a hypothetical 1906-type earthquake in San Francisco would be $175 billion if it happened today, according to

63. Ibid., 24–25. 64. For contemporary consumers of personal and home-based electronics, immediate actions would include changing channels or shifting to social media. 65. “Historical Earthquakes: Santa Cruz Mountains (Loma Prieta), California 1989,” U.S. Geological Survey, last modified April 6, 2016, accessed July 4, 2016, http:// earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/events/1989_10_18.php.

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research by the California Earthquake Authority.66, 67 These estimates are due to building code revisions, all the technology production that could be lost, and the speed with which the technology industry could recover. For perspective, Katrina costs are almost $125 billion and Superstorm Sandy $60 billion, according to statistics compiled in a 2012 Huffington Post article.68 Not only does the 1906 earthquake disaster appear to be a vastly different economic event than the Loma Prieta earthquake, but the ontology of each disaster event reveals the greatest discrepancy between the two earthquakes and displays an irruption to disaster discourse. The ontology of each event relies on the rate of information dispersion. And, the technology allows the event to always evolve or to be defined by the limiting parameters of available technology used to document an event. Both the rate of information and the mode of information are intimately related in 1906 and 1989, but we would like to focus not on the positive ontology—where we define a disaster event by what information is present—but instead look at the two earthquakes by what is absent. As noted above, the 1906 earthquake relied on print material, illustrations, and photos during its early stages. Extra editions went out along the West Coast the same day, and some East Coast papers did the same. And these initial accounts are largely textual in nature. Primarily, in 1906, one would read about this earthquake and the subsequent fires and deaths, as opposed to seeing these tragedies. On the other hand, the Loma Prieta earthquake is largely visible from its inception. We might attempt a parallel between technological eras by claiming that TV was the same to us in 1989 as newspapers were to those in 1906—these are both primary sources of news, one might argue. The workers running for their trolley cars in major cities were just as surprised by the “Extra—Extra” headline as we were in 1989 watching a baseball game. However, we must remember that Loma Prieta was broadcasted on a sports program, and the first absence becomes apparent—a news source. In fact,

66. “CEA Says It Could Pay All Claims if San Francisco 1906 Quake Hit Today,” Insurance Journal, last modified April 18, 2016, accessed July 5, 2016, http://www. insurancejournal.com/news/west/2016/04/18/405703.htm. 67. The California Earthquake Authority (CEA): “California Earthquake Authority (CEA) is one of the world’s largest providers of residential earthquake insurance. We encourage California homeowners and renters to reduce their risk of earthquake damage and loss through education, mitigation, and insurance policies that help repair and rebuild damaged homes, and replace valuables and personal belongings,” as stated on their website. The CAE is “Not for profit, Privately funded, Publicly managed, Not tied to the state budget.” See http://www2.earthquakeauthority.com/whoweare/Pages/ default.aspx. 68. Jaweed Kaleem and Timothy Wallace, “Hurricane Sandy vs. Katrina Infographic Examines Destruction from Both Storms,” Huffington Post, last modified November 5, 2012, accessed August 27, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2012/11/04/hurricane-sandy-vs-katrina-infographic_n_2072432.html.

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after Rosanne and The Wonder Years, Ted Koppel, a recognized news figure, finally came onto the television and Al Michaels served as his reporter on the scene. Newspapers, in 1906, were a medium in which a flow of information could be tracked reasonably through channels of authority. One might romantically imagine an editor running into the printing room to yell, “Stop the presses!” which could upset the news making process. However, for lack of a better term, in 1906, no one knew what they were missing—or more precisely, no one knew what they were not missing. An analogy that would apply today relates to reading fiction, a genre in which our reading experience and connection to a text is theoretically less infected by visual perceptions. However, pop culture has affected our reading experience. One cannot read Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (1996) after the adaptation was released without seeing Brad Pitt and that other guy (Edward Norton), and even if one has never seen the feature film Fight Club (1999), one knows the actors. In fact, subsequent additions that were published feature Pitt and Norton on the cover, and the cover also displays text that ties the novel to its film adaptation. Likewise with popular genres, where serial publications are ongoing ahead of or in tow of the accompanying film. An audience or fan base is acutely aware of a specific genre’s characters and settings. This type of audience reads the books and recovers the images they have seen on the screen. In terms of young adult fiction, we need only look at the Hunger Games and Harry Potter brands, which are both Scholastic holdings.69 Readers retrieve images from pop culture and film actors while they read. But with literary fiction, and especially the lost genre of short stories, we are forced to create a world in our heads or consciously resist temptation to use icons of culture. Within the literary fiction and its conventions—setting, plot, characterization, and so on—we contribute our individual cultural backgrounds and conjure a world with “people” in it. Our visions come from the text, we get lost in the text, and we create the narrative in our minds. This is a post-structuralist idea, of course, and it can be applied to people reading about San Francisco in 1906, who would have had a greater imagination than we do now in the twenty-first century. They would get lost in the text as they read the headlines and stories. They would conjure a world of disaster and destruction. Fires raging. Envision

69. Robert Ficociello: Even when I have used a novel in class about which students do not know, such as the John Kennedy Toole novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), they inevitably tell me that they picture Zach Galafinakas as the protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly. Now that they have put it into my head, I find it difficult not seeing Zach Galafinakas when I read the novel. However, a stage adaptation that starred Nick Offerman as Reilly was produced in 2015: https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theaterdance/2015/11/20/offerman-shines-but-bumpy-transition-from-page-stage-forhuntington-confederacy-dunces/m0XqmUEB9Kfff0C8x1qnxJ/story.html.

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people as they run for their lives. Hear explosions as buildings are dynamited to create a fire wall. All this from reading a newspaper. Pertaining to the speed of information, the speed and economics of travel would have prohibited a widespread, first-hand visual grasp of San Francisco by the nation. Few people outside of the West Coast would have experiential knowledge of the Bay Area. And this presents another absence, but it is a positive absence, where our friends in 1906 would have been lost in the text, conjuring the earthquake and fires in their minds. They did not know what they were not missing. Readers who had never visited San Francisco would never know what the city looked like before the 1906 earthquake and fires; however, visual technology allows us to “know” San Francisco before the Loma Prieta earthquake even if one had never visited the spatial geography of San Francisco. On the other hand, as can be seen in the 1989 World Series broadcast clip, the blackout during the game, and subsequent sitcoms, offers an accident of knowledge and information. Because of the new technology in the late 1980s, and the advent of live television news coverage, we also created the news blackout—an absence of information. And in turn, this absence needed to be filled with something—Roseanne. A nation of baseball fans no longer sat anticipating Game 3, but instead anticipated a return to earthquake information. As Al Michaels asked, “Can they hear us?” when the earthquake hit during introduction of Game 3, we could only quietly answer, “Yes. Yes. Keep talking” to a blank screen. The audience lacked information, and the livebroadcast technology of the time created that visual absence that viewers had not been accustomed to experiencing. Though technically more advanced in 1989 compared to 1906, in 1989 the presence of absence is evident because viewers were faced with an interruption in the advanced forms of information dispersion at that time. A question arising from this situation focuses on whether or not this absence can be filled the further we drift away chronologically from the disaster event. As time progresses, we seek and expect to find more information about a disaster event in order to complete a “picture” or narrative of the event. This paradox—that we would need to be further away from an event to gain more information— illustrates another absence: of the disaster event itself. Because as the disaster unfolded on television in 1989, the visual blackout began poking holes through the disaster event. After that, the Roseanne and The Wonder Years left more holes. The lack of a proper new authority created yet more holes. The question is, at this point, how does disaster discourse handle the Loma Prieta earthquake event with its absences? The similarities between the two earthquakes centers on the concept that no matter how much time evolves, the narratives for each disaster will ache for an unrecoverable description, and the narrative conventions used to satiate this yearning will always fail but are nonetheless crucial for a culture to find meaning. The disaster narrative is a necessary element of disaster discourse. On the other hand, the limits of this aching will depend on the technology.

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Although one would assume that a comparison between the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes would be logical in terms of disaster discourse because of the physical location and the type of disaster, the 1989 earthquake appears as more of an irruption to disaster discourse. The 1906 disaster event did not reveal an accident of knowledge and information. However, if we look at another disaster event, Hurricane Katrina, which earthquake would appear as a productive comparison? Loma Prieta? Both have emerging media technologies, both were televised, and both captured national attention with continued coverage of a widespread disaster that affected a great population. But also, alongside media technologies, Katrina’s disaster narrative had to contend with narrative speed, and in the twenty-first century, one would assume that the high speed of information would lead to quicker claims of true and false, and an elemental aspect of disaster discourse. The race for true and false claims in Katrina’s narrative paralleled the 1906 earthquake more so than the 1989 earthquake because the 1906 earthquake and Katrina bare discursive similarities. Here again, when we look at children’s literature and disaster discourse, we should decide not to be dismissive and begin to find coordinates over time within disaster discourse. Katrina’s discursive identity is created largely by following the questions and answers presented in If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, despite the hurricane occurring almost twenty years after the publication of the children’s book. As seen above with the 1906 earthquake and fires, the separation of causes, effects, and blame contribute to the ability of disaster discourse to govern meaning and actions. Likewise with Katrina, intense effort was expended, and still is now one could argue, to separate damage by wind, storm surge, levee failure, levee engineering, transportation, emergency preparedness, geography, racism, and government at local, state, and federal levels. Just as San Francisco in 1906, the stakes were high, and the stakes have not diminished significantly over time. The quantification of deaths due to the disaster events are both fluid numbers. According to a 2015 report by CNN.com, direct and indirect mortalities due to Katrina are 1833.70 On the other hand, a U.S. News & World Report article “No One Knows How Many People Died in Katrina” provides a “conservative” estimate of 984 mortalities and the standard number of 1833 mortalities, which many media outlets report.71 The lead webpage for the CNN

70. “Hurricane Katrina Fast Facts,” CNN, last modified August 24, 2015, accessed June 15, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/23/us/hurricane-katrina-statistics-fast-facts/. 71. Lindsey Cook and Ethan Rosenberg, “No One Knows How Many People Died in Katrina,” U.S. News & World Report, last modified August 28, 2015, accessed June 14, 2016, http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/08/28/no-one-knows-howmany-people-died-in-katrina.

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retrospective “Hurricane Katrina 10 Years Later”72 offers links to pages that could easily answer additional questions posed in If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake: chapter 1 (What did San Francisco look like after the earthquake?); CNN: “Katrina: Then and Now” in photos; chapter 19 (Were any babies born during the disaster?); CNN: “These embryos survived Katrina: Meet Sam & Ben”; chapter 24 (How long did it take San Francisco to recover?); CNN: “Why renewed New Orleans is better than ever.” Still, other question and answers prove alarmingly in parallel. “Different people began giving orders. … And sometimes these people disagreed with each other about the best thing to do” is from If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, but it applies to the rescue and public safety efforts in New Orleans during Katrina.73 “The inspector didn’t visit some homes for nine months” is also from the children’s book, but it applies to residents who waited long time periods for permits and inspections before being allowed to return to their houses.74 As If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake explains, those individuals displaced due to the disaster are called “refugees.”75 This term is still used in mainstream media reports, such as USA Today,76 despite public outrage about the term’s use before all residents had been evacuated from New Orleans. An NPR report by Mike Pesca in September of 2005, only a week after hurricane’s landfall, approached the topic and addressed Al Sharpton’s argument against using “refugee” to describe victims: Even the etymology of the word contains examples of applying only to trans-national evacuators, and to those who don’t leave their borders. … This is more than an argument over semantics. The word refugee has certain connotations. Sharpton’s point was that it strips a person of dignity. … But Sharpton is also saying that, to some extent, the victims of Katrina were victims of politics.77

This appears as Foucault would say about discourse and power relations, the categorizing and dividing of an individual where he or she is “either divided

72. “Hurricane Katrina: 10 Years Later,” CNN, accessed August 1, 2016, http://www. cnn.com/specials/us/hurricane-katrina. 73. Levine and Porter, If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, 54. 74. Ibid., 50. 75. Ibid., 36, 38. 76. Cook and Rosenberg, “No One Knows How Many People Died in Katrina.” 77. Mike Pesca, “Are Katrina’s Victims ‘Refugees’ or ‘Evacuees?’” NPR.org, last modified September 5, 2005, accessed June 12, 2016, http://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=4833613.

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inside … or divided from others. This process objectivized [him or her].”78 Here is where NPR reporter Mike Pesca on September 5, 2005, illustrates Foucault’s assertions that language and practice within discourse lead to power relations:79 There is a bigger reason why I think the term is apt. They’re refugees because circumstance is turning them into refugees. I was at one of the evacuation points the other day. Thousands of people were standing in mud. They were given food, drink and first aid. But there was little psychological aid, including even such basic information as what state they’d be bused to. If you watched this situation on television, you might not realize how dirty and foul-smelling these people were. There was a reluctance on the part of the rescuers to touch the people. There was a total unwillingness to walk among them. The reaction was understandable. Many of the people they were trying to help had swum through sewage water to get here, and no one was showering anytime soon. The dynamic I witnessed was clearly of the dirty masses on one side and the soldiers and police on the other. There was a justification for this separation because security was a concern in New Orleans and law enforcement was on edge. But if you looked at the armed men in fatigues on one side of metal barricades, and thousands of grieving people in tattered clothes on the other, you couldn’t help but think of Haiti or Kosovo. The people of New Orleans who finally made it out of town, and who are still being plucked from attics weren’t people on their way out of town. The people who heeded warnings and had the wherewithal to leave town before Katrina hit were evacuees. These beleaguered people who had lost everything were something else.80

Pesca, however, mixes the definitions. In the contemporary era of the nationstate, a refugee flees politically dangerous situations in one’s home nation willingly to cross borders when, as he notes, one has “the wherewithal” (means and money) to seek refuge. On the other hand, an evacuee is an individual removed from dangerous conditions, which Pesca uses incorrectly in describing those New Orleanians with the wherewithal to leave. Those elderly, poor, and handicapped are simply residents, but disaster discourse wants to categorize and divide linguistically. Also as Pesca reports, to categorize and divide physically behind barriers and gates using military means is another function

78. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1994), 326. 79. For the purpose of following the thread of Pesca’s argument, this lengthy quotation is necessary. 80. Pesca, “Are Katrina’s Victims ‘Refugees’ or ‘Evacuees?’”.

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of discourse. Hence, disaster discourse wants the question to be asked in Pesca’s article because it creates a division and category, and disaster discourse creates physical realities, just as it did for the 1906 earthquake and fires. The speed with which categorizing and dividing within disaster discourse proved vital with the 1906 disaster, and with the twenty-first-century technology, terms like “refugee” and “evacuee” were reproduced before Katrina’s landfall along the Gulf Coast. The discourse of disaster waited for the disaster event to rendezvous with it. And with that speed and spread of terms, which are coupled with dominant mainstream media stratification (television, print, web),81 resisting the use of these terms must be considered a subversive activity82 until disaster discourse adopts or excludes the resistance. However, once disaster discourse governs the terms and questions leading to the use of those terms, despite even the incorrect use of terms, other procedures within disaster discourse are working to support the language and practice of those terms as a disaster progresses chronologically. If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake describes refugees living in “homemade tents” until President Roosevelt “ordered … tents and blankets” to the disaster site83 until inclement weather, and then “the city built little cottages, which were called refugee shacks” to be used as temporary housing, despite public health concerns by city officials.84 After a period of time, the city required those with refugee shacks to move them to pieces of rented or purchased land because the camps would be closed permanently. The tent cities of New Orleans’s homeless people and FEMA trailer recipients faced stricter institutionalized treatment, where fines, arrest, and property rights challenged residents’ ability to reestablish their lives. Of course in 1906, the linguistic distinction between looters and needy becomes a procedure to categorize and divide, and as claimed in If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, looters were publicly shamed by authorities. Shortly after extended coverage began in the aftermath of Katrina, photos and captions appeared that described looters and finders in a contemporary form of public shaming of particular groups of people. The Associated Press distributed a photo where “a young man walks through chest deep water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans,” and they distributed another scene showing two people exiting a convenience store with goods, where “one person looks through their shopping bag … another jumps through a broken window.”85 We should not be surprised, at this point, that another 81. As we shall see in a later chapter, social media was in its very early stages and by no means, as it is now, part and parcel with pop culture. 82. See the satirical website, media outlet, and publisher www.nolafugees.com. 83. Levine and Porter, If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, 37–39. 84. Ibid., 38. 85. Aaron Kinney, “‘Looting’ or ‘finding’?” Salon.com, last modified September 1, 2005, accessed October 31, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2005/09/02/photo_controversy/.

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title of an article related to disaster discourse is posed as a question: “‘Looting’ or ‘finding?’”86 Another parallel between disaster discourse in If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Katrina is postdisaster communication among residents and displaced family members. Chapter 14 (How would you carry the things you save?), chapter 15 (Where would you live if your home was destroyed?), chapter 16 (How would you get food and clothing?), and chapter 17 (What would you do if you were lost?)87 deal with communication and property. Through the question and answer format of If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, young readers will learn what actions occur in a disaster. First, fear for loss of goods through theft is established, then the lines and waiting times are required to receive relief items, and, finally, lines of communication occurs through newspapers, personal advertisements, and homemade signs. Young readers will also grasp who is affected by disaster. There are six depictions of people of color, and all of them are presented as victims of the disaster in lines for relief (four of the six) or singing songs to keep spirits up (two of the six). For comparison, the book provides more depictions of animals than people of color. The physical signs illustrated in the book offer a tone that is “silly”88 or hopeful in order to provide a barometer reading of the recovery. On the contrary, the homemade signs made in preparation for Katrina and those posted after Katrina offer a spectrum ranging from defiance to rescue to hope to violence to despair. One message, but seen in various phrasings, warned that looters would be shot. Again, we see an illustration of how discourse’s procedures of dividing leads to actions. Looters, and people who were mis-categorized and intentionally categorized as looters, were shot.89 Although Katrina and San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake and fire offer similar discursive patterns for analysis and, as argued in this chapter, disaster discourse is a system in which disaster events are managed, governed, and created, what effect does the Loma Prieta earthquake have to disaster discourse? Being the first live televised disaster event, being a disaster event captured on video by ordinary citizens, and being a disaster event reported accidentally, how does the Loma Prieta fit into disaster discourse? We can see the Loma Prieta earthquake as a game changer but not an irrupter of disaster discourse. It caught us by surprise, despite our seemingly secure relationship to visual technology at the cusp of the 1990s, and it reminded us of our vulnerability. But this vulnerability is not a reminder that our safety is susceptible. By now, we should all know 86. Ibid. 87. Levine and Porter, If You Lived in the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, 33–45. 88. Ibid., 59. 89. Trymaine Lee, “Rumor to Fact in Tales of Post-Katrina Violence,” The New York Times, last modified August 28, 2010, accessed December 28, 2016, http://www.nytimes. com/2010/08/27/us/27racial.html.

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that these disaster events are supplementary and acceptable shadows of our American progress. Instead, it illustrates our dependency on the speed in which the disaster narrative is produced by those internal and external to disaster discourse. We may not want the disasters, but those are here to stay, anchoring a hope that a disaster does not affect us personally. What we cannot do without are the accidents of information—those gaps in transmission, specter, and mediation—in our connection to disaster events, and notwithstanding the surveillance culture in which we are immersed, the accidents of information will remain and leave an undocumented core to a disaster event. Disaster discourse desires this because truth is always part of discourse and up for contention, whether it be children’s books, news, or pop culture. Perhaps then, in American culture, disaster discourse has led us to focus upon the single wrong question being asked, especially during accidents of information. This is the question that those who have power within disaster discourse, those who govern how disaster discourse is deployed and practiced, and those who profit most from the manner in which disaster discourse operates want us to keep asking and wait continually for an answer. This is the question that fuels responses which will dominate cable news headlines, Internet memes, and grassroots efforts: What do we blame when a natural disaster occurs?

4 NAT U R A L D I S A ST E R : SE P T E M B E R 1 1 , 2 0 0 1

Of the many films focusing on Hurricane Katrina, Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke is perhaps the only mainstream film that caused the most controversy.1 Lee is unflinching in his condemnation of the problems that helped create “Katrina.” He also presents views that many would find far-fetched, including that the government purposely breached the levees in the 9th ward, a historically African-American community down river from the French Quarter. Although a controlled dynamite breach of downriver levees did occur previously in 1927 when business owners in the city sought to protect their interests, no such action occurred in 2005.2 From the very establishing scenes in which Lee juxtaposes scenes from New Orleans’s mythological past and scenes from the aftermath of Katrina, while Louis Armstrong sings “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” – a song originally written for New Orleans, a 1947 film – When the Levees Broke works at creating a picture of verisimilitude. Although Katrina was a media event that lasted for days and weeks after the levees did indeed break, and images of the destruction dominated the media, one would be hard-pressed to define the event with a one single, iconic image. Indeed, Lee musters thousands of images to get the viewer to understand that something had indeed happened. Something devastating. Something preventable. Spike Lee has said, “What happened in New Orleans was a criminal act. … Somebody needs to go to jail.”3 To Spike Lee, and many others, Katrina was not a natural disaster; Katrina was not Mother Nature leveling the progress made by man. Spike Lee sees Katrina as a man-made disaster and demands that individuals be held accountable for the crimes they committed against the citizens of New Orleans. 1. When the Levees Broke, directed by Spike Lee (2006; United States: 40 Acres and a Mule/HBO Documentary Films), DVD. 2. Lisa Myers, “Were the Levees Bombed in New Orleans?” NBCNews.com, December 7, 2005, accessed December 2, 2016. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/10370145/ ns/nbc_nightly_news_with_brian_williams-nbc_news_investigates/t/were-leveesbombed-new-orleans/#.WGail_krLS8 3. Spike Lee, qtd. in Felicia R. Lee, “Agony of New Orleans, Through Spike Lee’s Eyes,” The New York Times, August 9, 2006, accessed October 3, 2016. http://www. nytimes.com/2006/08/03/arts/television/03leve.html?_r=1.

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That there are “no natural disasters” is a concept previously discussed, so we will not spend time reengaging in that topic other than to conclude that what we term “natural” disasters are better termed “man-made” disasters. It is worth noting that the narrative of the “natural disaster as unavoidable” is used to prop up these systems that create and exploit these disasters. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine follows this path by discussing capitalism’s ability to take all threats to it and to commodify them, actually benefiting from disasters.4 Klein coins the phrase “disaster capitalism” to describe the system’s opportunistic capacities. We can take her thesis one step further and say that not only does capitalism obviously benefit from disasters, but that capitalism is actually responsible for those disasters. Thus, a hurricane whose by-product is the flooding of a major American city is not a “natural” disaster—suffering induced by angry Mother Nature, but a product of a type of capitalism that weighs risks and rewards, profits and deficits, following the cold calculation that if something were to happen, the human cost will be outweighed by the potential corporate profits to be made in the disaster’s wake, or, more tellingly, whatever the human cost, it is not worth preventing the disaster in the first place. This is not to say that all disasters are preventable. For as there are 100year floods in the United States, at some point there will surely be 1,000-year floods in the Netherlands. However, it is not hard to see that 1,000-year flood protection is more costly than 100-year flood protection, and the decisions about the level of flood protection are based on systemic variables influenced by cultures, politics, and economics. The flood protection afforded to New Orleans was, and still is, based on the now-outmoded concept of the 100-year event which can be contained by a system of earthen levees and wood screw pumps. Historically, the US Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps), the agency responsible for New Orleans’s flood protection, holds the primary concern of “big-ticket projects that promoted shipping … the projects most favored by the shipping-industry lobbyists—and members of Congress eager to get federal money spent in their districts.”5 After Katrina, the Corps began rebuilding the failed protection at an estimated cost of $14.7 billion.6 Yet in the face of that system’s failure, an alternative plan was proposed—the “Dutch Perspective.”

4. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007). 5. John McQuaid, “Broken: The Army Corps of Engineers,” Mother Jones, August 26, 2007, accessed July 20, 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2007/08/ broken-army-corps-engineers. 6. John McQuaid, “What the Dutch Can Teach Us about Weathering the Next Katrina,” Mother Jones, August 28, 2007, accessed July 20, 2016, http:// www.motherjones.com/environment/2007/08/what-dutch-can-teach-us-aboutweathering-next-katrina.

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According to the Corps’s Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Final Technical Report, which includes a sixteen-page appendix considering the “Dutch Perspective,” the preferred Dutch plan would have cost approximately $20 billion.7 That “Dutch Perspective” would provide, as in the Netherlands, 1,000-year protection. John McQuaid, writing for Mother Jones, describes what it was like seeing how the Dutch construct flood protection compared to how the Corps constructs flood protection: “After weeks of looking at decidedly low-tech structures of mud, steel, and concrete, it [seeing the Dutch system] was like materializing into a Star Trek episode.”8 McQuaid also notes of the Corps’s design that “the odds that any spot in this enhanced system will be overtopped in 30 years—the life of a mortgage—are about 1 in 4,” and this figure does not take into account the present erosion rates and the other effects of climate change. Yet, the Corps’s plan was the one ultimately favored and funded. So, the group responsible for the protection system that failed New Orleans is the one responsible for building the next protection system—a system physically built upon the old failed system. In 2015 and 2016 alone, the United States experienced at least eight flood events considered to be 500-year occurrences.9 Two of those floods occurred in Louisiana, close to still-recovering New Orleans. It has come to the point where the once-in-however-many-years standard to predict weather events or to judge protection structures is completely inadequate. In fact, New Orleans no longer has any “flood protection.” Instead, the Corps now offers “risk reduction.” As a Corps official noted to NPR, the Corps “changed that lexicon after Hurricane Katrina because we didn’t want the public to be deluded into thinking that they were protected, that they’re safe.”10 It would almost seem that another “natural” disaster has already been designed to occur. So we should be wary whenever the term “natural” precedes disaster, for too often we will find it being used to excuse the system that has created the disaster in the first place. With these considerations in mind, let us look at the disaster that was September 11.

7. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District, Mississippi Valley Division, “Dutch Perspective Appendix,” in Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Final Technical Report, June 2009, 7. 8. McQuaid, “What the Dutch Can Teach Us About Weathering the Next Katrina.” 9. Oliver Milman, “Disasters Like Louisiana Floods Will Worsen as Planet Warms, Scientists Warn,” The Guardian, August 16, 2016, accessed July 18, 2016, https://www. theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/16/louisiana-flooding-natural-disasterweather-climate-change. 10. John Burnett, “Billions Spent on Flood Barriers, but New Orleans Still a ‘Fishbowl,’” NPR, August 28, 2015, accessed July 3, 2016, http://www.npr. org/2015/08/28/432059261/billions-spent-on-flood-barriers-but-new-orleans-still-afishbowl.

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Although we may never know all the details behind the attacks, the broad brush strokes are known to all. Friends and foes of the United States were united in their sympathies for the victims and in their condemnation of the attacks. Gerhard Schröder, Germany’s chancellor, called the attacks “a declaration of war against the civilized world.”11 Tony Blair, the prime minister for Great Britain, declared his country would stand “full square alongside the U.S.”12 Even the Cold War foe, Russia, decried the “barbaric acts” that the United States suffered.13 The common refrain heard after September 11 was that because of the attacks “everything changed.” In fact, the Federal Bureau of Investigations maintains a webpage called “The Day Everything Changed,” which includes the stories of twenty-five FBI agents and their experiences during the September 11 attacks and its aftermath.14 For many young people, September 11 is one of the defining moments in their lives, with Boston.com calling September 11 the most significant event of the first decade of the twentyfirst century.15 On many levels, much did change: airport security became tighter than ever; “The Patriot Act” was passed; domestic and international surveillance grew exponentially; the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq; conditions were created that gave rise to other extremist groups destroying lives in the Middle East. A lot has changed. However, we have no choice but to investigate this thesis and dig further into September 11 as an event and as a disaster. For although the attacks may be defining in some respect, is September 11 anything more? Is September 11 an event that changes everything? In his book Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept, Žižek states that an “Event is a radical turning point.”16 Francis Seeburger, writing for the electronicbookreview.com, in his discussion of September 11 as an Event, expounds on the definition of the Event, calling it “a change in the very structure of significance, or signs, signifying, and significations—a change of

11. Gerhard Schröder, “Reaction from Around the World,” The New York Times, September 12, 2001, accessed February 4, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/ us/reaction-from-around-the-world.html. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Ten Years After: The FBI Since 9/11,” FBI. gov, 2011, accessed March 15, 2015, https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/about-us/tenyears-after-the-fbi-since-9-11/911/videos. 15. Stephanie Vallejo, “Decade’s Top National and International News Stories,” Boston.com, accessed March 15, 2015, http://www.boston.com/news/nation/gallery/ international_national_news_stories_of_decade?pg=11. 16. Slavoj Žižek, Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2014), 159.

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the entire cultural-existential context of meaning.”17 The implication is that the Event fundamentally changes the way we look at the world. In Lacanian terms, we may think of it as the sudden displacement of the master signifier, which creates the space necessary for a new master signifier to emerge. So was September 11 such an Event? Was September 11 such a shock to the system that the world has to be seen in a new way? If it is not some Event that shatters our worldview bringing us into confrontation with the Real, exposing the weakness of the Symbolic Order, then how are we to properly symbolize September 11? Analyzing the responses to September 11 may help to answer these questions. The first paragraph of Baudrillard’s collection The Spirit of Terrorism asks the reader to contemplate September11: “With the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, we might even be said to have before us the absolute even, the ‘mother’ of all events, the pure event uniting within itself all the events that have never taken place.”18 Yet, on the next page, Baudrillard writes that “the moral condemnation and the holy alliance against terrorism are on the same scale as the prodigious jubilation at seeing this global superpower destroyed— better … destroying itself, committing suicide in a blaze of glory.”19 Later, Baudrillard warns that to not see September 11 as an Event dooms us “to play out the flawless logic of a global power capable of absorbing any resistance, any antagonism, and even strengthening itself by so doing—the terrorist act merely hastening the planetary ascendancy of a single power and a single way of thinking.”20 But how are we to see the world after September 11? We are told it was the day that everything changed; however, after September 11, hasn’t it been business as usual for business? Let us not forget that the global economic meltdown of 2008 actually occurred because of business as usual—or, more precisely, neoliberal business as usual. We want September 11 to have meant something; yet, Baudrillard claims that “terrorism ultimately has no meaning, no objective. … And it is, paradoxically, because it has no meaning that it constitutes an event.”21 His reasoning does make sense because if it rises to the level of an Event, then it takes places outside of the symbolic. Something taking place outside the realm of the symbolic cannot have meaning for us as it has not been symbolized. Isn’t this what Žižek means when he states that the “event is

17. Francis F. Seeburger, “9/11 Never Happened, President Bush Wouldn’t Let it: Bob Dylan Replies to Henri Bergson,” Electronic Book Review, December 12, 2006, accessed March 15, 2015, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/musicsoundnoise/eventual. 18. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 1st ed. (London: Verso Publishers, 2013), 3. 19. Ibid., 4. 20. Ibid., 41. 21. Ibid., 45.

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not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it.”22 However, we should ask a question about Žižek’s book-length analysis of the concept of the Event: Why does Žižek reference September 11 so infrequently in Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept, especially when September 11 seems to be the most important Event that has occurred in the twenty-first century? A clue to this question’s answer may be found a third of the way into his analysis of September 11, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, when Žižek asks: What if, precisely, nothing epochal happened on September 11? What if— as the massive display of American patriotism seems to demonstrate—the shattering experience of September 11 ultimately served as a device which enabled the hegemonic American ideology to “go back to its basics”, to reassert its basic ideological co-ordinates against the antiglobalist and other critical temptations?23

Žižek is asking us to consider how September 11, instead of confining America’s role politically and economically, broadened it. And the world saw that American ideology actually became more pervasive after September 11. After all, the US attacks in the wake of September 11 were not limited to the perpetrators of the attacks. September 11 allowed the Bush administration to engage in what would become the “global war on terror,” a war the Obama administration did not seem to be too interested in ending, and what Charles Beard quoted as “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”24 When we ask why the United States invaded Iraq, we no longer have recourse to the pat answers supplied by the Bush administration, such as Colin Powell’s infamous pronouncements at the United Nations of “Iraq’s involvement in terrorism,” “active chemical munitions bunkers,” and “the gravity of the threat that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose to the world.”25 Indeed, we have to ask ourselves if we even need to ask why we went to war in Iraq. Maybe this is the ultimate problem, not why are we in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria or in any of the 135 other nations where US Special Ops

22. Žižek, Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept, 13. 23. Ibid., 46–47. 24. Harry Barnes, “Preface,” in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath, ed. Harry Barnes (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1953), 2, http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/ livres7/Barnespwpp.pdf. 25. Colin Powell, “Full Text of Colin Powell’s Speech,” The Guardian, February 5, 2003, accessed March 12, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/05/ iraq.usa.

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have been deployed, but what would happen if we were not in those places?26 What would happen if there was no global war on terror? Maybe being at war and having military bases in about eighty countries is actually the defining American value? If there is a relationship between the values and material production of a society, one would have to conclude that what the United States values is business and the military. Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 exposes the business relations between the Saudis and many officials at the highest levels of the US government.27 He points out the contracts given to those companies with well-placed connections. Moore questions why the United States allowed planes carrying Saudi citizens, including members of the bin Laden family, to leave the country at a time when no other planes were allowed to fly. However, like Spike Lee, Moore centers the blame on individuals. A corrupt group of politically connected individuals had come to power and used that power for their own benefit. Noam Chomsky takes the focus off the individual in his analysis of the situation. As he detailed it in the days after the attacks: “The U.S. government is trying to exploit the opportunity to ram through its own agenda: militarization … undermining social democratic programs; also undermining concerns over the harsh effects of corporate ‘globalization,’ or environmental issues, or health insurance, and so on.”28 He continues to call these consequences afforded by September 11 “All normal, and entirely natural.”29 Yet, as we do a disservice to those victims of what we normally call “natural disasters” by evoking nature’s wrath about which nothing can be done, do we not do a similar disservice to those victims of September 11 by ascribing the cause to abstract “evildoers” as Bush and company relentlessly did? As Žižek states, “The worse thing we can do apropos of the events of September 11 is to elevate them to a point of Absolute Evil, a vacuum which cannot be explained and/or dialecticized.”30 By looking at a situation through a moralizing lens, we actually render the causes of that situation silent. It simply does not matter why something happened if that something is evil. If it is evil, it must be stopped. Period. General Anthony Zinni, former CENTCOM Commander in Chief, has stated that at the time of the attacks and the Tora Bora offensive, Al-Qaeda

26. Nick Turse, “How Many Wars Is the US Really Fighting?” The Nation, September 24, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/how-manywars-is-the-us-really-fighting/. 27. Fahrenheit 9/11, directed by Michael Moore (2004; Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment), DVD. 28. Noam Chomsky, 9–11, Was There an Alternative? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 65. 29. Ibid. 30. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso Publishers, 2002), 136.

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“was a band of maybe a thousand radicals. Yet we created an investment in this that was on a level of what we do for existential threats. Obviously, we were traumatized by 9/11. … But this was not communism or fascism.”31 By 2001, communism and fascism had virtually disappeared from the map, and the world’s largest “communist” country, China, was one of the United States’ most important trade partners. We could say that in 2001 the United States truly lacked any “existential threats.” However, lacking those existential threats to the United States delegitimizes the constant expansion of the military industrial complex that has been aligned with neoliberal thought. The call for “rebuilding” the US military is a common rhetorical move for the political right, exploiting the citizenry’s fears every election cycle. Regardless of the fact that the United States spends more on the military than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan—combined.32 In fact, those voices that were most enthusiastic about neoliberal economic policies were also the same voices pushing for the US expansion of the “war on terrorism” into Iraq. And what did that incursion into Iraq create? The existential crisis needed to continue policies that had been in the making for years. It created an absolute evil to balance out the absolute good of the United States. Reading the attacks that occurred on September 11 as not being symbolic proves difficult; the Twin Towers have often been read as a symbol for our financial power and policy, and the Pentagon is not simply a symbol of our military power and policy—it is the heart of it. George Bush, in his address before Congress on September 20, 2001, stated, “Terrorists attacked a symbol of American prosperity.”33 However, on the left, Noam Chomsky has gone out of his way to claim that the targets on September 11 present no symbolic relationship. In 9–11, Was There an Alternative?— a collection of interviews he gave in the aftermath of the attacks—Chomsky made numerous statements to this effect. Although he felt the targeting of the Pentagon was made for obvious reason, he states at great length: As for the World Trade Center, we scarcely know what the terrorists had in mind when they bombed it in 1993 and destroyed in on September 11. But we can be quite confident that it had little to do with such matters as

31. Anthony Zinni, qtd. in Michael Hirsh, “An Anniversary of Shame,” Politico, September 11, 2016, accessed November 11, 2016, http://www.politico.com/magazine/ story/2016/09/9-11-15-years-anniversary-of-shame-214239. 32. Peter G. Peterson Foundation, “The United States Spends More on Defense Than the Next Seven Countries Combined,” April 18, 2016, accessed October 5, 2016, www. pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison. 33. George Bush, “Address to the Nation,” September 20, 2001, accessed March 30, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/ bushaddress_092001.html.

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“globalization,” or “economic imperialism,” or “cultural values,” matters that are utterly unfamiliar to bin Laden and his associates.34

Chomsky believes that the attacks are simply responses to the military and economic policies in the region and the symbolism is what we find within them. As he states, “They are fighting a Holy War against corrupt, repressive, and ‘un-Islamist’ regimes of the region, and their supporters.”35 Support for this point of view eventually came from none other than Osama bin Laden in his “Letter to America,” which came out in November 2002. In this letter, he gives the answer as to why they are fighting as “very simple: (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.”36 He then goes on to list what Al-Qaeda sees as US attacks across the Middle East. Globalization, neoliberal economic policies, and so on are not addressed in his letter. However, he is responding to the byproducts of those policies as they have been effected in the Middle East. Yet, as bin Laden called on the United States to embrace Islam, we can read Bush’s call for the terrorists to embrace “freedom” as a similar call—an attempt to create an even symbolic exchange. It appears that Bush and bin Laden make similar statements regarding the other, as though they share a structural relationship. They are two sides of the same coin. In the aftermath of the attacks, George Bush gave an important speech at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. The speech was for airline employees and was replete with easy applause lines geared towards that audience. Bush shared the stage with numerous politicians, including the then speaker of the House Denny Hastert, minority leader Dick Gephardt, Senator Dick Durbin, as well as the CEOs of many airlines. Introducing Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, Bush made sure to point out that Mineta traveled on a United Airlines flight and that it was “just perfect.”37 He continued saying, “The evildoers will not be able to terrorize America and our work force and our people.” Of course, he also called the terrorist attacks a “war against freedom” and that the goal of the attacks was to “affect our way of life.” Using terms like “freedom,” “a nation based upon fabulous values,” and “our way of life” was a conscious attempt to get the assembled crowd on board with the plan “to defend freedom from any terrorist, anyplace in the world.”38 However, looking

34. Chomsky, 9–11, Was There an Alternative? 108. 35. Ibid., 63. 36. Osama bin Laden, “bin Laden’s Letter to America,” The Guardian, November 24, 2002, accessed November 1, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/ theobserver. 37. George Bush, “At O’Hare, President Says ‘Get On Board’,” September 27, 2001, accessed March 20, 2016, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/ releases/2001/09/20010927-1.html 38. Ibid.

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at the speech to discover what those values and freedoms consist of leads one to a conclusion similar to the one reached above—the values and freedoms of business and for business. It should be remembered that this is the speech where Bush was misquoted as stating that, in the face of September 11, “we should all go shopping.” He did not say that. But, Bush did say that the people gathered on the stage with him were “here to say as clearly as we can to the American public, get on the airlines, get about the business of America.” After saying “the business of America,” he added, “That’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?” Towards the end of this speech, he enjoined the assembled audience, and no doubt the entire country, to “Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” And how are we to “enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed”? According to Bush, the powerful politicians, and the business leaders assembled with him, we enjoy life by traveling and spending. Said differently, we enjoy life by making sure the business interests of the country are not harmed. In this speech, Bush equates the country’s “fabulous values” with “the business of America.” The country’s “commitment to freedom” is a commitment to business. No wonder what people heard was Bush say, “go shopping,” for if they were not shopping, they may not be seen as good Americans doing their part to fight terrorism. If you were not shopping, you may not even be seen as an American. Read this way, Bush sees September 11 as a direct threat to “the business of America.” But was it really a threat—an Event that would rend the neoliberal symbolic order? Nominated for best picture, among other nominations, by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2012, Zero Dark Thirty coolly depicted the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden.39 The film’s protagonist is Maya, a CIA operative, whose job is to help track down the notorious Al-Qaeda leader. The first time Maya encounters torture, when Dan is trying to get information out of a prisoner, she is visibly shaken by the experience. However, after further exposure to the techniques of torture, she willingly participates, using the “enhanced interrogation” she initially found repulsive. The scenes depicting torture caused the most controversy surrounding the film. Hollywood actors, Ed Anser and Martin Sheen, joined with other Hollywood insiders to condemn the apparent endorsement of torture that the film portrays.40 This

39. Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (2012; United States: Alliance Films), DVD. 40. Erin Carlson, “Martin Sheen, Ed Asner Join ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Protest,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 12, 2013, accessed March 21, 2014, http://www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/martin-sheen-ed-asner-join-411733.

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led Bigelow to write a defense of her depiction of torture in the Los Angeles Times by saying that a depiction is not an endorsement. Yet, she adds, “It does seem illogical to me to make a case against torture by ignoring or denying the role it played in U.S. counter-terrorism policy and practices.”41 None other than Slavoj Žižek weighed in with his own attack against the film and Bigelow by saying, “The normalization of torture in Zero Dark Thirty is a sign of the moral vacuum we are gradually approaching.”42 Michael Moore came to Bigelow’s defense, writing on Facebook, “It will make you hate torture.”43 To be clear, the film does not present any discussions concerning the morality of using torture. And torture is something that Maya quickly gets used to and employs herself. We do not see Maya engaging in any soul searching from the way she treats others. The debates that were occurring in the United States concerning the use of torture and how to define it are all but absent from the film. The director may wish to come off as appearing neutral on the subject, or even feeling the need to defend a position in writing due to criticism; however, neutrality takes the side of those in power. In this case, neutrality sides with the torturers, or maybe the system that tortures—neoliberal capitalism. If the end justifies the means, then do we not see September 11 and the United States’ response to it as part of the same system? We would not be wrong in reading Zero Dark Thirty as a film presenting September 11 and its aftermath as nothing more than an extension of “the business of America”—business as usual. Naomi Klein, writing in The Nation about an event that took place forty years earlier, connects US neoliberal business policy with the US policy on torture. Klein essay prompts the reader to reconsider an essay written by Orlando Letelier, former Chilean Ambassador to the United States under Salvador Allende, that expressly linked the economic policies of Milton Friedman, one of the fathers of neoliberal thought and the “unofficial adviser for the team of economists now running the Chilean economy,”44

41. Kathryn Bigelow, “Kathryn Bigelow Addresses ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Torture Criticism,” Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2013, accessed March 21, 2014, http:// articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/15/entertainment/la-et-mn-0116-bigelow-zero-darkthirty-20130116. 42. Slavoj Žižek, “Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood’s Gift to American Power,” The Guardian, January 25, 2013, accessed March 22, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable. 43. Michael Moore, qtd. in Eric Hayden, “Michael Moore Pens Defense of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 25, 2013, accessed March 19, 2014, http:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/zero-dark-thirty-michael-moore-415374. 44. Orlando Letelier, “The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awfull Toll,” The Nation, August 28, 1976, accessed March 22, 2016, http://www.ditext.com/letelier/ chicago.html.

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with the campaign of torture in that country.45 As Klein calls it, Chile was forced into an “economic shock therapy … to turn Chile into the very first laboratory for Milton Friedman’s fundamentalist version of capitalism.” In his controversial essay, Letelier showed how “unrestrained ‘economic freedom’” was “inevitably accompanied by massive repression, hunger, unemployment and the permanence of a brutal police state.”46 Because of this essay, Letelier was assassinated by a CIA associate working with Pinochet.47 (At the time of Letelier’s assassination, future president George H.W. Bush was the head of the CIA.) Although an exact parallel cannot be drawn between the present-day United States and Chile in 1975–76, the results of the neoliberal playground that was Chile in the 1970s—large foreign debt, high unemployment, cuts in public services, mass privatization, wealth redistribution, increased incarceration, public health issues, and so on—can all be seen occurring in the United States now. Klein notes that there is a clear reason why mass incarceration exploded in the United States in the midst of the neoliberal economic revolution, when the welfare state has been radically eroded and the public funding of virtually all social services is under attack. It isn’t a grand conspiracy, but the economic exclusion of huge swaths of the population required some parallel strategy of escalated repression and containment (the drug war was awfully handy that way).48

Letelier even mentions that in Chile, at the time, “attempts by religious and other institutions to ease the economic desperation of thousands of Chilean families have been made, in most cases, under the suspicion and hostile actions of the secret police.”49 In the United States, do we not see contemporary stories about individuals and church groups being arrested or thwarted in their attempts to feed the homeless—not by “secret” police, but by uniformed, armed servants of the public trust? Also, let us not forget that the United States teaches torture as part of the curriculum at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formally known as the

45. Naomi Klein, “40 Years Ago, This Chilean Exile Warned Us About the Shock Doctrine. Then He Was Assassinated,” The Nation, September 21, 2016, accessed March 21, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/40-years-ago-this-chilean-exile-warnedus-about-the-shock-doctrine-then-he-was-assassinated/. 46. Letelier, “The Chicago Boys in Chile.” 47. Richard Kreitner, “September 21, 1976: Chilean Exile Orlando Letelier is Assassinated in Washington, DC,” The Nation, September 21, 2015, accessed July 16, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/september-21-1976-chilean-exile-orlando-letelier-isassassinated-in-washington-d-c/. 48. Klein, “40 Years Ago.” 49. Letelier, “September 21, 1976.”

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School of the Americas, in Georgia. As the LA Weekly article noted, “SOA’s graduates have been the shock troops of political repression, propping up a string of dictatorial and regimes favored by the Pentagon.”50 US economic policy is US foreign policy. It becomes difficult, then, to define something that “changes everything” as an Event when it actually helps to continue “business as usual.” Digging deeper into Baudrillard, we find him cautioning against seeing September 11 as simply an “incident on the path to irreversible globalization.”51 He critiques this “zero hypothesis” and the one that simply dismisses the terrorists as madmen or crazed sociopaths. He argues that we should hypothesize “a deep internal complicity between the power and the power ranged against it from the outside.”52 Baudrillard refuses to let us separate the victims from the perpetrators, which creates the impression that the two are not intimately related. He says of terror, “We know it is already present everywhere, in institutional violence … Terror merely crystallizes all the ingredients.”53 To link the outbursts of terrorists to those being terrorized allows us to read Baudrillard as saying that power begets a return of power. He creates a dialectic with both parts necessary and indistinguishable from the whole. This is John Kenneth Galbraith’s claim in The Anatomy of Power: “We may lay it down as a rule that almost any manifestation of power will induce an opposite, though not necessarily equal, manifestation of power.”54 For Galbraith, power is met by like power. Thus, bin Laden’s response to the question of why Al-Qaeda is fighting the United States, in his “Letter to America,” “Because you attacked us and continue to attack us,” should not shock anyone—unless one was unaware of US policies in the region. As Baudrillard writes, “So, at Ground Zero, in the rubble of global power, we can only despairingly, find our own image.”55 This would seem to go against the call, including Baudrillard’s, to define September 11 as an Event. So, we see September 11 and the response to it as part and parcel of the struggle for global power, and the violence (or to be generous—the perceived violence) that the West has perpetrated against those in the Middle East is necessarily met with a violent response. What else could be expected? Later, Baudrillard calls September 11 a “wound,”56 and although he places importance on that, we should remember that an Event totally changes the

50. Doug Ireland, “Teaching Torture,” L.A. Weekly, July 22, 2004, accessed March 30, 2016, http://www.laweekly.com/news/teaching-torture-2138566. 51. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 41. 52. Ibid., 44. 53. Ibid., 46–47. 54. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Anatomy of Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 74. 55. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 47. 56. Ibid., 48.

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symbolic’s ability to define the world. Wounds can be healed, some leave scars, and some prove fatal. Was September 11 like the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs—fatal? Or was September 11 more like a cancer, something internal to the subject—something growing inside the subject in order to rid itself of itself? There’s not much we can do about the asteroid, but we can treat a cancer; even if the cancer is nature run amok, it is still connected to a part of and from the body. The cancer is natural to the system. Baudrillard makes the case that a symbolic system cannot symbolize a situation that “creates a zone of impossible exchange: the impossible exchange of death at the heart of the event itself,” which is how Baudrillard defines a “singularity.”57 Singularity “consists of uncertainty, the collapse of laws, and from which the new, or an event, can emerge.”58 However, we can argue that the terrorists of September 11th have, as Baudrillard states, “merely devastated this world, it still has to be destroyed.”59 Without a doubt, the West suffered a rupture on September 11; however, it was not destroyed—physically or symbolically. The symbolic exchange of September 11 was not with Baudrillard’s suicidal towers but was instead with Bush’s global war on terror. Neoliberal capitalism has had no trouble symbolizing and entering naturally into a symbolic exchange with September 11. Neoliberal capital’s ability to create this symbolic exchange is readily seen in Paul Greengrass’s United 93, a film focusing on the flight of the last airplane to be destroyed on September 11.60 About half of the film shifts between air traffic control towers, military and civilian government command stations, and United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco. The film is graphic in its depictions of the attacks on the Twin Towers. The audience watches as the director shows the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, slam into the South Tower. Throughout the film, the burning towers are seen in the background whenever the scene cuts back to Newark International Airport. Also, the audience watches the CNN coverage with government officials as the towers collapse. Why does the director force the audience to continually view images that have already been burned into their consciousness? Because Greengrass needs to show September 11 as an Event; he must show that September 11 changed everything. But like the boy who cried wolf, in his attempt, he actually provides an illustration as to why September 11 is not an Event and is instead an occurrence natural to neoliberal capitalism. If it were truly an Event, Greengrass would not even need to represent it. Greengrass’s

57. Ibid., 42. 58. Jon Baldwin, “Singularity,” in The Baudrillard Dictionary, ed. Richard G. Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 202. 59. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 51. 60. United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass (2006; Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment), DVD.

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film helps to illustrate Baudrillard’s fear that September 11 is an “incident on the path to irreversible globalization.”61 Approximately halfway through the film, Greengrass shifts the focus of the film to only show the action on the plane. The audience is no longer privy to the behind-the-scenes action occurring on the ground. We no longer see the confusion of the FAA officials as they try to understand the situation or the military’s inability to get attack planes in the air and defend the country. The plane is initially hijacked, and the passengers have no clue about what is going on. Through intermittent phone calls and cell communication, it takes time for them to understand the situation and to discover that their plane is one of four involved in a larger terrorist plot. The passengers are then in the same position as the authorities on the ground—helpless and unaware. However, when the action shifts to the plane, the audience sees the passengers as they organize and come up with a plan to wrest control of the plane away from the hijackers. Through their actions, we can read their actions as the United States reexerting control over the potential rupture; we read this half of the film as neoliberalism symbolizing the situation. In fact, United 93, originally ended with a black title card that read “America’s war on terror had begun.”62 Here we have a parallel to the US response to the tragedies of that day paradoxically preventing an Event from occurring, as this conclusion keeps the viewer held within the prevailing Symbolic Order. This is not to say that September 11 did not have the potential to be an Event—to symbolically destroy neoliberal capitalism, to allow the space for the emergence of a new master signifier. Galbraith’s work helps us to understand why this didn’t happen. Power expects, or demands, the same power to be employed. And after September 11, this is exactly what occurred. The terrorists were playing on the same ball field as the neoliberal West they challenged. The neoliberal response kept the ball on the field and in play. Baudrillard likes to discuss the collapse of the Twin Towers as a form of suicide. That the only proper way for the system to respond to the threat created by the “impossible exchange” was to commit suicide. As much as Baudrillard likes to personify the collapse of the Twin Towers and frame it as a symbolic suicide, the Twin Towers’ collapse cannot be read as neoliberalism’s suicide. If there was a moment when an Event-full response to the “impossible exchange” was possible, that moment came during the response to the attacks—especially that moment in late 2001, when the United States, with bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Afghanistan at Tora Bora, decided not to destroy Al-Qaeda and bin Laden, but instead to back away from the battle. To help explain this odd military decision, Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense, explained,

61. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 51. 62. Dennis Lim, “A Flight to Remember,” The Village Voice, April 11, 2006, accessed July 14, 2016, http://www.villagevoice.com/film/a-flight-to-remember-6428060.

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“When foreigners come in with international solutions to local problems, it can create a dependency.”63 Isn’t this the neoliberal argument against the welfare state writ large? (The system will create the conditions for social and economic problems and then place the blame for those problems on those who suffer the most because of them.) The United States instead allowed bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda leadership to slip away, giving birth to the forever war. The September 11 attacks allowed a neoliberal fantasy of a hostile Middle East at war with the United States to be created. To see September 11 and the aftermath as a replication of a model set in place years before, one needs to investigate that neoliberal model. In 2000, Robert Kagan and William Kristol edited a volume entitled Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy. This collection of essays makes the argument that the United States needs to reverse “the increasingly alarming decline in American military capabilities” that occurred during the “squandered decade of the 1990s.”64 Elsewhere in the book, Paul Wolfowitz argues that “the absence of threat … also makes it possible to believe that the whole problem of national security has gone away or been transformed into a kind of international social work.”65 Fortunately for him, September 11 provided those who follow the neoliberal worldview the crisis they needed to make sure that “Saddam Hussein and his regime cannot be allowed to linger indefinitely.”66 After all, as Kagan and Kristol rhetorically ask, “How utopian is it to imagine a change of regime in a place like Iraq?”67 How utopian is it to imagine extending the tentacles of neoliberalism deeper into the Middle East, Asia, and Africa? Many of the authors in Present Dangers were founding members of The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neoliberal think tank “whose goal is to promote American global leadership.”68 And how did

63. Donald Rumsfeld, qtd. in Hirsh, “An Anniversary of Shame.” 64. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in America’s Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), vii–viii. 65. Paul Wolfowitz, “Statesmanship in the New Century,” in Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in America’s Foreign and Defense Policy, ed. Kagan and Kristol, 312. 66. Richard Perle, “The U.S. Must Strike at Saddam Hussein,” The New York Times, December 28, 2001, accessed October 5, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/28/ opinion/the-us-must-strike-at-saddam-hussein.html?_r=0. 67. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Introduction: National Interest and Global Responsibility,” in Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in America’s Foreign and Defense Policy, ed. Kagan and Kristol, 20. 68. Thomas Donnelly, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” September 2000, accessed December 3, 2016. https://archive.org/ stream/TheProjectForTheNewAmericanCenturyRebuildingAmericasDefenses_201606/ The%20project%20for%20the%20ne w%20american%20centur y%20-%20 Rebuilding%20America%27s%20defenses#page/n1/mode/2up/search/global.

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this group propose to support US global leadership? “By maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces.”69 As expressed by many in Present Dangers, PNAC also argued for removing Saddam Hussein from power. This idea was publicly presented by many members of PNAC who signed an open letter to President Bill Clinton in 1998. Some of the reasons they gave for removing Hussein are the same ones the Bush administration used later to justify the US incursion into Iraq after September 11. Many of these signees ended up serving in the second Bush administration, including PNAC members Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrams, Peter Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. So here we have a group of men representing the US power structure—at the uppermost echelon—who openly espoused a neoliberal economic and military agenda. Baudrillard’s insistence that the Twin Tower’s collapse be seen as a suicide in the face of the impossible exchange created by the terrorists should be read instead as similar to a sacrifice fly in baseball—the sacrifice creates a greater, utilitarian good for those doing the sacrificing. This sacrifice—popularly seen as an attack on American “values”—opened the way for the expansion of those American values. The Twin Towers did not commit suicide; they fell after being attacked, and their collapse needed to be avenged. Thus, the attack did not open the space for a singularity—for a singularity would force an observable change in the symbolic organization of the system. With the power of America’s military-industrial complex firmly in the fore, September 11 reinforced the prevailing ideological forces. Yet, September 11 could have opened the way for an Event to usher in a singularity. To explore this possibility, let us ask, what if the United States had taken an “asymmetrical” response to those attacks? But, what could have happened had the United States ceased to use condign power against its “enemies”? What if the United States had employed a different strategy after September 11? What type of military would the United States have created if the existential threat that terrorism now represents had not been created? Remember that the response to Al-Qaeda’s violence on September 11 followed with US violence in Afghanistan and Iraq, or as Galbraith would say, condign power was met with condign power, which is the natural response in such a situation. That is how power normally responds— with like power. However, imagine that after neutralizing Al-Qaeda, the United States then embarked on an “asymmetry in the exercise of power.”70 Galbraith discusses a couple of historical moments when “asymmetry in the exercise of power” was employed: by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Although Galbraith does not explore this asymmetry in depth, he notes that

69. Ibid. 70. Galbraith, The Anatomy of Power, 79.

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“departure from the accepted design was a source of infinite wonder, so deeply is symmetry assumed.”71 It is precisely this symmetrical game that the United States and Al-Qaeda (and other terror groups) play which keeps the neoliberal status quo in place. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard discusses the necessity of the binary operation, or in the case of capital, a diapoly. To read the neoliberal project as coming to fulfill the dominant economic and hegemonic position, Baudrillard notes that “diapoly is the highest stage of monopoly.”72 Since Vietnam, the United States has sought out, and even created, enemies of the state—communists, hippies, drugs, Sandanistas, terrorists—all of whom collapsed under the pressure of the exchange forced upon them by neoliberalism. With terrorism, it seems that neoliberalism has finally found a true partner—both playing on the same symbolic playing field. We could even say that neoliberal capitalism and terrorism created the playing field. One is natural to the other, and both are necessary to maintain a monopolistic structure. So what could possibly open the way for the singularity? What Event would shift the very frame through which we view the world? That Event would have been to instead abandon the power and “security” created by fielding and funding the world’s largest military. This is completely unthinkable to the standard operating procedures used by US politicians. An asymmetrical exercise of power would spell the end for neoliberalism. Galbraith highlights how both Gandhi and King, Jr. owe their success “to their break with the accepted and accustomed dialectic of power.”73 By supporting a response other than a military one, the one expected in the established dialectic, the United States would have had to begin to abandon the policies that had been developing since the end of the Second World War and that came to the fore of domestic and foreign US policy after Vietnam. It is the unrealized asymmetrical response that would have actually been an Event—a true suicide. After all, how could the United States not utilize to its fullest the largest, most powerful military the world has ever seen? To not do so would have not only caused a rupture in neoliberalism, but it would have ushered in something other than neoliberalism and potentially something other than the appropriate response to the neoliberal agenda—terrorism. We can see this situation played out in Zero Dark Thirty, which should now be read as a metaphor for this unrealized Event. When Maya becomes physically disgusted by the torture she witnesses being deployed in the name of American values, she has a choice to make—a choice analogous to the one the United States faced after September 11. Does she accept or reject the playing field that she finds herself on? We know she accepts it, and when she does, she

71. Ibid., 80. 72. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 143. 73. Galbraith, The Anatomy of Power, 80.

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becomes the necessary double to the terrorists, who were the necessary double to neoliberal capitalism. Had she not accepted her position of this field—there would be no film—there is no way for us to symbolize this action as Event. All we can say is that it would have ruptured the symbolic order and changed it. If September 11 cannot be seen as an Event, then how do we classify such a disaster? Looking at an event mentioned earlier, the global economic meltdown that occurred in 2008 helps us in this endeavor. A short piece written by Allan Roth, a well-known financial commentator, for CBS Money Watch, discusses what happened with the stock market during the decade post-September 11. He states flatly that September 11 was “an assault on capitalism, the brunt of the brutal attack was only steps away from Wall Street.”74 He then goes on to declare that the “sub-prime mortgage crisis and the recent dysfunctionality of American politicians” can also be seen as “attacks [on American capitalism] so insidious [because] they came from within rather than without.”75 Here, Roth explicitly links September 11 and the economic meltdown created by Wall Street. He goes on, “Greed is too much a part of the human condition to ever change.”76 What Roth has done is to show that there is a relationship not only between September 11 and capitalism, but that there is a relationship between September 11 and the way capitalism works. Let us not forget that deregulation of the banking industry is what many feel led to the financial meltdown. If we allow unfettered neoliberal capitalism, we get the conditions that led to the international banking crisis. Why? Because “greed is too much a part of the human condition to ever change.” Could we not then say that the financial meltdown was natural? Not in the sense of “mother nature,” but in the sense that is innate to the system—born from and fated to the system. That is why, as Roth suggests, we need regulatory mechanisms to constrain that which comes naturally. However, the neoliberal hand rocking the cradle is anathema to such rules or constraints on the system. If we can accept this, can we not then accept September 11 as a “natural” response to American neoliberal capitalism? Even if bin Laden knew “virtually nothing of the world and [didn’t] care to,” as Chomsky paraphrases Fisk, let us not forget that bin Laden was an American creation.77 As Žižek notes, “are not ‘international terrorist organizations’ the obscene double of big multinational corporations—the ultimate rhizomatic machine, omnipresent, albeit with

74. Allan Roth, “Stocks—A Decade After 9/11,” CBS Money Watch, CBS News, September 6, 2011, accessed March 17, 2015, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/stocks-adecade-after-9-11/. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Chomsky, 9–11, Was There an Alternative? 64.

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no clear territorial base? Are they not the form in which nationalist and/or religious ‘fundamentalism’ accommodated itself to global capitalism?”78 Žižek’s idea dovetails with Baudrillard’s monopolistic need for a diapoly. Roth ends his piece, quoting Walt Kelly’s cartoon creation, Pogo, as he observes, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Can we not say the same thing in relation to many of our perceived enemies in the Middle East? In fact, Baudrillard’s quote from Phillip Muray’s Dear Jihadists, stating that the terrorists “will end up prisoners of resemblance,” creates the same argument.79 Do we need to ask how many “allies” against the red menace have become enemies against the godless Americans? After all, the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy! This brings us back to an earlier question: Was September 11 an Event that fundamentally changed the way we think about the world? The answer has to be “no.” In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore refuses his audience the opportunity to gaze upon the smoldering Twin Towers, or for that matter display images from any other carnage of that fateful Tuesday morning. Why? Because September 11 was not an Event. Moore’s focus on the response to the attacks highlight that the possibility of the Event and its failure to materialize actually occurred after September 11 and should properly be found in the system’s response. If anything, Žižek’s rhetorical question asking if September 11 was “a device which enabled the hegemonic American ideology to ‘go back to its basics,’ to reassert its basic ideological co-ordinates” can easily be answered—Yes! Given Roth’s Money Watch comments coupled with Žižek’s, can we not see September 11 and the Western response to it as simply a part of “Capitalist Realism” as Mark Fisher calls it in the book of the same name? As Fisher points out, our “War on Terror,” has created “the normalization of crisis [that] produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable.”80 And are not these measures the product of the profit-making agencies that Klein terms “disaster capitalism”? Far from being an Event, September 11 can instead be seen benefiting and strengthening global capital—a product of and necessary to global capital and its continued expansion. And it is with this in mind that we can rescue the term “natural disaster.” For no longer can we call a hurricane or earthquake a natural disaster—that narrative seeks to make opaque the causes for those disasters and those who benefit from them. However, the next time a loosely defined, futuristic derivative crashes the global banking system or a terrorist attacks a center of financial or military power, we can rightly use the term “natural disaster.” Then, we will see the event (with lowercase e) as having occurred because it “naturally” arose from

78. Žižek, “Zero Dark Thirty,” 38. 79. Phillip Muray, qtd. in Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism. 80. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: 0 Books, 2009), 1.

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the system. The system is fated to experience these types of seemingly “fatal” events. We need to liberate the term “natural disaster” from its obscurantist, conservative trappings and make it, rightly, critical and progressive. Thus, we should see September 11 not as an “Event that changed everything” but as a natural occurrence—maybe a natural disaster, but not an Event. In 2008, writing in the London Review of Books, Žižek notes a similarity between the speeches Bush gave after September 11 and the economic downturn. He asks, “Where does this similarity come from?”81 This similarity comes from the fact that September 11 is a “natural” facet of the neoliberal project, so similar language is employed. As Baudrillard states, “The dominant power is the instigator of everything, including effects of subversion and violence.”82 The possibility for an Event to usher in a new way of perceiving the world was missed as the United States responded to this particular natural disaster by expanding its military and commercial operations into other areas of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, creating further economic opportunities in the region for the privileged few and their “dysfunctional” political officials. For instead of seeing the Twin Towers collapse as a suicide, al la Baudrillard, we should read their fall more precisely and properly as a “sacrifice” for the good of the neoliberal economic and military agenda. The opportunity for a properly symbolic suicide was missed when the United States, instead, created the forever war—the war against terror. And once again, we are left to clean up the wreckage of another natural disaster— another preventable, natural disaster.

81. Slavoj Žižek, “Use Your Illusions,” London Review of Books, November 14, 2008, accessed March 15, 2013, http://www.lrb.co.uk/2008/11/14/slavoj-zizek/use-yourillusions. 82. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 59.

5 G U L F WA R S : T H E NA R R AT I V E S O F I R AQ A N D N EW O R L E A N S

In the summer of 1990, the sabre rattling president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was complaining about Kuwait’s slant drilling into Iraq’s prosperous Rumalia oil field located on their shared border. This, along with long-simmering diplomatic, economic, and other border issues, heightened ongoing tension between the two countries. In July, Iraq began massing troops along the border, which intensified diplomatic actions around the world. Washington D.C. sent disambiguous signals concerning the intensifying situation between Iraq and Kuwait. As debate in Washington D.C. began heating up concerning potential US involvement, Margaret D. Tutwiler, the spokeswoman for state department, said, “We do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.”1 The Arab League attempted to mediate the situation by urging the United States to take a gentle stance to avoid fanning the flames. Iraq took a direct approach when Hussein met with the US ambassador, April Glaspie, to discuss Iraq’s history with Kuwait and the economics of oil production in the region. At that meeting and while discussing oil prices, Glaspie told Hussein, “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”2 Glaspie even went back into the history of Iraq-Kuwait border disputes, telling Hussein, “I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60’s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker [George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state at the time] has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.”3 By all appearances, the White House wanted to distance itself from the prospect of direct military action.

1. Elaine Sciolino and Michael R. Gordon, “Confrontation in the Gulf; U.S. Gave Iraq Little Reason Not to Mount Kuwait Assault,” The New York Times, September 23, 1990, accessed August 30, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/23/world/ confrontation-in-the-gulf-us-gave-iraq-little-reason-not-to-mount-kuwait-assault. html?pagewanted=all. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid.

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Tension came to a head on August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The United Nations quickly responded with Resolution 660 that called for Iraq to remove its troops from Kuwait. When withdrawal did not occur, the United Nations resolved to create sanctions against Iraq. Eventually, after Iraq ignored additional resolutions, the United Nations passed Resolution 678 on November 29, 1990, which “authoriz[ed] Member States … unless Iraq on or before 15 January 1991 fully implements … the above-mentioned resolution [to withdraw from Kuwait] to use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 … and to restore peace and security to the area.”4 As debates continued concerning potential US action against Iraq, it became clear that the United States was going to become militarily involved. However, to make military intervention more palatable, US citizens needed to become convinced that more than “oil was at stake.”5 According to Stauber and Rampton, an estimated “20 PR, law and lobby firms” were used to “mobilize US opinion and force against Hussein.”6 Stauber and Rampton’s book details the public relations (PR) campaign used to convince Americans that war against Hussein was in their best interests. Just the work on behalf of Kuwait and the war conducted by “Hill & Knowlton, then the world’s largest PR firm … would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion.”7 The media, and the PR fed to the media, drove the narrative away from oil by demonizing Hussein. Our former ally against Iran was now to become Public Enemy #1. In the lead up to the war, President Bush often compared Hussein to Hitler. At one point, while speaking at a Massachusetts Republican campaign function, Bush condemned Hussein’s use of human shields by stating, “I don’t believe Adolf Hitler ever participated in anything of that nature.”8 Even the New Republic, a “liberal” news magazine, manipulated an image of Hussein on its cover to make his moustache look more like Hitler’s. The television news magazine, Nightline, “began a program with an image of Hussein, targeted through a gun sight, an image usually associated with police

4. “Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) [Authorizing Member States to Use All Necessary Means to Implement Security Council Resolution 660 (1990) and All Relevant Resolutions],” United Nations Official Document System, November, 1990, accessed May 16, 2015, http://daccess-ods.un.org/access.nsf/Get?Open&DS=S/ RES/678%20(1990)&Lang=E&Area=RESOLUTION. 5. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), 168. 6. Ibid., 169. 7. Ibid. 8. Tom Raum, “Bush Says Saddam Even Worse Than Hitler,” AP News Archive, November 1, 1990, accessed July 23, 2014, http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1990/BushSays-Saddam-Even-Worse-Than-Hitler/id-c456d72625fba6c742d17f1699b18a16.

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target practice.”9 However, as Calvin Trillin pointed out in an early February 1991 column, Bush knew the evils that Hussein carried out had occurred while being supported by the United States.10 Trillin even stated about the New Republic, “If it wanted to indicate, in a sort of sneaky way, that the bad guy is really bad, Hitler is the obvious association. He’s the only villain with staying power.”11 For political and military purposes, Hussein needed to be portrayed as evil on the level of Hitler to get the public behind the desire for US military action. The media complied, and the public obediently followed. On January 17, 1991, the United States began bombing Iraq, and by late February, the ground offensive began. Four days later, the war was over. From January to February, over 100,000 sorties were flown—1,000 in the first twenty-four hours. Two years later, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), tried to get a handle on the impact of the war, and it concluded that “estimates for the number of Iraqi soldiers killed range from 60,000 to 200,000” and those estimates for civilian deaths ranging “from 100,000 to 200,000.”12 The White House had enacted a massive unapologetic response, which was called “the largest armored assault since WWII and the fastest in the history of warfare.”13 With the arrival of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the world watched cable television into the wee hours, and CNN started its rise to global media prominence. CNN was the only news outlet broadcasting from Iraq. The network provided awestruck viewers around the globe constant footage of Patriot surface-to-air missiles sent to intercept SCUD missiles, glowing tracer rounds knifing into the Middle Eastern darkness, and Tomahawk cruise missiles launched in phallic glory from the decks of navy ships safely deployed in the Persian Gulf. Even Dick Cheney, then defense secretary, was reported to be watching the events on CNN.14 CNN posted record viewership, and during

9. Ella Shohat, “The Media’s War,” in Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War, ed. Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 149. 10. Calvin Trillin, “Comparing Saddam to Hitler: Stop Splitting Hairs,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, January 3, 1991, accessed March 10, 2014. LexisNexus Academic. 11. Ibid. 12. “Flashback: 1991 Gulf War,” British Broadcasting Corporation, March 20, 2003, accessed August 30, 2013, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2754103.stm. 13. James A. Warren, “The Gulf War Victory That Never Was,” The Daily Beast, February 21, 2016, accessed July 26, 2016, http://www.thedailybeast.com/ articles/2016/02/21/the-gulf-war-victory-that-never-was.html. 14. Bill Carter, “THE MEDIA BUSINESS; CNN Takes an Early Lead in Coverage of the Gulf War,” The New York Times, January 17, 1991, accessed March 15, 2013, http:// www.nytimes.com/1991/01/17/business/the-media-business-cnn-takes-an-early-leadin-coverage-of-the-gulf-war.html.

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the early days of the war, many other channels conceded to broadcasting CNN programming.15 Another telling indicator that CNN was winning Desert Storm was that their stock prices rose over 35 percent during the conflict.16 However, the broadcasts were not the reality they may have seemed to be. Along the way, “some in the media quietly admitted that they’d been manipulated to produce sanitized coverage which almost entirely ignored the war’s human cost.”17 Sanitized to make it palatable. Sanitized to avoid questioning. Sanitized to reinforce the prevailing ideological narratives. As the war became a memory, those memories were being shaped by the narratives and images proliferated by an increasing media presence. The narrative becomes history, and history becomes “fact.” However, what are we to think when the facts are delineated by a history built around images—images that are not true? Fifteen years later, in the Bahamas on August 24, 2005, tropical depression #12 was churning through the warm waters far off the southern US coast when, following established procedures, it was given the name “Katrina” by the World Meteorological Organization. Katrina made initial landfall in Florida as a Category 1 hurricane with winds between 74 and 95 mph. It quickly crossed Florida and carried itself westerly into the Gulf of Mexico. Early “spaghetti” computer models had the storm moving towards the panhandle of Florida, and although the storm looked like a textbook major hurricane, most residents of New Orleans maintained a characteristically laissez-faire attitude about the proximity of Katrina to the city. After all, it was going to hit well to the east, placing New Orleans on the “good side” of the storm. Most thought there would be no major problems. Friday night, August 26, the storm changed course and shifted westward. It appeared as though the perfect storm was now going to directly hit a city sitting below sea-level, protected by earthen levees and nearly 100-year-old wood-screw pumps. By Sunday, August 28, Katrina had reached maximum wind speeds of 170 mph, becoming a Category 5 hurricane. At this point, Mayor Ray Nagin issued the first ever mandatory evacuation of the city of New Orleans. The next day, Hurricane Katrina made landfall again, but this time in southern Louisiana near the mouth of the Mississippi River. For twelve hours, the storm traveled just east of New Orleans hitting the border of Louisiana and Mississippi. In New Orleans, roofs peeled apart, glass shards from the windows of high-rise buildings flew through the air, and power lines flailed about like the tails of children’s kites.

15. Max J. Robins, Paul Noglows, and Richard Huff, “CNN Reigns in Desert Storm,” Variety, January 20, 1991, http://variety.com/1991/more/news/cnn-reigns-in-desertstorm-99128411/. 16. Ibid. 17. Rampton, “Toxic Sludge Is Good for You,” 174.

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Miraculous early reports from the city announced that “New Orleans was spared the catastrophic flooding that many had feared”18 and that “most of the levees held, but one was damaged.”19 Those reports, however, were the last good news to come out of New Orleans for months to come. Within hours, the entirety of the news media apparatus focused on water filling the bowl of the city, families stranded on rooftops, and the chaos of thousands of people waiting for help that did not arrive. Reports about the aftermath of Katrina are common knowledge, so much so that at the time the country was said to be suffering from “Katrina fatigue.” One NPR listener wrote, “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeese … stop that constant New Orleans coverage.”20 Another, “‘Enough already. ‘Nobody cares.’”21 Writing in Time magazine, New Orleanian Donna Brazile, a Democratic political operative, warned the country, “We simply can’t afford Katrina fatigue.”22 A retrospective look at Google Trends does point to a quantitative expression of Katrina fatigue. During the week of August 28–September 3, the term “Katrina” reached its trend peak. By the week of November 27–December 3, the week Brazile’s article was published, the term “Katrina” had already plummeted down to a relative 3 on the trend line.23 So what do these two seemingly disparate events, a war and a hurricane, have in common? Just like the Gulf War, Hurricane Katrina did not take place. On the surface, this statement may sound counterintuitive, even flippant, and rest assured, one would be remiss to discount, diminish, or dismiss the massive destruction and hundreds of thousands of lives that were affected or lost due to both events. Yet, a good argument can and has been made that the “Gulf War” never happened, and likewise, one can contend that “Katrina” never happened. To understand this position on Katrina, the Gulf War must be further discussed and contextualized because to understand and theorize the

18. John Burnett, “The French Quarter Picks Up After Katrina,” Morning Edition, NPR, August 30, 2005, accessed March 1, 2013, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=4823298. 19. John B. Treaster and Kate Zernike, “Hurricane Katrina Slams Into Gulf Coast; Dozens Are Dead,” The New York Times, August 30, 2005, accessed July 16, 2014, http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/us/hurricane-katrina-slams-into-gulf-coast-dozensare-dead.html?_r=0. 20. Susan Feeney, “Katrina Fatigue: Listeners Say They’ve Had Enough,” Nieman Reports, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Fall 2007, accessed March 11, 2013. 21. Ibid. 22. Donna Brazile, “Don’t Give In to Katrina Fatigue,” Time, November 28, 2005, accessed March 20, 2013, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171, 1132809,00.html. 23. Google, “Hurricane Katrina vs. Katrina,” Google Trends, accessed June 14, 2016, https://www.google.co.in/trends/explore?date=all&geo=IN&q=%2Fm%2F07n nlb,katrina.

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role of the media in constructing “Katrina,” we can look at the “Gulf War” as a model for natural disasters. As the lead up to the Gulf War intensified and commenced, French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote a series of articles for Libération, the French newspaper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. The first article, written as war seemed certain, was titled “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place;” the second, written during the war, he titled “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?” and, finally, the most controversial essay, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” was published after the war concluded. As the first major war taking place “live” on television with twenty-four-hour news coverage, one must remember that the media was not only tightly controlled, but also served as an active ideological participant in the war. As seen earlier, the major media outlets manifested a clearly proUnited States and pro-war agenda. Ella Shohat points out in “The Media’s War” that the Nightline discussions about Iraq’s missile attacks featured input by a “‘spectrum’ of experts … [that] ranged from right-wing Israeli official Benjamin Netanyahu, to right-wing former U.S. official Henry Kissinger, to right wing columnist George Will, to right-wing Democrat Steven Solarz to right-wing military analyst Edward Lutwak.”24 Essentially, Shohat states, the media “acted as public relations for the State Department, assimilating the language, terminology, and the assumptions of the administration.”25 In a highly critical article concerning the manufacturing of the Gulf War television spectacle as entertainment, Tom Engelhardt writes that “these televised events made explicit and visual the sidelining of the reporter in bringing the news to the public.”26 He goes on to quote a military spokesman saying that the military’s briefings “were the most significant part of the whole operation [because] for the first time ever … the American people were getting their information from the government—not from the press.”27 The press effectively functioned as an arm of President Bush’s military agenda. Engelhardt points out, “The Gulf War can, in fact, be seen as the Ur-production of the new media conglomerate. …the boundaries between military action and media event broke down in such ways that military planning could become a new form of media reality.”28 The Bush administration used the media as another weapon—a weapon against an independent, investigative press and against US consumers. By controlling the mainstream media, the military were able to extend the planning and the implementation of their agenda into the virtual realm. Through reporting pools, limited live feeds,

24. Shohat, “The Media’s War,” 147. 25. Ibid. 26. Tom Engelhardt, “ The Gulf War as Total Television,” in Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War, ed. Jeffords and Rabinovitz, 81. 27. Ibid. 28. Engelhardt, “The Gulf War as Total Television,” 82.

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and controlled access to scripted press officers, the mainstream news media became de facto supporters and propagators of the war. Even the opinions and pictures of dissent against the war and the military industrial complex were limited by the mainstream press. A particular narrative was being constructed for broadcast to the world. In an extensive article written for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Jim Naureckas states that the Gulf War was “one of the most disturbing episodes in U.S. journalistic history—a period in which many reporters for national media abandoned any pretense of neutrality of reportorial distance in favor of boosterism for the war effort.”29 He showed how reporters and news organizations accepted “the task of guiding public opinion in favor of the war as their natural role.”30 For some Americans, their vision of the war protester came from supermarket tabloids that vilified celebrities who dared to question the necessity of the war. In general, these inyour-face tabloids presented “a version of the war that was sometimes silly or incredible but always supportive of the U.S. military intervention.”31 The tabloids would show celebrities with pro-war opinions in a favorable light, while those who dissented were shown “less respectfully, as locked in struggle … with their own families and co-workers.”32 Rifas states, “The tabloids can be read both as journalistic evidence that dissenters were being intimidated and as a potentially intimidating force for conformity in their own right.”33 Obviously, in the eyes of the media, those who opposed the war were nonconformists who needed to be brought back into the fold lest everyone suffer from their obstinate dissension from the nationalistic norm. In terms of allowing dissenting views about the war to enter the mainstream media discussions, little time was given to serious, alternative voices. Even with mainstream reporting on the war, “Only about 1.5 percent of the nightly network news sources were protesters, about the same number as people who were asked about how the war had affected their travel plans.”34 Dissenting voices were confined to the “alternative” media and were held at best in suspicion, and at worst in contempt. The media-military narrative was being followed, and America was absorbed in the pageant created for their spectacular viewing pleasure. In Paul Patton’s introduction to Baudrillard’s essays collected in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, he sums up Baudrillard’s position: “This is not a war

29. Jim Naureckas, “Gulf War Coverage: The Worst Censorship Was at Home,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, April 1, 1991, accessed March 18, 2013, http://fair. org/extra/gulf-war-coverage/. 30. Ibid. 31. Leonard Rifas, “Supermarket Tabloids and Persian Gulf War Dissent,” in Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War, ed. Jeffords and Rabinovitz, 229. 32. Ibid., 230. 33. Ibid. 34. Naureckas, “Gulf War Coverage.”

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but a simulacrum of war, a virtual event which is less the representation of real war than a spectacle which serves a variety of political and strategic purposes on all sides.”35 This idea of the spectacle, a performance, or display recognized for its memorable visual quality, evolves out of earlier texts from Baudrillard. He states in The Evil Demon of Images that when we think of images, we think of them as “refer[ing] to a real world, to real objects, and to reproduce something which is logically and chronologically anterior to themselves. None of this is true.”36 He goes on, “It is precisely when it appears most truthful, most faithful and most in conformity to reality that the image is most diabolical. … It is in its resemblance, not only analogical but technological, that the image is most immoral and most perverse.”37 So what we now experience is an illusory and perverted version of what we have come to believe is our world through precision imagery—a simulacrum. The images, stories, and narratives (all signs) that are constructed for us to describe or explain our world actually create the “reality,” or as Baudrillard claimed, “Reality is the effect of the sign.”38 In Simulations, Baudrillard points out that the simulacrum can be thought of as similar to Borges’s map from his short story “On Exactitude in Science.” In this story, cartographers of the Empire create large maps with great precision. Although their work was known for its precision, the cartographers wanted to go even further and create a map that was perfect and “whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”39 The map literally covers the entirety of the land represented by the map. Eventually, this map, having been found “Useless” by later generations, ends up dissolving into and becoming one with the land “inhabited by Animals and Beggars.”40 So for Borges, although the map begins as a copy of the land, it eventually becomes the land. This is how Baudrillard sees the simulacrum—“reality is the effect of the sign.”41 The “truth” is the simulacrum or the image, but it is not true. Instead of the image of the land being described by the map, the experience of the land is defined by the map; the reality is not the land—the “reality” is the map. The spectacle has become the real, and the meaning of the event is its relentless display. Baudrillard states that we should not view the image as a representation of reality, but rather “in its ‘telescoping’ into reality …

35. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 10. 36. Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images (Sydney : Power Institute Publications, 1987), 13. 37. Ibid., 13–14. 38. Ibid., 47. 39. Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 325. 40. Ibid. 41. Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images, 47.

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in the implosion of image and reality.”42 Because of this implosion, when we are confronted by media images, we need to be aware that what is offered for consumption is not based in “reality.” The lack of referents is the condition of late capitalism. In his article for Libération, “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?” Baudrillard goes on to state: By the force of the media, this war liberates an exponential mass of stupidity … of those who pontificate in perpetual commentary on the event … the would be raiders of the lost image. Fortunately, no one will hold this expert or general or that intellectual for hire to account for the idiocies or absurdities proffered the day before, since these will be erased by those of the following day.43

Thus, Baudrillard sees the “reality” of the war as an endless chain of images that represent no “truth.” Despite the constant parade of experts providing voiceovers and the unfurling of media programs—documentaries and live-fromIraq reportage—the effort to “represent” the truth only increases in futility. There is no difference between the sign and the signifier. From Baudrillard’s point of view of the Gulf War, the only winners exist “from an economic point of view.”44 This idea relates specifically to military spending, but one can also see the economics of futility in the media. The three major US networks and emerging cable news channels, such as CNN, all fought over market shares. How coverage of the war would cut into their advertising dollars was a major concern to the network bosses, even acknowledging that people would grow weary of war coverage and tune in to “HBO and MTV.”45 The Gulf War happened long before the age of the Internet, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope. News came from select sources and access to alternative media depictions was limited for most people. What the masses in the United States received were military-approved experts and analysts commenting on the military’s experts and analysts.46 The media outlets, conscious of market share, gave the people what they wanted, which was the same thing that the military wanted, which was the same thing that the oil companies wanted, and which was the same thing that the White House wanted—a short-term, entertaining

42. Ibid., 27. 43. Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 51. 44. Ibid., 55. 45. Carter, “THE MEDIA BUSINESS; CNN Takes an Early Lead in Coverage of the Gulf War.” 46. Reporting about the Iraq War compounded this dynamic further. Retired Gulf War military became experts analyzing their former colleagues, both from the same ideological mold.

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spectacle which reaffirmed US ideological and military superiority. Engelhardt sees the Gulf War “as the U.S. response to the Japanese and European economic challenges in that it emphasized the leading-edge technologies of the United States’s two foremost exports: arms and entertainment.”47 He also points out that the final scene of the Gulf War—“a triumphant helicopter descent on the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait”—was “crafted for closure, it was meant to nullify in the most literal sense the final televised scene from the Vietnam War, the chaotic liftoff of the last helicopter fleeing the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in April 1975.”48 If that was not coincidental enough, at the end of a speech to the American Legislative Exchange Council on March 1, 1991, President George H.W. Bush concluded his speech with this: “And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”49 In his last essay of the trio for Libération, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” Baudrillard states, “Since this war was won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like had it existed.”50 Although this references the United States’ superior and overwhelming military firepower, one can see within this idea the question of narrative construction and the presence of a script being followed. “There is no question,” Baudrillard contends, “that the war came from their plan and its programmed unfolding. … In this perspective, war could not take place. There is no more room for war than for any form of living impulse.”51 So one of the main thrusts of Baudrillard’s argument is that, created by a predetermined model and experienced as a mediated entity— in particular, mediated through television—the Gulf War never happened. What we saw were images—hyperreal images—that functioned beyond mere representation: a “The Gulf War” production. That these are images of war proves of secondary importance since there is a hidden agenda behind the television image. As Baudrillard writes, It matters little what it “informs” us about, its “coverage” of events matters little since it is precisely no more than a cover: its purpose is to produce consensus by flat encephalogram. The complement of the unconditional simulacrum in the field is to train everyone in the unconditional reception of broadcast simulacra. … The result is a suffocating atmosphere of deception and stupidity. And if people are vaguely aware of being caught up in this appeasement and this disillusion by images, they swallow the deception and

47. Engelhardt, “The Gulf War as Total Television,” 87. 48. Ibid., 84. 49. George Bush, “Remarks to the American Legislative Exchange Council,” The American Presidency Project, March 1, 1991, accessed April 1, 2013, http://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=19351. 50. Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 61. 51. Ibid., 63–64.

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remain fascinated by the evidence of the montage of this war with which we are inoculated everywhere: through the eyes, the senses and in discourse.52

Thus, through this mediation, not only is a narrative created and fed to consumers, but the consumers are helpless in its face because of the totalizing nature of the image (which one can take to mean more than just the visual image—hence, the discourse encapsulating the image). An American cable network like CNN sought out and captured commentary from retired military and academics. However, despite the desired effect of live television, the questions are scripted as are the responses, just as other non-news forms of television, such as reality television programs. The proper guests are brought in because they fit into the program’s structure and content. So the Gulf War never happened because the “Gulf War” was a narrative created by images in order to enforce a neoliberal version of capitalism. How does this discussion concerning a brief war, that many have little to no experience with, relate to the largest disaster in US history—Hurricane Katrina? One can easily understand why the political and economic ventures of capitalism expressed in the Gulf War needed to be couched around the fight against terrorism or around a boogeyman instead of a fight for capital’s shortterm interests, but Katrina—completely different? However, Katrina rapidly evolved into a military operation,53 and the political and economic interests emerged before the fight for a recovery in New Orleans began. The need “to produce consensus” precedes the event in question. And, like the Gulf War, Hurricane Katrina did not take place. Yet, what would one say to a person living in New Orleans during this time period?54 Would Katrina have taken place for him or her? Would Katrina have taken place for you if you lived in New Orleans? For example, on Saturday, August 28, you, with your pregnant wife, elderly mother, and two cats, evacuate 80 miles upriver to just outside of Baton Rouge. You worry and wait. You watch a forty-foot tree get uprooted from the heavy winds and a nearby creek swell with water. But most of your “Hurricane Katrina” experience occurs in front of a television screen. You still tune in to CNN and the local news channels that are covering the storm without pausing for the requisite celebrity fashion faux pas that would normally dominate the weekend programming. You stare in disbelief as you hear that the roof of the Superdome has collapsed. Then, you celebrate when you hear New Orleans did not flood. It had “dodged a bullet.” However, the relief you and your family feel will quickly turn to heartbreak

52. Ibid., 68. 53. National Guard troops left New Orleans only in 2009, after hurricane season ended. 54. Both authors live or have lived in New Orleans pre, post, or during Katrina.

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and horror as you watch the city fill with dark, murky water from the breached federal levees that had failed. You glue yourself to the screen and watch news reporters comment on heroic rescue efforts and vain attempts to plug the gaping levees with sandbags dropped from military helicopters. You watch the scenes of apparent looting taking place throughout the city. You see the images of handmade signs warning that looters would be shot. However, something odd happens during your untold hours of television viewing, which you still remember vividly. A helicopter shot of the flooding city is panning from Interstate Highway 10 down South Broad and nearing the intersection of South Broad and Washington. “They’re showing our neighborhood,” you shout to your pregnant wife. The camera focuses on the old Bohn Motor Company on South Broad—a large two-story building. Its roof is ripped off, and it seems as though the building is nearing collapse. The camera holds its focus on the building for a few moments before shifting and focusing elsewhere. Here is what strikes you as odd. That building, about six blocks from your family’s home, was already ruined and dilapidated before the storm. It had long been a blighted eyesore for so long, that you forget about it every day while driving to work and driving home. Yet, at that moment, with the city flooded, it becomes part of the Katrina narrative. Had you remembered to look at that building on August 27, while running errands around the city, it would have looked the same as it did on August 30 through the lens of a camera mounted on a helicopter being broadcast to untold millions as they watched the same “Hurricane Katrina” that you were watching. In Baudrillard’s essay “The Precession of the Simulacra,” he discusses “the successive phases of the image.”55 One can see all of the phases running concurrently through our understanding of “Katrina.” The first phase of the image is that “it is a reflection of basic reality.”56 In the narrative above, this would be you, at your father-in-law’s house, watching his tree uprooted and smashed to the ground. This is a first-hand, embodied experience and the only “image” formed is temporal and at the back of the retina. One could say that it was experienced. The second phase is when the image “masks and perverts a basic reality.”57 This would be the helicopter shot you saw of an already-ruined building that became a building ruined by Katrina. The third phase is when “it masks the absence of a basic reality.”58 This can be seen in several ways. For instance, around the city you would have seen signs denoting “Hurricane Evacuation Route,” or the impression that levees protect the city

55. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 11–12. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid.

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up to a Category 3 hurricane. In both of these instances, there was no reality to hold onto—thousands upon thousands of New Orleanians had no recourse to a “Hurricane Evacuation Route” because these routes were flooded and did not offer evacuation. You were not, thankfully, one of the approximately 112,000 of the city’s general 500,000 population who did not “have access to a car.”59 You did have an automobile. And this is a city “protected” by levees that had flooded five times as a result of hurricanes in the past century: 1915, 1940, 1947, 1965, and 1969.60 Baudrillard calls this third phase “the order of sorcery”—as if by magic New Orleans had a clear path to save everyone and those who could not evacuate would be protected. Baudrillard’s final phase is when the image takes over, and the image “bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”61 Applying the strategy of Baudrillard’s final phase to the phenomena of Katrina is where things get thought provoking. In The Evil Demon of Images, he states that “the logic of simulacrum [is] the precession of models. … And it is for this reason that events no longer have any meaning: not because they are insignificant in themselves, but because they have been preceded by models with which their own process can only coincide.”62 One saw this with military models for the Gulf War, and one sees this with Katrina. Yet, a storm of equal or worse devastation hit New Orleans a year before Katrina, and this storm also had its beginnings in the Bahamas. In late July, 2004, New Orleans and surrounding parishes suffered through Hurricane Pam, a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane with “sustained winds of 120 mph, up to 20 inches of rain … [a] storm surge that topped levees … destroy[ing] 500,000–600,000 buildings.”63 Do you remember that? Well maybe in the summer of 2004, Pam did not get the national press that Katrina did thirteen months later because Pam was a model, a simulation, a simulacrum, that was created by FEMA contractor IEM, INC., an “emergency management and homeland security consultant.”64 The press release that announced the contract states, “A catastrophic event is one that can overwhelm State, local and private capabilities so quickly that communities

59. “Hurricane Katrina,” History.com, A&E Television Networks, accessed March 11, 2013, http://www.history.com/topics/hurricane-katrina. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 11. 62. Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images, 22. 63. Federal Emergency Management Agency, Hurricane Pam Exercise Concludes, July 23, 2004, accessed March 13, 2013, https://www.fema.gov/news-release/2004/07/23/ hurricane-pam-exercise-concludes. 64. “IEM to Lead Development of Hurricane Plan for Louisiana,” Insurance Journal, Wells Media Group, June 9, 2004, accessed August 29, 2013, http://www. insurancejournal.com/news/southcentral/2004/06/09/43008.htm.

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could be devastated without Federal assistance and multi-agency planning and preparedness.”65 However, the “real” disaster event took many years to surface. As Ekstrom and Kverndokk wrote in the introduction to a special issue of Culture Unbound, “Disasters are not events but processes with unclear beginnings and no obvious endings.”66 The Pam simulation showed that Louisiana’s emergency capabilities were “overwhelm[ed] … without Federal assistance and multi-agency planning and preparedness.”67 Nevertheless, Pam eventually became a celebrity and had her chance to shine in the media spotlight. She blossomed into a demure, superego model-mistress of Katrina who was outed once Katrina herself developed into a media sensation. Pam’s infamy increased when media accounts sought her out as a key witness in the Katrina blame game, and she seemed to sing and scold: “I told you we’d get caught.” The National Geographic’s cable channel aired Inside Hurricane Katrina in early November of 2005,68 less than a month after the last gallons of floodwater had been pumped out of sections of New Orleans, about a month after the first business owners and residents of select zip codes could survey their property, and at the same time as areas of New Orleans were still waiting for safe drinking water to flow from their kitchen taps.69 And later in November of 2005, Pam also starred in the PBS NOVA series opening an episode titled Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City.70 Too bad Pam never received the accolades that she deserved. Two curious features emerge in the beginning of this NOVA episode and its relationship with Baudrillard’s ideas about models and reality. In The Evil Demon of Images, Baudrillard states: [T]he image is interesting not only in its role as reflection, mirror, representation of, or counterpart to, the real, but also when it begins to contaminate reality and to model it, when it only conforms to reality the better to distort it, or better still: when it appropriates reality for its own ends, when it anticipates it to the point that the real no longer has time to be produced as such.71

65. Ibid. 66. Anders Ekstrom and Kyrre Kverndokk, “Introduction: Cultures of Disaster,” Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 7, no. 3 (October 28, 2015): 356. 67. “IEM to Lead Development of Hurricane Plan for Louisiana,” Insurance Journal. 68. In 2010, The National Geographic released a “Commemorative Edition,” presumably to commemorate Katrina’s five-year anniversary. 69. Inside Hurricane Katrina (2005; Washington, DC: National Geographic Studios, 2006), DVD. 70. Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City, directed by Caroline PenryDavey and Peter Chinn (2005; Boston, MA: PBS, 2006), DVD. 71. Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images, 16.

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In the NOVA episode, Pam, the “computer simulation” constructed by Ivor Van Heerden, became appropriated reality for the officials that attended the “exercise” in 2004. Two disaster officials in Louisiana, Walter Maestri and Madhu Beriwal, refer to Pam in their discussion of Katrina. Maestri recalls the delegation of authority in the Pam “exercise.” Local, state, and federal officials recognized their designated roles and subsequent actions outlined in the simulation. Marine scientist, Ivor Van Heerden, also uses the language of Pam in relation to Katrina when he claims that “a number of officials who basically scoffed at us,” which illustrates the “skepticism” within the agencies who would later be involved in Hurricane Katrina.72 For Maestri and Van Heerden, Pam served as a prototype for Katrina. They described Katrina with the language of Pam, the simulation. The “computer simulation” has produced the reality of Katrina for even these experts. Even the lack of disaster response from the state, local, and federal agencies, breakdowns that are obvious in the Pam model, becomes appropriated into the reality of Katrina. The disaster agencies failed in the model, and they failed during Katrina—just as they were intended to fail. Hidden within the bowels of the FEMA website, in an article entitled “Disaster Theory,” George Long, from the American Military University, addresses the unique reality of Katrina. He writes, “An exercise known as Hurricane Pam would point out the weaknesses in emergency planning along the [Gulf Coast], making Hurricane Katrina a reality before even hitting landfall in late August of 2005.”73 Without resorting to the difficult theories of Jean Baudrillard, Long comes to the same perverse realization that the image, the model, the simulation, the simulacrum precedes and actually creates the real disaster. Now, entering into the fourth phase of the precession of the image, the phase of the simulation, Baudrillard posits: [N]othing separates one pole from the other, the initial from the terminal [even space and time]: there is just a sort of contraction into each other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapsing of the two traditional poles into one another: an IMPLOSION—an absorption of the radiating model of causality, of the differential mode of determination, with it positive and negative electricity—an implosion of meaning.74

72. Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City, directed by Penry-Davey and Chinn. 73. George Long, “Disaster Theory,” last modified April 18, 2009, accessed March 11, 2013, https://training.fema.gov/HiEdu/studentpapers/Long%20-%20 Communications%20Systems%20(2).doc. 74. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 57.

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An implosion of meaning, an implosion of causality. Katrina had already moved past New Orleans; New Orleans had “dodged a bullet.”75 Then, the levees breached, and the bowl filled, flooding the city—a flood that was predetermined, not only by the model but also by history. In a Times-Picayune weeklong exposé, “Washing Away,” written several years before Katrina, it details how the miles and miles of levees, designed to keep water away, were not able to protect the city.76 As the authors pointed out in 2002, “The natural protections [mashes and barrier islands] are rapidly deteriorating, and that in turn is weakening man-made defenses, mainly because the entire delta region is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.”77 Other articles in the series highlight the fact that the specifications from the Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps) were made in the 1960s “using low-tech tools of the day … and may never have been exactly right, corps officials say.”78 Even the types of flooding events that the levees were designed to prevent— the 300-year, 200-year, 100-year flood—“actually conform to risks that most people consider relatively common.”79 In retrospect, studies done after Katrina found that the design of the levees was faulty from their original construction. Jed Horne wrote in the Washington Post, “As the Army Corps eventually conceded, they [the levees] were breached because of flawed engineering and collapsed because they were junk. … The Corps and local levee boards that maintain flood barriers pinched pennies and suddenly Katrina became the nation’s first $200 billion disaster.”80 Katrina did not breach the levees; the levees had already been designed and constructed to be breached. The model for disaster was already in place, and it was a model created by cost-saving considerations, a model enacted by the bidder of lowest cost, and a model concerned primarily what we value most—money. Worth noting is that in the face of the intense criticism leveled at the Corps, in 2006 they hired the PR firm Outreach Process Partners, LLC (OPP), based in Annapolis, Maryland, that “specializes in tech-savvy strategic

75. Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City, directed by Penry-Davey and Chinn. 76. “Washing Away,” The Times-Picayune, June 23–27, 2002, accessed February 23, 2013, http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/page/washing_away_2002.html. 77. John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein, “In Harm’s Way,” The Times-Picayune, June 23, 2002, accessed May 28, 2016, http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2002/06/ in_harms_way.html. 78. Ibid., “Evolving and Danger,” The Times-Picayune, June 23, 2002, accessed May 28, 2016, http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2002/06/evolving_danger.html. 79. Ibid. 80. Jed Horne, “Five Myths About Hurricane Katrina,” The Washington Post, August 31, 2012, accessed January 22, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fivemyths-about-hurricane-katrina/2012/08/31/003f4064-f147-11e1-a612-3cfc842a6d89_ story.html?utm_term=.348707f913a4.

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communications and mission support for government agencies and prime contractors.”81 To help the Corps, OPP would “foster strategic relationships with media outlets that result in more accurate and balanced stories.”82 We should see a similar dynamic between PR and the media in Katrina, and the dynamic occurring in the first Gulf War. After Katrina, the media was manipulated to foster the hegemonic narrative as it was leveraged to foster the hegemonic narrative during the Gulf War. The ability to hire a PR firm to make sure a particular message or narrative is the defining one is only available to those in positions of power, those who have sufficient monetary resources, and those who seek to protect their capital interests. Beside the discursive connection of Pam to Katrina, two other components of the PBS NOVA episode also relate to Baudrillard’s fourth phase of simulation: setting and characters. Even those directly affected by Katrina contributed to the “washing away” of their own experience. Several individuals play themselves as characters Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City, but some of these are officials who comment retrospectively about the policy decisions that occurred before, during, and after Katrina.83 However, they are always looking back at their experiences and revising their personal narratives in peculiar settings. They are interviewed such as one would find in a traditional documentary, even in the form of a traditional docudrama, in which one would see the victim interviewed intermittently with a dramatized version of the event played by professional actors. On the other hand, two individuals, Africa Brumfield, a New Orleanian, and Lisa Monti, a resident of the coastal Mississippi city of Bay St. Louis, play themselves as characters. They act as themselves in dramatized pre-Katrina settings. After the initial introduction of the episode, the viewer is presented with stock images of “pre-Katrina New Orleans” via a riverboat, a street musician, and the Mississippi River levee. The narrator begins his voice-over at 2:07 minutes and finishes the scene forty-two seconds later: It looks like an ordinary day in New Orleans. The city is just awakening, and it’s business as usual. Africa Brumfield, a resident of the 6th Ward, is up for an early morning walk; Walter Maestri, an emergency manager, is on his way

81. “About OPP,” Outreach Process Partners, LLC (OPP), accessed July 29, 2016, http://www.opp-llc.com/about-opp.html. 82. Georgianne Nienaber, “Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans: Buying Advice or Spin?” The Huffington Post, last modified May 25, 2011, accessed June 6, 2014, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/georgianne-nienaber/army-corps-of-engineers-i_b_199344. html. 83. Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City, directed by Penry-Davey and Chinn.

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to his office at Jefferson Parish; on the Gulf Coast, northeast of the city, Lisa Monti has dropped in at her neighbors. Things seem calm, but there’s trouble looming.84

Pre-Katrina Walter Maestri, in the episode, has a close up showing him driving his car on Decatur Street between the French Quarter and the Mississippi River in New Orleans, which is Orleans Parish, where he “is on his way to his office in Jefferson Parish.”85 Perhaps, Maestri lived in Orleans Parish and commuted into Jefferson Parish to the west. The footage of Maestri in Orleans Parish is vague enough so that the scene could be Decatur Street before or after Katrina, as the French Quarter did not acquire a fraction of the damage that other areas of the Orleans Parish encountered. However, Africa Brumfield, who is actually the post-Katrina Africa Brumfield, walks along the 6th Ward of New Orleans playing the pre-Katrina Africa Brumfield. The camera pans upward from Brumfield’s feet. To her left, as the narrator says her name, and in the background, Brumfield walks in front of a truck. This pick-up truck’s window is covered with mold and stained from sitting in water at least six feet high. This is Brumfield’s pre-Katrina “early morning walk.” After a brief shot of gentle waves lapping on the shore, pre-Katrina Lisa Monti, played by post-Katrina Lisa Monti, visits her neighbors. She stands on a neighbor’s pre-Katrina porch and chats with them. As with Brumfield’s “early morning walk,” the representation of a pre-Katrina setting is affected by post-Katrina effects. Behind one of the gentlemen who is speaking to Monti are the torn screens of the porch, flapping in the Gulf Coast breeze. Behind another gentleman, the bottom half of a window is boarded up with plywood. One might not think much of this, but prehurricane windows are boarded up to prevent breakage and then removed. Posthurricane windows are boarded up to prevent animals from entering and to protect the inside from rain while waiting for repair. Around the entire white porch, however, one can see the spider webs of mold and mildew spreading along a support column and the wood siding. Finally, while Monti faces the group and talks, she has a clear sightline to a home next door. This neighbor’s roof in the distant background shines in the sun, and two large holes are visible. Two eyes from the future are surveying the past. To those watching, these settings might flash by unnoticed, even a few months after Katrina when the episode first airs in early November. This oversight could occur before (or perhaps after) Katrina fatigue set into American viewers when national sympathy peaked. The majority of viewer’s perspectives on New Orleans and Gulf Coast would not even be superimposed,

84. Ibid. 85. Ibid.

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overlaid, or adjusted over present post-Katrina settings. In other words, viewers would know nothing else about these settings other than what they are watching; they would have no memory of a pre-Katrina version of the Gulf Coast. Nothing in the NOVA sequences would resonate or indicate a lingering presence of a pre-Katrina setting or narrative. Pre-Katrina and postKatrina become, as Baudrillard evinces, “a collapsing of the two traditional poles into one another: an IMPLOSION.”86 The setting of New Orleans is no longer pre- and post-Katrina, and likewise for the Gulf Coast. The images of these two locations, as settings, are singular. They become, in movie terms, “one set piece.” The National Geographic’s Inside Hurricane Katrina illustrates the same conflation throughout its pre-Katrina settings.87 In the dramatization of the simulated Hurricane Pam, video of Katrina’s destruction is treated with softfocus effects to provide an imagined or dreamlike quality. Over these images, the statistics about Pam flash brightly across the screen. When the narrator discusses the extensive levee system surrounding New Orleans and the parishes outward from the city, one sees a shot of one of New Orleans’s canals. At 8:44 into the documentary, the narrator says, “It’s protected by one of the world’s largest systems of earthen levees and floodwalls. But, some of the levees are slowly sinking and in need of repair.”88 As the narration trails off, the next preKatrina scene fades in, and the new scene, shot from a helicopter, is of only two seconds. However, as in the NOVA episode, post-Katrina invades pre-Katrina. In the final fleeting moment of that scene, as the camera pans up the span of a canal, a viewer should see the sun shining brightly upon a length of cement floodwall. But just prior to a jump cut to the next scene (“Friday, August 26, 2005 5:00 PM ET”), a viewer should notice a gaping breach in the floodwall: a symbolic opening from the future flowing into the past. Again, we find the future dictates itself into the past as the implosion of images also functions to implode viewer’s notions of narrative linearity and chronological time. But what about Brumfield and Monti and their respective roles as individuals and characters? Both Brumfield and Monti are not random choices to be characters in this episode. Yes, they both decided to stay when others followed instructions to evacuate. Yes, there is a balance of locales for settings, where Brumfield lives in New Orleans and Monti lives on the Gulf Coast. Yes, one is white and one is African-American. Lisa Monti is a journalist and photographer, and has expertise in business reporting. Africa Brumfield sought shelter at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, and her experience there proved to be unique even by Katrina standards. But, one can only imagine the moments of aporia that they must have faced during

86. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 57. 87. Inside Hurricane Katrina. 88. Ibid.

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filming—those moments where “Action!” would be called, those moments when they were coached on how to act as themselves, those moments where the sets that surrounded them held no tangible pretense (by Hollywood standards) of the pre-Katrina present they were portraying in front of the camera lenses. Those moments when they had to conform to the narrative that was being created for them about their personal traumas and Katrina. Lisa Monti, the real-life journalist with journalistic integrity, “has dropped in at her neighbors” and she stands on the moldy porch. Over the head of her neighbor, pre-Katrina Lisa Monti was acting as if her pre-Katrina life had been reset by a director, and post-Katrina Lisa Monti looked at openings in a neighbor’s roof. The openings gawk at her like the eyes of an adoring fan who is watching the filming of a movie. The two versions of Lisa Monti implode into each other, and a camera is recording all of it. And in November of 2005, viewers observe this implosion with perhaps little recognition of the additional implosion of the settings of pre-Katrina Bay Saint Louis and post-Katrina Bay Saint Louis, home of Lisa Monti—the dramatized person and “Lisa Monti”— the actress. When Lisa Monti watched the final-edited version of Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City, how did she reconcile to the versions of Lisa Monti on the screen, perhaps even as she watched in Bay Saint Louis? After all, she went back to live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Africa Brumfield the person, starring in a documentary where she plays the character of pre-Katrina Africa Brumfield, is directed to walk through the “pre-Katrina” streets of the 6th Ward—only a few months after her trauma. She is instructed to walk—to act—along the post-Katrina 6th Ward where she “is up for an early morning walk” among the post-Katrina wreckage of flooded vehicles, heaps of uncollected debris, and uninhabitable houses. Africa Brumfield and her family were some of the 20,000 individuals stranded by the flooding. They waited, as the globe watched on television, without water and food at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center until they were evacuated on September 4. Their rescue occurred only two months before the initial airing of the NOVA episode. Africa Brumfield’s experience is further compounded by the fatal shooting of her uncle, Danny Brumfield, on September 2. This occurred in front of her and other family members, including his wife, while marooned at the Convention Center. The investigation and subsequent legal proceedings did not completely conclude until April of 2012.89

89. According to The Times-Picayune, “The family’s [civil] suit against the city, filed a year after Katrina, was settled in 2008 for about $400,000” (McCarthy). Also in April 2012, according to The Times-Picayune, “Former New Orleans police officer Ronald Mitchell will serve 20 months in prison for lying about the circumstances of a fatal shooting days after Hurricane Katrina—and that brings a measure of justice to the family of Danny Brumfield” (“Former NOPD”).

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In the final moments of Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City, the narrator discusses possible strategies to eliminate another flooding of New Orleans. He states, “But just as difficult may be the task of rebuilding the confidence of the people of New Orleans. Both the disaster and the long, slow process of rebuilding have convinced many not to return.”90 The next scene reunites post-Katrina Africa Brumfield with post-Katrina New Orleans, and post-Katrina Africa Brumfield wears the same military pants and white t-shirt as pre-Katrina Africa Brumfield did at the beginning of the episode. Despite the literal shift in time for Africa Brumfield, she wears the same clothes and sits in the same setting. Some viewers might observe this “sort of contraction into each other” and “IMPLOSION” of meaning, pre- and post-Katrina “Africa Brumfield” and the Africa Brumfield actress who played both “Africa Brumfield”s.91 In Africa Brumfield’s final scene, she remarks, “This was home, and I’ve been all over the world thanks to the military. Nothing ever felt like New Orleans, ever. But I can’t come back to live. Going through that again is too scary.”92 Yet, for the viewers, post-New Orleans Africa Brumfield sits in New Orleans saying, “nothing ever felt like New Orleans,” and in a subtle way her statement reveals another element of implosion about Katrina; the New Orleans that Africa Brumfield “felt” and the Bay Saint Louis that drew Lisa Monte back to live there does not feel like anything to them. Neither of them could even act their way from the present setting of destruction into their preKatrina worlds, because as individuals, Monti and Brumfield, the pieces of the set are there to stay. Fighting through the endless levels of simulacra further enhances the idea that no natural disaster occurred in late August 2005. In fact, there may be no more natural disasters in this age of simulacra. There used to be a monotheological idea that natural disasters show how man must fight nature to survive—like Noah building his ark or Hemmingway’s Old Man floating through the same waters that spawned Katrina. That common image carries with it the ideological imperative that man must control nature— fight nature—destroy nature. That is the capitalist fantasy come to life in the traffic snarls of Los Angeles, the oil platforms of the Gulf of Mexico, and the radioactive waters around Fukushima Dai-ichi. Indeed, this is a modernist capitalist fantasy as we now ask ourselves if there is even a “nature” to control or even the possibility to show “nature” to our children. Another look at Google Trends may hint at the disappearance of nature through the unrelenting procession of images. For every instance of someone searching

90. Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City, directed by Penry-Davey and Chinn. 91. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 57. 92. Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City, directed by Penry-Davey and Chinn.

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for the term “Hurricane Katrina,” about 2.4 people searched for “Katrina” (1:2.38).93 More people searched not for the storm but for the event—the celebrity. This points towards the public’s identification of “Katrina” as a character in a larger narrative. This points to people being subconsciously mired in the simulacrum that was provided to them and from which they cannot escape. As seen in the 1999 film, The Matrix, the blue pill is easy to find, but is anyone offering up a red pill? Where is our Morpheus?94 Coming back to “Katrina” then, it is also impossible to ascribe to it a definitive meaning as it is an image, a simulacrum. It holds no truth—no reality. However, one can find within it an occult specter. Twentieth-century French philosophers, in spite of the different schools of thought to which they belonged or even their critiques of each other’s theories, have long held as part of their projects the exposing of the grand metanarratives that have been structuring how we think about society and how discourse has been used to manipulate the masses. Writing roughly fifteen years before Baudrillard’s Simulations, Guy Debord, in his classic text Society of the Spectacle, makes a prophetic observation about the image. He writes, “The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”95 Like Baudrillard, how can one not reverse that logic and see the image as accumulating capital? And, are not many of the most recent media images that have been fed to consumers the same images that keep consumers feeding capital? Do not Baudrillard’s and Debord’s critiques about the image arise fundamentally and inextricably from critiques of capitalism? In 2001, the narrative of September 11 was used to propel the United States into Afghanistan followed by the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2004, images of Hurricane Ivan and the South Asian tsunami paved the way for the images of Katrina. The global economic meltdown of 2008 paved the way for TARP as corporations deemed too large to fail were handed “bailouts,” which in turn went into the pockets of their executives.96 All of these images are images created by the media not to simply inform, although that is the superficial reason the public consumes these images. These images have deeper, occult purposes; these images must also increase market share, sell advertising, and foster the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. After all, the CEOs of the media conglomerates are primarily responsible to their shareholders, or perhaps

93. Google, “Hurricane Katrina vs. Katrina.” 94. The Matrix, directed by Lana Wachowski (formerly Laurence “Larry” Wachowski) and Lilly Wachowski (formerly Andrew Paul “Andy” Wachowski) (1999; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1999), DVD. 95. Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black & Red, 1983). 96. “Executive Compensation of Top Bailout Recipients,” Common Cause, accessed September 15, 2013, http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b =4923233#sthash.OOX4bAM2.dpuf.

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more accurately, the abstract image of the share’s price. These images also serve an ideological function to aide in the reproduction of the political and economic status quo. Ultimately, these images are not proffered up by the mainstream media with the intention of fomenting revolution. The images must serve to make money, to reproduce capital, and to maintain a society that creates capital from nothing. With the above examples, these images paved the way for transnational corporations and those associated with them to benefit and profit. Importantly, one must remember that these images, these narratives, are not real—they are media constructions. They are simulacra and cannot be thought of as real. Yet, we must remain cognizant that the prevailing narrative is not the only narrative that attempts to contextualize the events under discussion. Numerous narratives have been created to challenge the dominant discursive frame. Those narratives may come from apparent mainstream sources, such as Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts or Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters, or from the periphery such as A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge and the NOLAFugees collection Year Zero: A Year of Reporting from Post-Katrina New Orleans. The danger with alternative narratives is that they risk retelling mainstream narratives. For instance, Spike Lee dedicates a fair amount of screen time to the notion that the levees were purposively blown up in order to save the richer, whiter parts of the city.97 However, that narrative is simply one recycled from the collective unconscious of downriver residents. After all, it is true that in 1927, the levee below New Orleans was blown up in order to protect the city from the waters rising from that great flood. Other alternative narratives simply recreated the postcard visions of New Orleans fed to drunken tourists after vomiting their way down Bourbon Street. Josh Neufeld’s A.D., originally a multimedia comic published online by Smith Magazine, was collected into its present book form in 2009. Issued as a graphic novel, the story follows seven main characters, each experiencing Katrina in individual ways. Based on “real people,” Neufeld, in his Afterword, states, “The places and details are real too—down to the DVDs and comics on Leo’s shelves and the contents of Abbas’s store.”98 In his acknowledgments, Neufeld states, “Any errors or misrepresentations of their experience are entirely my fault.”99 However, without meaning to be too obvious, the entire premise is an error and a misrepresentation. Based upon blog posts, phone calls, post-Katrina meetings, and photos, Neufeld form is, by definition, an error—a misrepresentation. Neufeld unwitting falls into the trap created by the simulacra that Baudrillard

97. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, directed by Spike Lee (2006; New York: HBO Studios, 2006), DVD. 98. Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (New York: Pantheon Graphic Novels, 2010), 191. 99. Ibid., 195.

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warns us of. The panels and words in his graphic novel are based on images, and those images are based on other images. Neufeld wants to offer up the “truth,” but he has simply deluded himself and us into thinking the “truth” is even accessible. In contrast to A.D., the experiences of the NOLAFugees, a loose collective of writers based in New Orleans who approached the storm and the “recovery” through a highly critical and ironic lens, expose the precession of the simulacra. The NOLAFugees blog began in early November 2005, before most residents affected by the storm could begin the recovery process. Year Zero: A Year of Reporting from Post-Katrina New Orleans, a collection of pieces that originally appeared on the now defunct blog, challenges the dominant narrative because the editors intentionally disrupt the ability to create a stable narrative. Joe Longo, a senior editor for what was “New Orleans’s 3rd Most Popular Blog,” wondered what it took to report about the New Orleans of Katrina.100 He looked at some of the other reporting going on, mentioning and quoting the work of John Biguenet in The New York Times, Blake Bailey in Slate, and Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. Longo asks, “We of course concluded that without Lawyers, Guns, and Moet, what chance did we have to chronicle post-Katrina life? … How could we be expected to credibly assess our environment?” He then answers his questions: “At that point, we decided to make things up.”101 Without access to the power of the mainstream media, NOLAFugees did exactly what the mainstream media did—made things up! The inaccuracies of early reporting during Katrina may simply be reporting errors created during the fog of the disaster; however, by taking the satirical stance, “to make things up,” the NOLAFugees are free to construct a narrative subversive to the one created by the mainstream media. Instead of media experts working at think tanks supported by wealthy donors, NOLAFugees can have “Cookie Monster” reporting for them; a puppet is a puppet, after all. This is different from a fictional account; the fictional account—even as far-fetched as fantasy and science fiction can become—depends upon the illusion of a stable realty from which one is able to judge the fictional against. NOLAFugees admit to no stability—not only will the center not hold, but there is no center. The eye of the hurricane is just another empty hole covered by a story or image to place into the grand narrative. NOLAFugees ends up highlighting the news media as the third order of simulacra—“beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsity; a logic of the extermination of its own referent, a logic of the implosion of meaning in which the message disappears on the horizon of the medium.”102 When

100. NOLAFugees, Year Zero: A Year of Reporting from Post-Katrina New Orleans (New Orleans: Lavender Ink Press, 2007), xvi. 101. Ibid., xii. 102. Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images, 23.

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NOLAFugees senior editor Jarret Lofstead writes, “In the absence of truth, NOLAFugees will continue to blur the lines in hopes we all may see more clearly, because after the original, it’s probably this,”103 does he not echo Baudrillard’s words that “it is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”104 When there is no longer recourse to the “original,” what is left when the images are all lies? Unlike the dominant mainstream narrative that wants consumers to believe that there is some type of “truth” being described, NOLAFugees joyously leaps into the fourth order of the simulacra, exposing the vacuity of the images we are sold. Absent of an image depicting reality, we are left with the knowledge that Katrina never took place. Again, this is not to say that something did not happen in the world that set off a chain of events that is popularly called “Katrina,” because there are measurable effects occurring. However, do we now just simply read them as a diffusion of signs that point to the benefactors of that diffusion? Who benefits from such a diffusion of signs? Who benefits from the destruction of a city? The answer is almost too obvious. It is the system that created the diffusion of signs in the first place—it is global, neoliberal capitalism, a virulent form of capitalism that has created the conditions in which a “centripetal compulsion coexists with a decenteredness of all systems, an internal metastasis … which creates a tendency for systems to explode beyond their limits … in the sense of an increase in power, a fantastic potentialization whereby their own very existence is put at risk.”105 At this point, Naomi Klein’s thesis comes into relief whereby she exposes neoliberal capitalism as predatory after disasters, seeking only to expand the reach of capital, as indeed correct. Klein quotes Milton Friedman, University of Chicago professor and public intellectual who was one of the leading proponents and saviors of neoliberalism: “only a crisis—actual or perceived— produces real change.”106 That capitalism takes advantage of disasters and uses them to reproduce itself like zombies feasting on the brains of high school kids in the shopping mall seems clear. One simply needs to look at the list of corporations that have feasted on the dead bodies and grievous destruction created in the wake of Iraq or Katrina. In a working paper, Bruce Scott of the Harvard Business School defines capitalism as “an indirect system of governance based on a complex and continually evolving political bargain in which private actors are empowered by a political authority to own and

103. NOLAFugees, Year Zero, xvii. 104. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 25. 105. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (New York: Verso, 2009), 5. 106. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Picador, 2007), 7.

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control the use of property for private gain.”107 The goal of capitalism is to create profit for business owners—that is it. According to the Gospel of Adam (Smith, that is): “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.”108 All other sentiments are heresy to neoliberals feasting on the death and the continued destruction wrought by their economic theories and corresponding policies. However, can we not adjust Klein’s thesis and make it even more damning? Eventually, Klein does call for remodeling the system in This Changes Everything. She writes, “Only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. … To arrive at that dystopia, all we need to do is keep barreling down the road we are on.”109 However, one can now conclude that “natural disasters,” like wars, are not simply exploited by capitalism—they are in fact created by capitalism. These “natural disasters” are simulacra manufactured by capital for the proliferation of capital. The media conglomerates benefit from them in terms of advertising revenue generated by market share, and other corporations benefit from them as “exciting market opportunities, ‘disaster capitalism.’”110 Thus, if Americans are to be saved from the disasters created by capitalism, if they are to live in a world where “natural disasters” are not exploited as meaningless signifiers created to increase the power of that system, but rather prevented, they must live in a world that is free from an economic system that manufactures images to blind and bind the citizenry to the image. Not only must we destroy the neoliberal capitalist tendency to reproduce images of itself at the expense of those it exploits, but we must discover a path through what Baudrillard describes as the “most immoral and most perverse.”111

107. Bruce R. Scott, “The Political Economy of Capitalism,” Harvard Business Working Paper, 2006, http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/download.aspx?name=07-037. pdf. 108. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776, reprint of 1904 edition (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1977), 478. 109. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Simon & Schuster: New York City, 2014), 450. 110. Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 6. 111. Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images, 13.

6 S A N DY: SU B J E C T I V I T Y, C E L E B R I T Y, A N D S O C IA L M E D IA

From 1999 to 2004, if you lived in New Orleans, you pleasantly rode out a few storms: Allison, Barry, Bertha, Fay, Hannah, Isadore, and Lili. Nothing even approaching catastrophic. You did what the locals did: went out for a nice meal, got some drinks, and watched the show from a window with friends. After the storm passed, you might walk the streets to see if a tree fell, what trash blew around the streets, and which bar opened its doors first. However, in August of 2005, if you lived away from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, then you might have been glued to the TV. The Weather Channel in particular. Sure, you had visited New Orleans perhaps, walked Bourbon Street with beads draped around your neck, had friends who lived in the city, or became aware of the landscape’s bowl shape and fragile levee system. Maybe you canoed in the bayous, camped on the beaches of Grand Isle, or lost money in the casinos of Gulfport. And therefore, you were an invested viewer. You did not want to miss anything. Because in 2005, you could actually miss something—the computer-generated storm-tracker models, wind speeds, and states of emergency that would be updated. The energetic Weather Channel meteorological personality Jim Cantore interpreting the data that Hurricane Katrina hid behind and offering “what if ” scenarios for Katrina’s wrath. For the nation in 2005, this was can’t miss TV. Perhaps, predigital natives can remember those days when primary, real-time sources of information were limited by coaxial and fiber-optic cable, and a time when mobile devices and wireless Internet were not advanced enough to bring us live video. Hour by hour, one wondered, what is she going to do next? Ever the diva, Katrina did not disappoint. Nevertheless, an interesting shift occurred as Katrina passed through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Once the weather was not an issue any longer, the rumors about Katrina took over. Initial reports indicated that although New Orleans took a direct hit from Katrina, the city itself managed to withstand the storm surge, wind, and rain. You might have gone about your day with a feeling of relief. As the morning of August 29 unfolded, computer models, infrared satellite loops, and wind speeds had been supplanted—by the paparazzi. If you were old enough, you thought of OJ’s white Bronco barreling

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through the highways of Southern California. Over New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, news helicopters began to train their gazes upon areas of New Orleans that contradicted early morning reports, and you saw Mississippi casinos— those flamboyant excesses of American capitalism—washed hundreds of feet from the beaches of Gulfport. CNN took over where the Weather Channel had yet been equipped to follow. Reality TV started getting real. Like a celebutante, Katrina jilted New Orleans into a wreck. For the next week, each day’s episode of The Katrina Show revealed similarities to several popular reality TV shows during the time period: Cops, in relation to looting and crimes, both alleged and actual; Survivor, in relation to, well, surviving; The Apprentice, in parallel to FEMA head, Michael Brown, and George Bush, or Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin; The Scariest Places on Earth needs no explanation; The Amazing Race, where celebrities, such as Sean Penn, and corporations, such as Walmart, racing to provide relief and support; Starting Over, which again does not require much imagination. And this episodic structure, familiarity, and media saturation is why Katrina broke new TV ground. One could watch a live rescue on a rooftop. One could watch actual people suffering from heat exhaustion and dehydration. One could see prisoners handcuffed on a bridge, and “looters” apprehended. Depending on your perspective, you could see people finding supplies or looting grocery stores. Or Sean Penn, handsome and hardworking, assisting in search and rescue missions. Other than Sean Penn, this reality TV was played out initially by real people in unscripted circumstances. But, as the saying goes, “You can’t make this shit up.” This was real-world New Orleans, not the 2000 MTV reality show Real World: New Orleans. And unlike the MTV show, Katrina did not start out with a contrived premise, but as the voice-over claims during the opening credits of the MTV show, “This is what happens when people stop being polite and start being real.”1 And as The Katrina Show continued, disaster became a premise. Post-Katrina, all named storms have a premise, which is its comparison to Katrina: the hurricane, the coverage, the rescue, and the attempted reconstruction. Cable news networks’ live broadcasts of all phases of a disaster are another factor that establishes Katrina as a pioneer. Three years later, New Orleans and the nation watched as Tropical Depression Seven formed in the Atlantic Ocean. A few days later, one feared Hurricane Gustav would threaten New Orleans and the Gulf Coast again. Some areas enjoyed a fuller recovery, but still others, such as New Orleans’s working-class neighborhoods, the 9th Ward, Gentilly, and Lakefront, struggled for funding, permits, and safety to rebuild considerable swaths of housing and commerce. For obvious reasons, one watched the weather as if it were the pregame buildup

1. The Real World: New Orleans, created by Jonathan Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, MTV Network, 2000.

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to a Superbowl rematch. After all, the “Katrinaversery,” as locals termed it, had just passed a few days prior. Gustav upgraded to Cat 4 upon entering the Gulf of Mexico. Then, Mayor Nagin gave a live press conference on August 30, calling Gustav “the mother of all storms,” and he claimed that Gustav “is worse than a Betsy, worse than a Katrina.” After Katrina, Nagin proved to be a person never to shy away from straight talk: “You need to be scared, and you need to get your butts out of New Orleans right now.”2 With exclamations like these occurring live, one could not help but tune into Gustav’s hyped-up reputation. Three years after Katrina, and the question loomed in everyone’s mind: Would the reconstructed levees hold? As the storm surge built and the winds increased, you could not help watching live video coverage. In fact, the Associated Press had a remote camera positioned to capture water lapping and splashing over the levee walls of the 9th Ward.3 The feed was used by CNN, Fox News, and the Weather Channel. One had to be viewing this video and thinking, “There’s no way those little concrete walls are going to hold this time.” Talk about unscripted TV with a guiding premise. Finally—must-see TV! However, the walls did hold, thankfully. New Orleans did not experience Katrina-level flooding, but other areas surrounding the city fared much worse. Because the media had directed resources toward New Orleans in case another tragedy occurred, coverage of Baton Rouge and southern Louisiana increased, and it captured the nation’s attention until on November 4, when residents were granted permission to return to the city. End of the Gustav story. Katrina made for good TV and, in turn, created a premise for future hurricanes such as Gustav. Hurricanes are great for reality TV because they have names, they are unscripted, they have story arcs, and they affect famous people and regular people. But on the other hand, hurricanes cannot be counted on to show up for work and bring their star power. In May of each year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center (CPC) issues their Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook, which is then updated in August. The nugget of these reports is the percentage chance of a certain number of named storms. In effect, this also became the reality TV season forecast for the Weather Channel. However, after Katrina, cable networks had economic interests in covering disaster events, which, in reality TV terms, have low production costs and high ratings. The setting is free, the characters and anchors are already on retainer, and narrative structure writes itself, but names are still important for the brand

2. Leslie Williams, “Nagin Orders Evacuation in Face of ‘Mother of all storms,’” The Times-Picayune, last modified August 30, 2008, accessed July 25, 2016, http://www.nola. com/hurricane/index.ssf/2008/08/new_orleans_evacuation_ordered.html. 3. For archived and condensed version of the Associated Press raw video, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEhW3-TuRpk.

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recognition. Eventually, New York City, one of America’s media centers, stood poised to capture a branded disaster in progress without the need to mobilize resources more than a few blocks. Behind Katrina, Superstorm Sandy ranks as the second costliest storm for the United States. The storm affected millions of people in the population-dense Northeast, and the dollar amount escalated quickly. Not only does the cost of damage rise, but the money to be made from covering disasters increases. Trends in narrative rights for disasters are behind the curve of other digital and print rights, such as intellectual property, but with commercial interests and advertising dollars at stake, networks, such as the Weather Channel, must build a following early in an evolving disaster narrative. The right to name disaster events with high commercial interests becomes like copyrighting the name of a reality show. Institutions, such as the National Hurricane Center and the Weather Channel, hold the authority to name weather events. In the fall 2012, a press release was issued: “The Weather Channel will name noteworthy winter storms. Our goal is to better communicate the threat and the timing of the significant impacts that accompany these events. The fact is, a storm with a name is easier to follow, which will mean fewer surprises and more preparation.”4 Meteorologists are in an Onion5-worthy uproar. According to L.A. Times contributor Alana Samuels: “A named storm should be a hurricane, and only a hurricane,” George Wright, a meteorologist and the founder of Wright Weather Consulting in New York, said in an interview with The Times. “A hurricane is something that’s more unusual and devastating. If you start naming other storms, people will suddenly think this might be a hurricane.”6 With the onslaught of television news attention and social media focus on these named storms and related weather events, one might need to go off grid to avoid knowing about any approaching disaster event, much less confusing a named winter storm for a late-summer hurricane. However, it does address the question regarding the authority of naming a disaster event—even an event like the Dust Bowl that has arguably concluded. Who has the right? “Noteworthy” winter storms have a historical significance that involves names and monikers. New England and the Northeast experienced the Blizzard

4. Tom Niziol, “Why the Weather Channel Is Naming Winter Storms,” Weather.com, last modified November 11, 2012, accessed October 2, 2015, https://weather.com/news/ why-we-name-winter-storms–20121001. 5. The Onion is a satirical and parodic tabloid that often comments on current events or people in the news: www.theonion.com. 6. Alana Samuels, “Naming a Winter Storm? Meteorologists Are Appalled by Nemo,” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 2013, accessed March 20, 2013, http://articles.latimes. com/2013/feb/08/nation/la-na-nemo-winter-storm-20130208.

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of 1978, the Perfect Storm of 1991,7 the 1993 Storm of the Century, the April Fool’s Day Blizzard in 1997, and the 2011 Halloween Nor’easter. These names came about via a disaster’s connection to a year, a storm’s unique quality or rarity, and its occurrence on or close to a specifically recognizable calendar date. Merely, those who agree with the Weather Channel might argue, the network is attempting to standardize the nomenclature and secure a profit stream from specific winter storm names. Capitalism at work. But for some meteorologists and weather aficionados, the Weather Channel has crossed a line separating science and profit.8 On the other hand, weather luddites should not be surprised by the instantaneous media saturation when a natural disaster is merely a twinkle in the eye of the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans. Ask TMZ.com, they know how to capitalize on gossip that has yet to actually occur, for being the first for a breaking event that never happens is often better than no event happening. The event needs to be constructed before the event happens, much like the earlier discussion of Baudrillard, so that the event can happen. But will these labeling races fizzle out like reality TV show pilots that do not get picked up by a network? In the competitive world of disaster discourse and commerce, the Weather Channel and other media outlets should act like talent scouts, take the risk, and name every potential weather event, much like the recent profusion of reality TV programs ranging from talent searches to redneck exterminators, hoping one yields rating pay dirt. The next big Dust Bowl, superstorm, or flood could be debuting with the next television season, and with television seasons no longer corresponding to calendar seasons due to online streaming and successful cable network series, disasters are always in season because fear sells. Nevertheless, the Dust Bowl’s brief return to the spotlight is limited by its lack of mediums, but since Katrina, digitized media grants a plethora of narrative options. Hypothetically or not, we can imagine a season of MTV’s Real World: Oklahoma Panhandle. We see a duster roll in from the west as youthful tanned bodies are jumping up from their Ikea-sponsored outdoor patio and half-empty in-ground pool. They run for cover and scramble into a farmhouse that had been through the actual Dust Bowl, but it is remodeled with more Ikea furniture and retrofitted with DirectTV, webcams, and Westinghouse appliances. The voice-over begins: “This is what happens when people stop being polite and start being real during a drought.” MTV may not be interested in this type of Real World, but the network did find a return to New Orleans five years after Katrina in 2010 intriguing enough. During its premiere episode, Dave Walker of the Times-Picayune reported on a press

7. A Perfect Storm is also a nonfiction book written by Sebastian Junger and published in 1997. Subsequently, a film of the same name starred George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg and was released in 2000. 8. See chapter 1 and the discussion of the Dust Bowl’s authorship by Ken Burns.

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release from creator and executive producer Jon Murray: “Hurricane Katrina threw New Orleans for a punch, but the city is coming back and we’re hoping our cast members and the series can play a small role in the city’s rebirth.”9 Walker also notes that the filming of the episodes had concluded: “Interviews with the cast members before they left the Duffosat Street mansion where the season shot earlier this year indicated that some good works got done during the season. Some of the participants hammered with Habitat for Humanity. Others said they volunteered at WWOZ radio and a homeless shelter.” The season hardly proved to be a deviation from the typical plotlines focused on upper-middle-class versions of sex, addiction, and adolescent moral issues among the cast members. In a hypothetical situation on the level of Real World: Oklahoma Panhandle, a 2015 Washington Post piece by Jason Samenow claims that social media would have saved lives “maybe in significant numbers” during Katrina.10 Why? Access to information about the severity of the storm, according to Samenow, and motivation for “a more urgent evacuation effort [and] the importance of preparedness would have permeated much of society.” At first blush, this seems logical, especially if social media is a big part of one’s social world, such as those individuals in the eighteen- to thirty-year-old range. But Samenow undercuts his own argument when he writes, in one of the more accurate propositions of his article, “It is true that these [hurricane warnings] wouldn’t have made it to everyone, including some of the elderly, the poor (without access to information technology), the sick and the socially isolated. Reaching these vulnerable populations is the most difficult challenge in any preparedness and response effort. But social media certainly wouldn’t have hurt.” Samenow’s last sentence contradicts “saving lives in significant numbers.” Not hurting and helping are not synonymous outcomes. Notwithstanding, Samenow’s argument relies upon having a few assumptions in place, and these assumptions have been largely debunked by independent sources, not flimsy anecdotal evidence. First, why would one assume residents did not get information they needed as Katrina crossed Florida and intensified in the Gulf of Mexico? A time warp back to 2005 New Orleans is necessary to illustrate that residents did in fact get the message from Mayor Nagin, Governor Blanco, and President Bush to evacuate

9. Dave Walker, “MTV’s ‘The Real World’ Returns to New Orleans for Season 24,” The Times-Picayune, last modified June 30, 2010, accessed June 4, 2015, http://www. nola.com/real-world-new-orleans/index.ssf/2010/06/mtv_blew_an_altruistic_fanfare_ when_the_return_of_the_real_world_to_new_orleans_was_announced_in_jan.html. 10. Jason Samenow, “Why Social Media Would’ve Saved Lives During Hurricane Katrina,” The Washington Post, last modified August 28, 2015, accessed November 6, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/08/28/ why-social-media-wouldve-saved-lives-during-hurricane-katrina/.

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because of the predicted damage. Let us not forget that in 2005, one could still watch TV without a cable subscription. If we add the hypothetical social media revolution to New Orleans in 2005, then we need to add a few ancillary and hypothetical elements: all residents have a dependable vehicle, all residents have literal rainy-day funds, mobile communication infrastructure exists, New Orleans has a dependable transportation system, which includes public rail travel outside of the city, and a third of the population is not below the poverty line. And, all those people— Samenow’s “the elderly, the poor (without access to information technology), the sick and the socially isolated”—have the means and personal motivation to get an updated smartphone capable of downloading the appropriate apps. After adding all these supplementary conditions, then perhaps one could agree that social media would have saved lives. However, instead of building a hypothetical narrative of infrastructure and a revised socioeconomic stratification, what if these ancillary elements had been in place without social media? More than likely, social media would not have been necessary. Samenow’s argument reveals, in yet another mediated disaster opinion piece, that the US population prefers to ignore the root economic issues behind tragic disaster events. Also, the Washington Post article epitomizes the inflated usefulness of social media in one’s life (as opposed to importance in one’s life) over other forms of media now and especially in 2005. Samenow also claims, Sandy offers a great case example of the kind of influence social media might have had during Katrina. VatorNews published an analysis which showed Sandy dominated the social media conversation in the days before, during and after the storm: According to analytics firm Topsy, over 3.2 million Tweets with the hashtag #sandy were sent in 24 hours. [During the week of Sandy], 11 million Tweets were sent. On photo-sharing website Instagram, people posted 10 pictures of the hurricane every single second during the height of the storm. On Facebook, all of the top ten search terms were about Sandy during the height of the storm, and in the aftermath. While it was going on, some of the top terms included “stay safe/be safe,” “prayers/praying,” and “my friends.” After the storm, terms like “we are ok,” “hope everyone is ok,” and “made it” took the top spots.11

This is Samenow’s supporting point: an analogy of Sandy backtracked to Katrina. Because Sandy “dominated” social media does not equate to social media saving lives, and if one reads these five points with rigor, then one finds

11. Ibid.

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that the life-saving language is not present. Perhaps, we could make the logical leap that a Tweet or Facebook post convinced some undecided residents to finally pack up the SUV and head upstate. Samenow’s five points do not offer a case example of social media’s influence on Sandy, but, instead, the five points offer a case example of Sandy’s influence on social media—as it should! Sandy was a disaster event that affected millions of residents. The social media responses following Samenow’s article on the Washington Post website illustrates its vacuous logic. One post recognizes the impact Katrina had on future disasters, where residents across the nation after Katrina realize the severity of larger hurricanes: This is an interesting perspective, but I think some of the social media response during Sandy was a result of the lack of much concern during Katrina and people discovering after the fact the devastation endured. To deal with Sandy, everyone had the knowledge of what happened with Katrina and had adjusted responses to natural disasters accordingly.12 A post by eyeofthebeholder questions whether or not the Tri-State area had been properly prepared despite an overwhelming presence of social media and whether or not the hype of social media can be sifted through to distinguish legitimate sources from suspicious and invalid sources: I’m struck that in both cases—Katrina and Sandy—flooding caused the greatest damage and its extent was unanticipated. No one expected lower Manhattan to be blacked out, or for hospital generators to be knocked out by flooding so that patients had to be evacuated down stairwells. Were people really adequately prepared and out of harm’s way, even in New York and New Jersey, which are so much wealthier and better organized than Louisiana. There is a need for something beyond the flurry of social media to focus preparedness. I feel that current social media is like day dreaming. There are swells and cross currents of hype, and valid information gets lost in a sea of selfies, gifs, slogans, hoaxes, political posturing, etc. Some savvy or focused individuals will find reliable sources like CWG, but the majority may be following a teenager who doesn’t understand what he’s posting on Facebook, and 99,999 out of 10,000 think weather.com is the same as the National Weather Service. We still have a long way to go.13

12. RSW_72, “All Comments” to “Why Social Media Would’ve Saved Lives During Hurricane Katrina,” The Washington Post, last modified August 29, 2015, accessed August 10, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/ wp/2015/08/28/why-social-media-wouldve-saved-lives-during-hurricane-katrina/. 13. eyeofthebeholder, “All Comments” to “Why Social Media Would’ve Saved Lives During Hurricane Katrina,” The Washington Post, last modified August 28, 2015, accessed August 9, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/ wp/2015/08/28/why-social-media-wouldve-saved-lives-during-hurricane-katrina/.

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Nicholas Fenner’s post bears experience with Katrina and social media: While this is all a fascinating thought experiment, I have to disagree with you on all counts. Nearly everyone who died during Hurricane Katrina did so because they believed they could not evacuate from New Orleans. What the vast majority of people don’t realize, is that evacuation is incredibly expensive and can be asked for many times in one season. The people who died in Katrina would never have made a different decision based on what they saw on Facebook or Twitter. As someone who lived in New Orleans at time, I can promise everyone in New Orleans was talking about Katrina once it was a Category 4. Even those stubborn people who never left for hurricanes chose to evacuate for Katrina. Lastly, you say that the “social media hype” would have stirred people to action. Social media hype is exactly why people tune out important weather information. They get so desensitized by the inflated predictions of death and destruction that they start to ignore the real threats. So while social media would spread messages faster in today’s world, the message has never been the problem with getting people to evacuate.14

The fact remains that the majority of people who remained in New Orleans for Katrina did not have the ability to evacuate, and yes, the technological landscape of 2005 in New Orleans appears primitive to us. In a Pew Research study, only 50 percent of all Internet users went online for news about hurricanes Katrina or Rita, which made landfall in Texas less than a month after Katrina.15 Of this group, 75 percent went to traditional websites that corresponded to major television outlets for information. In other words, they got the same information they would get on television.16 Also in 2006, nationwide, only 16 percent of the Internet users were also on social media, but in 2012 when Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast, 65 percent of Internet users were also social media users.17 Therefore, the people who could not evacuate for Katrina and Rita would still have been unable

14. Nicholas Fenner, “All Comments” to “Why Social Media Would’ve Saved Lives During Hurricane Katrina,” The Washington Post, last modified September 2, 2015, accessed September 29, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weathergang/wp/2015/08/28/why-social-media-wouldve-saved-lives-during-hurricanekatrina/. 15. Stephen Morris and John B. Horrigan, “13 million Americans Made Donations Online after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita,” last modified November 24, 2005, accessed January 10, 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/2005/11/24/13-million-americansmade-donations-online-after-hurricanes-katrina-and-rita/. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid.

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to evacuate if social media’s pervasiveness existing in 2005. However, social media might have been useful for those evacuating to find routes, gas, and road services while they drove. On the other hand, social media could have been useful for the recovery efforts in the year following Katrina without a doubt—after electricity and communications infrastructure had been reestablished. Post-storm value of social media would be significant in the crucial first year for many of the obstacles residents faced: corrupt contractors and toxic sheet rock; price gouging on housing, equipment, food, and basic building materials; relief supplies and paperwork; demolition and blighted housing, safe roads and routes of travel; hiring labor and finding jobs; open gas stations, restaurants, and groceries; areas of the city that have/do not have public utilities. And as we now know from Sandy, social media does have a negative side. Due to false social media reports during Sandy, FEMA initiated a rumor control webpage to combat misinformation broadcasted in social media. FEMA also tweeted out corrections for information about access to bottled water, food, and transport that had been reported as exhausted. This is the type of back-and-forth drama we see among celebrities, professional athletes, and their audiences. Now with the naming of winter storms, #-ing and @-ing proves effortless and elicits a uniqueness or personality to natural disasters. But is this uniqueness becoming the status quo? Are we experiencing disaster fatigue such as we have with reality TV shows about the Kardashians and spinoffs? In other words, the new normal is a natural disaster becoming a pop star. Social media and disaster narratives will need to deal with the drama. And that drama just might be your life and your Facebook profile. In a December 2016 Wired article “Could Facebook Save Your Life?” Cade Metz updates readers on the role Facebook hopes to secure when natural disasters and public emergencies occur. Facebook has unrolled Safety Check, which is a portal to serve as a place where Facebook users can check on their Facebook friends’ safety and post their own status during a public emergency. Facebook users can post they are safe or not in the area. Safety Check is also a “personalized breaking-news service—one whose flow of information [is] narrowly focused” and will be combined in the future into “a live, centralized repository for information and media about any given disaster, where people can not only check on the safety of individuals but also coordinate ways of responding in the physical world, follow news and chatter, and perhaps monitor all the live video pouring in from the scene.”18 For better or worse, Safety Check had not been unrolled yet during Sandy, but what happens if “there’s no information coming out of a disaster zone—because the internet has gone down, as happened in large parts of New York and New Jersey

18. Cade Metz, “Could Facebook Save Your Life?” Wired, December 2016, 109.

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when [Sandy] landed in 2012”?19 Before reviewing Facebook’s response to this question, one must look at the statistics of Facebook. According to Metz, “about 23% of the global population is on Facebook.”20 So, the solution Facebook is working on now is bringing Internet access via solar-powered drone to areas where a disaster has halted Internet access. The logic behind this is reasonable and profitable from Facebook’s point of view: “speed up [its] efforts to expand globally and serve ads to even more people.”21 As an incidental benefit, Facebook “is becoming one of the world’s most important emergency response institutions.”22 Therefore, to gain access to this “emergency response institution,” one must be a Facebook subscriber; the more tied the public is to a private service, the less free the public is for their safety. Facebook is funneling in dominant public and private emergency agencies and other social media platforms, and to those individuals who know no other world than the social media world, this all might seem natural. This is where Samenow and Metz parallel each other in their assumptions about their audiences, which is understandable considering their employers. But they also parallel each other in their assumptions about victims of disaster—that victims are plugged into social media. A glaring unsubstantiated proposition from Metz illustrates this point after discussing the coordination efforts of the Red Cross, for “at the same time, when disaster victims can grab just a few minutes on the Internet, they often spend them on Facebook.”23 To facilitate this, we can picture disaster victims waiting for the Facebook drone, provided the sun is shining to charge the solar panels, so they can update their Safety Check status, which might need a new status button beyond the existing two options. To take Samenow’s situation where social media existed during Katrina and Safety Check deployed, the status buttons might be “Dehydrated,” “Starving,” “Swimming for my life,” “Trapped on a roof,” or simply “Fucked.” In the aftermath, “Looting” or “Finding groceries.” The recognizable downside of all this progressive social media that Metz and Samenow illustrate is multifold. Disaster responders are concerned about the control a single company would have on the ground during a disaster. Facebook has graciously planned to “open source its antenna and drone designs” with the purpose that “hundreds or even thousands of these drones will be in the sky at any given time, forming a high-altitude web of Internet transmission.”24 Safety Check paired with other Facebook applications, such as Facebook Live, opens up ethical questions. Should disasters with graphic

19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 111. 24. Ibid., 113.

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violence be fed live online? What if minors are involved? Also, how is a disaster defined at stake, and Facebook has the ability to shift this definition and be in control of a disaster’s narrative—a disaster’s career? Therefore, traditional non-“crowdsourced” news content will be devalued. Finally, as Metz’s article mentions, misinformation can lead to undesirable undertones to a disaster event. After a shooting in fall of 2016, protests in Charlotte, North Carolina, broke out. These were “predominantly by African Americans, were fairly localized, and the violence was even more so, but the live video showing the streamed out the scene gave a different impression.”25 Facebook’s Safety Check kicked on for the event—the protests not the shooting—and “white people from the suburbs began checking themselves in as safe.”26 So again, the question of what to do if the Internet goes down can be answered in a far-simpler and reliable manner in a natural disaster: be prepared. Have a hand-cranked or battery-operated radio in your residence.27 We think that charging our phones in an airport is a challenge. What about a disaster? Are the Facebook drones going to drop down portable chargers and cords instead of water and relief supplies? After all, during Katrina, we saw all the people on rooftops, and the last thing they needed was Internet access. Facebook’s goal is to up its global usage number of 23 percent, and leveraging natural disasters and public emergencies will be one step in that process. Facebook’s focus is making disaster information easier for its users. The public’s goal should be to reach people who are not in the virtual world of social media and provide disaster assistance to them. The issue during Katrina was not a lack of information or information technology; the issue was the high percent of citizens near or below the poverty level, poor public transportation, and underconstructed earthen levees. Social media solves none of these. Even in Sandy, more than half of the drowning victims were over sixty-five, and the number climbs higher for those over fifty.28 This is not the social media demographic. However, if Facebook continues its demand for more subscribers, the leveraging of mass shootings, emergencies, and natural disasters will serve itself well. Disasters will eventually need new titles, hashtags, twitter accounts, Instagram handles, and Facebook pages to address their perceived uniqueness and rarity among the endless effusion of catastrophes; after all, 100-year storm has already happened with Katrina and Sandy. Should we start expecting the 500- or 1,000-year event? This level of event has occurred already at least four times in 2016: Houston in April, West 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. For a simple list of items recommended by ready.gov, see https://www.ready. gov/kit. 28. Josh Keller, “Mapping Hurricane Sandy’s Deadly Toll,” The New York Times, November 17, 2012, accessed January 7, 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2012/11/17/nyregion/hurricane-sandy-map.html?hp&_r=0.

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Virginia in June, Maryland in July, and Louisiana in August. Therein lies the ultimate reality TV premise: the natural disaster. We have narrative prototypes. We know how to write it up. Computer prediction models serve as talent scouts. Doomsday Preppers is already a prequel for these events. Social media’s digital content supplements these events and adds drama.29 Thus far, however, disasters have not kept up with the Kardashians in pop culture. But, perhaps, one of these disasters will be overwhelming enough to break the Internet. Perhaps Sandy’s unborn sister can keep up with the Kardashians? In late October 2012, the Mid-Atlantic and East Coast of the United States watched intently and anticipated which tracking model would prove correct as Sandy meandered up out of the Caribbean. Scientist Adam Sobel writes: Over the Bahamas, Sandy had crossed paths with another weather disturbance, a low-pressure system in the upper atmosphere. It took on some of the system’s properties, including its great size. As it made landfall, it merged with yet another system, an extratropical, or “winter,” storm that had come from the North American continent at the leading edge of a blast of autumn cold air. This merger gave Sandy a new jolt of energy, increased its size further, and completed its transition from a tropical cyclone to a mammoth hybrid. When reporters saw this coming in the weather forecasts, they dubbed it, glibly at first, Frankenstorm. But as its gravity soon defied humor, it was renamed Superstorm Sandy.30

Sandy’s evolution as a weather system was paralleled with its evolution as a weather celebrity. Contemporary disaster events, consequently, are authoritative media events, much like reality TV shows. Disasters become celebritized. Sandy tracked out of the Caribbean and danced her way northward in the Atlantic Ocean. Media attention began accumulating as Sandy spun up the Mid-Atlantic until her debut, like a hot-mess reality TV star. What will she do next? Sandy made landfall on the coast of New Jersey, but her meteorological status was downgraded. She was not a hurricane. Nevertheless, she reached “super”star status, and needed to stay as must-see TV, which maintained Sandy’s commercial appeal. In a year-end NPR segment, “Let’s Double Down on a Superstorm of Malarkey: Picking 2012’s Word of the Year,” about the language of 2012, the subject of Sandy’s unofficial naming is discussed: Some words captured public attention for sadder reasons, like superstorm, coined to describe Hurricane Sandy. “Someone from the National Weather 29. Doomsday Preppers, created by Alan Madison, Kathleen Cromley, and Matt Sharp (2012: United States; National Geographic Channel). 30. Adam Sobel, Storm Surge: Hurricane Sandy, Our Changing Climate, and Extreme Weather of the Past and Future (New York: Harper Wave, 2014), XVI.

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Service actually suggested frankenstorm, because it was a hybrid of different weather systems, like Frankenstein’s monster, and it was also going to hit around Halloween,” Zimmer says. But many news organizations considered Frankenstorm too lighthearted in the wake of the disaster, so the consensus settled on superstorm.31

The ability of information to spread simultaneously through a nation and globally via twenty-four-hour news, weather, and social media for disaster events, such as Katrina and Sandy, seems to present a stark difference between twenty-first-century disasters and a static retrospective of a disaster like the Dust Bowl. But are these new narrative tools merely describing a disaster event? Or, do they actually create vastly different disaster events? With reality TV, form is content. In other words, all that a disaster event can be depends upon the narrative form to endow meaning to its audience. In fact, before the waters had receded completely from areas of New York and New Jersey, social media looked toward Hollywood. Quora.com, a social media website that follows a question and answer format, published a twopart question: “How long before Hollywood makes a Hurricane Sandy movie/ TV show? What will be the storyline, and who will be the bad guy?”32 Much like Wikipedia, Quora.com attempts to offer user-provided content that will “share and grow the world’s knowledge” and “empower everyone to share their knowledge for the benefit of the rest of the world.”33 On the Quora.com “About” page, its unique ethos centers upon the social media community’s ability to “Gather Around a Question.” Furthermore The heart of Quora is questions — questions that affect the world, questions that explain recent world events, questions that guide important life decisions, and questions that provide insights into why other people think differently. Quora is a place where you can ask questions you care about and get answers that are amazing. Quora has only one version of each question. It doesn’t have a left wing version, a right wing version, a western version, and an eastern version. Quora brings together people from different worlds to answer the same question, in the same place — and to learn from each other. We want Quora

31. “Let’s Double Down on a Superstorm of Malarkey: Picking 2012’s Word of the Year,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, December 28, 2012, accessed September 16, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2012/12/28/167719016/lets-double-down-ona-superstorm-of-malarkey-picking-2012s-word-of-the-year. 32. Neal Edelstein, “How Long Before Hollywood Makes a Hurricane Sandy Movie/ TV Show? What Will Be the Storyline, and Who Will Be the Bad Guy?” Quora, accessed August 18, 2016, https://www.quora.com/How-long-before-Hollywood-makes-aHurricane-Sandy-movie-TV-show. 33. “About,” Quora, accessed August 18, 2016, https://www.quora.com/about.

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to be the place to voice your opinion because Quora is where the debate is happening. We want the Quora answer to be the definitive answer for everybody forever.34

However, unlike Wikipedia’s dynamic, anonymous, and evolutionary approach to topics that are “continually created and updated,”35 Quora seeks authority, where a “definitive answer for everybody forever” arrives “from people who really understand the issues and have first-hand knowledge.”36 As opposed to Wikipedia’s collaborative approach, Quora’s responses to questions are ranked and organized, and how this is done is provided, of course, in the form of a question and answer. Quora posts from its official company account in June 2015: Quora ranks answers on a page according to how helpful they are. The goal of ranking is to put the most comprehensive, trustworthy answers at the top of the page, so that they are easily accessible for people who have a question. Quora uses a wide variety of factors to decide which answers should be ranked highly, and we update this system regularly. The exact reason a particular answer is ranked higher or lower will depend on many things, but may include: • upvotes and downvotes on the answer, in part based on how trustworthy voters are in a given topic • the previous answers written by the author • whether the author is an expert in the subject • the contents of the answer, including the type and quality of content (words, photos, links) • other signals, including ones that help us prevent gaming of ranking through votes Answers that rank highly will usually be consistent with our guidelines about what a good, helpful answer looks like. If you’re a reader, votes are the primary way you can indicate which answers are good and which ones need improvement. The ranking within a page is designed to evolve based on votes that appear over time.37, 38

34. Ibid. 35. “About,” Wikipedia, last modified July 18, 2016, accessed July 24, 2016, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About. 36. “About,” Quora. 37. All Quora answers are reproduced in the format of the original postings to the website, including any misspellings, bolded words, parentheses, and so on. 38. “How does the ranking of answers on Quora work?” Quora, last modified June 3, 2015, accessed June 23, 2015, https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-ranking-ofanswers-on-Quora-work.

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The subjective nature of the answers can be seen clearly, and the weight of each factor is not apparent. However, the ranking rubric above does seem to contradict Quora wanting to be “where debate is happening.”39 So, what do the Quora authors and the application of the ranking rubric finalize about this question: “How long before Hollywood makes a Hurricane Sandy movie/TV show? What will be the storyline, and who will be the bad guy?” Four answers are published between November 4 and 7. Chronologically, the first answer by Mircea Goia is the shortest: “I think they already did: The Day After Tomorrow (where they sink New York in water and in a deep freeze). What an anticipation!”40, 41 We can assume that Goia’s “anticipation” is concerned with a potential cinematic adaptation of the real Sandy event and not a real total sinking of New York. Goia’s answer is also ranked last out of the four answers. The highest ranking answer is provided by Ken Miyamoto, “Produced Screenwriter, Former Sony Pictures Script Reader/Story Analyst,” and he approached the question quite seriously. His response: Many factors are going to play into this answer. The first of which is on the film industry end. It takes a couple years to really get a project developed and released, so at the very least you’re looking at a couple years, possibly a little less if it is a miniseries or MOW (Movie of the Week) that is rushed into production by a network. Since power is still out and citizens are still finding their way out of the waters, it’s likely too early to green light a project, again with the exception of a network miniseries or MOW which always try to jump on a trending story as quickly as possible. What would the story be? Clearly the main villain is Superstorm Sandy. That goes without saying. When you’re looking at a film like this, or especially a miniseries or MOW, it’s easy to see that it would fit under the Disaster Flick paradigm. That basically dictates that you use the disaster as the core element of story and then showcase multiple character storylines as different characters deal with the disaster. So you could focus on Emergency Responders (Cop, Fireman, EMS, etc.), focus on some citizens trapped somewhere, focus on an Everyman that becomes a hero, focus on the New York mayor by showcasing the 39. “About,” Quora. 40. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) is a feature film directed by Roland Emmerich and stars Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Emmy Rossum. 41. Mircea Goia, “How Long before Hollywood Makes a Hurricane Sandy Movie/TV Show? What Will Be the Storyline, and Who Will Be the Bad Guy?” Quora, last modified November 4, 2012, accessed June 23, 2015, https://www.quora.com/How-long-beforeHollywood-makes-a-Hurricane-Sandy-movie-TV-show.

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politics of the disaster response, etc. And knowing the Disaster Flick conventions, you’d likely have a child in danger somewhere in the mix, as well as at least one shot of a dog struggling through the waters as someone saves it. LOL You could also simply use the disaster as a springboard for a story. Maybe there’s a bank robbery during the storm and the bank robber is forced to abandon his take in order to save those around him? Maybe someone is being chased by a villain for whatever reason and the storm only enhances that chase? Or you could go to the drama angle and showcase a character’s story being changed due to the effects of the storm? A family brought together or something like that. Or you could combine genres and make it a Disaster Flick and Love Story (Look no further than Titanic for an example). So there’s clearly plenty of angles to take. Considering that fact that we haven’t even had a major film, miniseries, or MOW that has focused on Katrina (We’re now seven years out from that), it’s hard to say whether or not Superstorm Sandy would be a standout subject that Hollywood would want to tackle. Time will tell.42

Miyamoto separates the potential plotlines into those where Sandy would be cast as the antagonist and those where Sandy would serve as the setting. If Sandy were the antagonist, then we revert to a character versus nature conflict, and this conflict would enforce our vulnerability to nature. Likewise with a character versus character conflict, where Sandy is the setting in which the struggle (physical and/or emotional) between protagonist and antagonist is amplified, the characters are still vulnerable to nature’s fury. The second highest ranked response is posted by Mark Hughes, who describes himself as, “I’m a lifelong cinephile, collect films on DVD/Blu-ray, review films for Forbes.” His answer agrees in part with Miyamoto about Sandy’s fit for a TV movie: I’d be surprised if they make a movie about Hurricane Sandy, unless it’s a TV movie perhaps. Now, a film “inspired” by it—meaning an unrealistic movie about some massive storm that does to New York City what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans—might be more likely at some point. If it DID happen, it would probably focus on the Global Warming elements and suggest that some group of “deniers” refused to listen to warnings about a possible storm, and then when the storm is approaching

42. Ken Miyamoto, “How Long before Hollywood Makes a Hurricane Sandy Movie/ TV Show? What Will Be the Storyline, and Who Will Be the Bad Guy?” Quora, last modified November 6, 2012, accessed June 23, 2015, https://www.quora.com/Howlong-before-Hollywood-makes-a-Hurricane-Sandy-movie-TV-show.

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there would be an added element of some government people who focused resources on evacuating rich neighborhoods and Wall Street while other officials and public workers tried desperately to redirect resources to other less fortunate neighborhoods. In the end, the heroes of the story (a collection of weather experts, disaster-preparedness workers, cops, teachers, etc) would go into endangered areas before, during and after the storm to try and rescue people. It would be done as a disaster film trying to be “realistic” (but of course failing, as all such films inevitably do, due to the nature of the genre). Look at the film Supervolcano43 for an example of the sort of “realism” and “before, during, after” style that I think a Hurricane Sandy film might attempt as well.44

In Hughes’ first paragraph, he describes a film like The Day After Tomorrow that is noted by Goia. His second paragraph seem less plausible, given the advanced technology employed in tracking and predicting storms. In fact, the tracking models’ accuracy more than likely saved many lives despite Sandy’s unorthodox storm trajectory. However, if Hughes is suggesting that “Global Warming” deniers dismissed the idea that humans are now susceptible to larger and fiercer weather events, then this plotline would fit into an aspect of American culture where citizens suppress or deny the anxiety and concern about human-affected weather events. One of the world’s largest market research organizations, Ipsos MORI, published Global Trends 2014.45 Their survey showed that the United States ranked last globally in agreeing with the statement, “We are heading for environmental disaster unless we change our habits quickly,” where 31.5 percent disagreed. Likewise, the United States ranked last in agreeing with the statement, “The climate change we are currently seeing is largely the result of human activity,” where 32.0 percent disagreed. Disassociating the weather disaster and global warming, as Hughes implies in his description of a possible film, does in fact portray a more “realistic” picture of American culture’s relationship to disasters and climate change, as evidenced by the Ipsos MORI surveys. “Realistic,” Hughes notes, is the element of the film destined to fail.

43. Supervolcano, a 2005 television movie directed by Tony Mitchell, features the outcome of a volcanic eruption in Yellowstone Park. 44. Mark Hughes, “How Long Before Hollywood Makes a Hurricane Sandy Movie/ TV Show? What Will Be the Storyline, and Who Will Be the Bad Guy?” Quora, last modified November 6, 2012, accessed June 22, 2015, https://www.quora.com/Howlong-before-Hollywood-makes-a-Hurricane-Sandy-movie-TV-show. 45. “Global Trends 2014: Environment,” Ipsos MORI, last modified 2014, accessed November 3, 2015, http://www.ipsosglobaltrends.com/environment.html.

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The next highest ranking (third among four) answer is by Marco North, “Independent Director and Producer for over 20 years,” according to his tagline on his posted answer, and North’s answer is the last chronologically on November 7, where his response relies upon information from previous answers: It sure felt like Revolution46 at some points, especially when my iphone started working. Actually, I think the raw elements lend themselves to a sweeping modern ensemble piece like Babel,47 with an ethical/moral theme. If Inarritu got the job, I think we could expect a film that follows a number of story lines with an emphasis on the details of their struggles (as opposed to big splashy Hollywood drama—aka. Towering Inferno,48 etc.) What I witnessed first-hand was the ethical/moral test. When the lights go out, when cash and gasoline become scarce—this is when we find out how evolved our culture is. Do we stop and lend a hand to a stranger, or do we conserve and take care of “our own”? Do we prey on the weak? Do we steal? Do we loot? Do we sleep in our clothes, waiting for the police to tell us we must evacuate? Do we make love? Do we fight? Do we find reserves of strength and resilience? Do we break down and cry? Do we feel stranded from those we love? All of these questions could be answered in a number of ways, in a number of true scenarios, creating complex answers. The ultimate truth is—it depends. Some of us are going to cruise the dark streets and hold-up tourists for some cash. Some of us are going to help a stranger out. The disaster is societal a litmus test. It is not about surviving—it is about how we act under pressure—what urges we give in to, and what urges we resist.49

46. Revolution is a TV series broadcasted by NBC from 2012 to 2014. According to the official website, “‘Revolution’ is an epic, swashbuckling drama from J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions and ‘Supernatural’ creator Eric Kripke. With sweeping scope and intimate focus, this show centers on the Matheson family’s struggle to survive fifteen years after a mysterious worldwide blackout. Their post-apocalyptic world is juxtaposed with bucolic, overgrown cities and a journey of hope, rebirth and retribution.” See http://www.nbc.com/revolution?nbc=1. 47. Babel is a 2006 feature film directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. See film critic Roger Ebert’s review and synopsis: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/babel-2006. 48. The Towering Inferno is a 1974 feature film directed by John Guillermin and stars Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and Faye Dunaway. For an interesting fan site about the film, see: http://www.thetoweringinferno.info/. 49. Marco North, “How Long Before Hollywood Makes a Hurricane Sandy Movie/ TV Show? What Will Be the Storyline, and Who Will Be the Bad Guy?” Quora, last modified November 7, 2012, accessed June 1, 2015, https://www.quora.com/How-longbefore-Hollywood-makes-a-Hurricane-Sandy-movie-TV-show.

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North waxes philosophically in his response, and the conflict that he suspects would be at the center of a Sandy film is character versus himself or herself. What are the character’s internal strengths and flaws? How will a character’s ego, id, and superego react in this situation? North does, also, include the fact that he “witnessed first-hand” these internal struggles, and we can hazard a conclusion that his choice of a possible Sandy adaptation is influenced by his experience during Sandy and his knowledge of cinematic narratives. There are a few additional aspects to extract from the Quora question about a film about Sandy, especially since the question is posed during the immediate days after Sandy’s landfall and while cleanup efforts are under way. North, Miyamoto, and Hughes all suspect that a film will not be made, but all three agree that a Hollywood film is possible. Each of them briefly sketch plotlines, conflicts, and themes, and these sketches evolve out of existing and established cinematic narrative forms. In other words, a film could happen. However, none of them offer a reason why a film could not happen. Only Miyamoto cites time as a factor, and as of August 2016, a Hollywood feature film has not been widely released. Another interesting aspect is the reference to Katrina by Miyamoto and Hughes, and these mentions lead to two points about a comparison of the storms and what is represented in a cinematic adaptation of a weather disaster. Miyamoto writes, “Considering that fact that we haven’t even had a major film, miniseries, or MOW that has focused on Katrina (We’re now seven years out from that), it’s hard to say whether or not Superstorm Sandy would be a standout subject that Hollywood would want to tackle.” Hughes writes in the subsequent post, “Now, a film ‘inspired’ by [Sandy]—meaning an unrealistic movie about some massive storm that does to New York City what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans—might be more likely at some point.” Miyamoto implies that if Katrina has not warranted a Hollywood look, then Sandy, in comparison, would not either. In 2013, however, Hollywood did address Katrina in Hours, directed by Eric Heisserer.50 Paul Walker stars as a father trying to keep his newborn daughter alive with a hand-cranked generator in a hospital during and after Katrina. The summer 2012 release of Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Benh Zeitlin and featuring a list of largely unknown and rookie actors, tells the story of a rural bayou community cut off from mainland Louisiana after a hurricane and flood.51 Thought not explicitly linked to Katrina, the connection is obviously implied; hence, this film should be considered a feature film about Katrina. So, with two feature films with

50. Hours, directed by Eric Heisserer (2013: United States: The Safran Company and Laguna Ridge Pictures and PalmStar Entertainment). 51. Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Beth Zeitlin (2012: United States: Cinereach).

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Katrina52 at its center, will Sandy, in comparison, at some point be a pivotal element of a feature film? But prior to answering the above question, we need to ask, how is a disaster film about Katrina or Sandy defined? One component that all four contributors to the Quora question include is the disaster event, the action of a storm’s landfall and immediate impact on characters and setting. As of the time of the social media posts on Quora in 2012, Katrina had been the subject of many documentaries, including When the Levees Broke53 and If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise54 by Spike Lee. All of the Katrina documentaries include footage of its direct impact during the storm. Katrina had also been the focus of HBO’s Treme series, which won Emmy awards in 2010 and 2014.55 K-Ville from FOX lasted only 11 episodes from fall 2007 to spring 2008, and it focused on the challenges police officers faced.56 Both series, however, did not include any plot points about action during the storm. Instead, these series and a number of other feature films deal exclusively with life after the Katrina disaster event, and we should be led, therefore, toward further defining two genres: the disaster film and the postdisaster film. This distinction would be analogous to apocalyptic and postapocalyptic films. In looking for an answer to the Quora question four years after it is posed and using the criteria discussed by Miyamoto, North, and Hughes, two cinematic releases provide an update.57 As Miyamoto states, the “Disaster Flick paradigm … basically dictates that you use the disaster as the core element of story and then showcase multiple character storylines as different characters deal with the disaster.” The first release is A Rising Tide, directed by Ben Hickernell, but the film had very limited releases in 2015 and 2016 at film festivals.58 A Rising Tide has received largely positive reviews, and in a Variety review, Dennis Harvey writes that it “is a likable drama that finds a clan of restaurateurs in hot water after Hurricane Sandy badly damages their business.”59 A wider, but 52. For a Top 10 list of Katrina films, feature and documentary, see: http://www.nola. com/movies/index.ssf/2015/07/cinema_katrina_10_years_later.html. 53. When the Levees Broke, directed by Spike Lee (2006; United States: 40 Acres and a Mule/HBO Documentary Films), DVD. 54. If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, directed by Spike Lee (2010; United States: 40 Acres and a Mule and Filmworks). 55. Treme, created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer (2010; United States: HBO). 56. K-Ville, created by Jonathan Lisco (2007; United States: Lockjaw Productions and 20th Century Fox Television). 57. After November 7, 2012, Quora did not have additional submissions to answer the question. 58. A Rising Tide, directed by Ben Hickernell (2015: United States: A Reconstruction Pictures and Fair Weather Pictures). 59. Dennis Harvey, “Film Review: ‘A Rising Tide.’” Variety, last modified July 19, 2015, accessed November 4, 2015, http://variety.com/2015/film/reviews/a-rising-tidereview-1201519286/.

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still limited, 2016 release of 3rd Street Blackout is written and directed by and stars Negin Farsad and Jeremy Redleaf.60 This romantic comedy focuses upon a “tech-obsessed nerdy couple [that] is forced to relate to each other without the help of their usual gadgets after a city blackout,” but “[while] the decision to use the real-life catastrophe as a springboard for a frothy comedy is questionable —people died, after all—3rd Street Blackout gets by, thanks largely to Farsad’s adorableness as the geeky heroine,” according to a review by Frank Scheck.61 The plots clearly fit into the predictions made by Miyamoto’s “springboard for a story,” where “you could go to the drama angle and showcase a character’s story being changed due to the effects of the storm? A family brought together or something like that. Or you could combine genres and make it a Disaster Flick and Love Story.” Recall, Miyamoto’s is the top answer via Quora’s ranking algorithm. As Neal Edelstein is posting his question to social media and Miyamoto, North, Hughes, and Goia are offering answers, a film about Sandy is actually in production. The Dark Side is a fifty-two minute “docufiction” directed by Richard Ledes.62 According to the press kit synopsis, When the lights go out during Hurricane Sandy, Dan falls and butt-dials his ex-girlfriend. Her name also happens to be Sandy. He takes it as a sign to visit her. Mimicking the hurricane’s capacity to cross boundaries, the film swirls together interviews with firefighters who lost their homes during Sandy with a romantic comedy. The resulting clash of genres creates unexpected juxtapositions that illuminate both the global and local dimensions of the storm.63

According to Ledes, shooting of the film initially started a few days after Sandy hit New York and began with little more than the idea of actor Edoardo Bellerini walking the East Village streets during a blackout period. Ledes then began developing a narrative after seeing the footage. The film crosses several genres. The narrative arc of the film is a romantic comedy, but interwoven throughout are interviews with firefighters from Queens, New York, and digital footage taken by the firefighters as well. Although this seemingly quixotic choice by Ledes runs a risk of trivializing Sandy’s effects on those in Queens, he rationalizes this in “The Making of The Dark Side”: 60. 3rd Street Blackout, directed by Negin Farsad and Jeremy Redleaf (2016: United States: Mina and Rudy and Brackets Creative and Vaguely Qualified Productions). 61. Frank Scheck, “‘3rd Street Blackout’: Film Review,” The Hollywood Reporter, last modified April 27, 2016, accessed April 30, 2016, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ review/3rd-street-blackout-film-review-888317. 62. Richard Ledes, The Dark Side, video, directed by Richard Ledes (2015, New York: Footnote Four) Web. 63. “The Dark Side Press Kit,” Richardledes.com, accessed August 13, 2016.

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To put [romantic comedy and documentary] together seemed evocative of the time we live in where we are constantly, particularly through the internet, cheek and jowl with the elements of comedy, elements of distraction, and immeasurably tragic events happening around the world. So, to make a film that actually clashed them together, inspired in a way by the hurricane, which breaks down the limits of the city, breaks down the limits that separate one group from another in their daily lives in a city like New York, and makes them mix together. I wanted to do the same thing, to mix the genres, to give the viewers an experience which would allow them to find new meanings rather than they have the usual expectations that one has from either a documentary or a fiction film [and] to have these two would within one film would be a little bit troubling … while at the same time a kind of pleasure in watching a film.64

The most mesmerizing scenes in the film are shot by a volunteer firefighter, and the footage shows fires raging and burning debris flying at the firefighter. Later in the film, Ledes films the firefighter as he watches his own digital footage and narrates his experience. Just as the firefighter was hypnotized by the flames during his original experience, now as a viewer of his own film he cannot, once again, avert his gaze. As viewers of the viewing, we, too, are occupied by the levels of mediated experience. Sandy, probably at a level never seen prior, is a digitally mediated disaster event, and social media proved integral to this evolution. As Ledes notes in an interview at the European Independent Film Festival in 2015, “There’s the tradition of everyone having an iPhone or cell phone these days with a video camera, and we all now are film makers. So I think independent film is able to respond and to draw on that tradition, as well as the tradition of large films.”65 Ledes’s The Dark Side does incorporate documentary-style filming, illustrated by interviews with firefighters and footage where he documents their reactions to the destruction they see in Sandy’s aftermath. The firefighters are narrating their story of being trapped by Sandy’s floodwaters and their challenges during the recovery period of four to five months after the water subsided. This thread is punctuated by and intersects with film shot by firefighters during the storm, and this thread is itself a narrated story by those shooting the film. Consequently, Ledes’s romantic comedy narrative is intentionally written, as he claims, to “clash” with the documentary elements.

64. “The Making of The Dark Side,” Video, 2016, accessed August 22, 2016, http:// www.indiewire.com/2015/10/watch-find-out-how-a-film-got-made-during-hurricanesandy-in-exclusive-the-making-of-the-dark-side-56183/. 65. Richard Ledes, “Interview of Richard Ledes at European Independent Film Festival 2015,” video, accessed August 20, 2016, https://vimeo.com/149416587.

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Nevertheless, this “clash” is largely located in the postproduction of the film, where Ledes arranges and juxtaposes the different narrative threads. One scene, however, takes a curious approach to this “clash,” and the scene does take a side regarding a collision between the threads Ledes establishes. About thirty minutes into the film, main characters Dan and Sandy are driving around Queens buying and delivering relief supplies to various locations in the minivan Dan borrows from his boss. They stop at one of the refuse dumps and park. They make love as construction vehicles around their minivan move and load piles of debris. Thereafter, they stop at a convenience store to pick up additional supplies and drive to the Point Breeze Fire Department. As they park, viewers can see a sign spray painted on a large sheet of plywood with “PBFD thanks you for your support.” As the shot transitions to inside the fire station, six characters stand in front of the turn-out gear lockers of the firefighters. To the left, Sandy flanks four firefighters, and Dan flanks them to the right. The shot lasts forty seconds. The firefighters explain a few details about explosions and the washing out of a bridge. Dan and Sandy mumble “Wow” a few times, and Dan’s only line, barely perceptible, is “No other option” when he hears the bridge had been washed out and the firefighters were stranded at the station and would not have the ability to escape the floodwaters. The subsequent scene jump cuts to Sandy and Dan driving in silence to their next stop. This scene exemplifies larger dynamics and themes of the film’s genres, as well as how disaster information is located within American culture, and how social media changes how we think of ourselves in disaster events. For Ledes’s decision to juxtapose a romantic comedy and a disaster documentary, we should be aware of the personal and private dynamic of Americans, especially in our contemporary landscape of social media. First responders and citizens were uploading videos of the fires and flooding to Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. Their personal disaster experiences became available to the nation and globe. Their trauma and loss became framed within notification feeds and labeled with hashtags. The scene in the film when Dan and Sandy visit the Point Breeze Fire Department illustrates the ironic disconnect of social media. Sandy and Dan, the consumers of social media and technology, stand face-to-face with the providers of social media content, and they are essentially speechless and unequipped to socialize. One common denominator between the romantic comedy and documentary genres is narrative conventions. Both have codes, structures, and techniques that form laws within each genre, and the laws keep borders and boundaries intact, maintain categories, and generate meaning. However, the most intriguing question is whether or not the clash of Ledes’s two genres upsets the laws, solidifies the laws, or revises the laws. Does Ledes’s disaster film illustrate that the genres are not as stable as might be assumed? In Jacques Derrida’s 1980 presentation and subsequently published essay, “The Law of Genre,” he suggests that not only do we find a law of genre, which addresses traits and codes of specific genres, but we also find a law of

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constructing our ideas of genre.66 “As soon as the word genre is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn,” writes Derrida, “And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind.”67 With filmmaking, we can approach genre and a film’s inception a priori or, in Derridian terms, always already present. The genre exists before a film begins to come into being. A film’s genre waits for the film to participate in the genre category. But, not only does a specific genre have characteristics, but there is “the law of the law of genre.”68 Here, the ideas and practices of placing texts, or films, into genres can be contradictory: [The law of the law of genres] is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In a code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. The trait that marks membership inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole; the consequences of this division and of this overflowing remains as singular as they are limitless.69

Therefore, the stability that a genre offers—and, in turn, its differentiation from other genres—depends on the recognition of traits for the purpose of establishing a unity of the genre and “boundary” between genres. However, what Derrida calls “contamination” in the law is also a recognition that unity of genre is undone simultaneously by overlapping and unrepresented traits. The law of the law of genres is for a text or film to be codified within a genre but to be simultaneously lacking traits of a specific genre and to hold traits of another genre. Hence, as a film genre awaits the film to engage in it, the traits and codes of the film genre that form the boundaries and limits—the law of genre—for it must be both inclusive and exclusive. Subsequently, a film genre projects the appearance of being a closed taxonomical distinction, but at the same time films belonging to a genre do not possess the complete traits of the film genre. Therefore, in film, the movie’s identification to a genre is determined before the movie has even begun its production, and the genre itself is an impure code in which to identify a movie, perhaps even the most important characteristic of a movie. The application of Derrida’s law of genre and law of the law of genre to Ledes’s The Dark Side and the disaster film genre proves to be intriguing.

66. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” translated by Avital Ronell, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 221–254. 67. Ibid., 224. 68. Ibid., 227. 69. Ibid., 227–228.

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When we critique disaster films, we no doubt acknowledge an intermixing of genre laws: romantic plotlines, horror film techniques, action adventure chase scenes, and science fiction settings. But does Ledes’s film intermix genres? The Dark Side, as a disaster film, participates in the disaster film genre, but its engagement with the genre is unique. Ledes’s film has a romantic plotline, offers a disastrous setting, contains scenes of nature’s wrath upon humans, features heroic characters and victims, and provides themes about nature, humanity, and survival. However, these elements are presented in a compartmentalized manner, and The Dark Side challenges Derrida’s law of genre and law of the law of genre. The Dark Side is a disaster film that contains a documentary and a romantic comedy, but the film’s aim is less on commingling the genres and more about signaling a renewed focus on the three genres. The Dark Side acts like the superego of genre. The documentary parts of The Dark Side form the “dark side” to the romantic comedy parts, the “light side,” of the film, and these sides are almost completely kept apart by Ledes. One “slip” is the scene described above, and another scene analyzed below is also as a “slip.” Now, we could take the dynamic further in psychoanalytic theory. In Freudian discourse, the dark side is the id seeking pleasure, the light side is the ego attempting to satisfy the id’s impulses but recognizing the reality of situations, and the film’s direction by Ledes is the superego navigating the laws of each genre. And perhaps, The Dark Side reveals deeper psychoanalytic issues related to social media and everyone being what Ledes calls a “filmmaker,” which are emblematized in disaster events. At forty minutes into the film, Kieran Burke, an off-duty first responder narrates not only his experience to Ledes on camera but also, like a voice-over, his video footage he took while experiencing the fires and flooding. He explains that he had an underwater digital camera, and with the flooding and fires, he says, “If anyone would find me in the water, then hopefully at least see what I was doing.” Burke tells how he made his way through the floodwaters to his home. Ledes cuts to him watching the digital video he shot of his home engulfed in flames, and then cuts to Burke’s original digital footage. An interesting aspect of Burke’s narration on camera to Ledes is how Burke describes his experience: “What I was witnessing was something on a scale that I could never imagine being involved in a major metropolitan city.” Burke’s narration throughout is his own digital video and on camera to Ledes takes the tone of a “witness” providing a voice-over for the digital video as if he is narrating his own reality TV episode. His involvement in his own disaster event is one of filmmaker and narrator. Burke’s narrative point of view to his own experience not only appears to create a distance, but also as though he has framed himself out of his own experience. Reality TV has made us think of ourselves as stars of our own shows. Social media and digital technology at our fingertips now makes us think of ourselves as filmmakers. When these two elements clash, especially in disaster events like Sandy, the stars of the show are the named disasters and

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destructive forces. The radical shift at work is how we think of ourselves with social media, reality TV, and disaster events. We are losing this first-person point of view to the third-person point of view when we are behind the small screen held with our fingertips. The disastrous event that shocks and reminds us that we are an “I” is becoming recontextualized by ourselves, the filmmakers of scenes in which we are not a part of. We assume a perspective in which we are not there. How else can we explain “extreme selfies”? According to Sarah Dean of The Daily Mail, in October 2016, a Russian schoolgirl climbed out onto a balcony on the seventeenth floor and fell to her death seconds after sending the selfie to a friend.70 This teen’s plight is not isolated, and it evinces the evolution of an uncontextualized subjectivity. We have moved beyond the hypermediation of twenty-four-hour news to reality TV to cell phone filmmakers to virtual existence—even in disaster events. The subject, the “I” of experience, disappears from the event because we do not think of the event from the first-person point of view, but as one who is documenting an event in which our point of view is framed through a three-inch by five-inch cell phone or digital camera. No longer will we hear the people who are involved in a disaster saying, “I felt like I was in a movie.” No longer will we hear people who are involved in a disaster saying, “I thought I was dreaming.” So, when the next big disaster hits, we will read the real_Prnc$$Diane69 social media post telling us about an event, but the point of view will not just be hypermediated, it will not even be the experience of a person behind real_Prnc$$Diane69.

70. Sarah Dean, “Russian Schoolgirl, 12, Falls to Her Death After Climbing over the Ledge of a 17th Floor Balcony ‘to Pose for a Cool Selfie,’” The Daily Mail, last Modified October 17, 2016, accessed October 31, 2016, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-3844082/Russian-schoolgirl-12-falls-death-climbing-ledge-17th-floor-balconypose-cool-selfie.html#ixzz4OOzQHVio.

7 T H E E N D O F D I S A ST E R C A P I TA L I SM : ( A ) B J E C T IO N T O ( Z ) OM B I E S O F F I NA L D I S A S T E R S

Losing one’s sense of self during a disaster event, as noted in the previous chapter, moves beyond Baudrillard’s hypermediated relationship one has to disaster events in which we are nonpresent observers. In effect, social media has made us reproduce our selfs to the point where no self exists, even under catastrophic circumstances. A majority of Americans do not experience traumatic disaster events, but as climate change advances, citizens inland from the coastlines will also be affected by disaster events. Social media, reality TV, and hand-held digital video devices grant all of us the ability to become, as independent filmmaker Richard Ledes claims, filmmakers of disaster scenes.1 Much like a traditional filmmaker, those using hand-held video devices during disaster events are assuming a position that is external to the disaster “scene” unfolding before the camera’s gaze; however, they are “in” the “scene” being affected by the disaster. This participant-observer has become completely decontextualized from the scene; instead of creating autobiography, he or she is creating a biography of their self. However, what process of a person’s subjective relationship to the external object (the disaster) has been usurped? In simpler terms, how did we get to a point where our subjective position is no longer recognizable in traumatic and disastrous situations? Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection discusses the psychoanalytic subject’s relation to the unconscious and conscious self. With Kristeva’s view of the process of repression, the individual’s process of subconsciously relegating hazardous and unwanted psychological desires and impulses to the unconscious area of the psyche and away from the conscious mind, shifts from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. For Kristeva, The “unconscious” contents remain here excluded but in a strange fashion: not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be

1. Richard Ledes, The Dark Side, video, directed by Richard Ledes (2015; New York: Footnote Four), Web.

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established—one that implies a refusal but also a sublimating elaboration. As if such an opposition were between I and Other or, in more archaic fashion, between inside and outside. As if such an opposition subsumed the one between Conscious and Unconscious.2

Kristeva suggests that the boundaries—I/Other, inside/outside, subject/ object—in this dynamic are not as stable or secure, as both Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan assumed occurs, as an individual progresses developmentally. For Lacan, this progress is solidified with an individual’s entrance into the world of language, the Symbolic Order. Here, an individual symbolizes the desires and impulses that were once prelinguistic and pure pleasure: hunger can be satiated, cleanliness can be returned, oneness with the mother can be reunified. This purity is spoiled by the wrought symbolism that a language system, Lacan’s Symbolic Order, contains but, at the same time, creates a recognizable and functioning “I.” Alternatively, the boundaries that Kristeva reveals instead are overwhelmed by this symbolic quality of language, and in turn, the boundaries remain a porous, messy, and fluid dynamic. This effect on the individual causes ambiguity among the relations of I/Other, inside/ outside, subject/object, but a simultaneous effort works to render these relations unambiguous. Our selfhood exists in the muddied liminal zone, but we strive to be outside of that zone. Our selfs are not stable, but our selfs toil for that stability. Also, these relations are both physical and metaphoric. In a physical sense, Kristeva refers to bodily fluids and cadavers: A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. … It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled. The border has become the object.3

Our physical reaction to what Kristeva calls the abject is an attempt to reassert our subjectivity, our sense of being apart from what is outside and our sense of an “I” distinguished from the Other. We avoid border and liminal situations. We can also see disaster events as times when abjection functions, and we see the abject represented in the literature and pop culture of both disaster and

2. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 7. 3. Ibid., 3–4.

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horror genres. However, we can also see examples of boundary breaches and abjection outside of these genres. The 1999 film adaptation of the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club, both rich with themes of materialism, politics, and identity (in particular, the “crisis in masculinity” of the 1990s), focuses on two characters: Jack, who is the narrator, and Tyler Durden. At the beginning of the film, Jack is portrayed as emasculated due to his catalog shopping, white-collar job, selfhelp addiction, and nonexistent sex life. As viewers realize about the film, Jack and Tyler are the same person, and Tyler is, in Lacanian terms, Jack’s egoideal—the big Other who Jack tries to actualize in himself. Tyler watches over Jack, guides Jack, and admonishes Jack. Tyler tells him, “I look like you wanna look. I fuck like you wanna fuck. I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I’m free in all the ways that you are not.”4 Jack wants this attention and needs this dynamic with Tyler to find his place in the world, to find his place within Lacan’s Symbolic Order, to not be lost. Jack and Tyler establish Fight Club, where only men fight bare-fisted but in a structured and respectful manner. The consumerist lifestyle that once gave Jack his identity becomes supplanted, with the help of Tyler, by Fight Club, and its evolution, Project Mayhem. Fight Club is a border and liminal zone. Early in the film, Tyler and Jack meet at Lou’s Tavern after Jack’s apartment has been suspiciously blown up: Tyler Durden: We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra. Jack: Martha Stewart. Tyler Durden: Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic. It’s all going down, man. So fuck off with your sofa units and Strinne green stripe patterns.5

Tyler’s plan for Project Mayhem is domestic corporate terrorism and, ultimately, the destruction of people’s financial footprint, which Tyler claims is tethered to selfhood: “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”6 Consequently, those tied to consumerism can reach a state of enlightenment; the Symbolic Order can be reset within anticonsumerist discourse. In service to this goal, Tyler wants the Fight Club members to whittle their lives down to basics in clothing, food, and social interaction for the purpose of wiping the

4. Fight Club, directed by David Fincher (1999; Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2000), DVD. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid.

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literal and figurative slates of its members clean. The material space of Fight Club begins this process of restructuring male identity away from capitalism. In the film, Fight Club serves a heterotopic and abject space where men can cross physical and metaphoric boundaries. Shirts are removed. Blood is drawn. Sweat is smeared. Bodies intermingled. In one scene, Tyler addresses the Fight Club before the fighting begins: Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man; no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised by television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t; and we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.7

Tyler recognizes the absence of an effective big Other to their collective “I.” Likewise, Tyler reifies the abstract aspect of abjection. Following his speech, the scene progresses when the owner of the tavern, Lou, descends the stairs into the basement where Fight Club has been meeting after closing time. Aggressively, Lou asks what is going on in his place, and calmly, Tyler asks him to join their club. Lou’s anger heightens, and he begins to hit Tyler in the face and kick him in the midsection. Tyler accepts the beating and laughs as Lou continues. Tyler’s mouth and nose are swollen red and bleeding. The members of Fight Club move in, but Tyler waves them off. Lou drops Tyler to the cement floor, and says, “Fucking guy is a looney, I’m telling you.”8 Lou begins walking away. Tyler jumps onto Lou, wrestles him to the floor, and kneels over his chest. Blood and saliva drip into Lou’s face. Tyler shakes the fluids from his cuts and wretches. Tyler screams at him, “You don’t know where I’ve been, Lou!” Fincher jump cuts to a Fight Club member vomiting because of the abject scene. Tyler extracts a promise from Lou to use the basement after Lou is splattered with fluids by Tyler. The scene represents two levels of physical abjection. The Fight Club member who vomits illustrates his reaction to the exchange of fluids between Tyler and Lou, and the member violently reacts: “It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled. The border has become the object.”9 The member’s selfhood is reified by his experience with this messy border. He recognizes the limits of

7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

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the border, and he backs away. Likewise, Lou’s selfhood is reawakened as the boundary between himself and Tyler becomes literally “fluid.” Lou reviles the confrontation with Tyler when it crosses into the abject; Lou had been the inflictor, but then he enters a liminal zone with Tyler where they exchange words, punches, blood, and saliva. In an abstract sense, Lou recognizes his differentiation from the group that meets in his tavern’s basement—Lou is not one of them—and on the other hand, the Fight Club member affirms his individual membership within the group—he is one of them. Both characters, due to the abject situation, have a decision to make. Be a member of Fight Club or not. Just as Tyler asks Lou directly at the beginning of the scene to “join our club,” each new member of Fight Club must fight at his first attendance. Lou does fight and unwittingly follows most of Fight Club’s rules that Tyler and Jack establish: The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. Third rule of Fight Club: Someone yells stop, goes limp, taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: no shirts, no shoes. Seventh rule: Fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: If this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight.10

However, Lou is horrified and leaves after seeing the results of his violence. Lou crawls and scrambles away from Tyler and then ascends the staircase. The members lift Tyler off of the floor and prop him on a toilet. Tyler announces that the members will have “a homework assignment.”11 This point of the film establishes a shift from Fight Club to Project Mayhem—a new outlet for each member’s repressed impulses. Tyler’s vision for Project Mayhem centers upon the destruction of corporate and consumer culture that had been defining Jack and his members; however, the group does not target people. As the plot continues, Project Mayhem’s destruction escalates, and Jack becomes disconcerted with the level it reaches. What had started as amusing “homework assignments,” such as losing a fight to a complete stranger, has pullulated into arson and death threats. Sensing Jack’s discomfort, Tyler leaves him a note and disappears. Tyler has set Project Mayhem on autopilot. Jack realizes abruptly that he and Tyler are the same person, and Jack attempts to shut down Project Mayhem. Because Tyler’s directions are mapped out into the future and account for Jack’s wavering, Jack’s desperation increases, and Project Mayhem’s plan climaxes when the group sets explosive charges in the buildings of major financial institutions; the detonation button

10. Fight Club, directed by David Fincher. 11. Ibid.

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is the reset button. While Jack waits for the explosion, he figures out how to navigate his relationship to Tyler. He threatens his split self. When Jack points the gun at his own head, Tyler reappears and tries to negotiate, but this fails. Jack shoots a hole through his own jowl, and Tyler vanishes. Through Jack’s final experience of abjection—facing his own mortality—Jack renews his ability to repress Tyler’s desires and impulses. Jack resituates his “I” to the big Other. The film ends as Jack watches the bombs detonate and each building collapses downward upon itself—phallic shrinking. Jack and Tyler’s goal of resetting the Symbolic Order has begun as an effacement of the natural ecology of capital, as discussed previously in chapter 3 about September 11. Fight Club illustrates a fear within masculine identity that evolved out the pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s. The Big 80s had its androgynous, gay, and glam pop stars, such as Boy George, Prince, Michael Jackson, Adam Ant, David Bowie, and George Michael. Couple that with the “hair bands,” such as Poison, Bon Jovi, and KISS, and “new wave” bands, such as The Cure, Dead or Alive, and Depeche Mode, men needed to spend time and money to express themselves and attract attention of other women and men. The excess of the 1980s manifested itself artistically, materially, and sexually. Credit card use expanded to nearly all citizens. The HIV/AIDS epidemic evolved over the decade from a disease affecting gay males to intravenous drug users to promiscuous straight males—all forms of abjection. No one was safe from this disaster. The 1990s led pop music and culture into less style and more substance. However, masculinity dressed down as “grunge” music exploded. Seattle bands, such as Pearl Jam and Nirvana, produced shy and reserved masculine rock stars wearing (at first) demure, thrift-store, and repurposed clothing. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana wore his cardigan with Chuck Taylor sneakers, and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam donned cargo shorts and flannel shirts. This subculture statement soon made its way to the runways of New York, where designer Marc Jacobs attempted a “historic grunge collection” and subsequently found himself no longer employed by Perry Ellis.12 The male fashion statement at the turn of the decade hung from the shoulders and waists of the cultural elite’s standards of femininity: supermodels Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen, and Christy Turlington. Where could men go next? Even icons of African-American masculinity became affected by HIV/AIDS. In 1991, NBA star Magic Johnson announced that he contracted the virus. Gangsta rapper Eazy-E of N.W.A. died from HIV complications in 1995. However, due to the threat of HIV/AIDS, high-profile figures, and safe-sex campaigns on youth-oriented television

12. Lynn Yeager, “Slammed Then, Celebrated Now, Marc Jacobs’s Perry Ellis Grunge Show Was a Collection Before Its Time,” Vogue, last modified August 31, 2015, accessed August 5, 2016, http://www.vogue.com/13293785/marc-jacobs-perry-ellis-grungecollection-90s-fashion/.

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programming, the rate of teens having sex decreased in the 1990s.13 Male subjectivity looked for emancipation, and pop culture waited behind every turn. Palahniuk’s novel and Fincher’s adaptation have different endings that indicate two options for male subjectivity near the end of the millennium. In the final scene of the film, Jack stands with Marla Singer, and he holds a gun in his left hand. The gun drifts to Jack’s side and hangs limp from his hand. He slips his right hand into Marla’s palm as the buildings begin to explode, and simultaneously the gun disappears from the scene. The phallic symbolism— violence, lawlessness, and freedom—of the gun weakens and fades. “You met me at a very strange time in my life,” he tells Marla apologetically.14 His identity becomes tethered to Marla. To cement the dwindled symbolic quality of the gun, Fincher splices an image of a flaccid penis, and consequently, viewers are led to the conclusion that Tyler is still out there up to his previous mischief. Even Tyler has toned down his masculine expression. Male subjectivity is simultaneously reoriented and returned to a traditional model. Jack is liberated from the financial system, but concurrently, he is also linked to Marla as a couple rather than emancipated from existing male identities. Palahniuk’s Fight Club ends with Joe (the narrator is named differently from the film adaptation) rendezvousing with Marla at the Bowel Cancer selfhelp meeting, where they first met. They argue about how Joe/Tyler has/have been treating her, and Joe assures her that it was Tyler’s motivation not his. Joe explains that he is trying to save her from Tyler and the Space Monkeys of Project Mayhem. Joe tells Marla, “I have to take care of Tyler Durden.”15 Next, Joe goes to a Fight Club: “I register to fight every guy in the club that night. Fifty fights. One fight at a time. No shoes. No shirt.”16 Joe is beaten repeatedly, and during the fights, he narrates his struggle with Tyler: “And in the basement of the Armory Bar, Tyler Durden slips to the floor in a warm jumble. … And the fight goes on and on because I want to be dead. Because only in death do we have names. Only in death are we no longer part of Project Mayhem.”17 However, neither Tyler nor Joe are exorcised or killed, and Joe wakes up to Tyler commanding him into action: Tyler says, “The last thing we have to do is your martyrdom thing. Your big death thing.”… “It has to be big,” Tyler says. “Picture this: you on top of the world’s tallest building taken over by Project Mayhem. Smoke rolling out of 13. Marlene Cimons, “Fewer U.S. Teens Having Sex in ‘90s, Officials Say,” Los Angeles Times, last modified September 18, 1998, accessed August 6, 2016, http://articles.latimes. com/1998/sep/18/news/mn-24018. 14. Fight Club, directed by David Fincher. 15. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 197. 16. Ibid., 199. 17. Ibid., 201.

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the windows. Desks falling in to the crowds on the street. A real opera of a death, that’s what you are going to get.” … I say, no. You’ve used me enough. “If you don’t cooperate, we’ll go after Marla.” I say, lead the way. “Now get the fuck out of bed,” Tyler said, “and get your ass into the fucking car.” So, Tyler and I are on top of the Parker-Morris Building with a gun stuck in my mouth. … The gun is in case the police helicopters get here sooner.18

The Bowel Cancer support group shows up, and Tyler disappears. The charges fail to detonate, Joe hears the choppers, and he pulls the trigger. As Tyler had announced at a Fight Club meeting, males of the 1990s lack a great event in which to tie themselves, and with Joe’s opportunity to create a significant personal event, both the disaster fails and he fails. The novel’s final chapter shows Joe thinking he is in heaven, but the text indicates that he is inside a mental institution. Both Marla and Tyler have survived as well: “Marla’s still on earth, and she writes me. Someday, she says, they’ll bring me back. … But I don’t want to go back. Not yet. Just because. Because every once in a while, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches, and he says: ‘We miss you, Mr. Durden.’”19 Although, like the film, Marla does function as a saving force for Joe, she has not aided him in resituating his male subjectivity. He remains untethered to her, and in effect, he is untethered also to the financial system. America, however for Joe, has consequences for not participating in capitalistic endeavors. The aim of Project Mayhem has been deferred, and his male subjectivity is managed not by an ideal ego (Tyler) any longer. Joe, instead, is governed by another set of institutional forces: “I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, ‘Why?’”20 Mental institutions, which supply therapy and pharmaceuticals, have replaced the financial institutions that provided male subjectivity with credit, means, and images. Neither the novel nor the film offer emancipation for male subjectivity, not even anything beyond Fight Club’s heterotopic space: abjection, males defining males, an illusion of emancipation from unfulfilling occupations, and a noncapitalistic exchange of reward and punishment. Even the moments of abjection Jack, Joe, and Tyler experience prove fleeting, but those moments do function, as Kristeva indicates, to kick start repression for Joe and Jack. In turn, both characters find their way back to the Symbolic

18. Ibid., 203. 19. Ibid., 207–208. 20. Ibid., 207.

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Order, but this Symbolic Order is not a result of revolution by Tyler, Fight Club, or Project Mayhem. Close readings of the book and film prove that these efforts have failed to provide Joe and Jack’s subjectivity a path of emancipation from the pervasive forces of capitalism. For Jack, the disaster of corporate terrorism that he and Tyler initiated only sent Jack back to Marla. For Joe, the impotent disaster plans landed him into an institution where his mind, body, and time are highly structured. Fincher’s adaptation of Palahniuk’s novel proved less than successful at the box office than anticipated, given Brad Pitt and Edward Norton as costars, but it proved itself as a cult phenomenon. The film attracted controversy due to the graphic violence and domestic terrorism, and the film’s release had to be postponed due to the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado on April 20, 1999, that was carried out by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. And although the film and novel do focus on male subjectivity at the end of the century, situated among a disaster (or potential disaster) to capitalist ecology, both also address the role of capitalism and technology upon subjectivity formation. One line in the novel exemplifies these effects. As Joe stands waiting for the building to explode and the choppers to arrive, Marla admits that she knows about the charges throughout the building, and Joe remarks, “This is like a total epiphany moment for me. I’m not killing myself, I yell, I’m killing Tyler. I am Joe’s Hard Drive. I remember everything.”21 Here, Palahniuk reveals a connection between subjectivity and technology: the digitization of our selves. Palahniuk conjures the analogous connection of “Hard Drive” and the human brain that had begun to circulate in computer and subjective discourse. By 1999, the cultural hysteria about Y2K climaxed, and as Time characterized it, “When a calendar change spooked fears for the end of the world.”22 However, fear did not center upon external apocalyptic forces, such as the 2012 doomsday predictions, wiping humanity away. Rothman recalls the problem: The bug at the center of the Year 2000 mess is fairly simple. In what’s proving to be a ludicrously shortsighted shortcut, many system programmers set aside only two digits to denote the year in dates, as in 06/15/98 rather than 06/15/1998. Trouble is, when the computer’s clock strikes 2000, the math can get screwy. Date-based equations like 98 – 97 = 1 become 00 – 97 = –97. That can prompt some computers to do the wrong thing and stop others from doing anything at all.23

21. Ibid., 204–205. 22. Lily Rothman, “Remember Y2K? Here’s How We Prepped for the Non-Disaster,” Time, last modified December 31, 2015, accessed October 1, 2016, http://time. com/3645828/y2k-look-back/. 23. Ibid.

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We were hysterical because of our computers. In those containers of data, we lay. Our power, our finances, our documents. Our selves. Pop culture continued that fear as the end of the millennium neared, and another disaster film in 1999 illustrated to audiences the next step “Joe’s Hard Drive” would take in a postapocalyptic world: The Matrix. This film achieved global box office success and critical acclaim for its pioneering special effects, complex plot, and philosophical engagement. In the first scene in which we see the protagonist, Neo, he is trafficking illegal virtual material, which he stores in a hollowed-out copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Neo is led to a meeting with a legendary cyberterrorist, Morpheus. Morpheus explains to Neo some details about the Matrix: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Neo: What truth? Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.24

Morpheus offers Neo a blue pill that will return Neo to his present life and a red pill that will show Neo “the truth.” Neo swallows the red pill, and it disrupts the Matrix’s software so they can find Neo’s body. He is awakened, unplugged, and flushed from a location where human bodies are used as energy sources to power the Matrix and its technology. Morpheus and his crew retrieve Neo, and as he experiences a brief level of consciousness, Morpheus tells him, “Welcome … to the real world.”25 Out of the Matrix, Neo realizes that his prior existence was only a computer simulation of a life he could lead. He lived as part of the Matrix’s program. Morpheus believes that Neo can save humans from the apocalyptic scenario outside of the Matrix, that Neo can bring the truth en masse to those inside the Matrix, who are actually those used as energy sources for the machines in a dystopic surface of the earth. One of their crew, Cypher, becomes dismayed by their efforts and Morpheus’s singular focus on Neo. Cypher meets clandestinely with Agent Smith, a program that polices the Matrix for insurgents. Cypher tells him, “You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix

24. The Matrix, directed by Lana Wachowski (formerly Laurence “Larry” Wachowski) and Lilly Wachowski (formerly Andrew Paul “Andy” Wachowski), (1999; Burbank, SC: Warner Bros., 1999), DVD. 25. Ibid.

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is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? [Takes a bite of steak] Ignorance is bliss.”26 Cypher elects to betray his crew and be reinserted into the Matrix, but he is killed before his “bliss” can happen. However, Cypher’s choice is representative of disastrous events and their mediation. He moves beyond merely watching the simulation and, despite his knowledge of “the real world,” elects to participate in the simulation. Firstperson shooter games, three dimensional graphics, and massive multiplayer online game communities blossomed in the mid- to late 1990s, but Cypher’s choice is deeper. He embraces an immersion into the Matrix, and he wants no part of his self—the self that is making the decision. Agent Smith asks him, “Then we have a deal?” Cypher responds, “I don’t want to remember nothing. Nothing. You understand? And I want to be rich. You know, someone important, like an actor.”27 Although viewers recognize the comedic allusion to actors and acting, but it also indicates the levels of simulation. Cypher wants to enter a simulation and also contribute as a simulator of real life to others in the Matrix. One should acknowledge the discursive connection to Tyler Durden’s speech on unrealized masculine “movie gods” dreams, which is the very situation Cypher desires. The Matrix is the first film in the trilogy, and Neo does prove to be “the one” Morpheus has been seeking. At the end of the film, Neo has developed agency in the Matrix from the inside of it. Neo can affect the Matrix. However, the final film of the trilogy, The Matrix Revolutions, was released in 2003 and provides a conclusion to the battle of humans against the machines. At the end of the film, Agent Smith has populated the entirety of the Matrix with clones of himself, and his behavior threatens the integrity of the system. Neo attempts to fight Agent Smith in the climactic scene, and Neo knows that he cannot win the fight and also win the war against the machines. In fact, Neo has brokered a deal with the machines and serves as a hired assassin. If Neo vanquishes Agent Smith, then the machines will reload the Matrix. Humans and machines return to a mutual and assured existence. Agent Smith begins overwhelming Neo, but Neo continues to resist. Agent Smith asks him, Why, Mr. Anderson? Why, why? Why do you do it? Why, why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting … for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although … only a

26. Ibid. 27. Ibid.

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human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?28

Neo responds, “Because I choose to.” Neo differentiates his human quality of choice—perhaps the only kernel of truth Neo has discovered—against Agent Smith’s programmed, hardwired responses to the surrounding conditions. However, Agent Smith’s reading of Neo’s humanity is perspicuous. To paraphrase Agent Smith, “If you know the levels of simulation, why do your fight for those levels of simulation?” Knowledge of choice allows Neo to regain his subjective position against the Other of machines: life against simulation. Agent Smith’s logical system cannot account for Neo’s choice to sacrifice himself for the greater good of humanity. In the film, Neo’s human qualities, such as knowledge of choice, cannot be absorbed by Agent Smith, as he had done with others in the Matrix, and his programmatic structure is unable to reconcile this addition. Neo perishes, but Agent Smith’s program is overwhelmed and eliminated from the Matrix. The machines reload the Matrix, and they agree to allow those who want to be free from the Matrix to leave. Balance is restored in the film, but this balance is not revolutionary. If the machines and the Matrix had been destroyed by Agent Smith, then an apocalyptic situation would have arisen. Human life would have ceased if he had not been destroyed. Therefore, the machines still appear to be in a position of control and advantage. The machines keep the humans—those free and enslaved, digitized inside the Matrix and outside the Matrix—alive. Returning to psychoanalytic terms, the I/Other, inside/outside, subject/object dynamics are reestablished. However, The Matrix trilogy neglects to reveal emancipation from the order of capitalism. Readings of both versions of Fight Club and The Matrix trilogy show that “[t]he border has become the object”29 at the turn of the millennium. Fight Club serves as a border between Jack/Joe and the big Other of capitalism. The Matrix provides a similar border between a complete digitization of humans and the real, purely human existence, exemplified in the film as the walls of human bodies who look like embryos floating in warm, pink liquid. If we contextualize Fight Club and The Matrix trilogy as “natural” disasters, these pop culture examples offer a rich interpretive opportunity for viewers and readers. However, academic criticism has dominated its focus on what object humans face in their conflict and what symbolic quality those objects harbor. Notwithstanding, a turn toward reading the types of subjectivity under

28. The Matrix: Revolutions, directed by Lana Wachowski (formerly Laurence “Larry” Wachowski) and Lilly Wachowski (formerly Andrew Paul “Andy” Wachowski) (2003; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 2004), DVD. 29. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

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disastrous circumstances will be more productive. In other words, instead of looking outside and wondering, “How has the world changed?” or “What does this disaster mean symbolically?” we ask, “How have we changed?” and “What does the ‘we’ mean?” The Matrix and Fight Club offer a step toward answering the latter questions. Tom Cruise is certainly a figure that exists on the border—on the border between mainstream actor and couch surfing loon, on the border between award-winning artist and celebrity headline fodder, on the border between high art and kitsch. He is also an actor comfortable exploiting the disaster genre. He played the lead in the 2005 remake of War of the Worlds,30 a film that wonderfully follows Hollywood’s aliens-attack-the-Earth template, where aliens attack, humans fight back, and, against the odds, humans win. In 2014, he starred, with Emily Blunt, in Edge of Tomorrow,31 another film that follows the aliens-attack-the-Earth template. In director Doug Liman’s film, the audience is dropped into the middle of the alien invasion that is occurring on the Earth sometime in the recognizable future. Cage (Cruise) is an army media spokesperson, who is selling the plan that victory over the vicious fast-moving aliens is possible by using new mechanized body armor. Cruise’s character is a PR man for the military industrial complex, and he reeks of new car smell. Even the higher-ranked, veteran military men don’t like his attitude of privilege and condescension. Little does Cage know that the higher ups are sending him to the front line of the war, which is occurring on the northern coast of France, a la D-Day. Completely unprepared for active combat, Cage somehow manages to kill one of the aliens just before Cage himself is killed; however, it seems that Cage killed a special, Alpha alien and got it’s blood on him. This event triggers a time loop, and Cage relives the day over again and again and again. Eventually, he finds Rita (Blunt), “The Angel of Verdun,” who happened to have been previously caught in a loop, but Rita is now “out.” Fortunately, Cage is “in” and can keep repeating the loop until he figures out how to defeat the aliens. Although this task is a small group effort, Cage is the individual the plot, and the fate of humanity, hangs on to. Unlike Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day,32 where Phil (Murray) repeats the same day after falling asleep each night, for Cage, every time he dies the day repeats. The audience then watches Cage killed in training, killed on the battlefield, killed by Rita to get the loop started again when a problem occurs, killed seemingly an endless number of times. It appears Cage is unable to

30. War of the Worlds, directed by Steven Spielberg (2005; Universal City, CA: Dreamworks, 2005), DVD. 31. Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman (2014; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2014), DVD. 32. Groundhog Day, directed by Harold Ramis (1993; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2008), DVD.

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“actually” die. However, the way he is able to eventually save the world is by entering into a situation where he gets out of the time loop. Leaving the time loop, Cage is in a position to die. We see that there is actually nothing behind his looping identity, just as there is ultimately nothing behind Baudrillard’s simulacra. Cage reproduces his self until he achieves the desired product. It is not until he is removed from the “matrix” that the subject/object dynamic is returned in a fashion similar to The Matrix. Doesn’t Cage’s plight in Edge of Tomorrow highlight the position of the mediated “self ”? As we upload “our” likes and dislikes into the Internet, as we create profiles and avatars, and as we create an “existence” on the web, we run the risk of not being able to die or experience abjection, and possessing an awareness of death is one of the markers for being human. Humans die, and we face the abject. Profiles and avatars don’t! Your dead friends’ profiles are still active after death, and you are able to wish them a “Happy Birthday. R.I.P. /.” Your dead grandma’s email account is still active and getting spam from Nigerian princes. Miles Davis suggests jazz gigs on his Facebook feed. The matrix keeps them, and all of us, alive indefinitely. Could this be one of the reasons that death as a spectacle is becoming more common? Much like the cutter who meticulously slices into the dermis to feel alive, we have become so enmeshed in our mediation that our consciousness recognizes death as an impossibility. Yet, as we create the conditions for immortality, we yearn for death and abjection because death and borders are the only things that can tell us if we are alive or not. Tom Cruise can only save the Earth by making sure that everyone on it, including himself, can die! Doesn’t this mean that our mediated lives are ultimately pure selfishness? Selfish because they do not allow anyone to die. Our mediated lives allow no one to be human any more—because to be human is to die. And what has brought us to this most selfish of positions? Of course, it is the most selfish of all ideological systems; it is the system that Tom Cruise is selling at the beginning of Edge of Tomorrow—neoliberal, disaster capitalism. As the world is being destroyed, buying this particular biomech suit will save the day—and maybe help stock prices, too. Because when the aliens come, we will need an American hero to rise, to cut through our mediated existence, and to, hopefully, help us all die. There can be no doubt that when the alien invasion comes, it will create many issues and highlight those that already exist. Just ask Stephen Hawking, one of the most famous and well-respected scientists on the Earth. Stephen Hawking believes in aliens.33 Stephen Hawking believes that the aliens which humans would most likely encounter would be smarter and more

33. Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, Season 1, episode 1, “Aliens,” directed by Martin Williams, aired April 25, 2010, on the Discovery Channel, accessed December 29, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3AjUQJnhkI.

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technologically sophisticated than humans, and it would seem that pop culture generally shares Hawkins’s outlook. When the humanlike alien, Klaatu, steps off his ship in the classic sci-fi film, The Day the Earth Stood Still,34 his message to the people of the Earth is that they are not responsible enough to possess nuclear weapons. The advanced civilizations that Klaatu represents are worried about the Earth’s warlike disposition and threaten to eliminate the problem if humans cannot overcome their “strange, unreasoning ways.”35 The film can be read as an allegory for the aggressive posturing that was being acted out between countries during the Cold War. At a time when fear over nuclear annihilation was high, this film taps into those fears, only these aliens are not speaking Russian. In one scene, Klaatu, who has been walking through Washington, D.C. with Bobby, who lives at the same boarding house with his mother where Klaatu is also staying, joins a large crowd that has surrounded his spaceship and his robot companion, Gort. A reporter is asking people what they are afraid of, and the common response has to do with the alien invasion; however, when Klaatu is asked this question, he begins to respond, “I am fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason. In fact, I would…”36 At that moment, the reporter, sensing that Klaatu’s response will not fit into the narrative being constructed by the media, cuts him off and moves to the next frightened person ready to discuss their fear of aliens destroying the world. Obviously, sentiments like Klaatu’s about fear leading to unreasonableness could not be readily expressed in the United States of 1951, and it could be a condition that may still possess consequences. We may not have the same fears today, but rest assured those fears that are manufactured for us are following a predetermined narrative. We are willfully following it, also. What system was Klaatu, and the other civilizations he represented, antagonistic toward? The obvious and immediate answer is the belligerence between nations and ideologies that developed after the Second World War. For Klaatu, it is imperative to deliver his message to all the people of the world, but he cannot because of the “petty squabbles”37 in which the world is embroiled. As Klaatu attempts to get his message out, which “concerns the existence of every last creature who lives on Earth,”38 he meets with Professor Barnhardt, whom Bobby calls “the smartest man in the whole world.” Klaatu hopes that the professor can help him spread his message, since government leaders cannot come together for a meeting. Klaatu explains that the other planets know that humans have developed nuclear weapons and rockets to

34. The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by Robert Wise (1951; Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox, 2003), DVD. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid.

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transport those weapons. When the world fought with tanks and planes, the aliens sat back and watched; however, as nations developed the means to transport weapons of mass destruction into space, Klaatu tells Barnhardt that “you become a threat to the peace and security of other planets. That, of course, we cannot tolerate.” This intolerable Cold War posturing concerned the growth and further development of two discursively opposed economic/ political systems—capitalism and communism. For Klaatu, the Cold War and the potential for mutually assured destruction are “petty squabbles.” Klaatu’s message is stop fighting, stop being aggressive, stop threatening to destroy this world and possibly other worlds. If not, then Klaatu will be forced eliminate this petty place. In nuclear terms, this would be classified as a preemptive strike. However, we should not rest our critical analysis on Klaatu’s exoteric message. For The Day the Earth Stood Still goes beyond critiquing our bellicosity. This film is not driven by a large cast, and one couple that features prominently in the film are Bobby’s mother, Helen, and her serious love interest, Tom. The first time the audience meets Tom, he is picking up Helen for a date, but Helen has no babysitter for Bobby. Klaatu (calling himself Mr. Carpenter), who has just arrived at the boarding house, offers to watch Bobby. Helen is hesitant, but Tom convinces her that it would be alright. Tom really wants to spend some alone time with Helen. A bit later, we learn that Tom has proposed to Helen, but she is still thinking about it. Wanting an answer, Tom tells Helen, “The boss is leaving for Chicago tomorrow. If I could tell him I was getting married—with two dependents—.” She tells Tom that he is a good salesman, but he replies, “A good insurance salesman wouldn’t give you time to think about it.” Tom, as an insurance salesman, benefits from the status quo and also a fear of change to the status quo. In this scene, the audience is not presented with love as a motive for getting married but instead sees the motive as an opportunity for Tom to further his career and create a better economic position for himself. The next time we meet Tom, he is again at the boarding house to pick up Helen, and he appears to be jealous of Mr. Carpenter. His jealousy bothers Helen. Soon after, Klaatu is forced to reveal to Helen the truth of his identity and why he came to the Earth, and within her, he finds someone sympathetic to his mission. Helen is one of the few people who have not taken a reactionary and aggressive position vis-à-vis the spaceman.39 In the meantime, Tom accidently also discovers that Mr. Carpenter is the spaceman that the government has been hunting. Aware that Helen has been desperately trying to get in touch with him, Tom instead wants to contact the Pentagon to “find out who’s in charge of this space man business.” Helen manages to interrupt him and tell Tom that she knows Mr. Carpenter is the spaceman and that he is here to help the Earth. Tom wants to hear none of it.

39. Ibid.

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He tells Helen, “You realize what this’d mean for us? I’d be the biggest man in the country. I could write my own ticket.” Helen replies, “Is that what you’re thinking about?” Tom retorts to Helen’s disbelief: “Why not?” The film wants us to contrast Helen’s and Tom’s views concerning Klaatu and the role the aliens are playing. The film demands that the viewer examine his or her position on aliens and different ideologies in general. All sympathies reside with Helen and her empathic view toward Klaatu and his antimilitaristic and antiaggression principles. When Helen tells Tom that he needs to consider the fate of the world, Tom responds, “I don’t care about the rest of the world! You’ll feel different when you see my picture in the papers. … You wait and see. You’re going to marry a big hero!” At this, Helen runs away from Tom as his telephone connection to General Cutler, in charge of the alien hunt, goes through. Here we see that not only is the film asking us to reject aggressive militarism, but, the film goes a step further, asking the viewer to reject the cold individualism and greed, which go hand in hand with a militaristic attitude.40 In the climactic scene of the film, as Klaatu speaks to the crowd before he leaves the Earth, he tells the crowd, “There must be security for all—or no one is secure… This does not mean giving up any freedom except the freedom to act irresponsibly.” This should be read not simply as relating to physical security, but also economic and legal security. When Klaatu walked through Washington, D.C. with Bobby early in the film, he was particularly taken with the famous words of Lincoln inscribed at his monument: “—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Klaatu is responding to the altruism in Lincoln’s words that denote a world where all people have a say and all people benefit—a world antithetical to Tom’s view of getting his reward at the cost of the rest of the world. In the end, Klaatu warns the world about the hazards to come if individualism, greed, nationalism, and wars remain entrenched as a primary mode of thought. Finally, Klaatu states before entering his spaceship to leave, “We will be waiting for your answer, the decision rests with you.”41 Forty-five years after Klaatu warned the world about the dangers of war and the attitudes that give birth to war, the hit movie Independence Day,42 starring Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum, showcases the full strength of and exhilaration many viewers find in America’s war machine. Like The Day the Earth Stood Still, the film is thoroughly and firmly grounded in American culture and mores. It is so grounded in the US point of view that the establishing scene on the Earth’s moon shows a darkening American flag, as a shadow cast by a giant alien craft passes over it. The subliminal message is that the reach of

40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Independence Day, directed by Roland Emmerich (1996; Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox, 2013), DVD.

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the United States extends beyond the globe and that even the moon is part of the US sphere of influence. As the scene progresses, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute picks up strange signals from the moon, and the lead researcher declares, “This better not be another damn Russian spy job.” Although the film is set in the post–Berlin Wall era, the viewer is brought back into the old antagonisms that helped to drive the narrative of The Day the Earth Stood Still. The scene cuts to the president, and we learn from The McLaughlin Group, which is playing in the background, that President Whitmore, played by Bill Pullman, was a leader in the Gulf War and, as he is criticized by the generally left-of-center analyst, Morton Kondracke, that those Gulf War leadership skills are different from the skills one needs to hone in the world of politics. As the viewer begins to get glimpses of the aliens in other countries, the first two locations the viewer is sent is Northern Iraq, where traditionally garbed women watch the alien ships approach, and then the scene cuts to a US submarine in the Persian Gulf. Not only are the viewers being asked to relive distant Cold War antagonisms, but also Operation Desert Shield (although we know that war never took place). By foregrounding the alien attack in these terms, we are being asked to see the alien invasion as an attack on American values and interests, much like the ongoing war on terror. Independence Day follows the familiar aliens-attack-the-Earth template, with an emphasis on the US military’s attempts to deal with situation, which they do rather poorly. In order to understand what is really at stake in this film, we can look at President Whitmore’s rally speech as the film enters the climactic scene: Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in this history of mankind. Mankind—that word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the 4th of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom, not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution—but from annihilation. We’re fighting for our right to live, to exist. And should we win the day, the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice: We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!43 43. Ibid.

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The speech echoes President Kennedy’s famous “ask not what your country can do for you” speech, bluntly postulating that base level of survival is what brings people together, in spite of the ideological dichotomies the film positions the viewer in. The common interest is, as President Whitmore states, “our right to live, to exist.” The aliens have come to this world looking to exploit the Earth’s natural resources, “like locusts,” Whitmore says. However, although there is an attempt to create an altruistic humanism here, what we find ultimately at stake is an American way of life—a militaristic, patriarchal, neoliberal system that has left behind many, including the family of the Russell Casse (Randy Quaid), who plays the role of an alcoholic crop duster living in a rural trailer park who ultimately and altruistically ends the alien threat.44 When Independence Day premiered, the United States was in the midst of the neoliberal assent. As Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he campaigned on ending welfare as it had existed. In November 1993, Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law. Clinton was also responsible for signing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that created “incentives for states to build prisons and increase sentences.”45 Although Ronald Reagan is seen as the leading harbinger for neoliberal policies, Bill Clinton may have been the one to fully consummate the neoliberal agenda. As Gregory Albo states in his review of Michael Meeropol’s book Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution, “Clinton broke the back of the New Deal.”46 No wonder audiences cheered when the White House was explosively obliterated in Independence Day. In fact, director and writer Roland Emmerich had hoped that would occur and had to convince executives at Fox that since people were so fed up with US politics they would enjoy seeing the White House blown to smithereens.47 In Independence Day, the White House simply served as a metaphor for American politics-as-usual that sought to increase control of the government and economy in the hands of fewer and fewer people. American politics-as-usual has been one of the many reasons why the US government has yet to enact sweeping and meaningful regulations to control

44. Ibid. 45. Robert Farley, “Bill Clinton and the 1994 Crime Bill,” FactCheck.org, April 12, 2016, accessed October 29, 2016, http://www.factcheck.org/2016/04/bill-clinton-andthe-1994-crime-bill. 46. Gregory Albo, “Neoliberalism from Reagan to Clinton,” Monthly Review, 52, no. 11 (April 2001), accessed November 11, 2016, http://monthlyreview.org/2001/04/01/ neoliberalism-from-reagan-to-clinton. 47. Kelly Konda, “‘You Want to Blow Up the White House?’: An Oral History of the Film Independence Day,” We Minored in Film, April 28, 2015, accessed November 2016, https://weminoredinfilm.com/2015/04/28/you-want-to-blow-up-the-white-house-anoral-history-of-the-film-independence-day/.

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the growing threat climate change poses. By relinquishing its role as the Fourth Estate, the press and the mass media fuel unproductive debates about the causes of climate change. For now the question may even be larger than how the humans are affecting the climate; it may be more appropriate to ask how the humans have affected the Earth and to what extent. The International Commission on Stratigraphy, a major subgroup of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), has been more quietly, but no less heatedly, working toward changing the name of the current geologic age in which we find ourselves. Deriving from the Greek for “new” and old French for “whole,” the Holocene, our current age, is roughly 11,700 years old and encompasses most of human history. However, many geologists and geochronographers are arguing that we have entered a new geological age, an age, which according to Crutzen and Stroermer, who in the May 2000 issue of the Global Change Newsletter, produced by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, first argued for using this new term to “emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology.”48 The new term is “Anthropocene.” As the term gains more acceptance, the argument has begun shifting to where the line is drawn to mark the beginning of this new era. Corlett’s summary of this debate points to four possible beginning points for “the central role of mankind in geology and ecology” in the geological record: the Industrial Revolution, the nuclear age, 2000, or a date in the future.49 Crutzen and Stroermer favor the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as the starting date. They believe using the Industrial Revolution to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene is appropriate because since that time “the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable.”50 Another way to think about that date is not simply as the advent of the Industrial Revolution, but also that the Industrial Revolution marks the rapid development of industrial capitalism. The realities of this new industrial capitalism are what we find reflected in the uncompromising works of William Blake, the English Romantics, and Charles Dickens. Although some philosophers saw the organizing principle of industrial capitalism in a favorable light, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels were quick to call for the dissolution of what was becoming the dominant mode of production. In the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Marx and Engels write that “the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society” because “it is

48. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene’,” Global Change Newsletter, 41 (May 2000): 17, accessed March 15, 2016, http://www.igbp.net/download /18.316f18321323470177580001401/1376383088452/NL41.pdf. 49. Richard T. Corlett, “The Anthropocene Concept in Ecology and Conservation,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 30, no. 1 (January 2015): 36–41, accessed March 15, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2014.10.007. 50. Crutzen and Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene’,” 17.

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incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery.”51 The point they make was, and still is, compelling. They believed that the ruling class, so drunk on the wealth created by a system of exploitation and alienation, could no longer create a ground fertile for societal growth. The capitalist class was essentially unable to create an ecology that would provide sustenance for the type of humanism that Marx and Engels called for. In John Bellamy Foster’s book-length analysis of Marx’s materialistic view of nature, he writes, “The ‘universal pollution’ that, according to Marx, characterized the large industrial towns, was the living environment of the working class.”52 Marx recognized the deleterious impact industrial pollution caused for people, especially the working classes. Don’t we see a vivid depiction of this type of class-based pollution distributed among a population in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner?53 In the sprawl of 2019 Los Angeles, the workers and the poor are stuck on the ground where they are subjected to the exposure of incessant showers of acid rain. While the poor suffer down below, up in the skyscrapers, the wealthy are literally above the pollution that affects the rest of the world. So, although, the “environment,” as we have come to define it, was not the primary focus of Marx’s work, man in nature and man’s nature was indeed central to Marx’s thinking, and the environmental classism that affects areas like “Cancer Alley,” between Baton Rouge and New Orleans,54 make unfortunate sense using a Marxian analysis. As the futuristic fiction of Blade Runner becomes the contemporary reality, man’s effect on the Earth’s systems must be faced in multiple ways. In Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, he feels that “we’re going to need new ideas. We’re going to need new myths and new stories,”55 and “we need to learn to live with and through the end of our current civilization.”56 He calls for a “new conceptual understanding of reality.”57 One way to reconceptualize our understanding of reality is to recognize the reality of the effects we have created on the Earth. Industrial capitalism has created a new class of objects—massive objects occupying not only space,

51. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 483. 52. John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 110. 53. Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott (1982; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2004), DVD. 54. Trymaine Lee, “Cancer Alley: Big Industry, Big Problems: Clusters of Poverty and Sickness Shadow America’s Industrial South,” MSNBC.com, last modified June 8, 2015, accessed December 8, 2016. 55. Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2015), 19. 56. Ibid., 22. 57. Ibid., 19.

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but also time. Timothy Morton calls these “hyperobjects.” Hyperobjects are viscous, nonlocal, and “exhibit their effects interobjectively; that is they can be detected in a space that consist of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects.”58 Morton boldly states, “Hyperobjects are directly responsible for what I call the end of the world, rendering both denialism and apocalyptic environmentalism obsolete.”59 He asks us to meditate on the Styrofoam cup which held the $1 cup of fast-food coffee that gets casually tossed onto the roadside. Sitting there in the elements, it will take 500 years to degrade, if it ever does.60 The plutonium from spent nuclear fuel rods possesses a startling shelf life. The half-life of plutonium-2309 is 24,100 years,61 which is about four times as long as human ancestors have been “civilized.” The oldest pyramids are 4,000 years old, while Stonehenge is a little bit older still. The stunning cave paintings at Lascaux are approximately 20,000 years old. The entire record of human culture contains very little as old as how long human created plutonium will be around. Think about how different we were 24,000 years ago. How different will we be 24,000 years from now? To this list of hyperobjects, we could easily add capitalism. Morton states, almost rhetorically, “Perhaps economic relations compose hyperobjects.”62 For Morton, capitalism directly acts upon the world and creates objects that will act upon the world for longer than can be reasonably imagined. Morton sees the existence of these hyperobjects as forcing us to rethink our fundamental relationship with the world. This is another reason to forge a “new conceptual understanding of reality.”63 We have entered an age where the first hyperobject, capitalism, is confronted by its infernal spawn—other hyperobjects. We find ourselves in a position where the effects of climate change (numerous hyperobjects) are becoming problematic to and are interfering with the ability for capital to reproduce. Regardless of climate change’s primary cause, the question at hand is can capitalism save, not only itself from the disastrous effects it has created on the ecosystem, but can it save the Earth? First, let us look at a few of the proposed solutions that have been put forth as potential means to slow global warming, although business has yet to show

58. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1. 59. Ibid., 2. 60. “Measuring Biodegradability,” The University of Waikato, June 19, 2008, accessed November 13, 2016, http://sciencelearn.org.nz/Contexts/Enviro-imprints/LookingCloser/Measuring-biodegradability. 61. “Backgrounder on Plutonium,” United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, September, 2015, accessed October 22, 2016, https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doccollections/fact-sheets/plutonium.html. 62. Morton, Hyperobjects, 100. 63. Scranton, Learning to Die, 19.

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much interest in combating global warming and climate change. A quick look at the websites of some powerful business-oriented think tanks shows neoliberal capital’s attitude toward adapting itself to lessening the effects of climate change. The Hoover Institution, in their energy policy essay “A More Balanced Approach to Climate Change Policy,” states that “global-warming science should not be an opportunity to impose broader—and potentially irrelevant— political and social values through favored policy instruments.”64 The American Council for Capital Formation published a paper against renewing federal wind production tax credits.65 The American Petroleum Institute produced a paper, “Climate Change and Energy,” which asserts, “We don’t need government mandates for natural gas to make it [lowering emissions] happen.”66 The US Chamber of Commerce states in its Policy Priorities for 2016, subtitled “The Jobs, Growth, and Opportunity Agenda,” that they “oppose efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through existing environmental statutes, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act”67 and make sure that “any comprehensive legislative solution must not harm the economy.”68 Obviously, these groups are trying to protect narrow private sector interests, but large-scale market-based solutions have been proposed that would operate within the known realm of capitalist production. One technological solution proposed is carbon sequestration. This technology works by capturing carbon wastes and then pumping them deep underground. The emissions would not get a chance to enter the biosphere.69 Several industrial plants that capture carbon are coming online in Canada and Texas. However, capturing and reusing carbon is not inexpensive. The

64. Thomas F. Stephenson, “A More Balanced Approach to Climate Change Policy,” Hoover Institution (2014): 5, accessed October 2016, http://www.hoover.org/sites/ default/files/research/docs/stephenson_2014_etf_abalancedapproachtoclimatechange. pdf. 65. George David Banks, “Clean Power Plan Subsidies for Wind Reinforces Arguments Against Renewing the PTC,” American Council for Capital Formation, November 2015, accessed October 23, 2016, http://accf.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/REPORTWind-PTC-FINAL.pdf. 66. American Petroleum Institute, “Climate Change and Energy,” July 2015, accessed October 2016, http://www.api.org/~/media/Files/Policy/Environment/ClimateChange-and-Energy/CLIMATE-PRIMER.pdf, 10. 67. U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “U.S. Chamber Policy Priorities for 2016” (August 2016): 7, accessed January 2, 2017, https://www.uschamber.com/sites/default/ files/2016_policy_priorities_-_august_2016.pdf. 68. Ibid., 8. 69. Environmental Protection Agency, “Carbon Dioxide Capture and Sequestration,” United States Environmental Protection Agency, last modified August 9, 2016, accessed October 29, 2016. https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ccs/.

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one Canadian plant will cost approximately a billion dollars.70 One billion dollars is a lot of money, but this is an investment in providing a cleaner environment. As a point of comparison, a billion dollars would buy only seven of the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters that are being developed for the US military.71 Of course, what could possibly go wrong injecting millions of tons of toxic chemicals into the ground? The solution creates the template for another disaster. The most well-known policy solution to global warming is known as “cap and trade.” Featured in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, cap and trade creates a market for trading carbon allowances which are mandated to stay below a certain “cap.” Of course, mainstream capital and media like this system for it operates wholly within a system that both capital and the media understand. Yet, the conservative Hoover Institution does not like cap and trade, saying, “It is hard to argue that the cap-and-trade program has had a strong additional impact in reducing overall CO2 emission levels.”72 The general issue with market-based solutions, as summarized by Sharon Beder in the journal Environmental Politics, is that “far from being a neutral tool, the promotion of market-based instruments is viewed by many of its advocates as a way of restructuring the role of the market. They serve a political purpose in that they reinforce the role of the ‘free market’ at a time when environmentalism most threatens it.”73 Basically, we are asking the system that created the problems to provide a solution using the same faulty system. Capitalism is designed to create capital and profit for the owners of production; it is not designed to not create capital and profit for the owners of production. Of “sustainable capitalism,” Morton writes that it “might be one of those contradictions in terms along the lines of ‘military intelligence.’ Capital must keep on producing more of itself in order to continue to be itself. This strange paradox is fundamentally, structurally imbalanced.”74 Capitalism has no choice but to create the disasters it now faces—whether one acknowledges them at the level of the geological or at the level of the psychological. Yet, can’t we argue that the issue here is that if these solutions are viable on any level, can we afford to not utilize them? To understand the viability of market-based policies to control climate change, we must further

70. Daniel Gross, “The Coal Paradox,” Slate, October 13, 2014, accessed October 29, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/10/carbon_capture_ and_co2_how_north_american_companies_are_entering_a_low_carbon.html. 71. Zachary Cohen, “The F-35: Is the World’s Most Expensive Weapons Program Worth It?” CNN, July 16, 2015, accessed October 19, 2016, www.cnn.com/2015/07/16/ politics/f-35-jsf-operational-costs/. 72. Stephenson, “A More Balanced Approach,” 8. 73. Sharon Beder, “Neoliberal Think Tanks and Free Market Environmentalism,” Environmental Politics, 10, no. 2 (Summer 2001), accessed January 3, 2017, ResearchGate. 74. Morton, Hyperobjects, 111.

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analyze the “market” that is not only offering solutions, but that created the very problems it is trying to solve. Two contemporary theorists in particular get at the operating mechanisms not only of capitalism but also at the way we perceive the world. Timothy Morton feels we have necessarily come to a time when we need to shift how we perceive the world and radically include the objects within the world in our discussions of that world. This focus on the importance of objects as part of the conversation is known as object-orientated ontology (OOO). He sees all objects as existing within the “mesh.”75 To think about man without the objects surrounding man is fallacious. To see man as the top of a hierarchy and mere things at the bottom is incorrect. All living and nonliving things need to be considered in our “new conceptual understanding of reality.”76 Another thinker that can help us to see our “reality” in a different way is Jason Moore, at Binghamton University and the coordinator for the World-Ecology Research Network. In his Capitalism in the Web of Life,77 he recognizes an issue similar to Morton in which Moore relates to Cartesian duality allowing us to separate “man” from “Nature.” It is not hard to see then how this can give rise to Marx’s observations of the alienation of man in the capitalist system. Let us not forget that that alienation is expressed between man and other men, between man and the objects of his labor, and between man and nature. However, qua Moore, this separation between man and nature occurs because the Cartesian dualisms become readily manifest through capitalism. Thus, we must read capitalism as an embodiment of Cartesian dualism. For Moore, the reification of dualism paves the way for many of the issues embodied within capitalism as the ideological engine shaping reality. And, it is that dualistic conception of the world which allowed for capitalism’s virulent growth and its accompanying contradictions. Moore summarizes the dualistic view of capitalism and nature: “Capitalism—or if one prefers, modernity or industrial civilization—emerged out of Nature. It drew wealth from Nature. It disrupted, degraded, or defiled Nature. And now, or sometime very soon, Nature will exact its revenge. Catastrophe is coming. Collapse is on the horizon.”78 However, in spite of the ideological and concrete realities embodied in this type of thinking, this type of thinking is flawed and will only continue to hinder our ability to create the conditions necessary to come to grips with climate change, ecological degradation, and the diminishing resource frontier.

75. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14–15. 76. Scranton, Learning to Die, 19. 77. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015). 78. Ibid., 5.

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As Morton calls for us to embrace “ecological thought” with all beings and objects connected in the “mesh,” Moore calls for us to think of all within the “web of life” or the oikeios—“the creative, generative, and multi-layered relation of species and environment.”79 Thinking in this way opens up new analytic tools that allow us to see not only capitalism affecting nature, but also nature affecting capitalism. Morton states that “letting go of what constitutes a self has become necessary because of hyperobjects.”80 We are offered a way to resist Cartesian duality in order to come to a greater understanding of the mechanisms at play within the various ecological and humanistic disasters that are looming upon the horizon. Cartesian duality helps us to create individualism, which feeds on and is fed by capitalism itself—alienation from the biosphere and all in it—alienation from the oikeios. This also gives rise to the notion that nature exists separate from man and that man is ontologically superior to nature. Thus, nature is something to be appropriated in the service of man/capitalism. And not just nature, but as Moore calls it throughout his book, “Cheap Nature.”81 Our constant movement toward frontiers searching for cheap nature and market opportunities also has driven capitalism since its inception in the fifteenth century. Cheap nature has allowed capitalism to deal with cheap waste easily; however, as new market frontiers become rare, cheap nature has become not-so-cheap nature and cheap waste, not only not-so-cheap. Consequently, waste has become more hazardous, affecting larger and larger ecological structures, and capitalism itself seems to be at a crisis point. The question we must ask, then, is this another crisis, like the others that capitalism has overcome before or is this an epoch-ending crisis? Can capitalism save the world? What if capitalism cannot save the world, or itself? What next? Will we be around to even see this apocalyptic scene unfold? Capitalism, thus far, in its own terms, has been adequate at causing, preventing, repairing, and profiting from disasters. Pop culture has not provided sufficient narratives of emancipation. Life beyond capitalism is grim. In 2010, a cinematic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 The Road illustrates a monochromatic and lifeless landscape following a cataclysmic event. Starvation and tribes of cannibals are a daily threat for the unnamed father and preteen son. At the conclusion, the father dies of a lung illness in addition to an arrow wound to his leg. In the film’s final scene, the orphaned son is approached by a family that looks to be in the same state of extreme distress as he and his father had been. Nevertheless, the boy joins their family. A modicum of hope, however, is difficult to tease from this ending.82 In 2013, Snowpiercer, 79. Ibid, 4. 80. Morton, Hyperobjects, 123. 81. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life. 82. The Road, directed by John Hillcoat (2009; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2010), DVD.

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based on the 1980s French graphic novel series Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette, offers even less. After the world has been cast into an ice age due to a failed attempt at engineering the global climate, a train circumnavigates human beings. The train is segregated into caste layers from front to back. When a revolt occurs, they explode the train, and two young children, seemingly the only survivors, crawl from the wreckage into the white surroundings.83 At least with the caste system created within capitalism, people live! It would seem that as capitalism goes, so do we. Even a zombie apocalypse, as a complete fiction, highlights postcapitalist issues. In 2009, Zombieland, with its satire on scarcity economics via a character’s mission for Twinkies, shows us how great the world would be if one could have access to every car, every weapon, every dwelling, or every gift shop.84 However, as a satire, Tallahassee’s maniacal drive to find the last Twinkies illustrates the ludicrous relationship between value and supply. But the zombie’s popularity in the Post-Millennium has shown no bounds. Yes, the zombie figure is a critique of late capitalism, and one need only to stand from a distance outside a Walmart on a Friday after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, to witness hordes of shoppers clawing for electronics and high-demand toys. The zombie is also our conscious—a ghoulish echo reminding us of our past indiscretions, mistakes, and flaws—in which we need to build a wall to keep at bay. By far the most successful zombie apocalypse is the AMC television series The Walking Dead.85 Based on the graphic novels of Robert Kirkman, the series began in 2010, and, as of 2016, the season seven’s opening episode attracted over twenty-two million viewers.86 The Walking Dead is nothing short of a franchise for AMC with sales of the DVDs, merchandise, and a prequel series spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead. Unlike prior zombie apocalyptic narratives in film and literature, The Walking Dead has legs, if not a brain. The series has seven seasons, with season and mid-season premieres, and no indication that it will terminate any time soon. Kirkman is still writing the graphic novels that feed the television series. This narrative strategy and trajectory provides viewers with brand recognition. Although a discussion about zombie symbolism proves reflective of our culture, and The Walking Dead is not an exception to this analysis, a question arises: Are humans any different in the zombie apocalypse? In other words,

83. Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon-ho (2013; New York: Dimension Films, 2014), DVD. 84. Zombieland, directed by Ruben Fleischer (2009; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2010), DVD. 85. The Walking Dead, created by Robert Kirkman (2010; New York: AMC Networks, 2010–2017), DVD. 86. Brandon Katz, “Why Is ‘The Walking Dead’ Dying in the Ratings?” Forbes, November 11, 2016, accessed December 18, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ brandonkatz/2016/11/11/why-is-the-walking-dead-dying-in-the-ratings/#73a6c3493ecc.

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in addition to analyzing zombie symbolism, what do the humans in zombie narratives symbolize? In terms of the series’ content, the zombie apocalypse is a postcapitalism America, the Atlanta, Georgia, region specifically, and just as the landscapes of the apocalypses noted above, the situation is unkind to humans. From the beginning episode, “Days Gone By,” the protagonist Rick Grimes awakens in a hospital bed after suffering a gunshot wound in the line of police duty—a situation that typically leads to an officer receiving a commendation upon his recovery. The hospital, however, is completely abandoned, and he wanders back to his home. His wife and son are absent from his ransacked house and neighborhood. He dons his uniform, but viewers find out soon that all of the comforting capitalistic institutions have fallen: healthcare, police, and commerce.87 According to Gary Mullen, The Walking Dead presents us with a graveyard of icons. The police cruiser of protagonist, Deputy Rick Grimes, comes to a halt at an intersection strewn with overturned and scorched vehicles. He continues on foot, empty gas can in hand, toward a service station packed with abandoned cars and tents. As he surveys the debris of the desolate camp, children’s toys (stuffed animals and a scooter) stand out, along with the decaying corpses of drivers still frozen behind the wheel. Rick is stirred by the sound of shuffling feet. He drops to looking underneath one of the cars to see two little bunnyslipper clad feet stepping slowly and a small hand reaching down to pick up a tattered teddy-bear. Rick rounds the car to address the little girl as she shuffles listlessly away from him. “Little girl, it’s OK. I’m a police officer. Little girl, don’t be afraid.” She turns to face him, and we see her lacerated, mangled face and opaque, undead eyes as she lets out a moan as she shuffles rapidly toward Rick. We see the anguish in Rick’s face as he looks down the barrel of his gun toward the girl and pulls the trigger.88

The Symbolic Order and its physical manifestations are shattered, and for Rick, his subjectivity is in suspension. He recognizes the threat to himself, but the threat is evolving out of something that symbolically does not typically represent a threat: an innocent child. But by the end of the first season, Rick has found his wife Lori and his son Carl, who have been staying with a small group of survivors combating the zombies, which they call “walkers.” He has found a familiar aspect of the Symbolic in which to anchor himself in spite of the abject presence of walkers. Soon thereafter, viewers find out that Rick’s

87. AMC, “Days Gone By,” The Walking Dead, directed by Frank Darabont (2010; New York: AMC Networks, 2010), television. 88. Gary Mullen, “Adorno, Žižek, and the Zombie: Representing Mortality in an Age of Mass Killing,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 13, no. 2 (2014): 48, accessed December 19, 2016, http://www.jcrt.org/archives/13.2/index.shtml.

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wife Lori is pregnant, and everyone wonders what kind of world this baby will be born into. In the second season, Rick’s group finds a small farm that is run by Hershel in an agrarian manner. Here, we see a fulfillment of the pure abject nature of the dynamic between humans and walkers. The walkers’ liminal role is disturbing on a physical level and on an abstract level. Walkers are us in human form, yet they are not us in living form; walkers need us, yet they devour us. Rick and his group have ordered their relationship to walkers, but the agrarian community still holds faith in God for a cure or faith that there is something inside the walkers still human. However, by end of the second season, Hershel’s group and all the characters experience abjection with the walkers, and the characters reestablish their subjective relationship to the walkers/Other. They no longer see the walkers in a liminal role. Walkers are dead. Walkers are no longer human. Walkers must be destroyed: “The border has become the object.”89 All the way up to season seven, capitalism appears to have died. However, as the series progresses, Rick and his group find themselves and create for themselves various forms of communal living, such as the agrarian situation they found themselves in at the farm. Hershel’s farm becomes overrun by walkers, and the group evacuates. They find an abandoned prison, clear it of walkers, and plan on staying indefinitely with a strategy of producing their sustenance within the prison walls. Rick, who has become a totalitarian leader and mentally unstable due to the death of Lori during labor (the baby girl survives), secedes his position, and the group moves toward democracy. Nonetheless, a rival totalitarian group run by The Governor combats Rick’s group, and the series begins to elucidate a progression of political structures. Rick and his group’s efforts at democracy are fruitless under the duress of warfare, and The Walking Dead, in the absence of capitalism, reveals nonprofit motives. Although rival groups are hording goods, the motives are survival (nutritional need) and safety (weapons need), but a shift occurs in the later seasons, six and seven, to a system approaching feudalism. The walkers remain a perpetual threat, but this commination becomes secondary to the other human survivors in the zombie apocalypse. Rick and his group evolve in their ability to efficiently and safely deal with walkers, but The Walking Dead illustrates that perhaps the motive of profit—capitalism—is what actually keeps the social order rather polite and subjectivity anchored. Instead, as Philip L. Simpson notes, Competing for rare safe zones and limited resources, the human survivors have to various degrees “tribalized”—that is, they have entered into surrogate familial relationships with those people with who they have endured the

89. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

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initial stages of the zombie apocalypse and routinely mistrust or fear those whom they now encounter as dangerous “Others” who threaten to take away their precarious hold on existence.90

So, in absence of capitalism and its profit motive, the humans in The Walking Dead seem to be reverting back to a subject/Other dynamic. In lieu of the capitalistic nation-state, “The spectacle zombie’s decayed and/or mutilated body, multiplied ad infinitum in the walker ‘herds’ haunting the depopulated landscape, reinforces the point that the American body politic is in some fundamental way diseased, brought down by metastatic corruption literalized on the wretched bodies of the walking corpses.”91 And despite the fact that human survivors are bolstered subjectively by the walker’s abject function, the postcapitalist human does not find much in the way of symbolism. At the end of the first season, Rick and his group migrate to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, where one of the researchers, Dr. Jenner, whispers something to Rick before dying: all humans carry the disease inside. No bite is necessary to be reanimated into a walker. One only needs to die. Once again, the liminal relationship between zombie and human is compromised, and as Kristeva writes, “There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.”92 And on the symbolic level, “the seemingly self-evident line between the quick and the dead is actually quite indistinct,” according to Simpson.93 The interpretation of both physical and symbolic qualities of The Walking Dead survivors should be tied to its preapocalyptic capitalism, where the borders distinguished themselves through the spectacle of abjection in pop culture. The Road, Snowpiercer, and The Walking Dead all portray what is perhaps the highest form of abjection: cannibalism. The living eating the living. These behaviors collapse and explode the physical and symbolic elements of abjection that link capitalism’s pre- and postapocalyptic ethos. Thinking outside of capitalism is impossible for survivors of any apocalyptic disaster. For this could be the problem, as well, with America’s real disasters—a fear of losing capitalism because it is through capitalism that we define for ourselves, our selfs. In pop culture, of course, we should be around to see the end of disaster capitalism, around to live it, and around to interpret it. One could also argue that we are indeed, in real life, living the end now, and we are failing to see

90. Philip L. Simpson, “Sects and Violence: The Allegory of Sectarian Conflict in AMC’s Zombie Apocalypse,” in The Walking Dead Live! Essays on the Television Show, ed. Philip L. Simpson and Marcus Mallard (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016), 166. 91. Ibid., 167. 92. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 93. Simpson, “Sects and Violence,” 167.

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it, much less interpret it. A nugatory, tautological, and purposeless apothegm used in America today encompasses this myopia: “It is what it is.” Social media, with perpetual simulations of our profile selfs continuing without us into the future, can only prevent us from abject experiences with disasters and trauma. Social media, the great evolution of capitalism, cast subtly into the virtual, digital, and discursive. We will not see the apocalypse because we will be filming it to upload for other profile selfs and their social media feeds on Facebook’s Safety Check. We will be looking to the sky not in prayer, but instead for Internet access beaming down from a solar-powered angel. In terms of technological progress, simulations of reality, as Baudrillard claims, prevents events from happening for us. Social media is the latest step, but as we have argued, this step is away from our selves. This walk is merely footprints without a feet. The disastrous situations we encounter are losing the potential to affect us traumatically. The experiences are diminished, if not extinguished. In American culture, every spectacular disaster event has not been unmanageable for us and for capitalism. Difficult to stomach, sure. Tragic enough to contribute our money, yes. Spectacular, of course. Narrative worthy and business worthy, always. However, in the fantasy and wish fulfillment of pop culture, what has been given to us to be able to imagine what an end will look like outside of capitalism? In alien movies, our economic, political, and social structures rescue themselves. In pandemic narratives, more of the same and science undoes its follies. In natural disasters, we return to our ways of life, grateful, hopeful, and resourceful. We do not find many examples of postcapitalistic existence, and when we do, capitalistic discourse dominates: scarcity economics, human capital, private ownership. By the end of these narratives, the audience can only stand and exhale a sigh of relief: it could be worse. Pop culture, and us as consumers of pop culture, have difficulty imagining a postcapitalist landscape because we know no Other to capitalism. Postapocalypse is postcapitalism, which means we are in the apocalypse now. What pop culture models do we see? Zombieland satirizes our puerile demands through quests for Twinkies and amusement park rides at Pacific Playland attempting to recover the exhausted sources of capitalistic pleasure, but the movie fails to offer emancipation for subjectivity, for a self. Look again at The Road, Snowpiercer, and The Walking Dead. Although all of these do contain the image of cannibalism, The Road and Snowpiercer leave us with children who will have no memory of capitalist culture if, as we should hope, they survive. Likewise, the continuing narrative of The Walking Dead delivers us a newborn baby girl, Judith, who has survived thus far into season seven, but does The Walking Dead deliver us a world we would want anyone to be delivered into? In The Parallax View, Žižek offers an extended reading of The Matrix trilogy. He criticizes the last film, The Matrix Reloaded, by saying that had film been successful, “it would have to produce nothing less that the appropriate answer to the dilemmas of revolutionary

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politics today, a blueprint for the political act the Left is desperately looking for.”94 However, Žižek must see the folly in any work of art living up to such an impossible aesthetic. For he continues, “No wonder, then, that it failed miserably—and this failure provides a nice case for a Marxist analysis: the narrative failure, the impossibility of constructing a ‘good story,’ which indicates a more fundamental social failure.”95 This could be why it was a pop culture smash. At this moment, we are trapped with a pop culture that cannot foresee anything other than that which will destroy it. Pop culture is not providing a narrative away from the neoliberal tunnel. Where is the line of flight? Conceivably, we are at the limit of our narrative imaginations— the limit of our selfhood (if we still have it)—against the hyperobject of capitalism. As it is now, all we have in which to look forward are infants and adolescents forging and scratching into the barren, the monochromatic, the hungry—the only imaginable.

94. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 315. 95. Ibid.

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INDEX abject 142, 144, 145, 154, 168–71 Fight Club 144, 145, 147 Walking Dead, The 168–70 abjection 142–4, 146, 148, 154, 169, 170 Fight Club 144, 146, 148 Walking Dead, The 169, 170 absence 40, 41, 56, 58, 111, 144, 169, 170 earthquake 41, 56, 58 accident 4, 7, 34–8, 42, 58, 59, 64 Massumi, Brian 7 Virilio, Paul 34–6 Acts of God: the Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America 3 advertisements 3, 95, 108, 112, 116 Aeolian process 21 Africa 80, 85 African Americans 65, 105, 124, 146 agency 4, 18, 38, 151 agenda 71, 81, 82, 85, 92, 96, 159, 163 agrarian community 169 agriculture 21, 35 Alabama 1, 113 Alaska 53 alien 13, 153–9, 171 Allende, Salvador 75 Al-Qaeda 71, 73, 74, 77, 79–82 ambiguity 19, 31, 142 AMC 167 America 17, 19, 30, 35, 40, 47, 70 in the 1920s 40 in the 1970s 17 bin-Laden’s “Letter to America” 73, 77 disaster discourse 47 and post-capitalism 170–1 American body politic 93, 170 American business 9 American capitalism 83, 114

American dream 37, 38 American ideology 70, 84 American values 71, 81, 82, 158 Anatomy of Power 77 Anderson, Alison 5 annihilation 155, 158 Anthropocene 160 apocalypse 13, 167–71 zombie 13, 167–70 Arab League 87 Army Corps of Engineers 2, 66, 102 Asia 80, 85, 108 assault on capitalism 83 Atlantic Ocean 3, 19, 35, 114, 125 atmosphere 96, 125 Auschwitz 28, 29 autobiography 28, 141 Bailey, Blake 110 bailouts 108 Baker, James 87 banking crisis 83 banking industry, deregulation 83 banking system 84 Baseball 23, 31 Baton Rouge 97, 115, 161 Baudrillard, Jean 69, 82, 84, 85, 117, 141, 150, 154, 171, 173 Gulf War 92–6 and hurricane Katrina 98–112 September 11 70, 77–81 Bearss, Ed 24 Beasts of the Southern Wild 132 Beder, Sharon 164 Bigelow, Katheryn 75 Biguenet, John 110 bin Laden 71, 73, 74, 77, 79, 80, 83 biosphere 163, 166 Black Friday 167

188 Black Sunday 33 Black’s Law Dictionary 4 Blair, Tony 68 Blanco, Kathleen 114, 118 blizzard 45, 53, 116, 117 bodies 150, 152, 170 border 142–5, 152, 169, 170 Borges, Jorge Luis 94 Boston Marathon bombings 8 Boston Strong 8 bourgeoisie 160 Brazile, Donna 91, 174 breach 65, 98, 102, 105 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 89, 176 broadcast 23, 37, 55, 58, 93, 96, 98 Brumfield, Africa 103–7, 176 Burke, Kieran 138 Burns, Ken 12, 19–25, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 117 Bush, George 70–4, 81, 85, 88, 89, 92, 114, 118 business class 51 business leaders 51, 74 business owners 65, 100, 112 business policy 75 by-product 66 California 12, 18, 37, 56 California Earthquake Authority 56 canal 6, 105 cannibalism 166, 170, 171 Cantore, Jim 113 cap-and-trade 164 capital 50–2, 82, 84, 103, 108–12, 146, 162–4, 171 capitalism 3, 5, 10–13, 35, 36, 50, 66, 76, 95, 97, 108, 112, 114, 117, 154, 156, 160–72 Fight Club 144, 149 Friedman, Milton 75 Great Gatsby, The 16, 19 Iraq 111 Matrix, The 150–2, 171 natural disaster 7–9 postcapitalism 171 September 11 78, 79, 82–4 sustainable 164

Index carbon 11, 163, 164 Cartesian duality 165–6 catastrophe 4, 9, 12, 19, 35, 124, 134, 165 CBS Money Watch 83 CBS news 83 CentCom 71 Chamber of Commerce 163 Charlotte, North Carolina 124 Cheney, Dick 81, 89 Chicago 73 Chicago Fire, the 52 children’s books 12, 39, 42–53, 59, 60, 64 Chile 76 China 72 Chomsky, Noam September 11 71–3, 83 Civil War 22–4, 31, 39 class 8, 19, 37, 51, 160, 161 classism 161 Clayton, Jack 16 climate change 10, 11, 13, 33, 36, 67, 130, 141, 160, 162–5 Climate Prediction Center 115 Clinton, Bill 81, 159 CNN 55, 59, 60, 78, 89, 90, 95–7, 114–15 Cobain, Kurt 146 code 32, 136, 137 cold war 5, 68, 155, 156, 158 Colorado 149 Columbine 149 comic 109 commercial interests 31, 33, 116 communism 5, 72, 82, 156, 160 compensation for 9/11 victims 27 computer models 90, 113 computer simulation 101, 150 Congress 66, 72 consumer culture Fight Club 145 consumer goods 16 consumers 92, 97, 108, 111, 136, 171 Coppola, Francis Ford 16 copyrighting 116 Corlett, Richard T. 160 corporate profits 9, 66 corporate terrorism 143, 149 corporations 10, 47, 50, 83, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114

Index corpses 142, 168, 170 counter-terrorism 75 creative destruction 50 crime control and law enforcement act 159 crowdsource 124 Cruise, Tom 153, 154 cruise missiles 89 cultural discourse 2 cultural elite 146 cultural fears 13 cultural hysteria 149 cultural mourning 43 cultural values 73 Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, The 47 Culture of Inequality 8 Davis, Miles 30, 154 Dawson, Scott 45 Dean, Sarah 139 death content, children’s books 42, 43, 46 death threats 145 Debord, Guy 108 debris 1, 106, 136 decay 142 decoupling, death and natural disaster 43 decoupling, earthquake and fires 49 Delta region 102 democracy 169 Derrida, Jacques 136–8 destruction 8, 57, 65, 105, 111, 121, 145 of nature 107 dialectic 77, 82 DiCaprio, Leonardo 16, 17, 37 dichotomy 3 digitization of disaster 13 digitization of humans 152 digitization of our selves 149 digitized content 28 digitized media 117 disaster capitalism 9, 13, 50, 66, 84, 112, 154, 170 disaster culture 8 disaster discourse 36, 44, 47–50, 56–64, 117 disaster event 22, 25–37, 44–64, 100, 119, 120, 125, 126, 133–42, 171 naming of 116

189

disaster film 130, 133, 137–8, 150 disaster genre 153 disaster narrative 25–6, 44, 53, 58–9, 64, 116, 122 disaster victims 123 discourse 26, 28, 45–53, 60–4, 97, 103, 108, 109, 143–9 Disney World 74 displaced 50, 60, 63 docudrama 103 docufiction 134 documentary film 19, 20, 25, 27, 30, 33, 71, 103, 106, 135–8 documentary genres 136 domestic civic unrest 37 domestic oil 35 domestic terrorism 149 Donahue, Deirdre 37 donations 27, 36 doomsday 2, 149 Doomsday Preppers 125 drones, Facebook 123, 124 drought 17–21, 31–5, 117 drought monitor map 37 dualism 165 Durden, Tyler 143–9, 151 dust bowl 6, 11, 12, 19–36, 116, 117, 126 Dust Bowl, The 12, 21–36 dust storms 19–21, 25–7 “Dutch Perspective” 66–7 dystopia 112, 150 earth 18, 19, 25, 160–2 earthquake 1–3, 6, 11, 12, 39–63, 84 East Coast 10, 19, 56, 121, 125 East Village 134 ecological disaster 19, 20, 22, 26, 37 Ecological Thought, The 4, 8, 166 ecology 20, 21, 160, 161 ecology of fear 9 economic disaster 19 economic downturn 17, 85 economic imperialism 73 economic inequality 38 economic meltdown 69, 83, 108 economic oppression 8 economic order 6 economic policies, American 73, 75

190

Index

economic progress 36, 37 economics 10, 11, 19, 20, 66, 75, 112, 137, 159, 163 economic systems 47, 112 ecosystem 25, 162 Edelstein, Neal 134 Edgerton, Gary 22 Egan, Timothy 24, 25, 29, 30 ego 132, 138, 148 ego-ideal 143 Ekstrom, Anders 100 elderly 61, 118, 119 emergency preparedness 59 emissions 10, 11, 163, 164 emotional archeology 23 “emotional glue” 23–6 emotional response 42, 43 Engelhardt, Tom 92, 96 Engels, Friedrich 160, 161 entertainment 37, 39, 51, 92, 96 environment 5, 10, 18, 19, 33, 161, 164, 166 environmentalism 162, 164 erosion 21, 67 Escambia Bay 1 ethics 123, 131 Europe 17, 96, 135 evacuation 90, 98, 99, 118, 121 evacuees 60–2 event 5, 6, 11, 19, 22, 23, 25, 29, 31–3, 36, 47, 55, 89–102, 109, 111, 115, 116, 125, 135, 171 Event 67, 69, 71, 85 September 11 as 69–85 exploitation 66, 71, 112, 159, 161 Facebook 75, 95, 119–24, 136, 154 faction 25 Fahrenheit 9/11 71, 176 farmers 19, 25, 34 farming 6, 18, 20, 21, 31, 32, 35 fascism 72 Faulkner, William 22 federal 6, 11, 59, 66, 100, 101, 163 Federal Bureau of Investigation 68 Federal Emergency Management Agency 62, 99, 101, 114, 122, 176 federal levees 3, 98 feudalism 169

Fight Club 57, 143–9, 152, 153 filmmakers 13, 138, 139, 141 firefighters 134–6 fires 3, 11, 12, 41, 43–7, 49–52, 55–9, 62, 135, 136, 138 first-hand 28, 58, 98, 127, 131, 132 Fisher, Mark 84 flood Kentucky 8 Missouri 3,4 New Orleans 66–115 Florida 1, 6, 74, 90, 118 Fonda, Henry 17, 20 Foote, Shelby 24 foreign policy 77 Foucault, Michel 47–9, 60, 61 Frankenstorm 32, 125, 126 freedom 5, 73, 74, 76, 147, 151, 157, 158 French Quarter 65, 104 Friedman, Milton 75, 76, 111 Frontline 1 Fukushima dai-ichi 1, 107 fundamentalism 84 Galbraith, Kenneth 77, 79, 81, 82 Garcon Point 1 Gates, Bill 10 gender 7, 8 genre 25–8, 40, 57, 129–38, 143, 153 Gentilly 114 geoengineering 10 Georgia 77, 168 Glaspie, April 87 global 9, 17, 36, 50, 69–71, 77, 78, 80, 81, 84, 89, 111, 123, 124, 130, 134, 150, 160, 167 global economy 10, 19, 69, 83, 108 globalization 71, 73, 77, 79 global warming 7, 10, 11, 129, 130, 163, 164 deniers 129, 130 Google 23, 44, 91, 107 Gore, Al 164 government 5–7, 12, 20, 27, 45, 52, 59, 65, 71, 78, 92, 103, 130, 155–7, 159, 163 Grapes of Wrath, The 17–20, 26, 36 graphic novel 109, 110, 167

Index Great Gatsby, The 15–19, 37, 38 greed 19, 24, 83, 157 greenhouse gases 10, 11, 163 Gulf Coast 1, 2, 62, 91, 101, 104–6, 113, 114 Gulf of Mexico 10, 90, 102, 107, 115, 118 Gulfport 113, 114 Gulf War 91–9, 103, 158, 176 Haiti 1, 61 Hannibal, Missouri 3 hashtag 119, 124, 136 Hawking, Stephen 154 hegemony 70, 82, 84, 103, 108 heterotopic space 144, 148 Hill & Knowlton 88 historian 23, 24 historical context 40, 41 historical event 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 33 historical fiction 45 historical marker 16 historical reality 22, 23, 32 historiography 22, 28, 30 history 22–4, 29–30, 34–9, 47, 87–93, 102, 160 Hitler, Adolph 88, 89 Hollywood 20, 74, 106, 126–32 Hollywood Reporter, The 36 holocene 160 homelessness 1, 62, 76, 118 Hoover Institution 163 Huffington Post, The 11, 56 Human Immunodeficiency Virus 146 humanism 159, 161 humanity 138, 149, 152, 153 humans 3, 5, 27, 138, 150–5, 160, 167–70 Hupp, Julie M. 42, 43 hurricane 32, 84, 91, 99, 115, 116, 119 hurricane Gustav 2 hurricane Isaac 2 hurricane Ivan 1, 108 hurricane Katrina 1–3, 6, 8, 12, 13, 27, 28, 32, 34–6, 45, 56, 59–63, 65–7, 90–2, 97–112 as reality TV 132–3 Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City 100, 107 hurricane Pam 99–101, 103, 105

191

hurricane Rita 1, 121 hurricane Sandy. See Superstorm Sandy Hussein, Saddam 80, 81, 87–9 hypermediated 13, 139, 141 hyperobjects 7, 162, 166, 172 hyperreality 96 hypnotized 135 hypothetical 2, 55, 118, 119 hysteria 149 icon 27, 57, 65, 146, 168 ideal 30, 148 ideal ego 148 idealism 5, 15, 17 identity 8, 59, 144, 146, 147, 154, 156 ideology 50, 70, 81, 84, 90, 107–11 shaping reality 165 If You Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake 39–42, 44–6, 49, 53 image 2, 27, 55, 57, 78, 84, 90 and Baudrillard, Jean 94–112 imagery 18, 94 imaginary 22 imperialism 51, 73 incarceration 76 individualism 157, 166 industrial capitalism 16, 160, 161 Industrial Revolution 160 inequality 38 information dispersion 56, 58 information technology 13, 40, 118, 119, 124 infrastructure 50, 52, 119, 122 Instagram 119, 124 institutions 31, 48, 76, 116, 123, 145, 148, 168 insurance 36, 51, 71, 156 intellectual property 116 International Commission on Stratigraphy 160 International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme 160 internet 40, 64, 95, 113, 121–5, 135, 154, 171 interobjectively 162 invagination 137 iPhone 131, 135

192

Index

Iran 88 Iraq 68, 70, 72, 80, 81, 87–9, 95, 108, 111, 158 irony 18, 110, 136 irrigation 20, 34, 35 irruption 56, 59 Islam 73 Israeli 92 I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906 45, 46, 50, 53, 54 Japan 1, 2, 45, 72, 96 jazz 30, 31, 154 Jefferson Parish 104 Joads, the 17–20, 25, 37 Joplin 27 journalist 24, 31, 50, 93, 105, 106 Kagan, Robert 80 Kardashians 122, 125 Katrina. See hurricane Katrina Katrina fatigue 91, 104 Kentucky 8 kernel 30, 152 Kirkman, Robert 167 Kissinger, Henry 92 Klein, Naomi 50, 66, 75, 76, 84, 111, 112 Kondracke, Morton 158 Koppel, Ted 55, 57 Kosovo 61 Kristeva, Julia 141–52, 169, 170 Kristol, William 80 Kuwait 87, 88, 96 Kverndokk 100 K-Ville 133 labeling 4, 30, 31, 34, 117, 136 labor 18, 26, 37, 51, 122, 165, 169 laboratories 10, 49 Lacan, Jacques 69, 141–3 laissez-faire 90 Lakefront 114 language 4, 12, 23, 32, 36, 85, 92, 125, 142 and hurricane Pam 101 and San Francisco earthquakes 45–62 Lascaux Cave 162 “Law of Genre” 136–8

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene 161 Ledes, Richard 134–8, 141 Lee, Spike 65, 71, 109, 133 lens 71, 98, 106, 110 Lessons from the Dust Bowl 21, 22 Letelier, Orlando 75, 76 levees 2, 3, 6, 59, 65, 66, 90, 91, 98, 99, 102, 103, 105, 109, 113, 115, 124 Levi, Primo 28, 29 Levine, Ellen 39, 42–4, 60, 62, 63 Lewis, Micahael 8 Libération 92, 95, 96 Liman, Doug 153 liminal 142, 143, 145, 169, 170 in Fitzgerald and Steinbeck 15–19 linguistic 49, 61, 62 literature 11, 20, 22, 47, 52, 59, 142, 167 live broadcast 40, 58, 63, 92, 97, 114 Lofstead, Jarret 111 Loma Prieta Earthquake 12, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63 Longo, Joe 110 looting 62, 63, 98, 114, 123 Louisiana 67, 90, 100, 101, 113, 115, 120, 125, 132 Luhrmann, Baz 16 machine 16, 83, 150–2, 157 madmen 77 Maestri, Walter 101, 103, 104 magnitude 36, 39, 46 mainstream 65, 109, 111, 153, 164 mainstream media 60, 62, 92, 93, 109, 110 Manhattan 32, 120 “Manifesto of the Communist Party” 160, 161 manipulation 88, 90, 103, 108 mankind 158, 160 manmade 7, 20, 29, 53, 65, 66, 102 manufacture 5, 16, 50, 92, 112, 155 Marcavage, Michael 4 Marx, Karl 160, 161, 165, 172 Maryland 102, 125 masculinity 143, 146, 147, 151 masking 8, 36, 98, 142 Massumi, Brian 6, 7 master signifier 69, 79

Index materialism 143 materiality 47, 49 Matrix, The 108, 150–4, 171 McCarver, Tim 55 McKinneysberg 8 meaning 29, 32, 47, 49–59, 69, 94, 99, 101, 102, 107–10, 126, 136 meaning making 27 mechanisms 48, 83, 165, 166 media 32, 43, 112, 114–17, 160, 164 and children’s books 43, 44 and images 108–9 and narration 55, 59, 62, 88–95, 103 Media, Culture, and the Environment 5 media coverage 2, 53 media event 3, 8, 32, 65, 92, 125 media outlets 7, 34, 59, 92, 95, 103, 117 media reports 8, 60, 122 mediated 96, 97, 119, 135 event 5, 12, 30, 64 self 13, 135, 151, 154 mediums 40, 41, 57, 110 Meeropol, Michael 159 memes 64 Memmott, Carol 23 memorial 27 meta-code 32 metanarrative 25, 27, 30, 36, 108 metaphor 82, 142, 144, 159 meteorology 90, 113, 116, 117, 125 Metz, Cade 122–4 Michaels, Al 55, 57, 58 Mid-Atlantic 125 Midwest 34, 42, 53 military 24, 61, 71, 73, 78–89, 92, 95–9, 107, 157, 159, 164 military industrial complex 9, 72, 81, 93, 153 Millennium, the 147, 150, 152, 167 Mineta, Norman 73 misery index 37 misinformation 20, 122, 124 misrepresentation 109 missiles 89, 92 Mississippi River 2, 90, 103, 104 Missouri 3, 27 mobile communication 119 mobile device 41, 113

193

modernity 28, 165 monopoly 82, 84 monotheology 107 Moore, Jason 165, 166 Moore, Michael 71, 75, 84 morality 6, 8, 46, 51, 69, 75, 118, 131 morality tale 24 Mother Jones 67 mother nature 2, 3, 23, 65, 66, 83 “mother of all events” 69 “mother of all storms” 115 motive 5, 31, 49–51, 118, 119, 169, 170 movie 37, 105, 106, 132, 137, 139, 171 multimedia 28, 109 multinational 10, 47, 50, 83 museum 27 Music Television 95, 114, 117 mutilation 170 Nagin, Ray 2, 90, 114, 115, 118 narrative 2, 12, 51, 53, 54, 57–9, 66, 84, 88, 90, 93, 103, 115–17, 125, 126, 166–8, 171, 172 Baudrillard, Jean 94, 97 children’s books 40–6 Dust Bowl 21–36 hurricane Katrina 106, 108–11 hurricane Sandy 132, 134, 135, 138 narrative construction 47, 96 narrative conventions 26, 32, 58, 132, 136 narrative rights 31, 116 Nation, The 41, 71, 75, 185 National Broadcasting Company 131 National Geographic 100, 105 National Hurricane Center 31, 116 nationalism 84, 93, 157 national media 3, 93 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 115 National Public Radio 32, 60, 61, 67, 91, 125, 182 National Weather Center 32, 120, 125 natural disaster 3–12, 19, 35, 64–6, 71, 84, 85, 92, 107, 112, 122, 124, 125, 171 children’s books 43–5, 52, 53 September 11 as 68–85 nature 2–10, 29, 107, 129, 161, 165, 166 Naureckas, Jim 93

194

Index

Nemo, winter storm 116 neoliberal capitalism 75, 78, 79, 82, 83, 108, 111 neoliberalism 36, 69, 72–85, 97, 108, 111, 112, 154, 159, 163, 172 Netanyahu, Benjamin 92 Netherlands 66, 67 network 49, 55, 89, 95, 97, 115–17, 128, 165 network news 55, 93 Neufeld, Josh 109, 110 New Jersey 32, 120, 122, 125, 126 New Orleans 1–4, 6, 60–2, 65–7, 90, 91, 97, 99–112, 113–21, 129, 132, 161 newspapers 3, 40, 45, 51, 52, 56–8, 63 New York Times 24, 51, 110 Nightline 88, 92 Ninth Ward 65, 114, 115 Nolafugees 109–11 nonfiction 25, 27, 29 normalization 5, 75, 84 Northeast 35, 116 nor’easter 117 NOVA 100, 101, 103, 105, 106 nuclear 1, 155, 156, 160, 162 Oakland Athletics 55 Obama, Barak 70 object 141, 142, 144, 152, 154, 169 objective 30 object-orientated ontology 165 objects 53, 94, 152, 161, 162, 165, 166 occult specter 108 ocean 10, 11, 19, 35, 53, 114, 117, 125 offshore drilling 35 Ogallala Aquifer 34, 35 oikeios 166 oil 17, 35, 37, 87, 88, 95, 107 Oklahoma 17–19, 24, 37, 53 online 20, 28, 109, 117, 121, 124, 151, 163 ontology 21, 30, 56, 165, 166 opium for the masses 9 optimism 35 Original Accident, The 34, 35 Oxfam 1 Pacific Ocean 11, 53, 117 paired images 27 Palahniuk, Chuck 57, 143, 147, 149

Pam. See hurricane Pam pandemic 47, 171 paparazzi 113 paradox 26, 58, 69, 79, 164 Parallax View, The 171 parameters 25, 26, 56 paratextual 45, 46 patriarchal 159 Patriot Act 68 patriotism 70 peace 70, 88, 151, 156 Pearce, Craig 16 pedagogy 48 Penn, Sean 114 Pentagon 72, 77, 156 perception 5, 22, 57, 151 Persian Gulf 89, 158, 176, 183 Pesca, Mike 60–2 Peter G. Peterson Foundation 72 petroleum 1 Pew 121 phallic 89, 146, 147 Philadelphia 35 Philosophical Journey Through a Concept 68, 70 photography 27, 51, 56, 60, 62, 109, 127 Piazza, Tom 109 plutonium 7, 162 politics 48, 60, 66, 82, 129, 143, 158, 159, 172 polystyrene 1 pop culture 51, 57, 64, 125, 146, 147, 150, 152, 155 abjection in 142, 170 narrative and 166,171, 172 September 11 28 Porter, Pat Grant 39, 42–4 post-apocalyptic 131, 133, 150, 170, 171 postcapitalism 167, 168, 170, 171 postmodern 25, 50 post-structuralist 57 poverty 8, 12, 30, 119, 124, 143 Powell, Colin 70 power 47, 69–72, 75, 103, 110–12, 150, 177 Baudrillard, Jean 77–85 Foucault, Michel 48, 49, 60, 61, 64 pre-apocalyptic capitalism 170 prelinguistic 142

Index progression of accidents 35 protagonist 20, 35, 45, 53, 54, 74, 129, 150, 168 pro-war 92, 93 psyche 141 psychoanalytic 138, 141, 152 Public Broadcasting Service 12, 19, 21, 23, 33, 100, 103 Queens 134, 136 Quora 126–9, 132–4 race 7, 8, 12 racism 8, 59 radical shift 139 radio 40, 41, 124 radioactive 107 Rampton, Sheldon 88 Reagan, Ronald 159 realism 130 reality 92, 138, 162, 165 Baudrillard, Jean 94–111, 171 historical 22, 23, 30, 32, 33 reality television 97, 114–17, 122–6, 138–41 rebuild 51, 56, 66, 72, 107 recession 17, 19, 37 reconstruction 50, 114 recovery 50, 52, 63, 97, 110, 114, 122, 135, 168 referent 95, 110 refugee 60–2 reification 144, 165 relief 11, 50, 63, 114, 122, 124, 136 Repent America 4 reporter 2, 40, 55, 57, 61, 92, 93, 98, 125, 155 representation 22, 23, 30, 41, 94, 96, 100, 104, 111 repression 15, 76, 77, 141, 145, 148 responders 43, 123, 128, 136, 138 revolution 17, 76, 109, 119, 171 rhizomatic 83 Rifas, Leonard 93 rights 12, 30, 31, 36, 62, 116 rising-action 46 Road, The 166, 170, 171 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 62

195

Roth, Allen 83, 84 Rothman, Lily 149 Royte, Elizabeth 24, 25 Rozario, Kevin 47, 49–51 rumors 113, 122 Rumsfeld, Donald 79, 81 rupture 78, 79, 82, 83 Russell, Gordon 6 Russia 68, 72 sacrifice 81, 85, 152 safety 9, 36, 44, 53, 60, 63, 114, 122–4, 169, 171 Safety Check, Facebook 122–4, 171 saliva 144, 145 Samenow, Jason 118–20, 123 Samuels, Alana 116 San Francisco 6, 11, 12, 39–42, 44–60, 62, 63, 78 San Francisco earthquake 6, 11, 12, 39–47, 49–51, 53, 54, 59, 60, 62, 63 satellite 12, 113 satire 62, 110, 167, 171 Saudi Arabia 71, 72 scarcity 167, 171 Scheck, Frank 134 Scholastic, Inc 39, 42, 45, 49, 53, 57 Schröder, Gerhard 68 science 36, 94, 117, 163, 171 science fiction 110, 138, 155 scientists 10, 11, 154 Scranton, Roy 161 Scribner 37 security 61, 68, 80, 82, 87, 88, 156, 157 Seeburger, Francis 68 seismic 50–2 selfhood 13, 18, 141–5, 149, 150, 170–2 selfie 120, 139 selfishness 154 September 11 6, 8, 12, 27–9, 67–85, 108, 146 sequestration 163 shacks 62 Sharpton, Al 60 Shohat, Ella 92 shopping 40, 62, 74, 111, 143 significations 68 signified 8, 142

196

Index

signifier 69, 79, 95, 112 signs 53, 63, 68, 94, 98, 111 simile 43 simulacra 94, 96, 98, 99, 107–12, 150, 154 Simulacra and Simulation 150 simulations 94, 98–101, 103, 105, 108, 151, 152, 171 Simulations 94, 108 singularity 78, 81, 82, 105, 137 sitcoms 55, 58 Slate 110 Snowpiercer 166, 170, 171 Sobel, Adam 125, 184 social media 13, 32, 36, 38, 39, 116, 118–26, 133–41, 171 social order 18, 52, 169 social services 76 society 3–7, 9, 29, 71, 108, 109, 131 Foucault, Michel 47–9 sociocultural 42, 43 socioeconomic 7, 119 sociopolitical 6, 8 Solarz, Steven 92 Southern Decadence 4 space 7, 101, 161, 162 capitalism and 7 signification 69, 70, 81 specter 64, 108 Spielberg, Steven 36, 37 Spirit of Terrorism, The 69, 77–9, 82, 84, 85 state 52, 56, 59, 61, 76, 80, 82, 99, 101 Stauber, John 88 Steinbeck, John 16–20, 24, 25, 36 Steinberg, Ted 3–6, 8, 50–2 styrofoam 7, 162 subconsciously 108, 141 subjectivity 30, 78, 139, 141, 142, 147–9, 152, 154, 168–71 subversive 62, 85, 110 suicide 79, 81, 82, 85 Superdome 97 superego 100, 132, 138 supermoon 2, 178 Superstorm Sandy 13, 32, 33, 56, 116, 121, 125, 128–34 suppression 130 surveillance 64, 68

survivors 29, 167–70 symbol 19, 72–4, 78–85, 105, 142, 147, 152, 153, 167–70 Symbolic Exchange and Death 82 symbolic order 69, 74, 79, 83, 142, 143, 146, 149, 168 symmetry 82 Syria 70 tabloids 93 Tarshis, Lauren 45 technology 10–13, 27–8, 35, 39–40, 54–63, 118, 119, 130, 136, 138, 149 teenagers 120, 147 television 40, 41, 58, 62, 89, 92, 96, 97, 106, 116, 117, 121 terrorism 69–72, 74, 81, 82, 84, 85, 97, 149, 158 terrorist 5, 12, 28, 29, 69, 72, 73, 77–9, 81–4 Texas 19, 24, 121, 163 threats 10, 31, 44, 74, 79–81, 116, 159, 160, 166, 168, 169 Times-Picayune 6, 102, 106, 117 TMZ 117 tornado 3, 27, 45, 53 totalitarian 169 transcultural 32 trauma 2, 28, 29, 106, 136, 141, 171 Treme 133 tsunami 1, 45, 108 twinkies 9, 10, 167, 171 Twitter 95, 121, 124, 136 unconscious 109, 141, 142 undead 168 United Nations 70, 88 upload 54, 136, 154, 171 utilitarian 81 utopian 80 Vatornews 119 veracity 28, 29, 32 verisimilitude 65 video 12, 28, 39, 54, 63, 113, 124, 135, 136, 138, 141 Vietnam 33, 37, 82, 96

Index Virilio, Paul 34–6 virtual 92, 94, 124, 139, 150, 171 Wachowski, Brothers 108, 150, 152 Walking Dead, The 167–71, 178 Walmart 114, 167 warfare 16, 89, 169 war on terror 70–3, 78–80, 82, 90–4 Washington, DC 55, 87, 155, 157 Washington Post 102, 118–20 waste 16, 18, 19, 25, 166 weapons 70, 92, 155, 156, 167, 169 Weather Channel 31, 34, 36, 113–17 weather event 1, 10, 31, 34, 67, 116, 117, 130 weather report 2 welfare state 76, 80 Wijkman, Lloyd 4

197

Wikimedia 20 Wikipedia 20, 21, 23, 30, 126, 127 winter storms 31, 53, 116, 117, 122, 183 witness 27, 28, 50 Wolfowitz, Paul 80, 81 worldview 69, 80 wreckage 49, 85, 106, 167 Wright, George 116 Youtube 21, 32, 34, 55, 136 Zahn, Paula 21, 22, 34 Zero Dark Thirty 74–75, 82–83 Zinni, Anthony 71, 72 Žižek, Slavoj 9, 68–71, 75, 83–5, 171, 172 Zombieland 9, 167, 171 zombies 9, 13, 111, 167–70