Long Sunday

Multi-culti

An excerpt from George Caffentzis's "Acts of God and Enclosures in New Orleans" (Mute, 2:2):

the contemporary model for managing the working class in disasters is increasingly warfare. Workers in a disaster are increasingly being turned first into right-less beings and then, when they resist, they become the ‘enemy’. In this logic, the refugee quickly turns into the terrorist. [...]

The US military and not Katrina performed the role required in every enclosure: the violent force that separated and continues to separate workers from their community of support and subsistence. True, the soldiers and sailors did save some New Orleanians from the floods at first, but their major long-term role is to be the bailiffs of the enclosures. For the object of the New Orleans enclosures is the opposite of the local ruling class’s goal in the 1927 flood. Instead of fixing black workers to the soil (a plan which ultimately failed, since many of them fled north in the 1930s), the aim now is to remove en masse a black working class population that was ‘too expensive’ and antagonistic to reproduce on site and scatter them throughout the South, further undermining already low wage levels there by intensifying the competition between documented black citizens and undocumented Hispanic immigrants at the bottom of the labour market.

From Mute's Dis-Integrating Multiculturalism edition, of which there are other articles of interest, including Benedict Seymour's "Free Speech as Shibboleth: On the Danish Cartoons", Mathew Hyland's "Proud Scum - The Spectre of the Ingrate", Eric Krebbers' "From Forced Multiculturalism to Forced Integration", and more.

Last Men, or the phenomenology of the camp

Just a link to some video,  found at American Samizdat.   And following on from here.  Update:  um, alright.  Who says we have to let them vote?  In an entirely more frivolous vein (or sinister, depending on how you look at it...and not that we'd ever want to become that kind of blog, heavens forbid!) here's the Fema Rap For Kids (courtesy of Mefi).  More on Katrina from a rhetoric/discourse-analysis tack here.

And on yet another note, some congratulations to Baghdad Burning are in order.

New Orleans: Survivor Stories

As the corporate media gleefully gears up for its next human interest story, to lead our nation in cheap demagoguery and onslaughts of insincere tears, perhaps one could do worse than to read instead some of the personal stories emerging from the event that was "Katrina," stories that refuse to be contained by mere soundbites. City Pages (courtesy of archive: s0metim3s) does just that:

Adele Bertucci, 53, hospitality worker, native of Cuba and 35-year resident of New Orleans The worst experience for me was being alone for maybe four days in the airport. That's something I'll never forget. There were bodies. There were people bleeding. There were people lying in their own waste. One after another. If you take Gone with the Wind and the Nazi War and the Vietnam war, and visualize that in one place, that's how I would describe the airport. When you watch it on TV, it's like watching a Walt Disney versus an R-rated movie. You only see what they want you to see. You can't smell it.

Bring Out Your Dead

The hurricane porn enjoying Katrina has, in part, circled around dead bodies. Bloated corpses floating in flood water. Blanketed bodies in wheelchairs. Rows of the dead found in a hospital chapel and a nursing home. Bodies gnawed on by animals. A town turned into a morgue blocked from view, from the gaze of the press.  A preoccupation with counting the dead, a preoccupation that seeks to reassure itself of its sovereign authority by reducing accountability to quantification, a matter of counting.

Tripping over these bodies, even rightwing pundits of cable news find themselves off-message, criticizing any and all governmental authorities including the federal. With Katrina the object of so many obscenities, why does the presence of the dead body on the street become a particular locus of anxiety?

Katrina Related Remix

Louisiana 1927

Hell on Earth (NPR)

George Bush Don't Like Black People

Cornel West

The Militarization of New Orleans

"He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks.  They key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."  -H.R. Halderman, cited in Lockdown America by Christian Parenti

Ottawa Citizen

Notes on Universal Experience and Difference

Project Censored

Reporters Gone Wild

Crooks

New Orleans to be rebuilt without "underclass"

The Last to Speak

Those that have been abandoned, have the right to a thought, to a word. The right to bear witness. Survival, in the wake of a disaster, is not just a matter of food and shelter, it is a matter of memory, it requires an act of memory.

Not long ago, one might remember, at the time of the "elections," there were names whose validity was questioned. They were erased from registers, their votes were cancelled. Names which ceased to exist.

Do they have something in common with those who were left to die a week ago? Can a system "save" those that it does not register or recognize as existing, the nameless existences, the inexistent names which it does not care to count or account for? Will they be recognized now, will they be saved by all the "representatives" that now claim to represent them, speak endlessly of them, for them, in their name? Will they be given the chance to bear witness, to their names, and to the names of the dead?

How to bear witness? In a very fine post here ( to which these very insufficient remarks do not add very much )  I read, "They must not realize their potential as last men. The world of elites cannot stand to bear witness to that."

So, I would like to try to translate a poem that, one could justifiably object, I am taking out of its singular context. Yet, it is a poem that is singularly addressed to the last one(s), and it bears the gift - as do all poems worthy of the name - of the right to bear witness. The poem, by Paul Celan, can be read here* ( please see below for this link.) My attempt to translate follows.

(Un)Moorings

The experts advise the Democrats not to further incite racial antagonisms.  They say that blacks are in the end just a minority, and fighting for minorities is a losing strategy.  This wisdom goes unquestioned on NPR.  But one would have to be blind to miss the message of this story.  One might even say there haven't been so many blue-collar black faces on TV since {you fill it in}.  As theorists have been arguing for decades now, it is essential to see and acknowledge that the movements for racial, economic and environmental justice overlap.   

Looting New Orleans

We need to celebrate the looting. When people, to survive, drop all `moral' baggage about not stealing. And when the authorities can't provide you with the water and food you need to survive, what are you left to do?
Of course you might, if you were a CNN floozie, ask just what those people were still doing there. Why didn't they obey the evacuation order?
As I argued at CPROBES, chances are that the authorities didn't have the thousands of buses available that they would have needed to get those people out. No doubt SUV drivers got out, but then who's left? Poor black communities.
Earlier when they were talking about looting, the image showed people walking away with water. Good on them.
Just now, horror of horrors, a young black male was walking away with an air mattress. Good thinking. It could both replace his lost bed and act as a flotation device. And for crying out loud, if he wanted to buy it, could he?
Scott McLellan says that Bush has a zero tolerance policy, even for those attempting to feed themselves. According to him they can get everything they need from the authorities. That's not what the multitude around the Convention Centre are reporting.

As the saying goes, when you've lost everything, you're free to do anything. Maybe, just maybe, a glimpse here or there of our beyond of capitalism.
Oh, they just replayed that guy with the air mattress, under the cover of looting. Racism is alive.

UPDATE: CNN reporter, talking about the evacuations, called those without car or money - to actually evacuate - the "wild card"... So the poor are the wild card. Well, that's not totally inaccurate...