Disasters and literature
Sep. 9th, 2005 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyjadwigaEveryone in the government, and most of the Republican party, are whining that 'this is not the time for finger-pointing' in terms of New Orleans. I agree; the level of necessary discipline to get these people to do their work is well into the grabbing-by-the-earlobe and emphasizing-lecture-with-smacks-across-the bum level of dealing with cleanup truants. This isn't about politics: it's about basic stupidity, incompetence and unwillingness to deal with problems, admittedly problems my spawned-by-feminism soul imputes to most white males but not exclusive to them by any means.
Last night's public radio cruising blended a lecture on The Well Read Life into the New Orleans news, and there I found the key to one of my biggest peeves.
One of the excuses feckless FEMA, Louisiana, New Orleans and other government yappers have put out is that 'a disaster of this magnitude could never have been expected/imagined/envisioned.'
Clearly, these civil servants aren't up on their reading. Literature and history is full of disasters of this magnitude, or similar ones.
Just as certain aspects of the World Trade Center reminded one either of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire or, contrariwise, the Hell's Kitchen neighborhoods the World Trade Center replaced, as chronicled by Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), aspects of the New Orleans disasters surely call to mind hurricanes and floods of history and literature, not to mention a number of juvenile adventure-novels. (In the past, 'Home Alone' scenarios in children's literature usually required the introduction of death or some great disaster to the plot.)
The idea that it is unthinkable to see the dead floating in the water or laid out on the porches of houses is a comparatively new one; dead bodies floating in flood water are a staple of nineteenth and early twentieth century literature. The flooding of the Mississippi, and flooding in general, is the focus of a number of children's books: the University of Illinois has a whole bibliography of such items.
I was brought up in the knowledge of the Johnstown Flood, and in college Sociology classes we trudged through the shocking Everything in its Path by Kai Erikson, which chronicled the effect of the Buffalo Creek flood on the miners who lived in that area of Appalachia.
The New Yorker, in its latest Talk of the Town ("In the Ruins," Nicholas Lemann, September 12, 2005), mentions "Chita: A Memory of Last Island," by Lafcadio Hearn, which centers on the flooding of the Mississippi in 1856. NPR highlights the song "Louisiana 1927" by Randy Newman about the New Orleans floods of that year.
Of all the things to think about, the phrase 'the dam has broken' and its chilling counterpart 'the levee has been breached' would, you think, spring to mind. After all, they are constants of survivor fiction. And the poor Army Corps of Engineers continually asks for more money for flood prevention efforts (a money sinkhole even greater than library journal subscription costs), so government officials should be familiar with the idea that those levees existed and that there was a possibility they could fail (even the best maintained engineering projects can fail under extreme conditions). If they didn't know, they could have asked librarians, who would have provided them with lists of information about it: see LII.org's list of links on Katrina and Flood Control. I may not be able to imagine the full extent of the devastation, but add together hurricane damage, a significant population without automobile transport or a place to stay in an evacuation, and a flood to a major city, and one would presumably be able to realize a big mess might occur and run the numbers to find out what might need to be done.
Yes, I am a librarian. I'm too darn well-read for my own good. I know that. But geez... if you are in emergency management, shouldn't you be the kind of person who reads disaster scenarios with breakfast? Shouldn't titles like Kai Erikson's A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters be on your bedside table?
Last night's public radio cruising blended a lecture on The Well Read Life into the New Orleans news, and there I found the key to one of my biggest peeves.
One of the excuses feckless FEMA, Louisiana, New Orleans and other government yappers have put out is that 'a disaster of this magnitude could never have been expected/imagined/envisioned.'
Clearly, these civil servants aren't up on their reading. Literature and history is full of disasters of this magnitude, or similar ones.
Just as certain aspects of the World Trade Center reminded one either of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire or, contrariwise, the Hell's Kitchen neighborhoods the World Trade Center replaced, as chronicled by Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), aspects of the New Orleans disasters surely call to mind hurricanes and floods of history and literature, not to mention a number of juvenile adventure-novels. (In the past, 'Home Alone' scenarios in children's literature usually required the introduction of death or some great disaster to the plot.)
The idea that it is unthinkable to see the dead floating in the water or laid out on the porches of houses is a comparatively new one; dead bodies floating in flood water are a staple of nineteenth and early twentieth century literature. The flooding of the Mississippi, and flooding in general, is the focus of a number of children's books: the University of Illinois has a whole bibliography of such items.
I was brought up in the knowledge of the Johnstown Flood, and in college Sociology classes we trudged through the shocking Everything in its Path by Kai Erikson, which chronicled the effect of the Buffalo Creek flood on the miners who lived in that area of Appalachia.
The New Yorker, in its latest Talk of the Town ("In the Ruins," Nicholas Lemann, September 12, 2005), mentions "Chita: A Memory of Last Island," by Lafcadio Hearn, which centers on the flooding of the Mississippi in 1856. NPR highlights the song "Louisiana 1927" by Randy Newman about the New Orleans floods of that year.
Of all the things to think about, the phrase 'the dam has broken' and its chilling counterpart 'the levee has been breached' would, you think, spring to mind. After all, they are constants of survivor fiction. And the poor Army Corps of Engineers continually asks for more money for flood prevention efforts (a money sinkhole even greater than library journal subscription costs), so government officials should be familiar with the idea that those levees existed and that there was a possibility they could fail (even the best maintained engineering projects can fail under extreme conditions). If they didn't know, they could have asked librarians, who would have provided them with lists of information about it: see LII.org's list of links on Katrina and Flood Control. I may not be able to imagine the full extent of the devastation, but add together hurricane damage, a significant population without automobile transport or a place to stay in an evacuation, and a flood to a major city, and one would presumably be able to realize a big mess might occur and run the numbers to find out what might need to be done.
Yes, I am a librarian. I'm too darn well-read for my own good. I know that. But geez... if you are in emergency management, shouldn't you be the kind of person who reads disaster scenarios with breakfast? Shouldn't titles like Kai Erikson's A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters be on your bedside table?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 06:15 pm (UTC)Heck, 2 weeks ago my Dad was telling me about the bodies floating up the Hudson from all the ships sunk off our shores during WW2. This was normal to him. He said he saw it almost every day for about 3 years straight. I never knew.
Lets not forget the constant bombardment the British suffered at the same time. Fire from the sky, every night for years.
All of the fantasy I read as a kid started with some comparable disaster.
I had hoped "we" would pull it together like the Londoners of WW2, like so many heros I have read about. I had always relied on the courage of the American to rise above and simply do what needed doing, damn the paperwork.
My heartbreak is wrapped in red tape, and the people who bow to it.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 06:39 pm (UTC)Clearly, these civil servants aren't up on their reading. Literature and history is full of disasters of this magnitude, or similar ones.
I have but one thing to say and that is, "Galveston!!"
Galveston
Date: 2005-09-09 06:46 pm (UTC)I'm putting Paul Lester's The Great Galveston Disaster: Containing a Full and Thrilling Account of the Most Appalling Calamity of Modern Times on my reading list.
Re: Galveston
Date: 2005-09-09 07:36 pm (UTC)I don't miss hurricane season
CNN Classic
Date: 2005-09-09 06:50 pm (UTC)CNN 9/9/2005, 2:22 pm, http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/09/katrina.washington/index.html
Headline: FEMA director Brown recalled to Washington
Re: CNN Classic
Date: 2005-09-09 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 08:35 pm (UTC)And for the ones of us who like lighter reading, there are articles in National Geographic and Scientific American.
In Germany, we had the very interesting acronym GAU (grösster anzunehmender Unfall - biggest conceivable accident). After Chernobyl blew up, the media talked a lot about a Super-GAU: bigger than anyone could have imagined. I suppose that's true, too - at least if we are dealing with the imaginations of politicians...
Even 9/11/ was conceivable...
Date: 2005-09-12 03:34 am (UTC)And plenty of other people had looked at airplanes and said "You know, that's basically a flying bomb, and if you were a terrorist, you could cause a lot of problems with that." It's extremely difficult to imagine that no-one in any of the governments varied alphabet-soup agencies that are responsible for these kinds of things had that same thought. So the question becomes "Why did this get buried? Why was nothing done?" And I don't mean blatant infringement of the civil liberties of innocent airline passengers either. None of the current infringements that have been instituted since 9/11 would have prevented 9/11.
I could go on, but I said I wasn't going to rant tonight.
Blatant Plug
Date: 2005-09-12 03:37 am (UTC)