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Humiliation and heroism

By Catherine Tumber

The moment hijacked jetliners slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, September 11 burned into the national psyche as myth. Olympian in scale, the catastrophe was impossible to compass in mere mortal terms, prompting a near-desperate longing for heroes. We found them, too, in abundance: firefighters and police officers, local elected officials, ordinary people who faced certain death to avert further disaster, even the president himself (some would argue), once he found his feet.

Hurricane Katrina, though it came as less of a shock and, literally, in waves, will most certainly turn out to be just as catastrophic, and has already been described over and over as a calamity "of biblical proportions." But this is hardly the stuff of myth. Rather, Katrina put Americans face-to-face with nothing more ennobling than George W. Bush’s man-made free-market dystopia. An act of god or an evil enemy is humbling, even as it raises up heroes and sharpens courage and resolve. The encounter with Katrina was nothing short of humiliating. Even our will to see heroism in the carnage has been sapped, amid a spectacle of chaos that reduces everyone involved — including those of us helplessly looking on in horror — to either victims or villains.

That’s not to say that bravery and personal sacrifice, scrappy resourcefulness and basic human kindness have been in short supply. But how do we make sense of it? The old categories don’t hold. Are looters improvisational aid workers or lawless thugs? Are police officers who abandon their posts deserving of our respect as well as our compassion? Are emotional reporters acting as badly needed conduits for the besieged or abdicating their responsibilities as objective journalists? Are nearly hysterical Democratic local officials performing their public duty under the most dire conditions imaginable or taking advantage of partisan politics and time-worn tensions over federal-versus-local authority?

In each case, there are probably shades of truth in both views. But how to frame these stories — individually and collectively? In Bush’s free-market dystopia, it’s all crony capitalism and Christian-conservative-base watch: clean-up projects go to Dick Cheney’s pals over at Halliburton, oil executives are asked to "give," but not to even think about cutting their profits for a few months, and when the White House initially posted a list of relief charities for a public frantic to help, its first instinct was to prioritize faith-based programs. Bush’s ghastly insensitivity — flying out to San Diego to compare himself with FDR and yukking it up with reporters about looking forward to sitting on Trent Lott’s reconstructed porch as poor black people were dying in the watery hell of New Orleans — combined with his transparently forced show of compassion were truly villainous, by any measure. Meanwhile, Mayor Nagin, who stayed with his people, holed up in a downtown hotel crying out for help, was ineffectual — a victim.

No, we don’t hear much hero-talk this time around. Heroism arises out of disorder of mysterious origins; contending with human corruption of this scope and dimension is merely humiliating. When a small, indecent man spits in your face, it hardly enlarges the spirit.


Issue Date: September 9 - 15, 2005
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