poverty, katrina and the boundaries of national tragedy
The posting titled "Race and Hurricane Katrina," and its comments and links at Amardeep Singh's blog (a blogroll standby here) have helped me form my inchoherant rants and queries to friends into the questions below. Still muddled, but that's where I am:
1. Why does the media care about poverty in Louisiana only when there is a flood?
2. If I grant that the flood is a particularly revealing disaster, in that the "natural" (flood) and the "unnatural" (poverty under US capitalism) converge, can we expand this definition of national tragedy to include deaths at the US Mexico border (desert heat meets US labor and immigration policy), the war in Iraq (natural resources (weak, i know) meets US energy and transportation policies) and so on . . . . ?
3. Are the floods, and other evidence of the earth's activity really "natural" in any sense? Or are they the product of global warming, more water moving on the earth's surface, more pressure on the plates, more active warm and cold fronts in the ocean, etc?
4. Is there a difference between a flood refugee finding food for immediate consumption and finding something else that might have value later (elsewhere called "stealing" and "looting")? Even if it is someone else's, they left it, they have valued it less than their lives and whatever else they took with them, if they were lucky enough to get the information to get out and had the resources to do so . . . . No one is making a profit here. Well, maybe not no one. Which leads us to question 5 . . .
5. Who will rebuild the petroleum infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico?
Categories: currentevents
1. Why does the media care about poverty in Louisiana only when there is a flood?
2. If I grant that the flood is a particularly revealing disaster, in that the "natural" (flood) and the "unnatural" (poverty under US capitalism) converge, can we expand this definition of national tragedy to include deaths at the US Mexico border (desert heat meets US labor and immigration policy), the war in Iraq (natural resources (weak, i know) meets US energy and transportation policies) and so on . . . . ?
3. Are the floods, and other evidence of the earth's activity really "natural" in any sense? Or are they the product of global warming, more water moving on the earth's surface, more pressure on the plates, more active warm and cold fronts in the ocean, etc?
4. Is there a difference between a flood refugee finding food for immediate consumption and finding something else that might have value later (elsewhere called "stealing" and "looting")? Even if it is someone else's, they left it, they have valued it less than their lives and whatever else they took with them, if they were lucky enough to get the information to get out and had the resources to do so . . . . No one is making a profit here. Well, maybe not no one. Which leads us to question 5 . . .
5. Who will rebuild the petroleum infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico?
Categories: currentevents
posted by zoe p. at 2:12 PM
1 Comments:
Thanks so much for your thoughts on this. I really appreciated your shot by shot analysis of the CNN story. And I generally like On the Media . . . its a good place to go when I can't put my own frustrations with mainstream media into words.
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