Fw: <nettime> Oh to have lived to see the day

[Aliette Guibert]

to notice (but you have read it by yourself probably)
A.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bruce Sterling" <bruces at well.com>
To: <nettime-l at bbs.thing.net>
Sent: Sunday, September 04, 2005 10:30 AM
Subject: <nettime> Oh to have lived to see the day


>
>      From:       ctheory at lists.uvic.ca
>      Subject:     [CTHEORY] Event Scene 164 - Katrina-Baghdad
>      Date:     August 31, 2005 3:37:55 PM PDT
>      To:       ctheory at lists.uvic.ca
>      Reply-To:       ctheory at lists.uvic.ca
>
> _____________________________________________________________________
>   CTHEORY          THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE        VOL 28, NO 3
>          *** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
>
>   Event-Scene 164   31/08/2005   Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
>   _____________________________________________________________________
>
>                           *************************
>
>                              1000 DAYS OF THEORY
>
>                           *************************
>   _____________________________________________________________________
>
>
>
>   Katrina-Baghdad: Initial Iterations of a Strange Attractor
>   ===========================================================
>
>
>   ~Dion Dennis~
>
>
>   On August 30, 2005, George W. Bush was sent to the wrong place, at
>   the wrong time, to deliver, in his pseudo-folksy ham-handed way, the
>   wrong script: Bush's political choreographers crafted a speech that
>   was delivered at a 60th anniversary commemoration of the end of World
>   War II, held at a California Naval Air station. As a salvo in the
>   propaganda war over Iraq, Bush histrionically claimed the moral
>   authority of World War II for the current U.S. occupation of Iraq.
>   Besides the highly dubious claim of moral equivalence, the timing of
>   the speech turned out to be inept. Unfolding events caught Bush and
>   his handlers off-guard.
>
>   Fifteen-hundred miles away, a concurrent event, the Category Five
>   Hurricane Katrina, laid waste to a significant American city, New
>   Orleans, and to a contiguous two-hundred mile swath of the Gulf Coast
>   east of New Orleans. Mississippi's Governor, the former head of the
>   Republican National Committee, Haley Barbour, unreflexively invoked
>   another descriptive icon of World War II, as well. "It looks like
>   Hiroshima is what it looks like," muttered a shocked Barbour,
>   describing parts of a devastated county on the coast. Meanwhile, the
>   Louisiana levees broke in at least three spots, unleashing the fury
>   of the swollen waters of Lake Pontchartrain on New Orleans. Potable
>   drinking water, electricity, and the other taken-for-granted basics
>   of mundane life disappeared into a twenty foot high stew of sewage,
>   toxic chemicals, Mississippi Delta mud, and Lake Pontchartrain
>   spillage.  Basic infrastructure was destroyed. Tens of thousands of
>   houses were severely damaged or simply obliterated. Bloated bodies
>   floated in the water, as much of the coastal population became a
>   large and instant group of internal U.S. refugees.  Meanwhile, police
>   looked on passively as looters raided both the upscale downtown shops
>   such as the Bon Marche, and less status-conscious looters stripped
>   the shelves of several outlying stores of the behemoth proletarian
>   vendor, Wal-Mart. On the night of August 30th, the CNN website
>   described it this way: "New Orleans resembled a war zone more than a
>   modern American metropolis on Tuesday."  As Army Reservists and a
>   remainder of National Guard troops rolled into New Orleans, they
>   resembled nothing as much as their comrades-in-arms concurrently
>   stationed in Iraq.  Ironically, the shock and awe produced by
>   Katrina's Gulf Coast invasion mirrored the effects of the Iraqi war,
>   in novel and all-too-tragic ways. On Tuesday night, August 30, 2005,
>   New Orleans became the ~de facto~ American Baghdad, as the contiguous
>   Gulf Coast east of New Orleans became an analogue for the Iraqi
>   countryside. It was no surprise, then, to see the juxtaposition of
>   the following morning's (Wednesday, August 31st) split-screen front
>   page headlines on MSNBC.com. A story on the "Nightmare" of Katrina
>   refugees was paired with the "Baghdad Stampede" that killed 800 or
>   more Iraqis. Panic, disaster, public disorder, the mass movement of
>   refugees, tightening military occupation, combined with the key
>   linkages between the disruption of oil production and refineries and
>   long-term economic dislocation and debt accumulation; these are just
>   the initial components of Katrina-Baghdad as a "strange attractor."
>   This emergent strange attractor we now call Katrina-Baghdad will spin
>   off and/or accelerate a series of complex economic, political and
>   social iterations over the near and longer term.
>
>   Today, there's a post-apocalyptic sensibility in the air. Mayor
>   Nagin's mandatory evacuation order of New Orleans will be carried
>   out, in part, by dispatching 475 buses contracted by FEMA (the
>   Federal Emergency Management Agency) to move tens of thousand of
>   Katrina refugees from the damaged New Orleans Superdome to the
>   recently shuttered Houston Astrodome. According to the ~New York
>   Times~, Texas state government officials expect to house the refugee
>   residents of this new "Dome City" for months, if not longer.
>   Meanwhile, as Howard Fineman notes, the bulk of the personnel,
>   equipment and financial resources necessary for a "war-like" response
>   to such devastation are sunk into another delta, a half-a-world away,
>   at the mouth of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Already consuming
>   eighty percent of the world's lending capital in prolifigate fiscal
>   and consumer consumption, sharp and immediate rises in oil and
>   natural gas prices, combined with tens of billions in infrastructural
>   reconstruction costs, may well set off an accelerating chain of
>   events (such as rising interest rates and the collapse of the housing
>   market bubble). The result could lead, in very short order, to a
>   steep decline in personal and national fortunes.
>
>   Finally, we should take note of a particular incident of
>   destruction. Across Lake Pontchartrain, two seven mile bridge spans
>   of Interstate 10, connecting New Orleans to the eastern U.S.
>   mainland, were catastrophically shredded into dozens of disconnected
>   concrete chunks.  As both a metaphor and event precursor, this
>   particular piece of devastation is profoundly symbolic. The
>   shattering of this part of I-10 connotes the liabilities of a fragile
>   and deep interconnectedness, in a global economic and ecological
>   system. A product of the mid-and-late 20th Century height of the
>   American Empire, the Interstate Highway System was a triumph of
>   economic nationalism and Fordist progressive capitalism. Katrina's
>   demolishing of this portion of I-10 can be understood as signifying
>   the shattering of the remaining structural supports for the effective
>   maintenance of such an economic nationalism, while revealing,
>   immediately and decisively, the hubris and frailty of the Imperium.
>
>
>
>   --------------------------------------------------------------------
>   With enduring interests in representation, communication, culture and
>   technology, Dion Dennis is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice
>   at Bridgewater State College.
>
>   _____________________________________________________________________
>
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