Words&Dirt

“Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together.  Increasingly, however, disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival.

Baghdad’s Green Zone is the starkest expression of this world order.  It has its own electrical grid, its own phone and sewage systems, its own oil supply and its own state-of-the-art hospital with pristine operating theaters––all protected by five-meter-thick walls.  It feels, oddly, like a giant fortified Carnival Cruise Ship parked in the middle of a sea of violence and despair, the boiling Red Zone that is Iraq.  If you can get on board, there are poolside drinks, bad Hollywood movies and Nautilus machines.  If you are not among the chosen, you can get yourself shot just by standing too close to the wall.

Everywhere in Iraq, the wildly divergent value assigned to different categories of people is crudely evident.  Westerners and their Iraqi colleagues have checkpoints at the entrance to their streets, blast walls in front of their houses, body armor and private security guards on call at all hours.  They travel the country in menacing armored convoys, with mercenaries pointing guns out the windows as they follow their prime directive to ‘protect the principal.’  With every move they broadcast the same unapologetic message: we are the chosen; our lives are infinitely more precious.  Middle-class Iraqis, meanwhile, cling to the next rung down the ladder: they can afford to buy protection from local militias, and they are able to pay off kidnappers to have a family member released.  But the vast majority of Iraqis have no protection at all.  They walk the streets wide open to any possible violence, with nothing between them and the next car bomb but a thin layer of fabric.  In Iraq, the lucky get Kevlar, the rest get prayer beads.

At first I thought the Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq.  Now, after years spent in other disaster zones, I realize that the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned.

It happened in New Orleans.  After the flood, an already divided city turned into a battleground between gated green zones and raging red zones––the result not of water damage but of the ‘free-market solutions’ embraced by the president.  The Bush administration refused to allow emergency funds to pay public sector salaries, and the City of New Orleans, which lost its tax base, had to fire three thousand workers in the months after Katrina.  Among them were sixteen of the city’s planing staff––with shades of ‘de-Baathification,’ laid off at the precise moment when New Orleans was in desperate need of planners.  Instead, million of public dollars wen to outside consultants, many of whom were powerful real estate developers.  And of course thousands of teachers were also fired, paving the way for the conversion of dozens of public schools into charter schools, just as Friedman had called for.

Almost two years after the storm, Charity Hospital was still closed.  The court system was barely functioning, and the privatized electricity company, Entergy, had failed to get the whole city back online.  After threatening to raise rates dramatically, the company managed to extract a controversial $200 million bailout from the federal government.  The public transit system was gutted and lost almost half its workers.  The vast majority of publicly owned housing projects stood boarded up and empty, with five thousand units slotted for demolition by the federal housing authority.  Much as the tourism lobby in Asia had longed to be rid of the beachfront fishing villages, New Orleans’ powerful tourism lobby had been eyeing the housing projects, several of them on prime land close to the French Quarter, the city’s tourism magnet.

Endesha Juakali helped set up a protest camp outside one of the boarded-up projects, St. Bernard Public Housing, explaining that ‘they’ve had an agenda for St. Bernard a long time, but as long as people lived here, they couldn’t do it.  So they used the disaster as a way of cleansing the neighborhood when the neighborhood is weakest….This is a great location for bigger houses and condos.  The only problem is you got all these poor black people sitting on it!’

Amid the schools, the homes, the hospitals, the transit system and the lack of clean water in many parts of town, New Orleans’ public sphere was not being rebuilt, it was being erased, with the storm used as the excuse.  At an earlier stage of capitalist ‘creative destruction,’ large swaths of the United States lost their manufacturing bases and degenerated into rust belts of shuttered factories and neglected neighborhoods.  Post-Katrina New Orleans may be providing the first Western-world image of a new kind of wasted urban landscape: the mold belt, destroyed by the deadly combination of weathered public infrastructure and extreme weather.

The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure––roads, bridges, schools, dams––that it would take more than a trillion and a half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard.  Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back.  At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity.  It’s easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures never repaired or rehabilitated.  The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.”

––The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, pg. 522-5

“‘You know why I’ve never taken a shadow?’ Bernard asked.  He flipped through the manual, saw the play on the reverse side, and turned the bound sheets of paper around.  He glanced up at Lukas, who lifted his palms and shrugged.

‘It’s because I shudder to think of anyone else ever running this place.’

Lukas assumed he meant IT, not the silo.  Bernard hadn’t been mayor very long.

Bernard set the play down and gazed out the window, where muffled voices argued once more.

“But I’ll have to, one of these days.  I’m at that age where your friends, the people you grew up with, are dropping like flies, but you’re still young enough to pretend it won’t happen to you.’

His eyes fells on Lukas.  The young tech felt uncomfortable being alone with Bernard.  He’d never felt that before.

‘Silos have burned to the ground before because of one man’s hubris,’ Bernard told him.  ‘All it takes is improper planning, thinking you’ll be around forever, but because one man disappears’––he snapped his fingers––’and leaves a sucking void behind, that can be enough to bring it all down.’

Lukas was dying to ask his boss what the hell he was talking about.

‘Today is that day, I think.'”

––Wool (Omnibus Edition), by Hugh Howey, loc. 3602-11