so, anyway.
this is just a way i'm trying to make sense of something that confuses me. i don't think it's the only way to view the hurricane, and even i find it a little ludicrous in parts. but here.
***
misonou made this long post, a week or so ago, questions about the hurricane, and i tried to clarify, not because i know anything specific about the hurricane or about New Orleans or Louisiana or that region, but because of my 19 years of forced immersion and intense study of American culture, because the hurricane is inseparable from the greater American political/social context, blah blah. one of the things she said that stuck in my head the most was this;
when I was 6, a lot of my country was suddenly occupied [personal context: misonou is from Croatia], half-occupied, in war, around war, just permanently unsafe, not knowing what's happening next... everything pretty blurry when you don't know whether you'll be bombed tomorrow, next week or never. Yet I can't remember civil unrest of those proportions ever taking place. My parents remembered a certain blackout in New York some time before I was born (so I'm not giving my own judgement, just quoting them), when apparently a similar state of disorder occured. Now, if you remember, half of Italy had a blackout pretty recently (for Christmas?), and nothing happened. How was it possible for complete disorder to take place so easy, in New Orleans? Was it just a media exaggeration (in order to either make a sensation or justify basically military intervention later, instead of social measures)? I honestly can't imagine anything similar happening in a city of that size in Europe.
ok, my first reaction was "she has to be wrong", because everyone has these ideas about basic human nature, like 'people are naturally too selfish for Communism' or 'people are naturally good at heart and spoiled by society', and one of my assumptions is that people will be more likely to steal and cause chaos when they can get away with it, not necessarily because we are innately chaos-causing agents, but just because... you know, if you really want this TV and there aren't any guards around or police officers, you might as well, right?
but Jana is one of those people whose opinions i trust implicitly, more than some of my close real-life friends who i've known for years. and, conveniently enough, i have this theory; i asked some of my friends the other night, would America continue to exist if somehow the government were violently overthrown and the Constitution thrown out? i think -- without the Constitution in its specific form, without the trappings of republican democracy, and without the American mythos, founding fathers, Washington crossing the Delaware, and that sort of thing, the country would likely disintegrate into what i can't even imagine.
the meaning of being an American is complicated, of course. but i think it can be boiled down to two things, assumptions or expectations, or just character traits of nearly all Americans -- first off, the acceptance of capitalism and republican democracy as the best and really only valid ideology, and secondly that thing called the American Way of Life, which includes things like carrot peelers [i learned that Europeans use knives for peeling carrots, which really work just as well], clothes dryers, and big houses, and above all the idea [myth] that if you work hard, you will get ahead -- this whole cultural complex that we feel we have the duty to export across the world. i'm not saying these are exclusively American traits [although it is true that it's patently obvious to most Americans that capitalism is the only way and the natural state of human beings, moreso than to any other nation], because prosperity is certainly important to other countries as well. America, though, has made an ideology of it, the American Dream.
so anyway, since the business of being an American rests on those two concepts, which really aren't all that separate, it seems to me that you could break down any semblance of civic order and national contiguity by taking away either of them. either the capitalism/democracy one, like in my hunch, which hasn't really happened at all in history, or the other, and destroy not only houses but also jobs and other forms of capital, not to mention things like basic sanitation, running water. which happened in New Orleans earlier this month. and these things simply don't happen in America, according to Americans. since in America's definition of itself, prosperity, or at least the illusion or pursuit of prosperity, is an intrinsic part. and so because this area has been so utterly destroyed, people feel that they're no longer members of a national unit, that national and civic duty is no longer relevant to them, and so of course order breaks down.
i am assuming in other countries, like Italy or Croatia, belonging to the nation is not nearly as dependent on physical conditions, but also on things like shared language, culture, history. this creates problems of its own, but also means that you're less likely to loot each other when things fall apart. [how correct is this assumption?]
***
and so Barbara Bush says things like it doesn't matter that this hurricane happened because most of these people were poor and not living in great conditions anyway. which means that the people affected by the hurricane were marginal enough in the political sphere that being a little more so can't harm them too much.
***
so. it's late. on weekends i've been sleeping late and then studying or drawing until midnight and going to sleep feeling wonderful because i know i don't have to get up until whenever i want the next day. i always default to laziness.
***
misonou made this long post, a week or so ago, questions about the hurricane, and i tried to clarify, not because i know anything specific about the hurricane or about New Orleans or Louisiana or that region, but because of my 19 years of forced immersion and intense study of American culture, because the hurricane is inseparable from the greater American political/social context, blah blah. one of the things she said that stuck in my head the most was this;
when I was 6, a lot of my country was suddenly occupied [personal context: misonou is from Croatia], half-occupied, in war, around war, just permanently unsafe, not knowing what's happening next... everything pretty blurry when you don't know whether you'll be bombed tomorrow, next week or never. Yet I can't remember civil unrest of those proportions ever taking place. My parents remembered a certain blackout in New York some time before I was born (so I'm not giving my own judgement, just quoting them), when apparently a similar state of disorder occured. Now, if you remember, half of Italy had a blackout pretty recently (for Christmas?), and nothing happened. How was it possible for complete disorder to take place so easy, in New Orleans? Was it just a media exaggeration (in order to either make a sensation or justify basically military intervention later, instead of social measures)? I honestly can't imagine anything similar happening in a city of that size in Europe.
ok, my first reaction was "she has to be wrong", because everyone has these ideas about basic human nature, like 'people are naturally too selfish for Communism' or 'people are naturally good at heart and spoiled by society', and one of my assumptions is that people will be more likely to steal and cause chaos when they can get away with it, not necessarily because we are innately chaos-causing agents, but just because... you know, if you really want this TV and there aren't any guards around or police officers, you might as well, right?
but Jana is one of those people whose opinions i trust implicitly, more than some of my close real-life friends who i've known for years. and, conveniently enough, i have this theory; i asked some of my friends the other night, would America continue to exist if somehow the government were violently overthrown and the Constitution thrown out? i think -- without the Constitution in its specific form, without the trappings of republican democracy, and without the American mythos, founding fathers, Washington crossing the Delaware, and that sort of thing, the country would likely disintegrate into what i can't even imagine.
the meaning of being an American is complicated, of course. but i think it can be boiled down to two things, assumptions or expectations, or just character traits of nearly all Americans -- first off, the acceptance of capitalism and republican democracy as the best and really only valid ideology, and secondly that thing called the American Way of Life, which includes things like carrot peelers [i learned that Europeans use knives for peeling carrots, which really work just as well], clothes dryers, and big houses, and above all the idea [myth] that if you work hard, you will get ahead -- this whole cultural complex that we feel we have the duty to export across the world. i'm not saying these are exclusively American traits [although it is true that it's patently obvious to most Americans that capitalism is the only way and the natural state of human beings, moreso than to any other nation], because prosperity is certainly important to other countries as well. America, though, has made an ideology of it, the American Dream.
so anyway, since the business of being an American rests on those two concepts, which really aren't all that separate, it seems to me that you could break down any semblance of civic order and national contiguity by taking away either of them. either the capitalism/democracy one, like in my hunch, which hasn't really happened at all in history, or the other, and destroy not only houses but also jobs and other forms of capital, not to mention things like basic sanitation, running water. which happened in New Orleans earlier this month. and these things simply don't happen in America, according to Americans. since in America's definition of itself, prosperity, or at least the illusion or pursuit of prosperity, is an intrinsic part. and so because this area has been so utterly destroyed, people feel that they're no longer members of a national unit, that national and civic duty is no longer relevant to them, and so of course order breaks down.
i am assuming in other countries, like Italy or Croatia, belonging to the nation is not nearly as dependent on physical conditions, but also on things like shared language, culture, history. this creates problems of its own, but also means that you're less likely to loot each other when things fall apart. [how correct is this assumption?]
***
and so Barbara Bush says things like it doesn't matter that this hurricane happened because most of these people were poor and not living in great conditions anyway. which means that the people affected by the hurricane were marginal enough in the political sphere that being a little more so can't harm them too much.
***
so. it's late. on weekends i've been sleeping late and then studying or drawing until midnight and going to sleep feeling wonderful because i know i don't have to get up until whenever i want the next day. i always default to laziness.