Mike Davis’s article “Twenty-five Questions About the Murder of the Big Easy,” is a clear-cut condemnation of officials’ reactions to Hurricane Katrina, which, David implies, go beyond incompetence into what could only be a premeditated act of violence. From the beginning, Davis’s title goes beyond the usual admonition of Katrina officials to imply thee things: first, that New Orleans is dead forever; second, that the death of New Orleans was consciously planned; and third, that there are still questions left to be answered in the public trial of the as-of-yet-unpunished murderer.
While Dale’s primary purpose in pointing us to TomDispatch may have been simply to provide a free link to Davis’s article, I think that Tom Engelhardt’s introduction becomes part of the text when it serves as the prelude for the thousands of people who read the article through his website. Engelhardt’s interpretation of Davis’ article is that, “The city is now…a huge crime scene that may never be properly investigated.” Engelhardt goes on to say, “The main question Davis and Fontenot raise below -- for an investigative body that may never exist -- is just how deliberate, from top to bottom, the neglect of the obvious was in New Orleans.” It’s clear that for Davis, the answer to that question is that this neglect was as premeditated as murder.
For Engelhardt, the audience for the piece (at least for those who read it through his blog) seems to be liberal-minded people who art willing to become the “investigative body that may never exist.” When Engelhardt provides context to the article by discussing the at-that-time-current investigation of the FEMA director by “Republican wolves in the House of Representatives,” he implies that despite their attempt at justice by attacking the FEMA director, the Republicans have allowed “the two national figures most in charge of the Katrina debacle [to] remain remarkably untouched by their acts.” Engelhardt won’t let the Republicans have any credit for pouncing – rather, he portrays them as allowing far greater injustices to be done. The “Republican wolves,” Engelhardt implies, seem to be zoning in on easy bait while the big game slips away.
Davis’s thesis seems to be, “Where outsiders see simple ‘incompetence’ or ‘failure of leadership,’ locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect – the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.” He goes on to say that “the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn’t the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy.” For Davis, these 25 unanswered questions are what provide unquestionable proof of official betrayal and hypocrisy – crimes that, he implies, have led directly to the destruction of the city. His evocation of a “sinister gray sludge” implies that it is not the hurricane that destroyed the city but the officials’ misdeeds – so that even after the hurricane “the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.” The hurricane is not the cause of “the most toxic debris in New Orleans” – rather, it is the officials who may as well have poured the sludge all over the city themselves.
Davis writes that his 25 questions are in “almost random order,” which actually calls attention to the order of the questions. Indeed, the questions seem to loosely follow a progressive order. Davis starts with questions about particular errors that draw attention to egregious neglect – such as what he calls “the most deadly hit-and-run accident in U.S. history.” His questions then begin to suggest that these errors were part of a larger plan “to force poorer residents to leave the city” and to destroy “blue-collar areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification” in order to ultimately move towards “the triaging of poorer Black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city.” In his final questions, Davis links this imagined plan to the breakdown of democracy itself in an “ethnically cleansed” New Orleans where, he says, there is no “plan for the substantive participation of the city’s ordinary citizens in their own future.” Davis invokes “the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act” in his final question, “what has happened to democracy?” This question ultimately sets the stakes of these 25 questions; a system where these questions are left unanswered, Davis implies, represents a breakdown of both justice and, ultimately, democracy itself.
Davis’s purpose in writing the piece is to spur into action those who can begin to uncover justice in the wake of New Orleans’s murder; as Davis puts it, “Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.”
--Marta Belcher
0 comments:
Post a Comment