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ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Here it is the beginning of February and the temperature in Indiana has been hovering in the mid-40s and low-50s.  Last week one day it was in the mid-60s.  Walking around campus has been a sheer delight, and a far cry from the typical weather one experiences in Indiana in the winter months.  I don’t know what the temperature was when this picture was taken last week in New York’s Central Park, but this is surely not the picture of “love in bloom” we might expect to see at this time of the year with couples skating in Rockefeller Center or maybe making snow angels on the Central Park lawn—or snow plows trying to figure out how to navigate around parked cars on otherwise deserted Manhattan streets.  And so the question is, what’s the problem with global warming, anyway?

Of course, we might not be so sanguine if we lived in Europe where an otherwise mild winter has turned abruptly to historically aberrant and excessively frigid temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in many places.

The scene above is from Kiev where the temperature is 8 degrees Fahrenheit, but the blowing wind no doubt makes it much colder than that.  And here, of course, we see at least part of the problem, for while the weather can be the background for a romantic liaison, it can also accent the effects of social and economic distance.  The woman walking has perhaps been inconvenienced by the frigid temperatures, but not so much that it has kept her from making her way down the street in stylish, high-heeled leather boots.  And judging from her stride it doesn’t seem as if she has noticed the prostrate woman laying in the snow and begging for alms or that she plans on slowing down or stopping.  And when she finally gets home it is altogether likely that her flat or house will be appropriately warm. The woman on the ground, on the other hand, is bundled in mismatched clothing and protected from the snow beneath her by what appears to be a plastic bag.  In all likelihood she is homeless.   And like so many of the poor and homeless, wherever she sleeps this evening her “inconvenience” will be much more acute, resulting in debilitating frostbite or even death. The numbers are hard to calculate, but even the most conservative estimates indicate that over 300 Europeans have died in the past two weeks due to exposure.

None of this proves manmade global warming, of course, but the conditions documented by these photographs surely corroborate the growing consensus to that effect of virtually every scientific organization that has studied weather patterns and climate change, including the National Academy of Science and the Union of Concerned Scientists.  And more, they gesture to at least one of the moral implications of our failure to preserve a sustainable environment, for surely it is the homeless and impoverished who will bear the initial brunt of the floods and draughts that are all but inevitable future effects of our current environmental practices and policies.

As I ponder these photographs it leaves me altogether amazed that serious candidates for the presidency can conclude that climate change is the result of “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects” or that  global warming is a “hoax.”  Then again, it was barely less than a year ago that the Republican members of the  U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee voted down an amendment to a bill that called for Congress to accept the scientific consensus that “climate change is occurring, it is caused in large part  by human activity and it is a threat to human health” on a 20-31 party-line vote.”

 And so, back to the question: What’s the problem with global warming, anyway?  And the answer has to be that the problem is that we seem determined to decide such matters on party line votes that systematically (and quite proudly) ignore the scientific facts.  And more, we forget that the spring-like conditions of a romantic liaison in the park during the dead of winter will have its costs, if not now, soon, and they will point to even deeper problems and contradictions within our collective lives.

 Photo Credits:  Lucas Jackson/Reuters; Gleb Garanich/Reuters

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Scientific imaging plays a limited role in photojournalism, but a role nonetheless.  X-rays, ultrasonic images, brain scans, electron microscopy, nanotechnologies, and other marvels reveal the many worlds underneath the surface of things, while telescopes peer ever more cannily into deep space.  So it is that you might wonder what is being show in this photo which was released last week.  Protoplasm?  A virus? A lesion?  Neural excitation for the smell of loam?

Or perhaps a satellite photograph of Isola del Giglio and the cruise ship Costa Concordia.  The ship is the bright smudge in the lower right quadrant, and the small bright spots  below it are other craft.  The photo was taken by the Italian Space Agency (A.S.I.).  (Those who like to sneer at Europe might want to ponder that concept while chewing on their freedom fries.)  Although I don’t want to do anything to diminish the suffering and other costs associated with the disaster, this photo nonetheless provides an object lesson in the limitations of seeing everything to human scale.

Even though I knew I was looking at photos about the ship running aground, I couldn’t help but see this image as something microscopic.  It looked too much like a scrap of the cellular world, or perhaps some bit of flotsam in a laboratory–”Scientists develop artificial skin,” or something like that.  And when I realized I was seeing a topographical image, it seemed more like a living thing that a promontory of rock.  And although a dot on the map and miniscule in comparison to other landforms, it dwarfs the ship, which then seems to be something less than a piece of lint in the natural order of things, which it is.  The image evokes an enormous, living planet, itself part of a cosmos that flows endlessly inward and outward.  Human life is part of that mystery but also microscopic within that outer world.

Perceptions of magnitude have a highly elastic quality within human consciousness.  Events can loom large and then whoosh back to the vanishing point is a second.  You are furious with a family member–until you learn the terrible news, and then everything changes.  The school board election is a disaster, until the phone rings late in the night.  The deficit is a national crisis, until tomorrow when it disappears from view.  Pain is real no matter what, but those of us watching at a distance have an opportunity to think about what we consider important.

But let’s not get too serious, either.  Here’s another satellite image, but one that transports us into the context of surrealism.  The ship is visible as a ship but cockeyed, laying on its side, and looking as if it is floating in space.  The land form is becoming more familiar as well and less attractive for that: lumpy structures clutter the terrain while any sense of of the whole has been obliterated.  The ship dominates the scene, but as if it were a toy or a dream.  The vessel’s importance is implied but also undermined.  Again, we are left to ask, well, what really should be important here?

I think that it is precisely because humanity is so small in the great scheme of things that we should be particularly attentive to caring for one another and otherwise living well together.  You may come to another conclusion, and that is your business.  Just don’t think that the difference is as big as it appears at ground level.

Photograph by ASI/Associated Press and DigitalGlobe/Reuters.  These and other photos of the wreck are at Alan Taylor’s In Focus photoblog at The Atlantic; there is some overlap with the archive of the same day at The Big Picture.

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The Costa Concordia is a floating resort. Larger than the Titanic by nearly seventy feet, it boasts 1,500 cabins, one third of which have private balconies, the world’s largest fitness center at sea (65,000 square feet), five restaurants (two of which require reservations), thirteen bars (in addition to cigar and cognac bars), a three level theater, a casino, a discotheque, a Grand Prix race simulator, an internet café, and much, much more.  It houses 4,300 passengers and an additional 1,100 crew members—that’s one crew member for every four passengers—on seventeen decks.  It is valued at just less than $600 million dollars.  And while we would probably not consider it a technological marvel in the late modern world, as we would have considered the Titanic or the Hindenburg in an earlier era, it is nevertheless something of a marvel, its sheer magnitude making it larger than life.

Of course, the photograph above doesn’t quite do it justice. Foundered on a rock off of the coast of Tuscany near the island of Giglio that left a 160 foot gash in its hull and listing to the starboard side, the marvel and magnitude of the Costa Concordia are somewhat diminished. The actual cause of the grounding has yet to be finally decided, though there is no evidence of bad weather or other emergency conditions that would have required bringing the ship this close to the coast line.

It is both a catastrophe and a tragedy. As of this writing the death toll rests at eleven with twenty or so others still unaccounted for.  And as with the mythological Icarus, the disaster is a result of sheer hubris.  In the days ahead the focus will no doubt be on the captain’s unauthorized deviation from the planned course and his lack of good sense animated by assumptions of unfounded pride in either his skills as a sailor or in the capacity of the ship. Or perhaps we will learn that he was intoxicated or otherwise distracted.  We are already hearing that much of the problem was due to the fact that passengers failed to participate in muster drills, as if the disaster was their fault.  In any case, “human error” will no doubt bear the weight of the burden.  And to be fair, a good measure of this may well be warranted.   But of course the hubris here extends beyond the human failings of the captain or the passengers and extends to a society that places its unfettered faith in its technological ability to master nature.

Elsewhere we refer to this faith as “modernity’s gamble”—the wager that the potential for catastrophic risks assumed by a technology-intensive society will be avoided by continuing progress.  Modernity’s gamble is most apparent in the building of airplanes and rockets designed to conquer the skies, or in nuclear power plants intended to free us from our reliance on fossil fuels, but it is no less relevant to things such as online banking and commerce, where the risk to economic catastrophe is no less disastrous—or likely.  It may be that we are passed the point that we can refuse modernity’s gamble, but surely we need to learn to respect it and to avoid challenging the odds for frivolous purposes. That here the wager was lost in a disaster involving a technologically advanced and sophisticated playground for the upper classes only underscores the hubris of a society that cares little for how it employs its resources and even less for how it respects its environment.

 The photograph above is telling in this regard, as it contrasts the  failure of an overextended and idealized technological mastery of nature (for fun and profit!) with the sustainable houses and buildings that occupy the coastline.  A storm could come along that wipes out the village, no doubt, but it wasn’t an unpredictable weather event that led to the disaster here.  It was the failure to respect modernity’s gamble.  And while those who built the village appear to have respected the natural crag of the outcropping, preserving it as a defense against the sea and the wind, but not trying to overcome it, those sailing the Concordia did not respect it, running aground in the process.  As Don Quixote’s sidekick Pancho reminds him, “whether the stone hits the bottle or the bottle hits the stone … its always bad for the bottle.” And so here, the ship once visually magnificent, is humbled; indeed, in its own way it appears to have settled into a fetal position of total resignation.  It is perhaps a subtle irony that the ship’s name—referring to the state or condition of agreement or harmony—is betrayed by the scene depicted in the photograph in which harmony rests with the village and not with the trappings of an unbounded hubris.

Photo Credit: Remo Casilli/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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9/11

The New Security State 1

The New Security State 2

The “Liberation” of Iraq

Abu Ghraib 1

Abu Ghraib 2

Abu Ghraib 3

Abu Ghraib 4

Guantanamo Bay

Extraordinary Rendition

Vice President Dick Cheney and Friend on a Hunting Trip

“We Got Him!”

Searching for Bin Laden in Afghanistan

Finding Bin Laden

“Old Glory” Continues to Fly Proudly

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This photograph won’t win any awards, but it tells an important story.  A story within a story, to be exact.

The larger story is that a terrorist attacked both a government center and a civics camp in Norway, killing at least 72 people.  That story includes all the madness you might expect.  The attacker wanted to protect Europeans, so he murdered Europeans.  To oppose Islamic groups advocating authoritarian rule to enforce cultural conservatism, he called for an authoritarian takeover of European governments to enforce cultural conservatism.  He got as far as he did by exploiting the freedom and social trust that he deplored.

Sadly, we know that story all too well.  It also is a story of how ordinary precautions didn’t work, how the state does not maintain a monopoly on violence, and how even advanced societies are sure to fail.  Which is why the smaller story is so important.  The photograph captures what can happen in the aftermath of system failure.  One person is comforting another who has been wounded by the blast in Oslo.  She appears to have a head wound, and he is responding appropriately by applying a compress while keeping her head elevated.  His posture can’t be comfortable, as he is on his knees while supporting and steadying her body.  Equally important, he is comforting her: holding her closely, talking and listening, being deeply attentive to her person despite all the mayhem surrounding them.

The scene is a moment of civic intimacy.  They are framed by the ordinary decor of the city street: pavement, a metal and glass door, the signage, chair, and trash bin of a cafe, yet they are closely attuned to one another.  Nor is this a merely personal incident, as we can see from the shattered glass strewn across the sidewalk.  She hasn’t simply fainted or had a seizure, and the person helping her may not have known her at all–the caption identified him as a “passer-by.”  They were strangers who have been thrown together by the blast–and his kindness.

His action is underscored by their ambiguous ethnicity.  Is he Norwegian?  Is she?  Could he be one of those dreaded Islamic immigrants?  Fascist ethnic typing is scrambled by this act of compassionate citizenship.  For whatever passports they might have, he has made both of them citizens: strangers having obligations of equality and assistance regardless of other differences.  As Ariela Azoulay argues, any photograph implies that relationship; here the citizenship conferred by the camera reinforces what is already evident on the street.

The Chicago Tribune’s report on the attack was on page 26 of the Sunday edition.  I can’t believe that the story of a fundamentalist killing 72 people in a European country would have been buried had the attacker not been Christian and blond.  (Don’t like the Christian label?  Then stop labeling Middle Eastern terrorists “Muslim.”)  The Tribune is another example of system failure–in this case, the way the story will be underplayed in most of the American media.

Fortunately, as important as institutions are, we don’t have to rely on them alone.  Disasters demonstrate again and again that, amidst large-scale disruption, small-scale action by ordinary citizens is vitally important to limiting damage and restoring order.  The photograph above is one example of true citizenship.  More will be needed, and in response to disasters ranging from terrorist attacks to economic catastrophes.

Photograph by Scanpix/Reuters.

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Guest Post by Bryan Walsh

While ruin gnaws at the promises of American democracy, photography serves as an invaluable technology for visualizing our increasing vulnerability to social and political abandonment—and just maybe for defending against it.  Consider the above image of a classroom in Detroit’s St. Margaret Mary School: empty desks are scattered throughout, littered course papers amass on a burnt and charred floor, lectures and exam dates are faintly scribbled on a chalkboard, closets are stripped of their possessions, windows are broken and boarded-up, lighting fixtures dangle from a moist and moldy ceiling, and what appears to be a broken ruler lies on top of a desk in the bottom right of the frame.  Despite being reduced to rubble and debris, the objects are nonetheless glaringly clear.  The wide-angle offers a perspective to the viewer that encompasses the totality of the classroom while the deep focus enhances the details and intricacies of the landscape and its objects.  The composition of the photograph effectively brings the space to life, offering all its complexity to the careful contemplation of the viewer.

But what does this photograph want us to contemplate?  Note the spatial layout of the remnants of the school: the chalkboards, windows, papers, closets, and most of the desks are relegated to the periphery of the room.  Complimented by the circular formation of the desks and the directionality of the lines on the windowsills and chalkboards, the fallout of the classroom orbits around an invisible but nonetheless noticeable center.  Indeed, there is something missing here and the photograph renders  it a ghostly presence that glares back eerily at the viewer.

Put bluntly, St. Margaret Mary School is haunted by the everyday activities that once animated it.  Even if you didn’t live in northwest Detroit, or attend Sunday services at the St. Margaret Mary parish, or endure lessons taught by an Order of Sisters, the landscape and its remnants are identifiable for most Americans: I once sat at those awkward desks and wrote childish nonsense on those papers; I gazed in reverie through those windows; my teacher scribbled on those chalkboards and demanded my attention with that ruler.  In short, this photograph displays a powerful paradox: what is so overwhelmingly visible within these spaces is also what is so painfully absent–the everyday activities that sustain and are sustained by a flourishing and hopeful city.

Despite its collapse, this  photograph of an abandoned classroom in the St. Margaret Mary School  calls forth the memories of a more promising past.  Such is the topic of concern for Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photographic project “The Ruins of Detroit.”  Depicting Detroit’s dilapidated metro-stations, schools, theaters, banks, industrial facilities and other civic spaces, Marchand and Meffre’s photographs invite a range of interpretations that put past and present in tension with one another: they could evidence the extent of Detroit’s civic and infrastructural abandon, or that of a weathered and beaten civilization, or for that matter they could even foreshadow the impending doom of American Empire.  Invoked by the images, such memories are nostalgic and mournful, at least insofar as they eulogize a flourishing cityscape buzzing with prosperity and modern mass production.

Detroit now stands (leans?) as a veritable wreckage of infrastructural and social disaster: not only have a quarter of its population fled the city in a desperate search for employment, but city officials and enforcement agencies have displaced families from their homes and boarded-up entire neighborhoods, leaving it in nothing less than a thorough state of collapse.  Just last spring, roughly 5,500 teachers and 250 administrators received pink slips, while seven public schools have been shutdown, and 45 others have been packaged to charter school developers, 18 of which will be closed if they don’t find a buyer.  This photograph of  a single classroom in the St. Margaret Mary School does not tell this part of the story, but it does provide resources with which communities can make sense of—and intervene in—the perpetuation of personal injury, social inequity, and political abandonment.  The image, then, does not  “exploit a city’s misery” through a “decontextualized aesthetics of ruin”; rather, it tangles the past with the urgency of the present, reminding viewers to acknowledge both the vulnerability of the people of Detroit as well as the imperative to do something about it.

Photo Credit: Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit

Bryan Walsh is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University. He can be contacted at btwalsh@umail.iu.edu.

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This past Sunday was World Environment Day (WED).  Unless you are especially attuned to such matters you probably did not know that. And it is little surprise since the day seemed to be missed almost entirely by the mainstream media despite.  Indeed, the only reference I found to it in the major national media  was in the caption to this photograph in the WSJ of June 6, which read: “SIFTING THROUGH GARBAGE: A boy who collects items to earn a living for his family searched through dirty water in Karachi, Pakistan on Sunday, World Environment Day.”

I find it difficult to understand why WED would slip by with barely any notice.  It’s not as if there have been major breaking stories in the past week that would eclipse all other news, unless, of course, your count concern for Congressman Weiner’s problems with his twitter account.  Nor is WED an insignificant event.  Sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme since 1972, it is an annual affair designed to stimulate global awareness of the environment and to promote “positive environmental action.”  Hosted this year by India, the particular theme is “Forests; Nature at Your Service,”  and given the impact of deforestation and forest degradation on climate change, water quality and supply, and general biodiversity—not to mention the fact that over 300 million people worldwide live in forested areas and that millions of acres of forests are lost each year—one would think that the day and its particular theme would warrant a couple of column inches and a few photographs.  But alas, no.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is the difficulty we have in visualizing the degradation of the environment—or at least the difficulty that the mainstream media has in doing so in ways that don’t mitigate prominent corporate, national, and multi-national agendas.  And so we come to the photograph above.  It is all but certain that this unnamed boy seeks to “earn a living for his family” by searching through these dirty waters on more than one day in the year, but the image takes its significance here from the fact that here he does it on World Environment Day.  The question is, why?  The cynical answer, of course, is to take the implication that the serious environmental problems, the places that most need attention, are not in the industrialized and corporatized west, but elsewhere, places like Pakistan, where “earning a living” by “sifting through garbage” in polluted waters is a matter of survival that displaces concerns for environmental sustainability.  By this read the “real” problem of environmental degradation is localized and fragmented rather than global, and the caption to the photograph underscores the irony of WED.  It is a day of little interest because it doesn’t identify a problem that is of real interest to the west.

But there may be another, more productive reading, one that resists seing the image in an ironic register and instead sees it as a synecdoche—a part-whole relationship—for the sense in which the problem of the environment is truly global.  From this perspective the photograph invites us to see the world (the whole) in the particularities (the parts) of a young boy reduced to sifting garbage in polluted waters.  Yes, this is Pakistan, but it could also be anywhere else in the world, if not actually today, then someday, and maybe even soon.  If we can bring ourselves to embody this optic it is hard to understand why WED passed without barely a mention in the western press. And whether we choose to honor this day in the future or not, we ignore the global problems of environmental degradation at our peril.

Photo Credit: PPI/Zuma Press

Note:  The relationship between visuality and  environmental concerns is of no small significance.  The editors of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture have just announced a special issue on “Visual Environmental Communication.”  For more information you should contact Anders Hansen at the University of Leicester.  The due date for manuscripts on a wide array of topics is 30 November 2011.

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The photograph above appeared on the front page of the NYT a few days ago in conjunction with a story concerning a series of bomb blasts that rocked Baghdad killing twenty people, including 8 Iraqi policemen and two U.S. soldiers.  At first glance, the image is altogether banal. The remnants of the wreckage in the foreground are barely recognizable, with only a single tire giving a clue as to its identity as a vehicle.  The absence of security personnel or emergency vehicles make it apparent that the explosion did not just happen.  And the individuals sitting and standing in the background are altogether relaxed, if not nonchalant, their attention dispersed in multiple directions, making it difficult to know what event the photograph is actually recording—the scene in front of us, whatever is outside of the frame of the image, or something else altogether.  Indeed, on the face of things the photograph does not appear to be an image of anything in particular at all.

At second glance, however, it may well be the very banality of the image that makes it especially worthy of our attention.  An explosion has taken place, or more specifically, as the caption directs the reader, “a series of attacks” have taken place, and yet any sense of urgency in dealing with the situation is altogether elided.  Everyday life  has been disrupted, to be sure, tragically so with the violent loss of life, but the event is shown to be so routine, so commonplace, that its status as a horrifying emergency claim goes unnoticed and unaddressed. The photograph thus purports to be the visual representation of a slice of life in a society that has become conditioned to such everyday violence, so much so that it lives, in Ariella Azoulay’s terms, “on the verge of catastrophe.”  This is not an appeal to the now tired idea of “compassion fatigue,” which claims that we become so weary of images of violence and disaster that we simply stop noticing.  Rather, it suggests the sense in which “the contours [of the scene represented] are indistinct; one could easily fail to notice it, passing in front of it without stopping.”  It is portrayed as a nonevent, however quotidian it might be, and thus it never rises to the level of an emergency claim. Put simply, the everydayness of the scene, which should alert us to the profound, catastrophic condition of the society, actually veils—if not altogether erases—the tragedy before our eyes.

To get the point, compare the photograph above with the photograph and slide show that the NYT published in conjunction with the 2008 bombing of a U.S. Army recruiting station in Times Square.

No one was injured in this blast, the physical damage to the building was relatively minor, and disruption to the city lasted for only a few hours, but nevertheless, all of the signs of urgency and emergency are present and pronounced.  Yellow tape marks the scene as the site of a dangerous criminal act.  Members of the bomb squad—state officials—stand post in front of what appears to be a technical expert dressed in a hazardous materials suit as he examines the bomb’s residue.  And note too that the explosion took place in the early morning hours and the street lamps in the background are still on, suggesting the immediacy with which the event was responded to and handled. Everything in the image casts this as a special event and in so doing initiates the conditions for classifying it as a catastrophe.

The point, of course, is that catastrophes come in a variety of forms.  The problem is not in reducing the conditions for defining a catastrophe to a singular event, but in how we visualize those conditions as a matter of urgency.

Photo Credits:  Karim Kadim/AP; Chip East/Reuters.  And with special credit to Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008). Esp. 289-373.

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There is no way that press coverage of the Mississippi river flooding can match the damage, discomfort, and discouragement that is spreading across the flood plain.  Maybe the coverage really doesn’t matter, but if it does, people are getting too little of it.  Nor is this surprising.  Big news from the Middle East continues to overshadow a story driven by the weather.  The news is drawn to dramatic events, while the flood has been spreading slowly.  Tragedies are supposed to be monumental, but the flood is about sandbags and soggy carpets.

You might say that this photograph says it all, precisely because it says so little.  A woman is carrying clothing out of a flooded house.  She is wading through the kitchen, which is standing in a couple inches of water.  The kitchen looks like many other kitchens across America and the world, right down to the magnetic decorations on the fridge.  The one difference is the water, which is not too deep but thick with mud and getting under everything.  Her expression is just right: this is an unexpected, unwanted chore, and one requiring concentration so that you don’t make it worse, but what can you do except wade through it?  Why waste time complaining?  Or making a big deal about it in the news?

The house has not burned to the ground, been devoured by an earthquake, or shattered by artillery shells; it’s just wet.  So it is that floods usually fall short of other disasters in terms of visual interest.  You can only look at so many photos of a boat being piloted down the street of a small town.  But something is being revealed, nonetheless.  The problem is not the nature of the disaster, but of a media system that is not suited to capturing conditions of general deprivation.  The news is drawn to emergencies, and to making emergency claims, but not to understanding how large groups of people may be on the edge of despair or at least having to get by with far less support than others take for granted.  Consider, for example, how the health care debate was hijacked by images of Tea Party protests, allowing millions of people to be shorted and billions of dollars squandered for want of being able or willing to depict systemic problems on behalf of the general welfare.  Also lost along the way was an appreciation for the fragility of human life and the social systems that we erect to protect ourselves from the forces of nature.

Another woman, another room of the house, another natural disaster.  This bedroom was exposed to the elements by a tornado that blew through Alabama not long ago.  (Remember?)  Once again, you see a demonstration of the coping skills that are so essential to everyday life.  The walls have been torn away, but what can you do except sort out the possessions that remain?

What strikes me the most about the scene is that the walls were so close to the bed.  We’ve all been in small bedrooms, but how often do we then feel that we are just on the other side of the outside?  Here we can see that, large or small, a house is but a thin shell between inside and outside, between the forces of nature in all their violent capriciousness and the shelter, security, warmth, and everything else we hold dear when in our own space.

Whether flooded or torn asunder or still intact, a house is a fragile thing.  More generally, housing has proved to be a fragile part of the national economy, one that, if poorly managed, can come crashing down to spread harm far and wide.  When deregulation allowed the housing market to be flooded with financial malfeasance, disaster struck, and ordinary people who had done no wrong were left to pick up the pieces.

We live in shells.  When they are well built and protected, we forget how fragile they are.  When disaster strikes, the thin barrier between ordinary life and catastrophe is exposed.  What remains to be seen is whether anyone else will notice or care.  And care not just about this house or that one, this town or that one, but enough to rebuild a society with the protections and support that ordinary people deserve and need.  It’s called government, by the way.

Photographs by Scott Olson/Getty Images and Butch Dill/Associated Press.

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A flood is a general thing.  Tornadoes are idiosyncratic, fires depend on their fuel, mudslides are site-specific, and so it goes.  Sure, not everyone is in the flood plain and the other natural disasters can cause a lot of damage, but somehow a flood seems the most comprehensive of them all.  Noah wasn’t asked to build a firebreak, and even today a flood can look as though it might cover the earth.

This photograph from a farm within reach of the Mississippi River shows how a flood brings everything under the singular dominion of water.  It’s not as if nothing is left, but everything is inundated, either covered or cut off and then suspended in the same elemental medium.  As you can see here, the structures may remain intact (for awhile, anyway), but everything else is swept away or drowned.

The dunning uniformity of a flood’s destructiveness is depicted perfectly by this photograph.  One result is that it becomes easy to see the disaster as a general problem, something that affects the whole community and is defined by collective action such as building dikes.  That’s not the full story, of course.  In fact, you are also looking at a personal disaster: this farmer is effectively wiped out for the year or worse.  House, place of business, equipment, everything has been ruined, and don’t even think about getting the crop planted in time.  Likewise, the waters that look so uniform from a distance will be a silent maelstrom of cross currents, fish, other animals, and debris, and the waters will reshape the land this way and that before they recede.  The particulars are not the story, however, nor should be.  The flood, both materially and symbolically, is one way that nature reminds us of how things that seem separate can share a common fate.

Which is why disaster relief will flow like waters from the federal government to the states.  Of course, it flows regardless: after the tornadoes that ripped through the South last month, and after the hurricanes and every other natural disaster.  The federal largess is particularly interesting this year, since–as often is the case–most of the damage is in so-called Red States.  That’s right, in the states where majorities pride themselves on their commitments to small government, low taxes, and deficit reduction.  And so the photograph above needs to be paired with the pictures that you won’t see: (1) Red State governors not applying for or accepting federal aid.  (2) Red State governors, senators, and representatives saying that they don’t want any aid if it would increase the deficit.  (3) The same crew saying that they will be willing to raise taxes or increase deficits to cover their own disaster needs, much less others’.  (4)  Anyone realizing that low taxes and deficit refusals are automatically denying aid to those who are experiencing disaster elsewhere–including economic disasters and social disasters such as bad schools and unsafe neighborhoods.  (6) Any suggestion that we should ask those citizens with low state taxes to rely on their tax savings to cover the costs of the disaster.  (7) Any suggestion that we should rely on market solutions: say, in line with health care revisionism, that the afflicted states should bid for the aid, with the lowest bidder winning while the other states are free to apply for help from other countries.

Hypocrisy is a necessary part of democratic politics, but there ought to be limits.  Unfortunately, the Red State politicians will ask for every penny that might be available and scream if they don’t get it, and do so without a thought to changing their relentless assault on federalism.  They should be helped, of course, but they also learn the lessons that disasters have to teach: lessons of reciprocity and other forms of cooperation on behalf of the general welfare.  That’s how human beings have been able to survive.  If you look at the photograph above, you might begin to understand how cooperation is the way that we can match nature’s comprehensiveness.

Photograph by David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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