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September 10, 2005
New Orleans is dead as a city as contaminated water, toxic chemicals, fire, stench, decomposing bodies, and drenched darkness spread through the city.
A quote from an article in Bad Subjects:
'Floating corpses, dehydrated babies, fires, National Guard soldiers with shoot-to-kill orders. This is a state of emergency.'
Chris Brett
The quote is from an article entitled 'The Floating Corpse of New Orleans' and it is by Tomasz Kitlinski, Joe Lockard and Stephane Symons. They go to say that:
It is this the state of exception that, according to Giorgio Agamben, characterizes our current political order.The state of exception has become the rule not only in far-off lands and isolated prisons, but even in the center of the American heartland. New Orleans has become a locale where law and human rights are not applicable anymore: the outside has penetrated to the heart of the inside. The Superdome and the Convention Center, with their anarchic interiors, absence of assistance, predatory gang violence, overflowing toilets, and piles of dead bodies, exemplified the materialization of a state of exception.
The people in New Orleans have been reduced to bare life. The people sitting lost in the streets of New Orleans are homines sacri, those who can be left to die or killed with impunity; they have been stripped of any content or quality, their lives have been reduced to mere biological instance.
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I'm struggling to understand the New Orleans/Katrina situation. I think many of us, in the US and elsewhere, will be doing so for a long time. The only think I've managed to do so far is draw parallels to Chernobyl. That disaster seemed a harbinger of the vitiation of the legitimacy of the Soviet regime: government negligence, corruption, and bad policy led to a disaster being far worse than it should have been; and then that same government being woefully inept in dealing with the consequences.
The fact has been exposed, for all but those most impervious to reality, that our government has been plundered of the resources and competencies to handle its most basic and essential functions. Yet a significant number of American voters must also face the fact that they enabled this. And I suspect that even those who feel rage at the treatment of the victims of Katrina, are not yet willing to feel the guilt to hold themselves and their neighbors ultimately accountable.