John Berger - Hold Everything Dear - Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

All this, though, was evident before Katrina to those living it, and to those who wanted to know. What she changed was that the media were there for once, showing what was actually happening, and the fury of those to whom it was happening. With her terrible gesture she wiped for a little while the opaque screens clean.

In some gnomic way the as yet innumerable dead on the Gulf Coast spoke not for, but with, the hundred thousand Iraqis who have died as a consequence of the ongoing disastrous and criminal war. Time and again in the US press Katrina and Iraq are being mentioned together. Yet Katrina was regular. She belonged to the familiar weather conditions which affect the Mexican Gulf. She was not hiding in Afghanistan. And merciless as she was, she did not belong to any Axis of Evil. She was simply a natural threat to American lives and property and she was heading for Louisiana.

It was in the self-interest (as well as the national interest) of the President and his chosen colleagues to meet the challenge she threw down, to foresee the needs of her victims and to reduce the ensuing pain and panic to the minimum possible. If they, the government, happened to fail to do this, they would be able to blame nobody else, and they themselves would be blamed. A child could foresee this. And they failed utterly. Their failure was technical, political and emotional.‘Stuff happens,' murmurs Donald Rumsfeld.

Is it possible that this administration is mad? This is my naive question. Wait. Let us try to define the variant of madness, for it may be that it has never occurred before. It has very little to do, for example, with Nero when he fiddled whilst Rome burnt. Any madness, however, implies a severe disconnection with reality, or, to put it more precisely, with the existent.

The variant we are considering touches upon the relationship between fear and confidence, between being threatened and being supreme. There is no negotiation between the two. Their ‘madness' operates like a switch which instantly turns one off and the other on. And what is grave about this is that it is in the long periods of negotiating between fear and confidence that the existent is normally surveyed and observed in its multitudinous complexity. It is there one learns about what one is facing. A binary ‘madness' excludes this.

On the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln President Bush announced two years ago: Mission accomplished in Iraq!

In some ways this binary affliction echoes the mechanism of a stock market, wherein there is only buying or selling and the two poles of bull and bear, and the rest of what exists, and how and where, barely impinges.

On Wall Street, the financial analysts are predicting increased profits for the Texan oil corporations as a result of the petrol shortages caused by the Gulf catastrophe.

Five days after Katrina had struck, when President Bush finally visited the devastated city, he astounded journalists by saying: ‘I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.'

On the same day, in the wrecked small town of Biloxi, the President's flying visit was preceded by a team who quickly cleared the rubble and corpses from the route his cortege would take. Two hours later the team vanished, leaving everything else in the town exactly as it was. The rest of what exists barely impinges.

To consider this heartless or cynical is to miss the diagnosis. His visits were a planned operation serving as a prelude to the assertion that: ‘We'll once again show the world that the worst adversities bring out the best in America.' Switch turned.

The calculations of the present US government are closely related to the global interests of the corporations and what has been termed the survival of the richest, who today also vacillate constantly and abruptly between fear and confidence.

The economist Grover Norquist, who is a talking head for corporate interests and to whom Bush and Co. listened when planning their tax reforms for the benefit of the rich, is on record as saying:‘I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.'

An ignorance about most of what exists, and an abdication from the very minimum of what can be expected of government — are we not approaching disconnections which amount to what can be called madness when found in the minds of those who believe they can rule the planet?

All political leaders sometimes parry with the truth, but here the disconnections are systematic and crop up not only in their announcements but in their every strategic calculation. Hence their ineptness. Their operation in Afghanistan failed, their war in Iraq has been won (as the saying goes) by Iran, Katrina was allowed to produce the worst natural disaster in US history and terrorist activities are increasing.

On my mobile I received a text message from Orange. It proposed that if I wanted to help the homeless and stranded in Louisiana, I could tap in the word FLOOD to a given number, and the equivalent of five dollars, debited to my account, would immediately be transferred to an aid organization.

I'd like to tap in now some more words to be sent between all of us: HOW MUCH LONGER GLOBAL POWER IN D NUMB HAND OF DOSE WHO KNOW NUTHIN?

1

SOMEBODY ENQUIRES: ARE YOU still a Marxist? Never before has the devastation caused by the pursuit of profit, as defined by capitalism, been more extensive than it is today. Almost everybody knows this. How then is it possible not to heed Marx who prophesied and analyzed the devastation? The answer might be that people, many people, have lost all their political bearings. Mapless, they do not know where they are heading.

2

Every day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not their home but a chosen destination. Road signs, airport embarkment signs, terminal signs. Some are making their journeys for pleasure, others on business, many out of loss or despair. On arrival they come to realize they are not in the place indicated by the signs they followed. Where they now find themselves has the correct latitude, longitude, local time, currency, yet it does not have the specific gravity of the destination they chose.

They are beside the place they chose to come to. The distance which separates them from it is incalculable. Maybe it's only the width of a thoroughfare, maybe it's a world away. The place has lost what made it a destination. It has lost its territory of experience.

Sometimes a few of these travellers undertake a private journey and find the place they wished to reach, which is often harsher than they foresaw, although they discover it with boundless relief. Many never make it. They accept the signs they follow and it's as if they don't travel, as if they always remain where they already are.

3

Month by month, millions leave their homelands. They leave because there is nothing there, except their everything , which does not offer enough to feed their children. Once it did. This is the poverty of the new capitalism.

After long and terrible journeys, after they have experienced the baseness of which others are capable, after they have come to trust their own incomparable and dogged courage, emigrants find themselves waiting on some foreign transit station, and then all they have left of their home continent is themselves : their hands, their eyes, their feet, shoulders, bodies, what they wear and what they pull over their heads at night to sleep under, wanting a roof.

In some photos taken in the Red Cross shelter for refugees and emigrants at Sangatte (near Calais) by Anabell Guerrero we can take account of how a man's fingers are all that remain of a plot of tilled earth, his palms what remain of some riverbed, and how his eyes are a family gathering he will not attend.