Victim Overload

Yesterday, September 17, I heard Ira Glass of "This American Life" interview a victim/survivor of the New Orleans disaster. As many of you already know, Glass is a popular Chicago radio personality broadcast on National Public Radio.

This personal interview left me with only one reaction: I cannot trust what a single survivor says.

Now why this scepticism? Why this seeming indifference to the traumatic experiences of others?

Let me begin to answer these questions by first stating that I've no problem with people sharing how they felt during and after the hurricane. I am certain the grief and worry expressed are all quite real. In "Help Me Understand", I in fact trust the feelings of a woman who has no interest in returning to a place once befouled by crime, and was documented as such long before Katrina hit. My sceptism kicks in when I hear victims' eyewitness accounts about gun-toting National Guard members ignoring pleas for help (though aiming guns at the supplicants); or accounts of water trucks indifferently passing thirsting souls.

The reason for my scepticism is simple. Since the entire event in the Gulf Coast was INSTANTLY politicized (mostly by the leftists in the media) I can not trust what these people are saying. Had pundits and politicians not fouled the waters with claims of racism, incompetence, belligerence and and a variety of other horrible ills, then perhaps we could trust what people are saying about the aftermath of Katrina. But for all I know, the person claiming to be overlooked by white rescuers has already been influenced by Jesse Jackson; the person claiming FEMA indifference has already been influenced by Maureen Dowd. Moreover, I can't trust Ira Glass to actively seek out those victims who contradict his personal views about federal bungling, since he claimed last week at the top of his show in a rare preamble that the laws of the land permitted and even obligated President Bush to immediately take control of the Gulf Coast as Katrina hit.

Lastly, since nearly everyone for miles and miles was a victim, there is a sort of odd problem of victim overload. If everyone is a victim, and therefore everyone a witness, can there really be a reliable account offered when the destruction is so complete? What I am saying is that there were no witnesses to the witnesses, if that makes sense, since everyone apparently was victimized. It's sort of like every person in the city being robbed and assaulted by the same man all at once. Who witnessed what without also being blinded by injury, rage, grief, sorrow or a thirst for vengeance? Who can be objective when everyone is defining everything in terms of how it affected them?

But mostly the problem has to do with politicization. I know there were and are photojournalists at New Orleans who are doing everything possible to get the "money shot", that shot fraught with irony, injustice, and one that depicts a preconceived political, social and/or economic reality. There are journalists doing the same thing everywhere, particularly Iraq. But as with all things we see but through a glass darkly, with the glass this time being the camera lenses of countless photographers and the recollections of countless now-politically polluted survivors.

It is a shame that politics can and do have such a corrupting influence on our perceptions of the real.

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes