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Wrath of God, Wrath of Men
By Richard Leader
Printable
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A week has passed since Hurricane Katrina devoured New Orleans.
Over the course of seven long days displaced residents have endured
a variety of horrors: from the quiet dread facing those who had
the means to escape, the meager comforts afforded by the sullen
white walls of hotel rooms only serving as a constant reminder of
the question mark of tomorrow, to the pandemonium endured by those
trapped within the confines of the city limits, whether on rooftops
or piled into the Superdome. Death was omnipresent; sometimes its
work was wrought by the hands of men alone. Many of us standing
safely outside the chaos (whether or not we participated in relief
efforts of various sorts) found ourselves trying to make sense of
it all.
Some looked to God for answers. Those believing in a God whose
existence is equally wrought by the hands of men and their violence—from
the bullets exchanged between survivors, looters, or figures of
authority, to the accounts of men raping girls and women that have
been reported—found a way to rationalize the destruction in
terms understandable to mere mortals. Groups such as the Columbia
Christians for Life circulated mailings (dated August 29) blaming
the inhabitants of the city for incurring God’s wrath. They
fancifully used satellite imagery of Katrina and compared it to
the photos of unborn children their movement uses in its attempts
to legislate motherhood on male-terms. In their own words:
Louisiana has 10 child-murder-by-abortion centers - FIVE are
in New Orleans
www.ldi.org (‘Find an Abortion Clinic [sic]’)
Baby-murder state # 1 — California (125 abortion centers)
— land of earthquakes, forest fires, and mudslides
Baby-murder state # 2 — New York (78 abortion centers)
— 9-11 Ground Zero
Baby-murder state # 3 — Florida (73 abortion centers)
— Hurricanes Bonnie, Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne in
2004; and now, Hurricane Katrina in 2005
God’s message: REPENT AMERICA !
Columbia’s message circulated widely, as it went out not
only to their highly conservative base but also to a number of liberal
writers. Rather than sitting on this calculated invective and perhaps
sparing those who lost loved ones or livelihoods in the hurricane
from the callous words, those of us on the Left also found ourselves
also needing to find people to blame: this went beyond just criticism
of President Bush, FEMA funding, and the racialization of poverty—all
viable complaints deserving popular consideration and redress—to
something more primal. We needed to find our own Sodomites to sodomize
in a game of hierarchy, a people richly deserving of calamity, whether
at the hands of God or our own.
Thus it was no accident that liberal men especially seemed to be
moved—perhaps more so than their female counterparts—by
the special brand of offensiveness perpetrated by the Columbia Christians
for Life, not because they themselves have a legitimate first-party
interest in the reproductive choices being blocked by the Right,
but because they have a keen investment in such games of hierarchy.
While female writers on the internet are commonly ignored by their
male peers, the story of Katrina-as-an-Angry-Fetus moved rapidly
from Eve’s Apple to Pandagon.net to Kevin Drum (a man who
has received more flack than anyone for refusing to acknowledge
women’s words) and his Political Animal column at the Washington
Monthly.
Prior to the emergence of Columbia’s plum—at least
when it comes to engendering agonistic male bonding—Drum had
previously written “At the risk of sounding overly righteous
every time disaster strikes, can I please suggest that Katrina is
really not an appropriate subject for partisan jabbing right now?
That goes for both left and right.” One reader later accused
Drum himself of violating that criterion with his posting of the
Columbia story (as reported, rather jovially, by Amanda Marcotte
at her Pandagon.net), even though Drum’s dictum itself was
rather naïve, or at least wanted to be interpreted as such,
given that there are certainly important political issues at stake
here; desperate ones. Yet profound pronouncements (too dreadfully
deep and laboriously momentous to ever capture the Pulitzer prizes
they seem to hungry for) and lowbrow ribbing (a fight broke out
at Political Animal where several readers made accusations of Southern
“inbreeding”) seem to be the only ways in which men
can express their political differences, while women—people
with actual uteruses at stake—seemed to take the “Angry
Fetus” hypothesis more in stride.
A great deal of the purported offensiveness displayed by the Columbia
mailing depended upon the belief that such callousness in the face
of human suffering is a unique calling card of Christian fundamentalism
and the Far Right: the highlighting of its egregiousness in this
case was more designed to serve as a reminder that progressive Liberals
would never engage in such behavior or stoop to such levels than
it was to highlight the legitimately offensive aspects of its content.
(Thus privileging the subjectivities of those outside the scope
of its primary invective, placing the male Left’s ego above
and beyond both the women targeted by the “Life” movement
and the citizens of New Orleans.) One of Kevin Drum’s readers
shamelessly advertised an article at a Perrspectives.com (presumably
both linked to and written by its owner, Jon Perr) arguing exactly
that, compiling a list of fundamentalist occasions for claiming
the wrath of God, citing the words of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
Yet the male Left has engaged in such behavior. Shortly before
the presidential election of 2004 an
image was circulated that ostensibly tracked the paths of three
hurricanes (Charley, Frances, Ivan; the same three the Columbia
Christians for Life cited in their own propaganda) across Florida,
the narrow black lines representing the storms flowing from one
“red” or Republican county to the next, carefully avoiding
the blue demographics on the map. As the text of the image concluded:
I thought it was an interesting coincidence that a state with
questionable election results would be pummeled by hurricanes
just before the next election. Then I thought it was an interesting
coincidence that the storms spared Miami, who voted for Gore
in 2000. Just out of curiosity, I overlaid two maps: one of
the tracks of the hurricanes of 2004, and one of the election
results of 2000.
This is no longer and interesting coincidence. It is an unmistakable
message by God. I hope everyone is listening.
While the map itself is fictitious and is now found mostly on
various internet “joke” sites, its verisimilar presentation
was enough to foster credibility for those of a disposition to find
some amusement in the pondering of its plausibility. The seriousness
of the joke’s appearance was bolstered by the fact that much
of its text was an extended copyright notice, a strange inclusion
as the Bob Morris to which the image is accredited seems to be largely
anonymous; across the internet a variety of eponymous writers have
declared that they had no involvement whatsoever.
The image was posted with a chat-smiley grinning at a forum hosted
by Nonviolence.org to much amusement, was controversially “locked
down” at another at TheDemocraticUnderground.com, and even
received a scientific debunking by writers at Snopes.com. The image
was circulated even as Hurricane Ivan traveled northward across
the United States and as many were still reeling from its effects.
Jason Kucsma, founder and co-editor of Clamor magazine,
had the following to say in a September 23, 2004 entry in the publication’s
blog (the same entry was republished by a Milwaukee Indymedia list):
While the hurricane disasters in Florida were undeniably horrible,
we couldn’t help think that they might be an election
season message from god that she wasn’t going to put up
with an election tampering this time around. Then we received
this from a fellow who took the time to overlay the election
results from 2000 with the hurricane paths of 2004. Who’s
on god’s side now?
The words are an exercise in the management of contradictions.
At once Kucsma takes personal credit for the “God vs. Bush”
concept at the same time that he works to distance himself from
it, using both the fact that the image was authored by a conveniently
functionally anonymous third-party (in opposition to his own use
of the royal-we) and through his disclaimer of “undeniable
horror.” Similarly, one Bob Morris of Polizeros.com insists
that while he did not come up with the idea, he thinks “the
map is great,” although his praise is also tempered by an
apologetic:
As one who has been through hurricanes, I wouldn’t wish
them on anyone, not even Jeb Bush.
However since Bob Woodward reported that Dubya believes Jesus
told him to invade Iraq, it’s only fair that lefties can
believe God is smiting Florida for its sins in the 2000 election.
Well, those lefties who still believe in God and sin, that is...
Jason Kucsma took this mitigation a step further at Clamor
in his attempt at mock-feminism—citing a female pronoun for
the divine—to disguise the fact that his use of the image
and the legacies it entails is a purely patriarchal one. If it is
wrong for Christian Fundamentalists who genuinely believe as a religious
conviction the rhetoric they employ to promulgate that world view
when it results in psychological harm (or often material and even
mortal harm) to others, how much more wrong is it when the same
thing is done with no conviction at all, with utter insincerity
as a mere joke to be temporarily paraded as truth? Even as the “God
vs. Bush” trope was likely created as a direct response to
similar conservative efforts, the cynicism it employs is not earnest
on a political level, but mired in male-centric competition: the
message is we can dish it out too; we have penises. Though the masculinities
worshiped by the Columbia Christians for Life and that of the male
Left are antagonistic, they are also complementary and mutually
reinforcing.
Humor is the stock response to every conceivable bad situation
these days. We are invited to laugh at one catastrophe after the
next; it is only human, we are constantly reminded. Those without
such good humor are traditionally called—radical feminists,
no matter if many of them are quite funny indeed. Our culture’s
total investment in irony, particularly so on the Left, has less
to do with genuine humor and more to do with its utility in disguising
men’s agonistic behavior toward each other: while the saber-rattling
on the Left and the Right may appear political, it is ultimately
in favor of the status quo and is hence apolitical unless the notion
of patriarchy is considered.
Even so, given the short memory of contemporary society, “God
vs. Bush” was conveniently all but forgotten barely a year
later, allowing men on the Left to pretend that Katrina-as-an-Angry-Fetus
was beyond the pale: that it existed outside the prescribed limits
of acceptable agonistic displays as determined by male culture.
Such liminal flexing is itself part of the agonistic process. Clearly,
there was no such violation; nor is any such violation even possible:
only the dour admonitions of allegedly humorless feminists are seen
as an authentic threat to the current regime, one that is highly
punishable. Today many feminists themselves are even quick to jump
upon their more “uptight” sisters in order to rein them
back in line.
Dealing with religious fundamentalism often proves impossible;
there is seldom an adequate response to those who believe a hurricane
is directed towards individuals in a certain city or even a nation
as a whole. Becoming a scriptural expert oneself would not prove
sufficient: though Jesus states in Luke 13:4 that the victims of
a particular disaster were no more sinful than those who were spared,
the “wake-up call” response to tragedy that more moderate
believers accept can sometimes be just as dangerous politically
as the Old Testament vendettas of Fred Phelps (of God Hates Fags)
and his kin. This is complicated further by the fact that the Right
does have substantial influence and wealth (and thus aid to victims
of Katrina has been purposefully limited by the power structure
to cash donations whenever possible), and most conservatives are
equally sincere in their humanitarian efforts, even when they also
believe that the sin of New Orleans was its undoing.
Dishonesty, however, is never an effective counter to such rhetoric:
in this case, the forgetfulness of male liberals when it comes to
their own participation in the “God vs. Bush” nonsense,
as well as the contradiction involved in claiming the particularly
heinous nature of Columbia’s mailing when segments of the
Left had their own selfish reasons for ensuring the circulation
of the offensive and hurtful material. As much as some people out
there need a reminder that Jesus is God and not a strap-on, it is
not a valid complaint if your only argument is that theirs is bigger
than yours.
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