Voyeurism as Compassion

Voyeurism is a term that often refers to the practice in which sexual pleasure is derived from observing other people. Such people may be engaged in sexual acts, or be nude or in underwear, or dressed in whatever other way the "voyeur" finds appealing. The word derives from French verb voir (to see). A literal translation would then be “seer” or "observer", with pejorative connotations.

However, voyeur can also be used to describe someone who receives enjoyment from witnessing other people's suffering or misfortune…

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I had had it! I snapped.

I was watching a CNN news report on Katrina (sandwiched in between hours of shameless coverage of “The Ramsey Case”) while waiting for a train at NYC’s Penn Station the other day, when I heard (yet again!) a young lady say “I just don't know why they didn't evacuate.” I turned to her and snapped, "You don't know because you lack the ability to imagine being in their situation,” and walked away shaking my head in disbelief.

The Katrina Hurrucane did not kill people -- it's winds did not kill people. Our government, and it's apathetic response killed people.

Our president, who took eleven days to even make it to NOLA, is accountable.

The whole Bush Administration is accountable.

Where was Cheney? (Hunting)

Where was Condeelza (she was attending musicals)

Where was Rove? (nowhere to be found)

This isn't about blame, it's about paying heed to Santayana who said after WW II: "Those who refuse to learn from the past are condemned to relive it." today, a year after Katrina nothing has changed.

So, leave the superficial, "everything is fine, why muck it all up," analysis at home boys and girls. What I'm about to write isn’t nice and I'm not taking any prisoners today.

People died needlessly and if it were YOUR child, or YOUR loved one who died, you would be singing a different tune.

Editor and Publisher, the mainstream journal that reports on reporting, recently counted tens of thousands of stories on the recent developments in the Jon Benet Ramsey case. First, let me just say that I just don’t understand that obsession and why that story trumps the fact that two national elections were very likely tampered with and that people are dying in Iraq as we speak for a war we entered under false pretexts. I guess I’m dense, but it saddens me that in death, little Jon Benet is paraded before our eyes in garish make-up night after night. If that isn’t child pornography, I don’t know what is.

But it is in this voyeuristic framework that the media presents most of its stories. And the vast majority of Americans, buy right into it. With Katrina, the media presented stories that seemed to suggest that those that stayed, stayed for weird “cultural” reasons. They were too entrenched in their ways to stay, reports said. We’ve all seen variations of the cat woman, who chose to stay and perished as a result. In order for voyeurism to replace compassion, we first have to de-humanize the object of our gaze. 

Take as an example how the media's focus on looters and supposed gang raping murderers (all unsubstantiated), at the expense of the efforts by thousands to help one another in the midst of hellish conditions, facillitated the racist stereotyping of Katrina victims as vile trash. Once the climate had been created and the frame set -- one that said, these are bad people, who do bad things -- it took no effort at all for racists to concoct lies and peddle those to a willing and gullible public.

As recent surveys show, the public’s attitudes towards poor people in general haven’t been changed by the Katrina disaster. Those people that died deserved to die because they were too stupid to evacuate in time. How dare you feel compassion for those poor stupid fools!

People still think “po- folk” have it made and are poor by their own design or inherent laziness. I believe the young lady’s remark at Penn Station was deeply informed by that attitude. In fact, people’s attitudes towards the victims of the Katrina mismanagement can be mapped according to race: for the most part, according to one University of Chicago study, whites tend to mirror the notion that those trapped during Katrina were too stubborn to leave.

Let’s talk facts folks, Okay? The fact is that some people chose to ride out the storm in town because they had commitments to be on site to keep the city functioning and help return it to order. Some stayed for more idiosyncratic reasons, not least because they expected their homes to withstand the hurricane, which, incidentally, most did. The vast majority who didn't evacuate as the storm approached, however, were either too poor or too frail to leave, or both!

Two months before Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin's administration decided that it couldn't afford to provide public transportation to evacuate residents in the event of a major storm. So the city produced DVDs (?!?!) to distribute in poor neighborhoods, alerting residents that they would be on their own. There was no attempt, as part of the evacuation plan, to provide transportation for the nearly 100,000 New Orleanians who didn't own dependable cars and couldn't afford to pay their way out of the city. This was cowardice.

This is “efficient government” and the consequences of Katrina lead directly to this notion that government can’t do anything right. So let’s leave it to the private sector because they’re best. Hey! Maybe Halliburton, whose doing such a great job in Iraq, can clean up NOLA! It’s Corporate Christianity! The fact is that the ineffective way in which Katrina was handled (which was directly responsible for the deaths), is a prime example of how “less government” failed us. I will explain…

That notion that New Orleans couldn't afford to mobilize for evacuating up to a quarter of its population, speaks to the real sources of the devastation of New Orleans and the excruciatingly slow pace of its recovery. Every government determination of what can or can't be afforded depends on a costs/ benefits calculation and of the interests that compete for use of resources. The Nagin administration couldn't afford to use enough buses as part of its evacuation plan because it gave higher priority to dedicating funds to other purposes--such as subsidizing development and keeping taxes and fees low.

"Efficient" government is a code phrase for a public policy that serves the interests of business and the affluent—this was the ultimate cause of the city's devastation. Remember that the city survived the hurricane. It flooded because the levees failed. The levees on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals failed because, in the words of the Independent Levee Investigation Team, “safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced costs.” This was the result of federal underfunding, the Corps of Engineers' skimping, state and local officials' lack of vision, and a lack of adequate government oversight--or, in neoconservative language, cutting government red tape.

Bush’s boy, “Brownie,” placed in charge of the drastically cut FEMA as a political favor, had no experience regarding emergency management. I think he had something to do with Arabian horses. Today, on CNN, they’re questioning whether government can adequately manage emergency services. Great! Set something up to fail and then point out that it didn’t work! Makes sense!

Where the breech occurred on the 17th Street Canal, the Corps made concessions in sturdiness of construction to accommodate real estate developers' desire to stuff as much new upscale housing as possible into that neighborhood. The levee on the Industrial Canal failed because of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet's extreme vulnerability to storm surge. MR-GO, as it is called, is a forty-year-old white elephant of pure corporate welfare. In this case, in other words, public safety was sacrificed in the name of corporate greed.

The major idol on the altar of “less government”/ Corporate Christianity is the notion that government services are wasteful and unnecessary. The conservative dogma that the market can take care of everything that needs to be taken care of, was exposed for the scam that it is. FEMA failed because Bush and the worthless bums he put in charge of the agency were completely blind to the notion that a public institution should have responsibilities for securing the public welfare. When disaster struck, they were blindsided, unable to imagine what to do, that perhaps its responsibility should include mobilizing rescue and assistance efforts for people on the Gulf Coast whose plight CNN was broadcasting round the clock. For Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and former FEMA Director Mike Brown, the organization existed only as an opportunity for plunder, political cronyism, and posturing.

I don’t know, maybe I’m dense, but the way I see it, this was a crime, plain and simple. And the freakin' buck stops at the freakin' top!

Today most of the city remains practically deserted. The social infrastructure is at best spotty in most of the city. Only 21% of Orleans Parish public schools had opened by the end of the 2005/2006 school year. Fewer than half of the city's bus routes and less than a fifth of its buses are operating. The levee system hasn't been adequately repaired or upgraded, though the new hurricane season officially opened on June 1. (The Army Corps of Engineers has apologized for its tardiness.)

Meanwhile, privatizers and developers lurk everywhere. Most of the schools that have reopened have done so as charter schools. Both mayor and council can imagine only scenarios in which the private sector will be stimulated to come to the rescue and lead a renaissance. This means that they can imagine only policies aimed at boosting the interests of the monied few -- cutting spending precisely when they should be increasing it--or drawing on corporate “expertise.” Speculators are coming on themselves at the bit to act on redevelopment plans that would reconstruct the city as a theme park with resorts, casinos, and upscale housing.

Welcome to corporate Christianity where property owners are able to assert their influence, while non-owners are nearly as invisible in civic life now as ever before.

Welcome to the Thunderdome!