‘Swords into shovels’ part II

BY subarno c| IN Media Monitoring | 03/11/2005

Subarno Chattarji 

Building safety for the future:

The Washington Post editorial focused on reconstruction: ¿Before urban rebuilding starts, geologists need to determine where reconstruction can most safely be located.¿ The Christian Science Monitor editorial was more specific: ¿Schoolhouses must be built to the latest earthquake standards, and children should be given regular training in how to respond during earthquakes. (Japan is especially experienced in such training).¿ The Denver Post and Montreal Gazette also referred to the need for earthquake safe buildings. 

The fact that an entire generation had been lost in the collapsed school buildings is poignant and the calls for better building standards entirely justified. What the well-meant editorials seem to overlook - although the mention of Japan¿s expertise unconsciously highlights the point - is the poverty of the region. Only a major influx of aid can create better buildings and futures. As the Montreal Gazette put it: ¿We in the rich complacent countries can send more money, more supplies, more aid workers.¿ Natural disasters and responses to them are no longer, as Katrina illustrated, defined purely in terms of the economic North-South divide. The only viable response in this scenario was highlighted by an editorial in the Sacramento Bee: ¿What¿s clear is that the response to the threat of earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics - and drought, which still outranks all others as the deadliest scourge - must be international¿ (¿Inklings of apocalypse,¿ October 11, 2005). 

US role in disasters:

Within this international arena the US is preeminent although Robert D. Kaplan configures the US role from a very different perspective. He projects the US military as a humanitarian agency that could accrue goodwill along with information on terrorists. ¿Indeed, because of our military¿s ability to move quickly into new territory and establish security perimeters, it is emerging as the world¿s most effective emergency relief organization¿ (¿Next: A War Against Nature,¿ New York Times, October 12, 2005). 

The war on terror is conflated with the war against nature and aid becomes a substitute for earlier commando-style raids against terrorists. Kaplan describes the new aid scenario as ¿unconventional war¿ and sees it as a strategic opportunity for the US rather than as an intervention in a humanitarian crisis. Or rather the latter provides the ideal camouflage for pursuing strategic objectives such as ousting Islamist terrorists. The politicization of the quake was inevitable given India-Pakistan relations, but Kaplan¿s analysis represents a degree of cynical strategizing that reduces the victims to mere pawns in US geopolitical interests. Kaplan¿s is the cynicism or realpolitik, depending on one¿s point of view, of the US liberal media. 

Media coverage of disasters:

Two articles dwelt on the idea of information overload as a result of saturation coverage of which David Warren¿s piece represents the callousness of the conservative press. A self-defined ¿right wing intellectual¿ his column on October 12 was more about Harriet Miers¿ nomination to the US Supreme Court than about the quake. The bit about the latter stated: ¿I¿ll send what money I can to help with the recovery, and the reader should do likewise. All men are brothers¿ (¿Disasters and a non-disaster,¿ Ottawa Citizen). The platitudinous dismissal leads to Warren¿s central argument that ¿disaster coverage of the world¿s media has become a little too efficient. It is a mixed blessing, processing by small increments into a curse¿. At this point I would agree with the idea of a vulture-like efficiency that draws media to disaster sites and reduces everything to a passing drama on our TV screens. From the 2004 tsunami to Katrina to Guatemala to the quake is only a blur; saturation media coverage may not necessarily enhance memory or empathy.[i] 

Warren¿s point, however, is somewhat different. He thinks this coverage is ¿evil¿ because ¿it gives a skewed impression that disasters are becoming more frequent, when really they are just being more prominently reported.¿ The problem seems to be with the frequency of media coverage rather than the actual disasters; if we didn¿t know about them we wouldn¿t worry. This is similar to arguments used with references to incidents of rape in India: not that it is an abomination that is occurring with sickening regularity, but that it is reported more often. 

Warren then answers his question: ¿Why is this [media coverage] an evil? Because it feeds public demand for obnoxious and intrusive legislation, to "do something" to obviate risks that are, in the main, beyond human power to avoid. Our media have, both wittingly and unwittingly, bought into a "Kyoto syndrome," that feeds on junk science and exploits paranoia.¿ It is stunning the way in which Warren dismisses ozone depletion, climate change, and environmental depredations attributable to human activity as ¿junk science.¿ His reference to the ¿Kyoto syndrome¿ indicates a conservative contempt for rolling back or controlling emission levels or reigning in consumption of automobiles and fossil fuels. His argument is the ¿obnoxious¿ conservative one for less government investment whether it be levees in New Orleans or better housing in Balakot. The South Asian earthquake is used as a pretext for bashing the media and environmentalists. 

Warren ends with another platitude: ¿We will all die; but by the end of days, only a tiny fraction of us in natural catastrophes. Let us live with that.¿ Even statistically the ¿tiny fractions¿ are increasing as the Washington Post emphasized by quoting figures: 140, 000 dead in the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone, 230, 000 in the 2004 tsunami. Warren presents a cynical argument that expresses contempt for the poor and the future of the planet. As Polly Toynbee put it in a piece on Hurricane Katrina: ¿Katrina lifts the lid on the hidden America invisible in sitcoms, but above all shows how the rich don¿t acknowledge shared nationhood with the rest.¿[ii] For Warren and his ilk solidarity with the poor whether in Louisiana or in Muzzafarabad is a media conspiracy to increase government spending on public works. Mansoor Ijaz¿s analysis may be naïve but it is without the bad faith of David Warren. 

Conclusion:

Inevitably a survey such as the above throws up varying points of view, ranging from the overly empathic to the balanced to the plainly cynical. As always, what is left unsaid is often as significant as what is repeatedly highlighted. For instance, the idea of media overload was mentioned by David Warren but twisted to suit his own conservative agenda. The Sacramento Bee editorial also referred to information overdrive but neither analyzed the ways in which disasters become media events, how they proliferate in the public domain, and then disappear till the next disaster. 

A large number of pieces dealt with extremes, whether liberal or conservative. Perhaps Sandip Roy captured best the ambiguity and agony of Kashmiris caught up in the twin disasters wrought by nature and politics. He quotes Agha Shahid Ali to convey the duality of Kashmiri existence: "I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of Hell¿ (¿A Mountain Tsunami Rattles Kashmir¿s Fragile Peace, Pacific News Service, October 10, 2005). He also refers to the Shenaz Kausar case: ¿Did Shenaz Kausar¿s daughter with her star-crossed bloodlines have the last laugh today, as the earth split into two to show, as Agha Shahid Ali wrote, that we are stitched to each other¿s shadows?¿ The construction of Kashmir as paradise, its hellish actuality, the immutable bonds across the LOC, the politics of aid, and the continuing trauma of the earthquake survivors are best summed up in Agha Shahid Ali¿s words. (3188 words)