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September 1, 2007

There is a House in New Orleans...

UPDATE: I've replaced the old viewer client for "The Saints are Coming (Version 2)" with the same clip from YouTube. The quality isn't as high, but The Spouse informs me that the AOL viewer gives Internet Explorer fits.

It's the second anniversary of the debacle and the horror of Hurricane Katrina, and I still don't have much to say about it.

As I mentioned in posts from 2005 (here, here, and here), this isn't a political blog, but as the various waves of feminist theory and praxis have insisted, sometimes the political is personal, and the personal is political. And, for me, it's all tied up in the ways we imagine (literally, how we construct our own "image" of the event, and how the media "images" it for us) what happened then, what is still happening now, and what it means to us.

I haven't been back to New Orleans since the MLA conference of 2001, so I'm not in a very good place to pontificate on the state of the city. But one of my former students came by my office to talk about VOIP and mobile phones (as you do), and mentioned that he'd spent time this summer in Central City rebuilding houses. He said that he was glad that he'd been a part of that effort, but that at the end of the day, he wondered whether it was really worth it after what had happened, and the state that the entire area is still in now.

But this post isn't about the reality on the ground, it's about the image of the reality on the ground, and the possibilities for the past, present, and future of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and I guess, of the rest of the world.

Back in 2006, U2 and Green Day covered The Skids' song, "The Saints Are Coming" during the reopening of the Louisiana Superdome as part of a charity effort "to bring instruments and music programs back to New Orleans."

The video for the song blends studio footage, concert footage from the Superdome performance, and a reimagining of the aftermath of the storm. The second-half of the video has been further refined and re-edited, and that "second version" is the one I'm linking to below:

Scott brought my attention to "Version 2," and as with the first version, he's absolutely right: "Tell me if you get chills up your spine like I did the first time they sing the chorus lyric 'the saints are coming' and the jets streak across the sky." Every time I watch the video, I do.

It is, I think, "shock and awe" as it should be. It is shocking to see military planes flying in purposeful formation over U.S. airspace. And it is awe-inspiring to think of what the combined might of the U.S. armed forces could have accomplished over here.

I'd like to contrast that with another music video that uses military footage to make a point about what is, was, and what could be -- Linkin Park's "What I've Become Done" (thanks, Coeurlion):

Here's the bulk of the lyrics for the song:

So let mercy come
And wash away
What I’ve done

I'll face myself
To cross out what i’ve become
Erase myself
And let go of what i’ve done

[. . .] For what I’ve done
I start again
And whatever pain may come
Today this ends
I’m forgiving what I’ve done

It seems to me that Linkin Park is attempting to express the sentiment that no matter how terrible one's actions and/or feelings might be, that self-reconciliation is always a possibility, and that no life is beyond hope. The emphasis is on the hyperbolic nature of angry teenager self-understanding. You may feel, Linkin Park tells us, like a neo-nazi, but you can move past this and become a green growing sprout of positivity.

But what comes across because of the strength and terror of the images they've chosen to use, is that all of these atrocities are forgivable. That if an actual klansman forgives himself, that he'll be okay. That the military industrial complex can "cross out what they've become" and move on to a happier time "somewhere that's green."

I know I'm asking too much of Linkin Park here, but when images of above-ground nuclear testing, race riots, police squads moving against protesters, deforestation, the slaughter of elephants for black-market ivory harvests, industrial pollution, third-world starvation and first-world anorexia, Mussolini, the Klan, neo-nazis, the fall of the WTC, injecting heroin, an oil tanker wrecked upon a shore and spilling millions of gallons of oil, Chernobyl, and children with assault rifles (to name just a few) become mere stock footage used to illustrate an excessively emo wallow in self-hatred, then we have a problem.

Posted by reparent at September 1, 2007 11:40 AM

Comments

Posted by: Liam at September 1, 2007 9:00 PM

Posted by: Richard at September 2, 2007 8:45 AM

Posted by: coeurlion at September 3, 2007 6:37 PM