It’s not a contest, but were it to be, it’s the right kind of contest. The tsunami relief efforts of so many countries, and so many people, is something of a phenomenon in itself.
The speed with which the citizens of so many countries are making donations to aid those struck by the tsunamis is astonishing. As are the amounts (in most cases) being raised. Governments around the world are acting with equal celerity and generosity. Australia is an astonishment. The government of John Howard has pledged $800 million (U.S.) toward assisting victims of the disaster, most particularly the citizens and government of Indonesia. Mr. Howard has a fine ear, as displayed in his comments announcing the aid:
“This is a terrible tragedy for mankind. But what we are saying, to the people of Indonesia particularly, is that we are here as your friends. There’s an old saying in the English language that charity begins at home. Our home is this region and we are saying to the people of our nearest neighbour that we are here to help you in your hour of need.”
It is worth remarking that “giving” has its canons of tact and delicacy. How people give is as important sometimes as what they give. Whether on a public or a private scale, people can be aggressive or blunt in their charity—help can come with a snarl of superiority or rancid with condescension.
It is one of the finer moments of our time, in which there are so few fine moments to begin with, that the response to the present catastrophe is so little stained—as these words of Mr. Howard demonstrate—by the wrong spirit behind the giving.
The Americans, God bless ’em, are acting with their usual dispatch and generosity. Who would have guessed that an aircraft carrier, the nuclear-powered USS Abraham Lincoln, would be among the first and most vital contributors to the tremendous challenge of offering succour and relief to the survivors of Sumatra?
It will take all the desperate and jaded ingenuity of the genetically anti-Bush crowd to turn this marvellous example of benign intervention into a parable of imperialism and Yankee hegemony. But I have faith in them. I am sure they will. I look forward to the speculation that Halliburton had the contract for the Lincoln’s propellers, and Dick Cheney’s aunt’s getting a dollar for every helicopter takeoff from the carrier. Very likely, Michael Moore has a documentary in the works proving that the invasion of New Zealand is the real object of this exercise, and Naomi Klein is even now readying to pen “Let’s bring Sumatra to Seattle,” or some equally fastidious essay on the perfidy of American goodwill. “No quinine for oil” might strike the right note.
Those less hospitable to the anti-Bush monomania see this wonderful conjunction of an aircraft carrier and the crisis in South Asia as being just what it seems to be: America being generous, and quick with its generosity when it counts.
George Bush himself has been engagingly alert to this disaster from the beginning. When we see him asking his father and Bill Clinton (!) to be joint fundraisers in the private relief effort, we know he’s not posturing. Anything that could unite Bush the First with “Elvis,” under the sponsorship of Bush the Second, goes beyond even the scripted fantasies of The West Wing.
The Canadian public and government are reacting with a wide spirit and an open pocketbook. I agree with a number of people who point out that we seem to be feverishly self-conscious about what we’re doing, and that there’s far too much self-congratulation in our response. Even that criticism can go too far. The itch to be seen as benignant is a hell of a lot better than studied neutralism of indifference. An anxiety to be seen to be doing good is a stress we can live with, especially as it is a prompt to the actual doing of that good.
Our wish to act is circumscribed by the chronically reduced circumstances of our military. However bountiful the spirit of Canadians may be, what we can actually do depends, in very large measure, on having the mechanical and logistical resources to act. Depends, in other words, on how well-equipped and prepared of a military we are ready to support.
A military is never just a war-making machine. It is always the only ready instrument for practical and trained intervention in a time of catastrophe. We cannot short-fund the military and simultaneously extend our reputation as a benign and humanitarian nation.
That seems like a paradox. But so does a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier on an errand of mercy.
As when the Sun … from behind the Moon in dim
Eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the Nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes Monarchs.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
The word “disastrous” is a more choice or Latinate version of “ill-starred.” The word evokes an old idea of fate as the influence of a star—a famous and easy example being the story of Romeo and Juliet. The play itself tells us they were “star-crossed.”
Belief in astrology, that the juncture and rotation of the planets is meaningful to one’s life, is a feeble, though durable, idiocy, often accompanied by a taste for wind chimes or the equally melodious gurgling of PBS’s pet mystic, Deepak Chopra.
The etymology of “disaster” is useful in one particular. It speaks to the dark grandeur and enormity of a given calamity. For, if a mischance or calamity is on such a scale that it speaks to the operation of menace birthed in the cosmos itself, then the mischance, the catastrophe, must be mighty indeed.
Certainly, Hurricane Katrina was, and is, a disaster—nature at her most violent and devious. The scale of devastation and misery entailed is not something, let us thank our stars, we on this side of the world are much familiar with.
The great devastation the hurricane wrought is truly a horrific and heartbreaking visitation on our good neighbours the Americans. They deserve every good wish and support we Canadians have to offer, because they are undergoing a real disaster—an event out of proportion to all human efforts, even in the puissant West of the twenty-first century, to forestall.
I think a portion of the meaning of this terrible word, disaster, has left the consciousness of North Americans. It may be a terrible sentence to write, but we don’t expect cataclysms, real disasters, to happen in our part of the world—they are not “natural” here. We have become inured to a heartless exceptionalism: that whenever a typhoon, hurricane, tidal wave, famine or earthquake occurs, when the dead number in the thousands or tens of thousands, it is only “natural” if it occurs somewhere else.
But when a natural disaster of the scale of Katrina does hit our side of the world, its devastation carries a psychological magnification. We have all but given up the belief that such events can happen to us.
But they can, they do and they will. And there is nothing that wealth, technology or government can do to stop a disaster—however much all three can do to circumscribe everything but its central impact. It is in this area, in the area of deploying the abundant resources of a powerful state to check and reduce the human tragedy incident upon every disaster, that the furious debate over Katrina now rages.
There was no stopping the hurricane itself, and most likely no staying of the terrible flooding that followed. Floods are as old as Noah; the whirlwind spoke to Job.
But there were deficiencies of planning and response, from the mayor’s office to the White House, and the incidents of sheer recklessness and criminality during a time of crisis are sufficient to fill an anthology of incompetence and willfulness.
The failures of planning and response may, in part, be set down to that sense of immunity to disaster, our sense of favoured exceptionalism, that has seeded itself in the West. The recklessness and criminality on display from some in New Orleans perhaps belongs to some territory beyond explanation. Both factors have made a horror more horrible.
However, there is one aspect of the debate that is a very troubling signal of the state of American politics now. The ferocity of unstoppable partisan frenzy, which began with the first news of Katrina’s landfall, is, I fear, almost too much for the American political system to contain. For the antagonists of George W. Bush, there is nothing too grotesque or outrageous by way of insinuation or allegation to lay on his doorstep. Of which the charge that racism “explains” whatever shortcomings the U.S. federal response may have displayed is both the most vivid and toxic.
A great natural calamity is just another stick to wield in the partisan wars. American politics is, day by day, more a continuous fever of accusation, irrational hostility and destructiveness. Partisan combat knows no limits. A democratic system cannot be sustained under such a pitch of opportunism and cynicism.
The dead have not been numbered, grief has not been given its time—and, yet, partisanship rages on. This may be Katrina’s second drear gift: the eclipse of American politics.
I wrote here about partisanship as “toxic.” If there is anything that will finally dismantle the modern democracies of the West, it will be found in the ever more total, fervid, blind and angry reduction of politics to the hyper camps of left and right. Nothing is off-limits to real partisans. Foreign policy, natural disasters, personal life—these were once the territories where decency feared to tread. Politics has become total; any weapon will do; decency of argument is a museum relic. The American system is supersaturated in hyper-partisanship; ours, being smaller, has not reached the white-hot and hateful depths of our burdened neighbours. But it has its moments and spaces of rival ugliness. Left and right are the new fanaticisms for some.
Newfoundlanders are as exuberant as everyone else about Canada Day, but, in my province, it has been an abiding irony since we joined the Confederation that the national birthday coincides with the bleakest day on the entire calendar of Newfoundland history.
That’s a large claim to make. Newfoundland history is streaked with calamity and loss of life. Those who have any familiarity with the long, sad course of the contentious seal hunt are aware that its pursuit has been scarred all too frequently with appalling catastrophes. Indeed, it was on the very eve of the First World War that seventy-eight sealers from the SS Newfoundland were caught away from their ship in a savage storm on the northeast coast and died a gruesome death.
Outport existence and fishing on the wild waters of the North Atlantic were always a wedding with danger and peril. How many, over the generations, went out in the morning not to return at end of day is probably impossible to tell. It is enough merely to note that Newfoundlanders are not unacquainted with grief.
Modern times are no different. The boon of offshore oil had a terrible inauguration with the Ocean Ranger disaster. On February 15, 1982, under the assault of 100-mile-an-hour winds and massive waves, the Ocean Ranger went down, and all her eighty-four-member crew with her. I remember that day. Newfoundland is a small place. It blackened the entire province, as everyone seemed to have some connection—family, neighbour, friend—with one of the lost.
Grief strikes hard in a concentrated space; it echoes longer in the common memory. For every rollicking ballad of the likes of “We’ll Rant and We’ll Roar Like True Newfoundlanders,” a song intoxicated with the delight Newfoundlanders take in the rough, wild place we call home, there is another pitched in a minor key.
There is an undernote of keening in all Newfound-land history. That keening was never sharper than after the morning, ninety years ago today, when the 801 members of the Newfoundland Regiment left their trenches and went “over the top” toward the German lines at Beaumont Hamel. So many, and so young, they went to death or maiming. Of those 801, only sixty-eight were present for roll call the next day. For the Newfoundland Regiment, for Newfoundlanders back home, it was, to summon up a biblical name, Aceldama, the field of blood.
If Newfoundland, in terms of population, is a small place now, it was an even smaller place then. The young men of Beaumont Hamel (we would surely call many of them boys today) had come from every corner of the country (as then it was). Not an outport nor a town but sent someone, not a family hardly but was to bear the terrible cross of a favourite they were never to see again.
They had gone with that mix of motives with which young men have always gone to war. Adventure beckoned some, escape from the too-familiar others; honest fealty to “King and Country,” which probably seems a little outré today, likely spoke in some measure to all.
But it surely ripped the heart of all of Newfoundland that, in the very first minutes of the great Battle of the Somme (in less than half an hour, they knew doom was upon them), on a perfect summer day, so many of her sons in that battalion, nearly all, were dead or mangled. The Newfoundland Regiment fell under a brutal hammer stroke of concentrated machine-gun fire, mortar and sniping. They were, for that time, alone on the field. The Essex Regiment, which was to have simultaneously advanced, in the confusions of that morning, had not.
It was the most brutal day in Newfoundland history.
The regiment received the honorific of “Royal” from King George himself, the only such designation that was awarded during the entire war. But for me, the most affecting memorial comes not from the ceremonial designation—the Royal Newfoundland Regiment—or even from the carefully tended battlefield, which today will host the first return of the regiment as a unit since that awful day ninety years ago, but from the words frequently cited of some of the wounded survivors of that terrible morning: “Is the Colonel pleased? Is the Colonel satisfied?”
There is a ferocious loyalty in those words. And a ferocious innocence as well. They are empty of every cynicism.