Sinners in Katrina's Hands

SINNERS IN KATRINA’S HANDS


An Essay in Psychosemiotics -- How Hurricane Katrinka is experienced by the Group (America) as shown through sign-use; and Elaboration.

In three Parts. 1. How She is seen; 2. Punishment for the Way They (=those seeing her as such) Are; 3. Apocalypse of self-hatred for those who reject the message.


Part 1. How She is seen. New York Times’ iconography

1. 8.30.05 “Nature’s Revenge” (editorial)
Associations:
a. to “Nature” = Mother (Mother Nature, Archetypally personified in the boundless, turbulent, arbitrary, impervious force of the ocean (Tiamat, Tehome, Leviathan, Uroborus)

b. to “Revenge” = retaliation, punishment, reckoning for prior transgression. In fantasy: instinctive impulse in children to hit back against powerful, abusive -- or imagined abusive -- parent/authority figures.

Summary: “Nature’s Revenge” anthropomorphizes hurricane Katrina as retaliation of primal creative planetary force -- God personified as female/Mother side of creation -- to punish the sinful children of America.

2. 8.31 “In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina” (Heading of 5 Letters to the editor section.)
-mid-page picture is sketch of young girl’s shroud-blackened bowed head, with a hurricane drawn in her eye. Katrina, one supposes.

3. 8.28 Contextual juxtaposition: “The Vietnamization of Bush’s Vacation”, Frank Rich. The Iraq war, and how to get out of it, is repeatedly getting compared to the Vietnam quagmire. In synch with this, by archetypal coincidence through sign-uses, one reporter commenting on the fury that devastated Gulfport, Mississippi, just on the east wall of the eye where it made land, exclaimed: “She hit as if she had a score to settle.” The reference was to the l969 hurricane Camille, also category 4 coming ashore at almost the same spot, but not nearly as vicious, according to old-timer’s testimony. “As if she had a score to settle” connects the acts of God’s judgment on America in the midst of two failing wars, 35 years apart. The added ferociousness of Iraq over Vietnam says: “You thought THAT was bad? You want to see SHOCK AND AWE?”

Summary: The punishment is by the Almighty through Mother Nature, for the wars. The killing, driven by delusions of child sacrifice heroism, is repetition by compulsion of the ancient ritual of slaughtering massive numbers of children, as mother’s once did to Moloch in Carthage. “Just throw ‘em in the volcano. That will silence their infernal squalling and squabbling.” Katrina is the answer to that kind of Below thinking, from Above. As Above, so Below. “These things are not for you, but for Me, to do if I so choose.”
*****/

Part 2. Punishment: Not Just for the war
For the way they are


The way She came up, and came on, had an as-if focused, purposeful aspect, as if to say “Look: what you see in the epic narrative is the message my coming intends to send.” Like: “What you see is what you get,”, and what you see has been scripted (by God).

This was first strongly evident after it had approached Florida as a strengthening Tropical Depression with winds up to 45mph, at most a Category 1. Then, stalling; then suddenly releasing bands of high-potency wave-blasts up its urethal canals (“America’s wang”, as Homer Simpson called the state that threw the ‘00 election to Bush). Sucking the gambling and other operations on the wealthy Keys into its couter-clockwise maelstrom.

Odd enough, that, yet still only oxygen for surfervid imagination. As She emerged into Gulf of Mexico waters at the beginning of August’s last week, any expected damage threats a few days away were pushed aside by more immediate news demanding attention: the collapse of the constitutional process in Iraq; Israel’s Gaza pull-out; Cindy Crawford’s anti-war protest camp outside Crawford, Texas; the President’s sagging poll numbers (below 40% approval; raging 55% disapproval, taken by many as signal of an irreversible public opinion tipping point); the hunt for missing Alabama teenager Natalaie Holloway in Aruba; plus the sentencing and imprisonment of Wichata’s BTK killer … were top of the list. Models projecting its probably routes toward the shoreline of America’s southern underbelly – Florida’s Pandanle, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana – were shown. Meanwhile, it traveled very slowly, 6mph CNN said, “it will strengthen over the warm water.”

Did it ever. Suddenly there was a distinct, unblinking eye, surrounded by a spinning wall of red that expanding several miles – 50? guess – solid, to the North east sector approaching New Orleans, outward, though suddenly constellated bands of raging wind-rain torrents 200 miles or so in a huge circle. The familiar vortex pattern appeared early, with distinct definition, dominating an enormous chunk of southeast U.S. terrain, and did nothing but deepen, as if gathering strength for what it had to do.


Suddenly it stood in front of New Orleans, Category 5 winds aimed straight up the gullet. Monday morning, there was some relief. It had diminished to Category 4 and turned to the north more easterly, thus delivering the city only a ‘glacing blow’. But the respite was short-lived. Levees north and behind it broke, flooding the French Quarter, the SuperBowl area. The resulting catastrophic situation, now, Wednesday aafternoon, is being called “the greatest natural disaster of America’s history” (FEMA official),” “What Hiroshima looks like”, Haley Barbour. “Killer”/”Our Tsunami”—successive Daily News page 1 headlines. Watching an entity that was thriving with life only yesterday getting snuffed today. Drowning like rats on TV. It will be a trauma indelibly etched in historical memory.

And in Iraq there were reports of up to 800 people being killed by getting hurled or jumping off a bridge and drowning in the river waters below, the reports aren’t clear. Someone is supposed to have yelled “suicide bomber” and caused panic – the ultimate “crying fire in a crowded theatre” disaster. Perhaps the one who did thought it was true.

The Way They Are refers to those who brought the public to the point of such panic reaction. It is a eye of self-contradictory – twistedly turned-on-itelf – rhetoric that preaches the universal, in theory, but hews to the particular, in practice. It has been brewing in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, pumping oil into the U.S., forming a field of implosive vortex force that creates wave-bands swirling counter-clockwise in concentrated fury far, far away by mile measurement, yet part of the same “weather pattern.”. The metaphysical point is the crystallizing power of the “eye” forces – inside of which, it should be remembered, it is calm, with a tiny patch of open sky above.

The inner core of the imploding vortex is the way of being that, in Christian terms, has not been washed in the blood of the lamb, but remains tied to Old Adam, as alchemical symbology called unredeemed humanity. This decadent strain of Old Adam humanity, previously kept on a tight cultural leash, was endemic to the gambling and resort businesses along the Gulf coast. Perhaps one might say “but those sins are minor, and have always been forgiven.” Perhaps; but when that strain is allowed to merges with the militaristic, pro-war strain, through sign-use (theological – appeal to “God”), as if that life-style, and the state of Israel, had been pre-ordained for Americans to die for, it rots the system. In fact, it invites what Katrina delivered. Nothing else on earth has the moral authority plus the power to deliver the message. (“No”, to “Las Vegas America” – which is not to call for its shut-down.)


Part 3. Apocalyptic.
Those who can see must decide

Let’s go with the comparison of Katrina to a Biblical event for a moment, even forgetting the talk may be only metaphorical. One chief function of the theological level of sign-use (S*7, by type of token) is to subsume all universes of discourse under a unity of consciousness, ideally projected, and this allows for rich shifting of feeling-complexes along with names, personae, scenes, allegories, etc. of Biblical narratives, so that the line between predication on what is metaphor, and on what is fact, gets obscured. (But cannot disappear in fully analyzed, systematically ordered rational discourse, on pain of engendering antinomy and self-contradiction, evidence of logical sins.)


tbc. ("We have to learn how to think a different way" -be)