WHY Katrina must be regarded as an act of God

WHY
HURRICANE KATRINA MUST BE REGARDED AS AN ACT OF GOD

Basic argument (from formal non-deniability; its negation cannot be true): The denial of the phrase “act of God” as predicate of the hurricane event called “Katrina” violates formal rules of truth conditions in communication. Because: if Katrina doesn’t qualify as an act of God, nothing does; and if “act of God” isn’t predicable of Katrina, it isn’t predicable of anything. Neither of these consequences is consistent with actual use.

This argument is elaborated as follows.

Point One. Regarding the subject term.

Katrina is paradigmatic of events to which “acts of God” is applied in common use.

By its:
-scale of magnitude of material destruction (wealth) (“The $100 Billion “Cane”)
-extent and scale of human trauma (the eye=core of suffering experiences)
-universal symbolism: - the untamed power of Mother Nature
-the ocean as primordial geneatrix
-waters of amniotic fluids encasing the unborn fetus
-the rising waters of primordial origins of all life stirred up in
fury against the coastal shore-line, taking back Her own
-In its contemporary context:
-political turbulence, esp. over war in Iraq; Cindy Sheehan
Anti-War Mom demonstration at Crawford;
Plummeting presidential poll numbers with sense of an
Administration beginning to crack (Rove scandal, gas price backlash, split in Republican ranks up and down the line), SENSE OF BEING ADRIFT (cf. “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”)

AT THIS POINT IN TIME -Millenial end-of-age, transition from Pisces to Aquarius Zodial archetypolog. No matter how much the science-minded textualist remind everyone that calendar numbers are conventional time signs, nothing shakes the conviction, deep down, that rounding out almost exactly 2,000 of them, WHEN ‘THEY’ ARE ACTUAL ORBITS OF PLANET EARTH, might, just might, carry some kind of metaphysical signature. This allows for a pourous boundary, or dynamic interface, between the neuro-physical (anatomical) basis of “mind” (conscious and unconscious psyche) and the psychic fringes of matter (talk to your plants).

Summary: in such circumstances, NOT to regard Katrina as an act of God – to withhold use of the predicate – would be a psycholinguistic perversion. If any event deserves to be so considered, it does. Of course, it can be denied that any event in the life of a nation or people qualifies as an act of God – but this, as the most extreme position, goes over to the question of what the predicate means. If it is ruled in advance that nothing qualifies as an act of God, this arbitrarily forecloses common use and possible synthetic unity.

Point Two. What the Predicate Means

Analysis of the psychosemiotic function of the “God” sign in communication

-As a Name: as if in reference to an object
As a Word – the spoken name, as actual token uttered.

All signs (words, pictures) exemplify these two characteristics, or ‘sides’: they are what they are as actual events (tokens), and what they are are particulars that stand for something other than themselves (text). “God” is a uniquely singular Name-Word, or Word-Name, for what is completed in text through all tokens: the unity of tokens under a single text; the Name of Names, as well as of everything Names name (reality, as reached by sign-use); the Predicate predicable of whatever subject, therefore predicable of itself (as tokened). This has never been clearly and succinctly explained, until now: how “God”, the sign-use, itself, contains all reality as the totality of sign-uses for actual experience, as part of its formal function.

“God”, as Text/Token (type: S*7 – highest ranking in the token hierarchy)
as Predicate of all sign uses (types: S*6 … S*1 = lowest neuro-psychological level events: patterns of brain firings from birth-trauma through primary process, arousing unconscious group-fantasy, collective dreams)

Divides into: God as Text: The completion of all totalities (totality of totalities as a
Unity). The all-encompassing unencompassable; the unsurpassably all-surpassing.

And: God as Token: the cathexis (as commitment) of inner totality – recurrent thread of historical continuity from first pre-individual awareness in the womb (the fetal origins of experience) , through the Archetypal feeling/toned developmental complexes, as psychological ‘eras’. “God” is a token of individual totality at the conscious level that bids merger (asks to be merged) with the textual function for the group; in other words, a token of unconscious group-fantasy, where trauma of birth first ‘unified’ us all, followed by sexual and emotional vicissitudes that ‘unify’ strands of persons on the token side, mostly according to the history of their childhood. “How they were raised” is the philosophical water that, over time, seeks and finds its own level wherever the individual person is.

Summary: The function of “God” as a sign-use in communication is, by the token, total commitment; by the text, completion of all totalities; by itself, for itself (Text x token), commitment to completion in all and every sign-use.


Conclusions from Points One and Two --
What loss of the God* function would mean: Katrina is not viewed as an act of God

…The nation is not brought under the representation (vorstellung) of a single unifying completing idea consistent with (cosmic) totality with commitment.
Immediate consequence: massive splitting, with self-contradictory re-conjunction. Overall result: gross human psychological deficit.

America as a nation is now beset with two, not just one, monumental catastrophes – the war in Iraq and New Orleans. Without commitment to see the life of the nation as a whole under a single unity (through the God signs, or functional equivalent), these will be split off from each other and not taken together as One people’s national reality. “We can do both,” LBJ said of providing guns for Vietnam and butter for the Great Society. “Someone questioned me the other day, “do we have enough National Guard troops (to fight the war in Iraq as well as confront the New Orleans tragedy)?” Mr. Bush said. “Of course we do.” (NYTimes 9.3.’95 A3) Without commitment to not just saying, but seeing and acting toward both as happening to One nation “under God”, these become vacuous political boilerplate.

Further: since use of “God” carries the token commitment to totality/completion demanded for addressing matters of life and death in both cases,, whether added together as acts of a nation under a single bond of inner unity or not, the term itself will tend to be split, and REVERSE JUDGEMENT applied to each left unbalance by consideration of the other. Thus, overall U.S. responsibility for the Iraq disaster will be split-off as “bad”, “negative”, “glass half-empty”, brought up only by “nay say-ers”, rejectionists, congenital pessimists – always on hand as a minority plaguing true leader’s initiatives. This is “splitting off whatever displeases” from description of reality. What IS split off – the condemning content -- will be ‘dumped’ (projected) into the Critic’s attitude: “you want democracy to fail, don’t you? just like Islamic terrorists”. (Bumper sticker: “Terrorists hate Bush. Are you a terrorist?”) “They always blame America first,” Jeanne Kirkpatrick says of liberals. It is a tautology that “God is on our side when it comes to war – its in the grammar of the leader’s use of “we”, “us”, plus the way military chaplains talk.

One eye-popping thing G.W. Bush said at the end of a news conference in Biloxi, Mississippi 9.1.05 was “May God continue to bless this country.” Against the background of Katrina’s carnage, this was grammar based tautology trumping reality.

For, the “other side” of God blessing Our troops in Iraq (pray for all of them – but for warriors of Allah? Fuhgeddaboutit), is splitting off and ignoring the suffering of those in America’s Gulf Coast as unrelated. Not pretty to look at. Their devastation would surely be called “evil”, if any “intelligence” (or “God”) “sent it”. But God is good. Token tautology trumps the evidence of the senses. He cannot make mistakes; but moves often in mysterious ways. Thus, while “God“ the word/name will no doubt resound triumphantly from pulpits and synagogues across the nation tomorrow, it will not be used for the power that watches, judges and punished America August 29 through these, looters as well as others alike.

Its citizens will be robbed of the opportunity to confront, renounce, repent their sinfulness in following this Republican party, neocon “Israel first” Middle East policy.

Thus, denying that hurricane Katrina is an act of God allows use of that term, with its commitment-to-completeness, to be split in two, with each of the split-off parts themselves split off -- twisted, spun, re-issued from the unconscious -- so that its use becomes utter mockery. “May God continue to bless our country.”