Analyzing acts of God?

Thursday, August 19, 2010

OUR MEDIA can be bizarrely inconsistent in assigning significance to so-called “acts of God” around the globe, but one truth remains universal. What turns a natural catastrophe into an out-and-out disaster?

Feckless government, of course.

 

The deadly flooding in Pakistan, when it began three weeks ago, prompted me to highlight in THE MEDIA BEAT the then under-reported absence of the country’s president, Asif Ali Zardari who was jaunting around Europe and, into the bargain, dynastically launching his son’s political “career” in Britain, among its population of Pakistani origin.

At the time an already stunning 3 million people in Pakistan’s northern regions had been inundated by storm waters. Now the number has more than doubled, as the mighty Indus River carries all its swollen volume downward in altitude and further south in latitude. And the citizenry’s chorus of complaint about its leaders has crested into a fury.

The Associated Press, in its traditionally cool tone of straight news reportage, speaks of “frustrated citizens who have complained about slow or non-existent aid”. The Karachi-based Express Tribune newspaper quotes middle-aged family men like Amunulla and Rohulla in the North-West Frontier province (where one-word names are common) decrying the “apathy of our leaders”, and how “in 10 days since the flood destroyed our villages, no official has visited us nor has any government aid reached us.” A welfare organizer named Mukhtar describes a community where “amid a stench of dead animals, survivors were begging for food and water, and we didn’t come across any government agency offering relief”.

The Nobel-prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen has famously written about major calamities - from the floods that brought the Great Chinese Famine of the late 1950s to the Ethiopian drought of the 1980s that also led to mass starvation, plus many, many more - arguing that it is always unresponsive governments (either dictatorial or plain incompetent, and often both) who transform the unavoidable misfortunes of life into unmanageable crises. He portrays democracy as the only really effective opponent of what are so loosely labeled “natural” disasters. 

Boldly, for instance, Sen points to the last Indian famine in 1943, under British imperial rule, and argues there has never been anything as bad since, with his country under freely elected multi-party governance.

 

  

 

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QUOTES FROM AMARTYA SEN’S GLOBAL analyses are featured prominently in a sadly compelling multimedia exhibit currently on display in New York City, at the Irish Consulate, though it’s normally housed at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. 

Titled simply Ireland’s Great Hunger (in English at least it sounds simple - the Irish “An Gorta Mór” tolls in a thoroughly more plangent tone) this extraordinary show combines revealing historical documents, maps, contemporary visual records, forensic examinations of fungal crop damage, and – powerfully – an impressive range of modern-day sculptures and pictures interpreting the unconscionable nineteenth-century disaster that ravaged Ireland’s population … and also helped to shape the United States we know today.

 

The artwork comes from assuredly polemical yet also reflective geniuses like Rowan Gillespie, who made The Victim (pictured above left) and the American Glenna Goodacre who is celebrated for Philadelphia’s Irish Famine Memorial.

A calm but forceful video documentary provides us with some telling context for the entire story, evocatively produced by the exhibit’s main curator Turlough McConnell, a veteran of both Irish and American historical exposition.

One important retrospective reassessment is included. In 1997, the authorities that had presided as imperial rulers over this atrocity - or at least their modern-day successor, in the shape of British prime minister Tony Blair, then still new to his office - finally acknowledged some responsibility. He said: “Those who governed in London at the time failed their people”.



ACTUALLY HE DIDN’T SAY THAT. Those words, which have now gone down in the annals of Anglo-Irish relations as some moderate form of apology, were not actually voiced publicly by Blair himself. He sent them as a written message to a commemorative event in County Cork; they were read to the crowd by the actor Gabriel Byrne, an Irishman who - like so many during the famine, and over the 160 years since - became an immigrant to the US.

Blair’s statement, however delivered, certainly came a long way from his Victorian predecessors - notably Charles Trevelyan who was made Secretary to the Treasury part-way through the famine’s ruinous course. He applied a doctrinaire “free market” approach based on laissez faire principles, and was convinced that providing food aid, even when the potato blight that had triggered poor harvests was about to repeat itself, was a bad idea. It would, he said, bring “the risk of paralyzing all private enterprise" and make the Irish "habitually dependent". Does that theme sound at all familiar to you today?

Economic theories apart, and perhaps more to the point ultimately, the show captures how in his godlike superiority Trevelyan spoke for all disdainful and prejudiced rulers, historical and contemporary, who are blind to the simple humanity they share with their fellow-citizens. 

This privileged aristocrat’s words glare balefully from the exhibit’s wall, as manically severe as his portrait’s eyes (above right), when he describes the famine as “the judgment of God [who] sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson”.

 

As I said at the beginning, "acts of God" have a lot more to do with the acts of men, or at least of certain kinds of men.

 

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