(no subject)

[gordonzola]

One of the things I did while sick this week was watch, "When the Levees Broke", the Spike Lee documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. It was well done and compelling, though a little depressing for the edgy emotional state I get into while sick. I watched it in dribs and drabs, sometimes because it made me cry and sometimes because I found I couldn't concentrate because of my sick brain.

The only part I watched where I was like, "Hmmm, this seems a little picky." Was the scene where a teenager gives a tour of his FEMA trailer, complaining about how cheaply made it is. I didn't dwell on it but Lee had just documented how few people had gotten the trailers at all so it seemed a little, I hesitate to write this, ungrateful. It was a minor moment, but to me it seemed like a false note, a moment of less righteous anger in a film where "righteous anger" was the baseline .

And you know what? I was totally wrong.

Not 15 minutes after watching that I read a Nation article that just came out. Written about a year after the movie was filmed, it detailed that those trailers are making people sick because the materials aren't rated for people to actually live in them. Truly much of New Orleans is toxic still, and it would be hard to separate the toxicity of formaldehyde from the toxicity of sewage, mold, etc without massive study. But, man… It just keeps coming.

In other movie news I finally saw "Pan's Labyrinth" last night. I never get tired of seeing Fascists killed, especially Spanish ones. My favorite scene was right near the end so I probably shouldn't mention it until the movie is out of the theaters, but as someone who grew up watching war movies the "Fuck your honor" moment was incredibly satisfying and against genre. As it should be.

I also somehow got that James Bond movie from Netflix... "The World is not Enough" starring Remington Steele. It was so bad that I actually returned it unfinished. I realized about half way to the mailbox that I actually forgot to watch the last 15 minutes and I totally didn't care. I swear I don't know how that got on my queue. I think the name confused me. Maybe I was thinking it was "The World Can't Wait" and it was about sectarian front groups, I dunno.

Comments

[stopword.livejournal.com]

I've only watched the first disk of "When the Levees Broke", but I thought he did a great job of bringing in a wide varity of opinions and statements, without seeming to favor one point of view exclusively. I'm thinking in particular of the way he'd find some very sad stories, trump that story, trump it again, and then present someone so beat down that all they could think to say was the absolute extreme of "the government should have helped us [I agree], should still be helping us [I totally agree], should be giving us a hundred thousand dollars for pain and suffering [wait] and rebuilding my house twice as nice as before! [what.]"

I took a social science class in my long-ago undergrad years, and the professor specialized in disaster psychology. It's fascinating to see how people behave in the exact ways he said they would - there was a particular phase he focused on where people can't help themselves at all because they're too overwhelmed, and they get very angry with their rescuers because it's really the only emotion left that is safe to have. When the people in NOLA hit that phase (and they all seemed to hit it at the same time, and it has lasted a long time), the Right Wing used it as a wedge to prove that all of "those people" were ungrateful wretches who had things work out "quite well, overall" and who just couldn't appreciate the nice things they were being given.

Um, I'm not sure what the point of this is. I guess just that Spike Lee delivers a great movie yet again. I need to watch the rest.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

that social science class stuff is interesting. I wonder how cynically that information is used in government.

[flipzagging.livejournal.com]

There was an interesting Harper's article which talked about the opposite question: “Why do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?”

The contention was that our leaders expect always chaos in the streets, but usually the atmosphere is one of mutual aid, and there is a distinct drop in destructive or neurotic behavior. Totally by coincidence, this was on the newsstands when Katrina hit.

I was impressed by the article at the time, but it sounds like you're in a position to know whether it's backed up by the facts?

[stopword.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not sure people going through a disaster can be considered mentally unhealthy, so probably the phases of disaster coping are compatible with what Harper's found. Here are the phases, which I found online and did not remember with my headbone:

In the impact phase, survivors do not panic and may, in fact, show no emotion. They do what they must to keep themselves and their families alive.

In the inventory phase, which immediately follows the event, survivors assess damage and try to locate other survivors. During this phase, routine social ties tend to be discarded in favor of the more functional relationships required for initial response activities such as search and rescue and emergency medical operations.

In the rescue phase, emergency services personnel are responding and survivors are willing to take their direction from these groups without protest. They exhibit a sense of trust that their rescuers will address their needs and that they can then put their lives together quickly.

In the recovery phase, however, survivors may believe that rescue efforts are not proceeding quickly enough. That feeling, combined with other emotional stressors (for example, dealing with insurance adjustors and having to find temporary living accommodations), may cause survivors to pull together against their rescuers.