No Humanity Please, We’re Americans:
The Political Geography of Relief
Matt Ruben
The scale of the tsunami disaster makes it seem virtually incomprehensible. One is riveted by the images of shores swamped, entire coastlines altered, villages wrecked like model toys. Caused by the random, agentless agency of nature, the tragedy has touched hearts and tugged at consciences all over the world. It appears in the public sphere as a universal disaster.
Take for example the public service announcement (PSA) currently making the televisual rounds, in which George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton appeal for a continuation of the outpouring of individual donations to the relief effort.
The PSA’s memorable title and tagline is “What Happens Next.” But the most compelling words come from Clinton (who always seems to get the best lines): “…despite our differences, we are bound together by our common humanity, and we all have an obligation to help the victims of the tsunami have the blessings of a normal life. … Please join this worldwide cause.”
The invocation of common humanity and global purpose is elegant in its simplicity: hackneyed, facile, yet so welcome in these horribly reactionary times. So too is the remarkably direct and forceful focus on obligation, an ethical term shorn of much of the dangerous ideological baggage of moralistic notions like pity, guilt and shame. We are human beings; we help simply because we should and we must. End of story.
It’s a seductive bit of one-world humanism, even for a cynical leftist internationalist.
Interestingly enough, however, no one in the United States has ever seen, nor likely will ever see, Clinton deliver those pretty lines on television. They come from the script of what the U.S. State Department Web site calls the “international message” version of the PSA, and neither they nor anything remotely like them appear in the “domestic message” version.
The domestic version makes no mention of a worldwide effort, or – amazingly – of commonality, humanity, obligation, or even everyday normalcy. Instead it directs viewers to a list of “reputable” aid organizations to which they can confidently make their tax-deductible donations. It speaks of donation as a reaffirmation of “the strength of the human spirit” and – in an odd, disturbingly glib turn of phrase – of giving victims “hope in the brighter future.”
The rest of the world gets a humanistic message of global mutual assistance, while we Homelanders get an unmistakably American message of spirit, hope and Consumer Reports. Everyone else hears about international obligation (which is precisely what Bush foreign policy has steadfastly refused), while Americans get assurances that their money isn’t being wasted, and that it will soon be Morning in Aceh.
Clearly there’s a disturbingly neoconservative undercurrent here, indicative of the hard-rightwing turn U.S. foreign policy has taken since September 11. There’s also another, older undercurrent: a xenophobic, narcissistic Orientalism. It centers on Western fears of charity falling into the wrong hands in remote Eastern precincts, and on a willful refusal to acknowledge not only the politics of the region, but our connection to those politics – and our egregious ignorance about that connection. To see this geopolitical Orientalism in action, one need only go to www.freedomcorpsusa.gov, where it becomes clear that list of “reputable” charities has been compiled and authorized by USAID, an agency whose historic complicity in the political problems of South Asia is surpassed only by the CIA’s (with which it was of course entwined).
The contrast between the two PSAs, then, indexes not only the gulf between the sensibility of Dubya’s America and that of the rest of the planet, but also a larger ideological imperative present in both versions (albeit more overtly in the American one): to safeguard future U.S. interests by invoking a humanitarian ethic that obliterates the people of South Asia – and the governments that serve and oppress them – from public view. The ultimate rhetorical symptom of this effort is the total absence of a concept that gets to the core of the long-term picture in South Asia: development.
In his 1968 film Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea paints a complex portrait of his native Cuba in the early years of the revolution. Alea, better known in the U.S. for his later works Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate; 1994) and Guantanamera (1995), uses the word “underdevelopment” to signify the bourgeois protagonist’s psychic trauma as he grapples unsuccessfully with the massive changes in social relations and everyday life in his country; and to reference the incomplete state of the revolution itself (of which Alea was a strong supporter).
But of course underdevelopment had other meanings then, and other meanings now. Then, it referred to Cuba’s status as a Third World country, an island nation of neocolonial resorts and subsistence agriculture, not so unlike the places hardest hit by the tsunami disaster.
Today, underdevelopment refers, among other things, to our own impoverished understanding of what meaningful development might actually look like.
In this vein I’m reminded of another, less illustrious film, John Frankenheimer’s made-for-HBO movie The Burning Season (1994). In one of his last, and best, performances, Raul Julia plays Chico Mendes, the Brazilian rubber tapper, environmental activist and labor organizer who fought reckless development that would destroy his people’s lives and livelihoods.
In a key scene, Mendes is at a conference in Washington lobbying the Inter-American Development Bank to pull funding for a detrimental logging and road-construction project in Brazil. In the men’s room, one of his European allies, a representative from an environmental group, chides him for his apparent indifference to a particular environmental preservation matter. Mendes explodes. “You don’t want development!” he yells, exasperated. “We want development. We just want it in a way that doesn’t keep us poor!”
When Memories of Underdevelopment was made, reformist and revolutionary political activity spanned the globe, and the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) – Alea’s Cuba among them – spoke in a voice very much like Mendes’, resisting (however incompletely and imperfectly) the imperial push-pull of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and advocating for meaningful development that did not keep poor people poor. The world was full of voices opposed to the neocolonialism of the superpowers and supportive of economic policies that served domestic needs for land, housing, health care, infrastructure and industrial self-sufficiency.
Today, of course, the NAM is but a shadow of its former self, its unity, vision and influence nearly gone. In the intervening decades, democratically elected governments that nationalized key industries have been overthrown by covert U.S. action; nations enacting import-substitution policies have been severely disciplined by the international lending agencies; and Chico Mendes has been assassinated.
It seems an entire generation of voices, an entire set of policies, an entire way of thinking about how to build the world, has been lost, erased, destroyed. In its place stands the laissez-faire, supply side, debt-bound, export-economy model of neoliberalism, straddling the oceans like a colossus. There are protest movements, to be sure. There is Chavez’s Venezuela. And there is the World Social Forum, wrapping up in Porto Allegre as I write these words. Perhaps one day they will coalesce into a force more powerful than the Nonaligned Movement ever was.
For now, though, meaningful development remains an obscenity, literally: off the world stage, beyond the pale of public discourse on the aftermath of the tsunami disaster.
And this, it seems to me, is the real work of the tsunami PSA. Giving to the aid effort is a voluntaristic act in several registers, in ways that tie multiple themes together; it is a structure of feeling. It brings the illusion of individual communion with the dead and the suffering. It constitutes charity to the deserving poor, idealized as they are by the nonpolitical character of natural disaster. There is nothing wrong with the charity per se. It is, in fact, virtually impossible – and more than a little ghoulish – to make any sort of argument against the voluntarism of charity relief. Rather, the problem lies in the erasure of the crucial distinction between such short-term relief on the one hand, and long-term development on the other.
In this context, development is much more than a matter of politics and policy. As Alea recognized so clearly, it is a challenge to the very core of the imperial bourgeois mindset. For between relief and development – between the ideas, but also between the time when “aid” is said to end and “rebuilding” to begin – is a moment. It is the moment when the embarrassing questions of social equality get asked: Will the people of Aceh live in tents, or shacks? Lean-tos or houses? Will they have infrastructure and local industry, or will they and their children become lifelong refugees in their own towns and provinces? Are the resorts to be recreated, along with the immiserated subsistence economies that surround and support them? Is there supposed to be some sort of time-out called, like the caution flag at NASCAR, while rebuilding happens, after which the race resumes and the victimized communities assume their proper place at the back of the pack?
It is not difficult to guess the likely answers to these questions. It is even possible to imagine such answers being articulated with a fair degree of pride in the halls of the Cato Institute and other right-libertarian precincts. By and large, though, the real tragedy of the tsunami aftermath, as exemplified by the Bush-Clinton PSA, is that the answers will not be voiced at all, because without a distinction between charity and development, the questions will not be raised in the first place.
All one needs to know in this regard can be gleaned from how Clinton and Bush Senior introduce themselves at the outset: “We are speaking to you not as Presidents, but as private citizens.” The PSA imagines a world in which large-scale relief – and for that matter any collective, ethical action in service of the greater good – is the exclusive province of individual volunteerism.
This imagined world, in which government supposedly has no capacity or responsibility for doing much of anything, is already familiar. It’s called the Ownership Society. By erasing the distinction between relief and redevelopment – and between investment and social insurance (see Social Security privatization) – this “ownership” philosophy throws the poor to the wolves, and makes you and me shoulder impossible burdens that can only be properly taken on, funded, and coordinated by states.
And so, while the World Social Forum insists that “a better world is possible,” and Clinton gets to tell the Europeans, Asians and Latin Americans about our uniting humanity and existential obligations to one another, our leaders stick we Americans with the “domestic message” that there is no world community, and that government need do nothing so long as we keep dropping quarters in the collection jar at the local checkout counter.
It is a story worthy of the stupid son at the Seder table. Or the C student at Yale.
Ours then, as leftists, is not to oppose the sentiment (or sentimentality) of charity and relief. Ours, rather, is to insist that something much larger – and, crucially, much different – lies beyond. Ours is to tell a better story, a more truthful, anti-Orientalist story, across the United States and the world.
Before the political will exists to provide meaningful answers in South Asia, the political vocabulary must exist to ask the questions. If there is a more fundamental – and apt – role for the left in this moment than recreating the vocabulary of internationalism and development so that the better story may be told, I don’t know what it is.