Print
Email
A Yard-Man Snow Blower looks like a lawn seeder. It has a swing handle that helps rooster tail the powder, and it sometimes tommy guns like an outboard. This I know because I'm shoveling (or, more accurately, snow blowing) for my supper.
I'm in DC for a conference and a board meeting and now I'm the Bartleby-like house guest who ain't budging. "I'm overstaying my welcome," I say. "No worries," my hosts say. They pause and look at each other. "You can shovel for your supper."
Thankfully, snow blowers aren't carbon neutral, so I have the consummate Northwest excuse. ("Carbon footprint" sounds more meaningful than an ungrateful, "I prefer not to.") It's a get-out-of-work strategy not without risk. Let me put it this way: My hosts serve drinks in wine glasses that read, "George Bush President's Dinner, June 13, 1991, United States Tobacco Company."
"It's an electric snow blower," my hosts reply. I get handed an orange utility cord and the Yard-Man and off I go. Should I confess my fear of death by snow-blower shock? Not if I'm hungry.
The two feet of snow that dropped on Washington, quickly dubbed "Snowmageddon," is something to behold. Stranger still is the quiet circulation in the city, the low-metabolic hum of snow plows, of delivered newspapers (at least The New York Times), and of a route-limited, closing-early Metro system that's nevertheless moving people.
A massive snowball-fight meetup at Dupont Circle was scheduled on the Internet. The camaraderie, the volunteers with four-wheel drive shuttling patients to hospitals, the neighborly service ethic — all offer some evidence for Rebecca Solnit's >thesis in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. Disaster and trauma stir the best in us, Solnit argues. Washington's Snowmageddon isn't utopia, but there's something un-Hobbesian and communitarian and worthy about it. At least for now.
And so the dormer window flies open. My hosts' 12-year old son shouts, "Shovel for your supper!" I can't feel my skin. It's very sweet. Sort of.
Like what you just read? Support high quality local journalism by becoming a member of Crosscut.com today!
Twitter
Facebook
RSS Feeds
Comments:
Posted Mon, Feb 8, 12:24 p.m. Inappropriate
Mr. Jackson makes a point worthy of serious contemplation.
During my years in Manhattan, I always relished blizzards, and I realized in early adulthood this is because blizzards overwhelm, however briefly, the rigidly hierarchal, relentlessly exclusionary geometry of urban patriarchy. By transforming the City to a quiet realm of often-startling beauty, the snow provides us all – whether we acknowledge it or not – the forbidden but nevertheless psychologically vital reassurance of reconnection to the cosmic motherhood of Nature.
For those of us so aware, such moments – in which the misogynistic taboos of Abrahamic theology are revealed as impotent snarls of womb-envying hatefulness – are truly sacramental.
As to Ms. Solnit's hypothesis, my only criticism is that -- at least according to the reviews I have read -- she dared not follow her own logic quite far enough.
I was in Manhattan during the epic 1965 blackout, and as I wrote at the time, the night was one of pure (and purely pagan) celebration, its unabashedly optimistic eroticism proven by the huge spike in the birth rate nine months later.
Indeed I strongly suspect most of us who were present have never known another night quite as powerfully magical.
There was not just the decidedly eerie sense Nature had granted us what so many would later describe as the special dispensation of "a second Hallowe'en” -- an impression many times intensified by the jack-o-lantern glare of bonfires in the parks, the smirking brilliance of the Full Moon, the implicit prophecy revealed by the haunting pallor of the de-electrified and thus seemingly abandoned skyscrapers -- but the intuition too that we had been allowed a glimpse of post-technological life and had thereby been handed a bright promise of survival beyond the thermonuclear Armageddon in which we then all assumed humanity would soon perish.
Mostly though what we celebrated in that blessedly pale darkness was a momentary release from the slave-burdens of what we have been conditioned to think of as “civilization.”
Having also experienced many lesser such episodes – storms, floods, rural power outages of up to two weeks, that sort of thing (myself present not merely as a journalistic witness but as an active participant in recovery efforts) -- I am in absolute agreement with Ms. Solnit that these events bring out the very best in us.
I also believe Ms. Solnit's “best” is released precisely because these sorts of disasters not only remind us of Nature's supremacy but restore – if only briefly – the cooperative mandates implicit in our ancient sense of being siblings in Nature's family.
In this context I do not find it the least bit surprising that disasters of human origin – for example riots – seem to bring out negative behavior in almost exactly reverse proportion to the extent natural disasters bring out positive behavior. As a journalist I've repeatedly noted how examples of altruism (and often heroism) in natural disasters are so numerous as to be effectively uncountable, while such exemplary conduct in man-made disaster (and I use the gendered noun deliberately) is typically limited to official reports of acts by official responders – a distinction invariably confirmed by on-the-scenes observation.
By way of additional confirmation, note too that whenever disastrous circumstances bring out humanity's worst traits, they invariably occur in the context of attempts to retain or restore alleged “normalcy” or to exploit disaster by the imposition of what might be termed “super-normalcy”: competition (savagery); greed (price-gouging); avarice (looting, theft and robbery); discipline (violence including murder); hierarchy (tyranny); caste (bigotry); etc. ad nauseum.
Hence I believe the answer to Ms. Solnit's core question – if the worst events can bring out the best in people, why can’t that impulse be sustained in everyday life? – is strongly suggested by the very examples Ms. Solnit cites.
Outside the few realms in which socialist values yet endure, everyday life on this plant is governed almost entirely by the harsh social-Darwinist principles derived from Abrahamic religion – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
By definition these principles serve only to facilitate what natural disaster reveals to us as negative and even suicidal behavior: patriarchy, misogyny, capitalism, the ultimately theocratic despotism of social orders ruled by “god's select,” the hierarchy anointed by capitalism's divine-right values of infinite greed, limitless selfishness and ultimate moral imbecility – the entire ecocidal, genocidal credo capitalism has elevated to maximum virtue.
While man-made disaster intensifies the ferocity of these principles and thereby exacerbates their consequences, natural disaster not only nullifies the entire Abrahamic construct but allows the real human spirit out on a kind of prison furlough.
Which – lest furlough become revolution – is exactly what prompts the authorities to move so quickly (and often so brutally) to crush its manifestations.
To paraphrase something I wrote in 1965 immediately after the Blackout: At heart we are all Nature's children. Else why do we dance so joyously in the ruined cathedrals?