The Ugly Tone of Gratuitous Contempt

Some French commentators have been dismayed by the tone of the media coverage concerning the destruction across the Atlantic

writes Sebastian Rotella in the L.A. Times (merci a Duff).

Some prominent people in the French press and politics, they believe, have eagerly turned the catastrophe into an all-purpose symbol of American ills, real or imagined.

"If the United States didn't exist, it would have to be invented so that elsewhere we can reassure ourselves, as if to better hide our own defects and incoherencies," warned a recent editorial in Le Figaro newspaper. "It's easy to ramble on about the decline of the American empire. Some even see the difficulties encountered by the U.S. as the work of a vengeful hand from the beyond…. Derision and demonizing are out of place."

The extensive coverage has tended to paint the picture of a superpower brought down by economic inequality, racial conflict and neglectful government. A recent Nouvel Observateur cover summed up this stark view: "America Stripped Naked: The cyclone reveals the wounds of the every-man-for-himself society."

Marianne, a left-leaning newsmagazine, declared: "The American giant folds beneath the weight of its failures and struggles to enforce an order that it wanted to impose on the world."

Marianne's take typified the profound disdain for President Bush in evidence here. A special issue titled "The Fall of the Pyromaniac Fireman" blamed Bush for a planetary flash fire of crises — from Iraq to global warming — that, in the magazine's view, discredit an entire free-market-driven, militaristic "Anglo-Saxon model" of governance.

In the newspaper Liberation, Gerard Dupuy accused the Bush administration of "contempt for victims who without a doubt were doubly at fault for being both poor and black." He concluded that the neoconservative "crusade," which was "already mired in the Mesopotamian marshes" of Iraq, had "foundered in the Louisiana bayou."

The U.S. media has also been tough on the administration for its response to the hurricane. But the invective here has been particularly harsh and grows partly out of an "old anti-American undercurrent reawakened by the war in Iraq," columnist Laurent Joffrin wrote in Nouvel Observateur.

In the past, the anger about Iraq sometimes distorted reality, some analysts say. In 2003, author Alain [Hertoghe] undertook a day-by-day analysis of French media accounts of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and compiled his findings in a book titled "The War of Outrages." His study focused exclusively on the three-week invasion, not the unproven prior allegations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or the insurgency that began after Saddam Hussein fell.

Herthogue [sic] asserted that the French media consistently, and erroneously, gave the impression that the military operation was about to collapse even as tanks rumbled into Baghdad.

French criticism of the Katrina crisis also shows fundamental differences in the role of the state in France and the U.S.

The French national government controls everything from law enforcement to healthcare to transportation. City and regional officials have more limited powers and duties than their U.S. counterparts, especially when it comes to disaster response. So New Orleans' woes appear to confirm suspicions that Washington leaves Americans at the mercy of the forces of nature as well as markets.

Some pundits predict that Americans will now want a more muscular, "French" approach to government. But others suggest that it's best not to point fingers. They recall the heat wave two years ago that killed about 15,000 people in France.

In that tragedy, many elderly people perished in hospitals and nursing homes that lacked air conditioning. Thousands of corpses were discovered in sweltering apartments as the death toll escalated and French leaders, as well as some relatives of the dead, were criticized for remaining on summer vacation.

"The denigrators have rushed to condemn the 'American model,' " wrote Ivan Rioufol in Le Figaro. "But have they looked at the state of their own country? The Third World, exposed in the [American] South, exists in French housing projects…. The indifference to the marooned corpses recalls the 15,000 elderly, dead and abandoned in the 2003 heat wave…. It's indecent to suggest, in this jubilation at describing a humiliated superpower, that France would have fared better."

In a recent letter to this newspaper's Paris Bureau from the southwestern town of Frejus, a retired contractor named Cesar Orefice complained that the media coverage of Katrina had been "absurdly triumphant" and gleefully anti-American.

It "leaves me disillusioned, overwhelmed, heartbroken by the simplistic anti-Americanism served to us like a dish a thousand times warmed-over," wrote Orefice, 71. "We talk about these events essentially to criticize with a few accompanying giggles the incapacity of the American administration to react…. I wonder what efficiency we would have seen if a city like Lille, Lyon or Bordeaux had been wiped off the map."

Read also Nidra Poller's France Passes Judgment on Katrina (thanks to e-nough):

As for George Bush, who should have been there while the wind was tearing the place apart, and should have shipped in the troops if he hadn’t already sent them to make trouble in Iraq, [and should have refrained from shipping in the troops instead of rescue personnel,] and shouldn’t have come to Biloxi when the real mess was in New Orleans, and has a nerve coming to New Orleans, not once but three times, just to get his picture taken. With Blacks! As if everyone didn’t know that the reason the hurricane hit New Orleans is because America is a racist, capitalist, warrior state.

French viewers (and radio listeners, and newspaper and magazine readers) were invited to tisk tisk and cluck cluck over this stuck-up country that thinks it’s rich and high tech, and can’t even eradicate poverty or protect itself from a “cyclone.” Why do French media want to call our hurricanes “cyclones”? It’s just one more item in a long list of distortions designed to misappropriate our reality. By depriving the hurricane of its specificity, you deprive the experience of its high-end intensity, you bring it down to size, to French size, to the size of things that any person in his right mind should know how to handle.

Nidra Poller then shows a typical example of the double standards existing in French society:

A terrible airplane crash killed 152 Martinique-French citizens recently. Overall coverage of the accident, the aftermath, the grieving relatives, the touching ceremonies came close to the time subsequently devoted to Katrina. The difference is stunning.

… press coverage focused on sorrow. Beautiful dignified sorrow: a priest crying as he read out the names of the victims, children crying for their parents, brothers crying for their sisters, the entire island of Martinique crying for its loved ones, and tears welling up in the eyes of a lovely French newscaster snug in the studio, reporting on the events. No indignation against the travel agency that booked seats on the rotten airline. No outrage at government agencies that are supposed to regulate air safety. No rebukes against French society that is failing citizens on more than one count. And of course no one asking President Chirac to resign because he couldn’t bring a planeload of Martiniquais back from Panama.

He did go to the memorial service. But that’s another story.

The gratuitous contempt for the victims of Katrina has no better comparison than the obsessive, hypocritical, vomiting contempt for Jews…in France…in the 1930s. The words slime and sleaze are appropriate to this particular kind of hatred that covers everything, sticks to the smallest detail, can’t be removed. Not one word, not one image of Katrina was fair and honest. Whatever the subject — the damage, the overwhelming logistical problems, the inadequate responses, the time elapsed, the number of victims — it had to be nasty, virulently anti-American, pointedly anti-Bush. But not in the way of political rivals, even low down cheating rivals. No, in the way of Jew-haters. A hatred that comes from deep dark sources.

…To sum it up, Katrina, seen from over here, was not a natural disaster. It was a pre-programmed event and, as it happens, a test case of American ineptitude. As a result, any American claim to world leadership is automatically rejected. Further, if one had any doubts about the wisdom of Bush’s intervention in Iraq, it is now clear that it was a disaster. He should have intervened in the weather instead of fooling around in distant countries and creating terrorism out of whole cloth. Any one in his right mind would have known that this cyclone would destroy the levees, that the levees should have been reinforced, that the population should have been evacuated under the personal direction of the US president, that people who wanted to stay should have been provided with all the necessities, that Biloxi was right next to New Orleans, that no one should be poor in fair weather and all the more so in foul and doubly so if they are poor and black. When white rescue workers come to the aid of poor black victims it proves that the United States is racist all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

What more do you need?