Turmoil and taste
Turmoil can cause bad taste.
But clearly bad taste can also cause turmoil.
“I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago.”
— Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, about the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina
Whooops. As disaster characterizations go, this one does not exactly lean on the tasteful side.
In Hiroshima, not counting later deaths (lots of them) from radiation sickness, about 78,150 people were killed.
… on purpose.
Louisiana and Mississippi are in pretty bad shape today, no denying that. Their misfortune is not denied or slighted by appreciating that at least they don’t have 78,150 corpses with no skin on, some of them staggering around crying for water before finally keeling over, and they don’t have the prospect of decades of radiation diseases and deformed babies to worry about. And Katrina wasn’t ordered by the president of any country.
To be fair, in terms of buildings and economic havoc, Hurricane Katrina may well have caused even more damage than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don’t know. But surely we all agree — even those who have the stomach to find the bombings justified — that this comparison was best left unraised. Probably Gov. Barbour agrees too; he probably let this out in an unsettled emotional state and is now bleeding profusely from biting his tongue afterwards. I sure hope so.
Political opponents are probably having a field day with his remark, as well as with that of Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway, comparing the disaster to the December tsunami in Asia (death toll: 237,000).
In a state of emotional turmoil, we are all prone to blurting out unfortunate, ill-thought-out remarks. I’ve done plenty of that, and will probably do plenty more in the future. Is that tendency a useful measure of a person? It is certainly a lazy one. My first reaction was “what a jackass,” and then I realized that I knew nothing else the man has ever said or done. He may well be a jackass, but at present my basis for concluding that is flimsy.
I hereby publicly challenge myself to be (a) less prone to letting my turmoil affect my taste, and (b) less quick to judge others for the same.
You stand challenged too: the next time you are seriously stirred up, conduct yourself in a manner you can be proud of afterwards. And the next time an opportunity for hasty judgment presents itself — hold your horses.
September 2nd, 2005 at 4:12 am
Of course. What other kind of behavior would you expect from Americans, to overstate? Just imagine if these statements had come from Texas, where everything is bigger than anything else in the entire cosmos. But this is how our culture works.
Meanwhile, so many people are suffering, and not much is being done about it. Sad. Today I heard a radio announcer say, “Something like this makes you feel very lucky to be living in Iowa.” Ironic, but true.
September 2nd, 2005 at 2:16 pm
Whoah now … I would not expect this behavior of Americans in general. That would be a pretty judgmental overgeneralization that I would not want to be guilty of. I don’t think Americans in general would raise the comparison to Hiroshima, and I do not want to judge American culture as a whole as being a culture of overstating things. I would want to have really good reasons for making such a broad judgment.
Major natural disasters in the world also make me feel lucky to be living in Iceland, where they are neither particularly common nor particularly major. That probably goes for most uneventful areas of the world. :)
September 6th, 2005 at 2:42 am
Um, note the sarcasm about this… Me being American… and then overstating things… put it together…
And yes, I wish I was back in Iceland, where my life was more positively eventful as opposed to unpositively eventful OR uneventful…
September 6th, 2005 at 8:34 am
Ah, right … self-referentiality. Usually I am one to appreciate that. Guess I had my fattari off!
(For non-Icelandic speakers: “fatta” = “figure out, realize, comprehend” … and “fattari” = the device in your head taking care of that function)
September 6th, 2005 at 7:17 pm
I agree that the comparison with Hiroshima and Nagasaki is very improper, and almost vulgar. But a good point you make about not judging the character based on these comments.
The comparison with the Tsunami in Asia is however not so far off. There are two sides to every catastrophe, micro and macro. On a macro level (society) these two events have very little in common, except that both were natural disasters – but their size and probably cost differs by two orders of magnitudes.
However on a micro level they are similar, each involves individuals who lost their lives, homes and families. For these individuals the experience was probably comparable, although the Tsunami in Asia had 100 times more of those individuals.
September 7th, 2005 at 12:38 am
Well, sure, but on this same micro level the recent apartment-building fire in Paris could be called similar to the tsunami. And so could the summer cabin carbon monoxide incident in Iceland (kerosene lamp gone awry, all windows closed, everyone inside died in their sleep).
That’s not to say that this micro level is irrelevant, or that individual human suffering is unimportant … but it is arguably not an apt basis for this kind of comparison, and in any case I think it is clear that Mayor Holloway’s comparison of Katrina and the tsunami had little to do with this level. :)