Rodger Kamenetz on the Gulf oil spill
by Ekaterina Krasavina · 06/14/10
Rodger Kamenetz, the Louisiana-based author who described post-Katrina New Orleans in Habitus 04, continues to trace the city’s misfortunes. Five years ago when New Orleans was struck by the hurricane, it was the human factor that accounted for the graveness of the consequences. This time the disaster is man-made from the start, and the management of its consequences is no more effective than before. In his article for Tablet, Kamenetz compares the bureaucratic and political upheaval that followed the BP oil spill with the absurdist world of Franz Kafka.
He lived every day of his life with a persistent sense of doom—which in New Orleans in hurricane season is called watching the news. So, I think he would have had no trouble feeling his way into this hovering malevolent undersea black cloud of oil and dispersant waiting to strike. Meanwhile BP offers, for our entertainment and distraction, a dog-and-pony sideshow straight out of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.”
Kamenetz offers neither solution, nor salvation. Instead, he turns to a traditionally Jewish response in times of trouble:
It hurts so much it’s funny. In the land of disaster, even a bitter laugh is a start.
