Can This Really Be Happening in America? (Katrina as Meta-Blues)

The answer is: yes. I'm at pains to come up with a response to Tamer El-Gobashy's recent first-hand account of the violence and desperation in New Orleans. Ctheory, on point as usual, see the remarkable similarities between New Orleans and Baghdad (which they dub a "strange attractor"), where disasters -- one natural (we think), one man-made (we know) -- have plunged modern cities (both of them located on river deltas, incidentally) into Third World chaos. What is the appropriate response to such devastation, when we suspect that even the charities are corrupt?

Some of us will be tempted by tonglen, the famed Buddhist practice of exchanging positive personal energy for the negative vibes of those in pain (imaginatively at least). Others will hop a bus to go and help out. Still others will ignore the loss, embroiled in their own dramas, or dismiss the suffering of the Big Easy as the deserved retribution of obstinant, stubborn looters and losers. People will point fingers (often with good reason) at the failures of the government, or FEMA, or the Nat'l Guard. People will blame themselves for never caring enough, for being too afraid to do anything for anybody.

All of this is to be expected, and all of it is worthy of compassion. But what else is going on?

Consider again that New Orleans is America's second chakra, the body of the United States' "energy center" of sexuality, dance, and love. Knowing that, in the Hindu tradition, water is the element which corresponds to this chakra (or "wheel"), it almost appears that, rather than being killed off and assassinated, New Orleans was inundated with its key form of energy, almost like a holy hit of inspiration plunging into the waiting skull of John Coltrane, or Fats Domino, or Howlin' Wolf. Hurricane Katrina, on a macroscopic scale, was to New Orleans as a whole what the slings and arrows of poverty were to individuals like Robert Johnson, namely, a catalyst for growth, for expression, for the Blues.

I know this sounds ridiculous, but what I'm suggesting is this: the United States is a living superorganism, and its great cities are its organs and energy centers. What looks like a disaster to we tiny mortals may be a sign of something far greater and mysterious at work (much the way the tearing down of muscle tissue during a hard weight workout might appear as though a disaster to the neuromuscular "societies" living in our arms). New Orleans and its residents are in deep pain at the moment, and I don't mean to aesthetisize their misery, but we have to wonder: what does the blues sound like when a living meta-being of a billion billion souls is singing it? What does a 12-bar guitar solo do when it catches solar wind and whips around the galaxy? What ears can hear Earth's Sacred Complaint?

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