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Disaster as spectacle, motivator

By G.D. Maxwell The earth shrugs, indifferently. Thousands die. Dreams, villages, lives, the past and the future are swept away, ground to bits, bloated by the tropical sun. Change the channel, honey, we’ve seen this movie before.

By G.D. Maxwell

The earth shrugs, indifferently. Thousands die. Dreams, villages, lives, the past and the future are swept away, ground to bits, bloated by the tropical sun. Change the channel, honey, we’ve seen this movie before.

A somnambulant, hung-over first world awakens from its post-Christmas binge of indulgence, reaches into its pocket and flips some spare change, a Tums and a ticket to the opera it won’t be able to attend to the flooded street bums of the Third World. "Sorry, it’s the best I can do on short notice."

Challenged by an unimportant do-gooder from an irrelevant part of town and upbraided by his friend for being stingy – stingy? Moi? – he fumbles in the other pocket, the one with foldin’ money, and coughs up another $20. His friend, not waiting for the taunts of parsimonious penny-pincher, ups the ante with $40 of his own. And the new wave of giving goes round and round, each friend in turn raising the bet, sweetening the pot in a seemingly endless cycle of call and raise. The game takes on a life of its own.

But no one stops to ask, "Hey, just what the heck is the appropriate response to this catastrophe?"

In the aftermath of the unwanted Christmas present visited on Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, et. al., what’s a first world boy supposed to do? Send money? Lots of that being promised, bundled and headed in the direction of the people who need it and the miscreants who’ll siphon off more than their share. Demand government action? Lots of that being demanded, with heads of state being chided for stinginess and delay and general inaction. Pitch in and help? Don’t know if it’s such a good idea to add another body to an area unable to nurture the living already on the ground.

Go on vacation?

Last Saturday’s Globe and Mail ran what was possibly the photo of the year on its front page. Under a colourful beach umbrella, poked into the sand and secured with a piece of rebar driven in for support, sit two crudely-made, wooden chaise lounges, one with a very crooked leg. A woman with a one-piece body lies on one. She’s wearing a bikini. She’s white… very white. Well-fed. Looking well-rested but for all we know, she’s just spent three days in travel hell trying desperately to escape from a high-pressure human resources job where she’s spent the previous year downsizing thousands of working stiffs into oblivion for the benefit of the company’s shareholders.

She might be asleep or just resting her eyes. We can’t tell since she has shades on. A small table beside her holds an item of clothing, maybe a book beneath. The ironist in me likes to think it’s Krakatoa: East of Java but it’s probably some vacuous Danielle Steele pageturner. Maybe she’ll read later. Maybe she’ll go for a swim if there aren’t any more bodies in the water on her stretch of beach.

The beach itself looks very well tended. The sand is, well, sand-coloured; the sky is blue and the picture feels warm. A tropical vacation.

Next to her is another chaise. Its thin, blue pad is covered at the upper end by a colourful beach towel showing a blazing sun setting behind palm trees and a distant mountain across a postcard bay. The woman’s male companion sits pensively on the edge of his lounge. He is naked save for his bathing suit, completely bald and looks well-fed but not over-stuffed.

His attention, unlike his wife’s, is directed toward the scene of rubble behind him. The foreshortened scene suggests a long, telephoto lens but perhaps 20 metres behind the couple, a dozen or so workmen are busy clearing away the flotsam deposited amongst the palm trees by the Christmas tsunami. Branches, sticks, seaweed, ropes, fishing floats, a blue tarp, swaths of red, white and blue cloth all litter the expanse between the couple and the buildings – still standing – in the scene’s background.

One Thai worker, a lean man dressed in a blue sweatshirt with a white T-shirt poking out the bottom and long, dark shorts, stands facing the direction of the couple. One hand is on his hip the other raised to his mouth. He’s looking away from the couple. He might be disgusted, he might be diverting his face as he yawns or coughs. He might be exhausted. He might have been removing bodies from the rubble moments or days before.

The male tourist looks tormented, especially compared to his snoozing companion. Should he pitch in and help? Is there a language barrier? Has he already proffered help and been graciously turned down by workers who are grateful tourists are still in their midst so cooks, busboys, chambermaids and bartenders still have work?

The picture perfectly encapsulates the tortured reality of a devastated people and a puzzled outside world. What to do?

Are tourists in a tourist resort after a catastrophe more out of place than the world’s media clamouring to cover the event ad nauseum ? Did all the CBC reporters in Sri Lanka and Thailand pack their own food and water when they went over? Is the incremental value of the thousandth "news" story greater than the incremental value of the thousandth Canadian tourist? Is the contribution made by seemingly clueless tourists more or less valuable than the contribution made by the distraught survivor pestering local officials to help him find his missing girlfriend?

Fact is, the first world is in a giant PR race to see who can out-do the others in the race to contribute. As of Wednesday, Germany’s in the lead with $625 million.

But the fact also is, the first world, day in and day out, doesn’t give a damn about these people. As Nicholas Kristof wrote the other day in the New York Times, they don’t give a damn about the two or three million who die each year of malaria, the 240,000 each month that die of AIDS or the 140,000 who die, unbelievably, each and every month of each and every year of diarrhea.

This is disaster as extravaganza. Disaster as entertainment. Reality TV writ big.

It reminds me uncomfortably of the anti-abortion people. They may be worried and worked up when the "crisis" of pregnancy is current, the outcome uncertain and pending, but once the child gets born, they don’t really give a damn whether it lives in poverty, abuse and exploitation.

I don’t know the appropriate response to a disaster like this. I don’t think being a tourist is more cretinous – as letter writers to the Globe seemed to think – than being a reporter or a visiting dignitary.

But I stand in awe of the power of a natural disaster to get people to generously respond to other people they really don’t give a thought to the rest of the time. What would the world be like if it were otherwise?