The Politicization of Disaster

In regards to the nearly 10,000 children who’ve died in China’s most recent earthquake, the New York Times has a fascinating article on the way the disaster has become politicized at local levels, leading to demonstrations against the government for having failed to address the unsafe building conditions prior to the earthquake, as well as exaggerating the role they played in disaster recovery. Concerning the issue, the Times has this to say:

The protests threaten to undermine the government’s attempts to promote its response to the quake as effective and to highlight heroic rescue efforts by the People’s Liberation Army, which has dispatched 150,000 soldiers to the region. Censors have blocked detailed reporting of the schools controversy by the state-run media, but a photo of Mr. Jiang kneeling before protesters has become a sensation on some Web forums, bringing national attention to the incident.

… The authorities in Beijing appear to recognize the delicacy of the issue. On Monday, a spokesman for the Education Ministry, Wang Xuming, promised a reassessment of school buildings in quake zones, adding that those responsible for cutting corners on school construction would be “severely punished.”

The article goes into more detail regarding the protests aimed against specific officials who the parents have identified as being negligent in regards to building safety conditions. What makes this particularly interesting is that it demonstrates that even so-called “totalitarian” states (in truth, China’s politics could be more aptly described as pragmatic authoritarianism) must be responsive…

# posted by Bryan

Indiana Jones and the Family Myth

I recently saw the new Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and was pleased to find a film that so easily accommodated itself to a psychoanalytic interpretation. I suppose, as a general principle, however, that the majority of mainstream Hollywood films are perfect terrain for examining the contours of today’s ideological constellation from a variety of angles: in this respect, Indiana Jones did not surprise in the least.

The film takes place in 1957 when Colonel-Doctor Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) leads a convoy of Soviets (disguised as American soldiers) to infiltrate an American military base in Nevada, where they force Indiana Jones to lead them to a crate containing the remains of a mysterious alien creature. Following Dr. Jones’ escape, he learns from a young greaser named Mutt Williams (Shia LeBeouf) that the Soviets are after the alien’s crystal skull in Peru.

The film gets interesting when Indiana flies to Peru in order to rescue his kidnapped colleague, Dr. Harold Oxley, and retrieve the crystal skull before the Soviets, with the help of Mutt Williams. After coming across a long lost love in Peru, Dr. Jones discovers to his surprise that Mutt is in fact his son. It is from this development that the film should be properly understood. As Slavoj Zizek outlines in his In Defense of Lost Causes, a common trope in Hollywood cinema, ranging from Deep Impact and Armageddon to Reds and Doctor Zhivago, is to place a family drama…

# posted by Bryan