MEDIATING THE MORALS OF DISASTERS

The Norwegian media responses to Hurricane Katrina were structured around three well-established sets of motifs in a globalized late modern disaster discourse: 1) The collapse of civil society, 2) Social vulnerability 2) Extreme weather and global warming. These sets of motifs portray relationships or non-relationships between natural evil and moral evil. Starting with Voltaire’s description of Candide’s arrival in Lisbon after the earthquake I discuss how an 18th century disaster discourse is echoed in contemporary media narratives. This paper explores a folkloristic and narratological approach to writing nature. I use Hurricane Katrina as a case for studying Norwegian media disaster narratives. In these narratives I am concerned with how such narratives transform disasters from being acts of nature to become issues of morale. Modern disaster narratives have more complex historical roots then often claimed. This complexity is mirrored in the media representations of Hurricane Katrina.


MEDIATING THE MORALS OF DISASTERS
Hurricane Katrina in Norwegian News Media by Kyrre Kverndokk The Norwegian media responses to Hurricane Katrina were structured around three well-established sets of motifs in a globalized late modern disaster discourse: 1) The collapse of civil society, 2) Social vulnerability 2) Extreme weather and global warming.
These sets of motifs portray relationships or non-relationships between natural evil and moral evil.Starting with Voltaire's description of Candide's arrival in Lisbon after the earthquake I discuss how an 18 th century disaster discourse is echoed in contemporary media narratives.This paper explores a folkloristic and narratological approach to writing nature.I use Hurricane Katrina as a case for studying Norwegian media disaster narratives.In these narratives I am concerned with how such narratives transform disasters from being acts of nature to become issues of morale.Modern disaster narratives have more complex historical roots then often claimed.This complexity is mirrored in the media representations of Hurricane Katrina.

Introduction
As soon as they recovered themselves a little they walked toward Lisbon.They had some money left, with which they hoped to save themselves from starving, after they had escaped drowning.Scarcely had they reached the city, lamenting the death of their benefactor, when they felt the earth tremble under their feet.The sea swelled and foamed in the harbour, and beat to pieces the vessels riding at anchor.Whirlwinds of fire and ashes covered the streets and public places; houses fell, roofs were flung upon the pavements, and the pavements were scattered.Thirty thousand inhabitants of all ages and sexes were crushed under the ruins.The sailor, whistling and swearing, said there was booty to be gained here.
"What can be the sufficient reason of this phenomenon?" said Pangloss.
"This is the Last Day!" cried Candide.
The sailor ran among the ruins, facing death to find money; finding it, he took it, got drunk, and having slept himself sober, purchased the favours of the first good-natured wench whom he met on the ruins of the destroyed houses, and in the midst of the dying and the dead.Pangloss pulled him by the sleeve.
"My friend," said he, "this is not right.You sin against the universal reason; you choose your time badly."(Voltaire [1759(Voltaire [ ] 1918:19-20) :19-20) In his poem of 1756 on the Lisbon earthquake and in the paradigmatic novel Candide three years later, Voltaire used the earthquake as an opportunity to argue against the optimism of the mid-18 th century.In polemic terms he argued against the idea that, despite such a dreadful disaster, we still live in the best of all possible worlds, and claimed that no meaning could possibly lie behind such a catastrophe.At the same time, he also argued against an opposite position, what the historian Kevin Rozario has termed a pessimistic cosmic fatalism, the widespread idea of calamities as the rightful divine punishment of sinful man (Rozario, 2007:15).The Lisbon earthquake and Voltaire's polemic writings on the disaster are often referred to as a turning point in the western thought.
It changed the way of thinking about disasters, nature, evil and morals (e.g.Löffler, 1999).In her now classic book Evil in Western Thought, the philosopher Susan Neiman writes: "Since Lisbon, natural evils no longer have any seemingly relation to moral evils; hence they no longer have meaning at all.Natural disaster is the object of attempts at prediction and control, not of interpretation" (Neiman, 2002:250).If this is the case, it is tempting to ask a rather naïve and simple question; if natural disasters really are fundamentally meaningless, how do we then make them understandable?
The ways Candide, his preceptor Pangloss, and the sailor respond Taylor, terms the social imaginary of disasters, is structured according to a number of symbolic forms (Holm, 2012a;Holm, 2012b:21).He even claims that since the Lisbon earthquake, this cultural repertoire "of images structuring the cultural imagination of disaster in the Western world has, in fact, been surprisingly small and surprisingly stable" (Holm, 2012b:24).Following up on this claim, I will point out the very limited number of symbolic forms or cultural models of morals and disasters that appear when natural disasters are being mass mediated in a late modern world.To be more precise, the paper will discuss the ways relationships or non-relationships between disasters, nature, morals and evils were articulated in Norwegian media representations of Hurricane Katrina.
Writing nature from a folklore studies perspective involves a history of ideas written from below.Folklore studies is a discipline examining how cultural understandings, ideas and evaluations are distributed and negotiated through vernacular and popular cultural expressions, with an emphasis on culturally distributed narratives.Hence, the practice of writing nature in folklore studies may just as well be described as a practice of reading nature.Such reading of nature could, within folklore studies, be undertaken from a number of theoretical positions.My contribution has some connections to actor-network theory.It is often emphasized that the key term in actor-network theory, actant, is taken from the semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas.What is less known is that Greimas based his concept on the formalist Vladimir Propp's study of the morphology of folktales (Holbek, 1987:349-354).What Greimas describes as an actant, is in Propp's narratology called a sphere of action.In a sphere of action, the narrative character -the dramatis personae -and the narratological function of the character are amalgamated into one narratological unit (Propp, 1968:79).
As an approach to a narratological reading of nature, I will focus on the spheres of action of natural forces and mankind in Norwegian media representations of Hurricane Katrina.Hence, in this narrative and rhetorical analysis, vernacular concepts of nature, social structure and human behavior represents the starting points for discussing how certain cultural models of morals and evil are articulated in the Norwegian media response to Hurricane Katrina.

Mediating Hurricane Katrina
Mass media is an arena for public sense making, and brings distant events to local audiences.Media audiences today are able to follow extreme and spectacular events around the world, such as natural disasters, in real time.Hence, media-made spectator aesthetics and well-structured narrative scripts have become crucial for how we perceive and understand disaster (Ekström, 2013:473) and the absence of the authorities.They argue that these motifs followed a well-established script of disaster narratives.These narratives were displayed almost before the catastrophe became reality (Dynes and Rodríguez, 2007).These motifs framed the disaster as a globally exposed, vivid TV drama.The European and the Norwegian media representations of the disaster were structured around topics and narrative motifs similar to those on American TV.Hence, the media coverage first and foremost illustrated how globally integrated the media world is.
Western disaster discourse has been claimed to be heavily influenced by Hollywood movies and popular culture (Tierney et al., 2006;Webb, 2007;Žižek, 2005).However, it is certainly not only popular culture that structures how we imagine and represent disasters.Late modern disaster discourse has deep historical roots (Holm, 2012a:65).The Norwegian media coverage of Hurricane Katrina was, roughly speaking, structured after four main topics.
One of them was the increase of petroleum prices, due to reduced oil production in the Mexican Gulf and heavily damaged oil refineries in the Gulf region.Several newspaper articles and national broadcast news reports discussed the impact the hurricane had on the Norwegian economy.Such kind of news illustrates how calamities and expectations of ruin and renewal are integrated in capitalism as a premise for economic development (Rozario, 2007).
They illustrate how one man's profit is another's loss.However, such kinds of news first and foremost tell how the global economy works, and put little direct emphasis on either the disaster, or the disaster area.I will therefore leave this topic out of my further discussions, and concentrate on the three remaining topics, which I have called: "The collapse of civil society", "Social vulnerability" and "Extreme weather and global warming".These topics are all, in one way or another, dealing with relations between disasters, morals and evil.They are all handling the shocking news in ways that make it possible to cope with the meaninglessness of the disaster, in the sense that they place it into structures that make them morally and intellectually explainable for the media audience.

The collapse of civil society
On September 2, 2005, four days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the tabloid Dagbladet could report that a state of lawlessness and helplessness dominated the flooded city of New Orleans.
An article simply titled "Lawless and helpless" described a chaotic,  In the aftermath of the Great Kantō earthquake in Japan in 1923, Korean guest workers were accused of starting fires and looting the ruins.As a consequence, groups of vigilantes in Kyoto and Yokohama lynched Koreans (Reilly, 2009:101).The examples of rumors and news reports on looting mobs in disaster areas are numerous.After the earthquake in Japan in 2011, Western news media even asked why the Japanese did not loot, implying a presumed normality of looting in disaster areas (Dagbladet, March 14, 2011, The Washington Times, Mach 14, 2011).
The disaster scholar Kathleen Tierney has remarked that stories about looting are not only frequently told and broadcast.Disaster narratives also frame how we handle disasters.Tierney and her colleagues has pointed out that such stories suddenly turned the often used metaphor for describing disaster areas -a war zoneinto reality when 69 000 troops from the National Guard arrived New Orleans (Tierney et al., 2006).The governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, announced the appearance of these troops with a warning: "I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will" (CNN, September 2, 2005).These words went around the world as an echo of the San Francisco mayor 99 years earlier.It later turned out that the stories of looting were highly exaggerated.
Stories of looting and destruction become urban legends, presented and widely distributed as true stories of extraordinary events, yet their truth content is difficult or impossible to verify.The chaos of a disaster scene generates such narratives, especially when the disaster wipes out an entire city.The folklorist Carl Lindahl even claims that: "The death of a city is the ultimate urban legend" (Lindahl, 2012:141).The collapse of modern city life followed by chaos and lawlessness is portrayed in a long list of disaster stories narrated and distributed in both Hollywood blockbusters and news reports.In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, legends about looters and snipers were told locally and distributed globally.These kinds of stories belong to what Lindahl terms as the master script of chaos.They are, according to him, projected from pre-existing cultural fear.Even though some gunshots probably were fired, the countless number of gunshots reported was for the most part never fired.The noisy soundtrack of the storm could perfectly well be mistaken for gunshots, he claims (Lindahl, 2012:145).The intense noise worked as a vehicle in a literary transformation of meteorological forces into human forces, and into the sphere of action of the criminal antagonists in a human drama of chaos and order.
In general, legends are distributed narratives that are tested and shaped in collective processes of telling, transmission and re-telling.They are renegotiated and reformulated in a continual interplay between tellers and audiences in order to be accepted by the audience and eventually to be re-told (Bogatyrêv and Jakobson, [1929]  The article from Dagbladet, along with a number of similar news reports, reveals a certain kind of disaster imagination.In the Norwegian press, the lawlessness and helplessness of the people in New Orleans was explained partly in light of American social structures and partly due to fundamental human behavior uncovered when civilization was literally swept away.Hence, the true disaster was not the hurricane; it was rather the lawless and chaotic situation that apparently appeared in its aftermath.The hurricane was just a necessary background for the story.The storm prepared the scene for the incomprehensible actions of the looting antagonists.Nature, understood as the meteorological forces, had no active part in the drama and was thus not ascribed any explanatory value.Instead the stories about looting framed the disaster as a fundamental human-moral situation.The writer Rebecca Solnit, has pointed out that this kind of framing of disasters draws on an idea best formulated in Thomas Hobbes' concept of the state of nature, as a war of all against all (Solnit, 2009:91;241-242).My point is that this kind of narrative framing, so to speak, converts the catastrophe from a natural to a moral disaster, caused by the true nature of mankind.

Social vulnerability
An article in the regional newspaper Adresseavisen from December The war metaphor was again repeated, but why was it put in connection to the third world?What was it with the pictures from New Orleans that made such an analogy possible?
This analogy reflects an idea about the interrelationship between development and vulnerability, and is based on an idea of a divide between natural hazards and disasters.This distinction is well established in both disaster studies and popular disaster discourse.
Over the last 30 years it has been emphasized that it is social vulnerability that makes it possible for hazards to turn into disasters (Hewitt, 1997).This is by now a well-documented empirical fact.Nevertheless, this way of understanding disasters also has a discursive dimension.The concept of vulnerability implies an idea about the opposite -invulnerability, often referred to as resilience.
While countries in the third world are generally considered to be more or less vulnerable to natural hazards, the western countries, on the other hand, are presumed to be more or less invulnerable. of the term was based on a presumption that a superpower is supposed to be resilient per se.And likewise, that the third world as such was most likely to be vulnerable to disasters.
One consequence of the rhetoric in the quotes from Adresseavisen and Dagsavisen is that New Orleans and Louisiana are textually framed as semi-developed or as a third-world-like area.However, the problem seems to be that the development-vulnerability model did not necessarily fit reality.In the following example picked from a commentary in Dagbladet, this model collides with the author's knowledge about disaster management in two socalled developing countries: One could almost believe this to happen in one of the least developed countries in the world, apart from the paradox that it is precisely the poor countries that are often very good at dealing with natural disasters.Bangladesh has simple and effective measures concerning flood and are doing reasonably well, in the same way as Cuba manages to handle the annual returning hurricanes.(Dagbladet, September 3, 2005: 9) 6 The critique of the disaster management in the aftermath of the hurricane was highly politicized both in the USA and abroad.In quite direct terms it was directed against the Bush-administration, and in the USA also against FEMA (The Federal Emergency Management Agency).However, on a more fundamental level such kind of critical reports was about more than the stupidity of the Bush-administration.While narratives on looting thematize the collapse of social structures, reports on social vulnerability represent the opposite.They are all about social structures -political and institutional structures one would expect to be working but didn't, and the structures that were working all too well -in this case, the armed forces.
In American public debates, Hurricane Katrina was characterized as an unnatural disaster (Lee, 2006;Reed, 2006;Hartman and Squires, 2006).The term unnatural was not used in the Norwegian press.Yet, both the news reports and the commentary referred to in this article were still in line with such an understanding of the disaster in the sense that nature was completely written out of this kind of analysis, in favor of structural and political explanations.
An impression was given that modern, developed societies were expected to be natureproof, so to speak.7 When the disaster was written entirely into a political sphere of action, the possibilities Extreme weather and global warming -when nature strikes back In the USA as well as in Europe, Hurricane Katrina was almost immediately linked to global warming, (Mooney, 2007:150;Boykoff, 2011:136).The profiled American environmentalist Bill McKibben called it "the first of many global warming disasters destined to strike in the twenty-first century" (quoted in Hertsgaard, 2006:19).
In There are some striking structural similarities between the argumentative pattern in this text and early modern reasoning about disasters as divine signs or so called omens.In early modern sign-reading practice, phenomena in nature were interpreted as semiotic signs.Omens predicted a forthcoming disaster, most often Judgment Day.Natural phenomena were interpreted in light of eschatological verses in the Bible, working as modeling examples.Hence, this kind of reasoning was based on exemplarity, not probability.The particular sign was further linked to other peculiar incidents.An earthquake could, for instance, be associated with floods, heavy rainfall or even comets.Each one of these incidents was remarkable, but the semiotic pattern first appeared when they were linked together, and authorized each other as signs of the same kind.Together they would form a pattern of divine signs, predicting the end of the world.This was the case with most of the religious interpretations of the Lisbon earthquake (Kverndokk,   8   (Kjørup, 2002).
dangerous and desperate situation where: "Criminals and desperate armed survivors are making the rescue work life-threatening, and the police lack resources"(Dagbladet, September 2 2005:12).1The article is heavily illustrated.Six illustrations document a seemingly tense state of chaos and violence.The state of chaos is especially emphasized in the two main illustrations placed above the text.One of these pictures shows four men helping a woman who has fainted (left main illustration, fig 1), while the other one shows armed police driving though the city in an armored vehicle (right main illustration, fig 2).All the pictures in the article were distributed to the newspaper through the international press agency Associated Press (AP).The picture of the armed police troops driving through the streets of New Orleans was shot by the AP photographer Eric Gay, and distributed globally.It was, among other places, also published in Paris Match.The French magazine commented upon it in laconic terms:"The only response: The army".Paris Match blamed the US authorities for treating New Orleans as another Afghanistan or Iraq(Kempf, 2013:14).The skepticism to American militarism was also present in Norway in the days after Hurricane Katrina.However, in this particular news report in Dagbladet, no such skepticism is uttered.The military presence is instead described as a necessity, which the pictures serve to illustrate.The caption to this picture reads: "(…) Armed gangs are now controlling most of the city center and the authorities lack resources" (Dagbladet, September 2, 2005:13), 2 while the caption the left main illustration reads: Looting and suffering: New Orleans is dominated by criminal gangs and suffering victims.A woman is carried away after she has fainted in the enormous shelter of the Superdome.The evacuation of the Superdome was stopped yesterday after a gunshot was fired at a military helicopter (Dagbladet, September 2, 2005:12) 3 This caption sums up the content of the article.It is noticeable that no persons are named in this text, not even the fainted woman, and the four men carrying her are just mentioned indirectly.The text is written in a passive form and contains remarkably few concrete persons.Even though both of the captions refer to looters, the actual pictures do not expose any looters, just victims and armed police.Hence, the captions are framing the pictures in ways that turn them into illustrations of a state of helplessness and lawlessness.This kind of portrayal of the situation inscribes the inhabitants of New Orleans into three possible subject passions.The term lawless defines two active positions, the looters or snipers shooting at the helicopter and the law represented by the military and the police, while the term helpless defines the rest of the population as passive victims.However, stories of looting in the aftermath of the disaster were not unique for New Orleans.Such kinds of stories are among the most frequently told disaster narratives in modern times.Moreover, they are both told locally in disaster areas and distributed widely through mass media.The opening quote from Candide illustrates how looting was a topic already in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake.Reports of looting were published all around Europe after the earthquake.151 year later, in 1906, local circulation of such stories caused a state of public fear after the San Francisco earthquake.The mayor of the city, Eugene Schmitz, encouraged the military troops and the police force to "KILL any and all persons found engaged in Looting or in the Commission of Any Other Crime" (quoted inSolnit, 2009:36).

Figures 1
Figures 1 and 2, from Dagbladet, September 2, 2005 (Reproduction: The National Libbrary of Norway) 2005).In this sense they reflect culturally shared imaginations, evaluations and values.The article from Dagbladet was far from the only Norwegian news report focusing on looting and criminals shooting at helicopters.Such stories actually dominated the Norwegian press coverage of flooded New Orleans.Hence, it is likely to assume that the re-telling and re-contextualization of looting narratives from a local American context to a Norwegian media context to some extent reflects that the cultural imaginations these stories are based on also found resonance among a Norwegian media audience.
28, 2005 was looking back on 2005 as a year of disasters.The chaos and disorder of the directly broadcast disaster in New Orleans was commented upon by asking these questions: How can the wealthiest and most resource-rich country in the world not manage to help the population of New Orleans?How can a tourist city suddenly look like a city in the third world ravaged by civil war?(Adresseavisen, December 28, 2005:50) 4 Vulnerability and development are in other words two sides of the same coin.Hurricane Katrina exposed the vulnerability of American society to the world.It was a tremendous shock when the USA was unable to handle the situation.In an editorial article, the social democratic daily Dagsavisen wrote for instance: "The pictures from the disaster area are such pictures one would expect from a developing country, not a superpower" (Dagsavisen, September 10, 2005:3).5In the aftermath of the hurricane, the phrase "the world's only superpower" was used as a fixed rhetorical figure around the world; by Reuter's news agency, in the German press, in Indian press and in Norway (e.g.NTB, September 2, 2005a; Dagbladet, September 3, 2005:9; Spiegel Online International, September 12, 2005; The Times of India, September 4, 2005).With the term superpower, a global, power political discourse was connected to a disaster discourse.The example from Dagsavisen clearly shows how the use were opened for drawing parallels to radically different catastrophe discourses; such as war, concentration camps and genocide discourses.Dagbladet, one of the largest Norwegian tabloids, for instance drew parallels between a temporary prison at a bus station in New Orleans and Guantanamo Bay(Dagbladet, September   14, 2005:9), while Norwegian News Agency (NTB) called the Superdome a concentration camp (NTB, September 2, 2005b).The concentration camp analogy gives a hint of a cultural model on structural evil, drawing on the idea of the banality of bureaucratic evil in Hannah Arendt's sense.
Europe leading politicians such as the British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and the German Minister of the Environment there used to be bare mountains to Hurricane Katrina by the use of this concept.As extreme weather, these weather phenomena are all indicators of global environmental processes.They work seemingly as direct evidences for how global warming is affecting the environment.However, the text tends to focus upon the message of these dramatic events, rather than the underlying causes of them.Consequently, quite different kinds of weather phenomena work together, establishing a worldwide pattern pointing towards a forthcoming climate crisis.In this sense the weather events operate rhetorically as communicative signs, 9 bringing messages from nature about the future, and not as strict scientific evidences.