The Tsunami Blame Game
By Marni Soupcoff
What if something happened to make the President's cabinet appointments, the inauguration and Colin Powell's retirement seem like small news? As little as two weeks ago, such an event would have been unfathomable.
But it's because they are so unthinkable that the post-Christmas tsunamis that rocked South and Southeast Asia have transfixed the media and the public alike. Suddenly small, difficult to pronounce places like Phuket and Banda Aceh are foremost in Americans' minds. Rather than obsessing about holiday weight gain or New Year's resolutions, shaken Westerners are counting their blessings and looking for ways to help the devastated region. It is, all said, not a bad side effect of a terrible disaster.
It does all of us good to re-examine our priorities once in a while. Why expend too much worry or negative emotion on matters like partisan politics or personal appearance when life itself can be so fleeting? If watching entire villages get wiped out within a matter of minutes does nothing else, it reminds us of what really matters: blaming everything on George W. Bush. Oh no wait, sorry.
Did I say "blaming everything on George W. Bush"?
Of course I meant happiness and faith and family. A natural disaster is a reminder that life is precious and short. Except that for an alarming number of people, it also seems to have served as a reminder that anything bad that happens on earth--nay in the entire universe (let's not forget the weaponization of space--is the fault of one man: Dubya. Would an earthquake and deadly tidal waves on the other side of the world serve as a rare exception, seeing as how the President has never before been credited with the wizardry to whip the Indian Ocean into a frenzy? Not a chance.
Bush is getting credit for the tsunamis with surprising frequency. The irrational notion takes many forms. Some link Bush to the disaster through global warming or war.
As one, now notorious, post on Democratic Underground mused, "Since we know that the atmosphere has become contaminated by all the atomic testing, space stuff, electronic stuff, earth pollutants, etc., is it logical to wonder if: Perhaps the 'bones' of our earth where this earthquake spawned have also been affected?" Ah, yes, the bones of our earth. If only the Republicans would stop messing with them, we might finally be able to achieve peace.
But the other Bush-is-the-cause-of-all-evil theory is even more difficult to swallow. That line of thinking blames the President for staying at his ranch in Crawford, Texas in the aftermath of the disaster rather than returning to Washington, D.C., where he would have been in oh-so-much closer proximity to, you know, Sri Lanka and stuff. Get a globe people. Unless he was heading to the beaches of Thailand to deliver food and water purification tablets himself, there was no way that the President's personal location was going to be a factor in the tsunami victims' survival.
I would submit that, happily, the majority of people understand that natural disasters are just that, natural. What makes them so terrifying is that there is little that any person, even the all-powerful George W. Bush, can do to stop them or even minimize their damage. Suddenly the terrifying implications of the dull expression "act of God" are brought home in disturbing detail.
But what of those people who don't understand this? What should we make of the vocal minority that insists that somehow, whether through his bombs or aerosol cans, George W. Bush has personally caused the devastation in Asia and Africa? Not much, I suppose.
There will always be conspiracy theorists, and they will always be most active in the wake of a disturbing upset that leaves the world searching for an explanation.
It is hard to approach loss without having someone or something to blame. So it is, in a way, natural that a chorus of Bush-haters would turn up their volume on this occasion. They are, at least, strangely sincere in their beliefs.
The problem with blaming is Bush, however, is that it ensures that the most important lesson of the tsunamis is missed. What the disaster teaches is that no matter how advanced a civilization becomes--and no matter how socially progressive, racially diverse, tolerant and environmentally friendly--there will still be horrible things that happen to good, innocent people. The best judge of our character will not be in how many of these disasters strike us, but in how we respond in their aftermath. Do we seek to help out those who have been hardest hit? Or do we merely look for a way to cast the blame for the tragedy on our worst enemies?
Only time will tell.
Marni Soupcoff's column will appear in its regular spot next Monday, January 10, at TAEmag.com.
