Damage Control

Paris, Flint, Trees, Bodies, Temples, Death

I watched Notre Dame burn, as did most of us. I was there just a few months ago, and I posted my iPhone pic, as many of us did.

But I was not sad. I was moved, melancholy, nostalgic. But part of the meaning and awe of Notre Dame was that it still existed, that it lasted so long. It's potential demise was always baked into what it meant to us. Just like the decay we live amongst in Cleveland. Just like our own goddamned mortality.

Within a few hours, the calls came to raise money for other churches that have long needed repair, that were burnt by white supremacists. Instead of raising money for all the churches that need restoration, I thought, why don’t we not renovate any of them and let them become symbolic sublime wrecks. Stabilized ruins, as the preservationists say—like Eastern State Penitentiary, like, well, the Colosseum. Take all the funds to renovate all the churches go to the poorest amongst us. Every city should have a decayed damaged building as its symbol! From Rome to Detroit to Paris to Cleveland!

And then, a few hours after that came the reminders that people in Flint still do not have clean water. Instead of billions to Paris, let’s send it to those poor folks in Michigan! Now this made me sad, and angry, those emotions everyone else seemed to be having about Notre Dame that I was not. Over on Facebook, my friend Connor Coyne nails why I found these shout-outs to Flint troublesome:

For some time I've been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with a lot of the "Flint" memes I've seen floating around.

Initially, probably when the water crisis broke, I thought that the difficulties of my friends and neighbors were finally getting their long overdue recognition... that this might lead to solutions. As months, and then years dragged on, I kind of winced when I read the memes, but I told myself, "well, as least we're not being forgotten." 

But increasingly, they're making me feel squeamish. Even angry. It feels like outsiders are pointing at us on the street, and saying "look at that; evidence of how messed up the world is." And then continue walking along, continuing the conversation they were having before, because most of these people will never do a thing for Flint beyond sharing that meme. Because they certainly have never reached out to me and asked about what life here is really like. Because the words and thoughts people choose to share often do not indicate any awareness of other problems or broader historical contexts than can be summed up in the word "lead."

I am sorry, but my friends and family and neighbors are not something to be ogled in order to score a quick point against whoever or whatever.

On the other side of things, I am a Catholic, it is Holy Week, and I was horrified and dismayed by the destruction of a millenium-old sanctuary to my faith. I have never been to Paris -- never been to France -- but I had long hoped to visit someday, and since I could not go, I have enjoyed seeing the pictures others have been sharing. I have enjoyed reading peoples' experiences -- especially Catholics and especially the French -- of a place that was deeply ingrained in their sense of history and faith. Notre Dame was a living monument of wood and stone that has weathered war and plague and revolution and another dozen tides of history for a thousand years. 

And it upsets me today to see the love of that church pitted against my hometown -- as if they were opposites and only one should thrive -- by people who are not familiar with either; who are neither Catholics nor Flintstones but who use both as cheap tools to notch some ephemeral moral victory in the meme wars without lifting a finger to help anyone in the process.

The water crisis *does* remain, in large part, unrectified, but it is caught up in the courts, in class action lawsuits, and in disbursements by the city, state, and federal government, some of which have been released, some of which have not, some of which is caught up with local contractors. Every single aspect of this problem is complex and controversial and impossible to sum up in a sentence with a meme, but I can assure you it isn't as simple as your friend Joe writing a check to Flint instead of Notre-Dame.

IF you want to solve a problem, PLEASE ask yourself if you are saying what you are saying to solve it, or to look good in front of other people.

IF you think people are donating to a frivolous cause, you do far more for the causes you care about to make a donation (of any amount; don't @ me and tell me you just don't have a single dollar) and then share THAT, say "THIS is worth your time and money" and "PLEASE support these people / this cause," and "THIS is urgent."

You can totally accomplish this without trashing someone else's charitable contribution, their passion, their pictures, their memories and thoughts. Indeed, they are more likely to respond to your plea if you meet them with passion and eagerness than with recrimination.

And IF you profess to care about Flint, you owe it to Flint residents and to yourself to try to understand Flint. IF you want to help Flintstones for real, drop me a line. I can give you a dozen things you could do to help, and if you hate them, I could give you a dozen more. One or two might be water crisis related, but most of them will have to do with worthy nonprofits, with literacy and education, with other basic services, with PEOPLE. And if you don't like my priorities, well, then I can put you in touch with a dozen other people doing good work throughout the city and they can make their own recommendations.

But please don't think that by sharing some meme and moving on with your day you're performing a service for the people of Flint. You're pointing and staring at a destitute person on the street. And, increasingly, I resent it.

(Connor posted this to his FB friends only, and explained to me that others disagree with his opinion, and are working to use the energy to direct people to make donations.)

Connor says, “You’re pointing and staring at a destitute person on the street,” encapsulating the complications of what it called “victim photography.” Here are some passages from Martha Rosler’s powerful expose of that ideology:

Or to put it in a story that is easy to grasp (I won’t show you the photo but it is easy to find if it’s not already in your mind’s eye):

In 1978 there was a small news story on a historical curiosity: the real-live person who was photographed by Dorothea Lange in 1936 in what became the world's most reproduced photograph. Florence Thompson, seventy-five in 1978, a Cherokee living in a trailer in Modesto, California, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, "That's my picture hanging all over the world, and I can't get a penny out of it." She said that she is proud to be its subject but asked, "What good's it doing me?" She has tried unsuccessfully to get the photo suppressed. About it, Roy Stryker, genius of the photo section of the Farm Society

Administration, for which Lange was working, said in 1972: "When Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate. She never surpassed it. To me, it was the picture of Farm Security. ... So many times I've asked myself what is the thinking? She has all of the suffering of mankind in her but all of the perseverance too. ... You can see anything you want to in her. She is immortal."15 In 1979, a United Press International story about Mrs. Thompson said she gets $331.60 a month from Social Security and $44.40 for medical expenses. She is of interest solely because she is an incongruity, a photograph that has aged; of interest solely because she is a postscript to an acknowledged work of art.

Now one more leap, to my obsession with ruin porn. As John Patrick Leary writes:

So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city. And to see oneself portrayed in this way, as a curiosity to be lamented or studied, is jarring for any Detroiter, who is of course also an American, with all the sense of self-confidence and native-born privilege that we’re taught to associate with the United States.

Leary gets at so much in this 2012 essay (read it to see how he also discusses Jacob Riis, whom Rosner also critiques, and the variety of responses to Rust Belt decay).

I cannot let the subject go because I still have not figured something out. As Leary says, of outsiders finding ruin more fascinating than locals: “For someone from New York, Paris, or San Francisco, history seems more visible here, and this is the visual fascination that Detroit holds.” History is more visible in Detroit than in Paris? No that cannot be. Only if we consider it an unresolved history of some sort—or, to put it more directly: the future. It is the future, not the past, that we cannot figure out, and which holds us in awe when we look at abandonment, when we watch those spires fall. As Leary says, even the best ‘ruin photographers’ still fall into the traps the genre sets for us: “That they themselves fail..testifies not only to the limitations of any still image, but our collective failure to imagine what Detroit’s future—our collective urban future—holds for us all.”

Katie Flinn writes about the ecology of ruin, and how at root the point is not the past but the future:

“Often artists show delicate ferns and vulnerable tendrils taking over grand structures.  Focusing attention on the plants in the frame sets up a David-and-Goliath struggle in which nature is the unlikely winner. This is environmentalism’s opening: increasingly, artists and audiences seem attracted to the trope of nature’s renewal, resurgence, redemption.  We want to believe that ecosystems can, and should, recover from any damage we do.”

Isn’t the problem the third act, the narrative trajectory, the teleology, the future? What now? What next? And more pressing: what to do.

The easy actions—to restore, shore up, preserve, send billions to Notre Dame, fix those damned pipes in Flint—don’t scratch our itch. It’s visceral. Climate change, Michigan Central Station, the future of our own goddamned death. Our broken bodies.

Maybe what we want is an impossible stasis. We build the Temple; enemies destroy it. We rebuild; they destroy. Can we not just have a Temple in abeyance, a Temple always being built, always on the verge of being destroyed, a no-state solution?

Last week the City Council of Cleveland took the scrawled names of citizens, the very symbol of people saying “I AM HERE THIS IS ME.” They asked for remediation, for repair, for a future. The officials threw out their signatures. Now, activists—the people who are allowed to have that verb become their noun— actors—are back out knocking on doors, asking individuals to again make their literal presence known. They too want damage fixed. Once it has been, perhaps they will no longer be looked at, pointed at, made into a metonymy, a meme. The goal, of those living in sub-par housing filled with poison is, to a certain extent, is to be erased from the documentary record, so to be a subject, so to be no longer an object.

Notre Dame burns; it is poignant. It makes us think. But how much time are we allotted to spend staring, watching? And when and if we do stop, do we even know which future, which history we want to make? We cannot do it as we please.

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