From Apocalypse to Disaster, America Is Obsessed with the Prospect of Bad News

Given the windfall profits reaped by corporations like Halliburton in the wake of Katrina and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the concept that disasters can benefit some will surprise few close observers.

However, when Kevin Rozario set about researching the dark days of the American experience, he stumbled across something unexpected. Americans, at large, viewed catastrophic earthquakes, fires and hurricanes with surprising optimism. Whether seeing it as a religious opportunity to get back on the straight and narrow, or an economic opportunity to rebuild bigger and better, Americans are uniquely steeped in the potential of crisis.

Rozario's recent book The Culture of Calamity explores the role that massive catastrophe has played in American culture. Why did the stock market radically jump despite the prediction of thousands of jobs lost in Hurricane Katrina? Who benefits from disasters? How did it come to be that, in the wake of 9/11, an average of $2.1 million in tax-free payments were made to the families of those killed in the attacks? Why are mainstream media outlets inundated with images of destruction?

Rozario, having spent years exploring primary documents from fires during the time of the Puritans, overcivilized San Franciscans living through the great earthquake, to the fallout of 9/11, has a unique perspective on America's crisis-oriented imagination. He joined AlterNet in a recent interview to explain how the American economy and self-perception has become dependent upon catastrophe.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: You write that the United States is particularly crisis-oriented. Why is that?

Kevin Rozario: Going back to the 17th century, religious ideas were important to the formation of thinking about disaster. The Puritans in New England were especially weighted with this Calvinist sense that trial through suffering is the thing that leads you to God. A culture like that is going to be absorbed in catastrophic events because they're always looking for those testing times.

From the very beginning of European settlement in the 17th century, there was intense fascination with hurricanes, fires and earthquakes. The religious dimension imposed a narrative on these moments of destruction, and the narrative is that settlers are sinners, god speaks to them primarily through disasters, and when a disaster happens, that's god telling them how to correct your evil ways and get back on the track of salvation and virtue. These ways of thinking spread more broadly into the population. And it's this way of thinking that led to a perception of calamities as instruments of progress.

OR: What opportunities do disasters provide Americans?

KR: Generally speaking, it tends to be more affluent and powerful Americans who view disasters as opportunities, as blessings, because they're the ones who are able to capitalize on them in order to bring about the kinds of political and economic outcomes that they want.

Take Increase Mather, a Puritan divine in the late 17th century, a very influential figure. For him, a disaster was specifically useful for bringing people back to the path of God. Everyone stopped to listen to him at a time of crisis. It allowed him to pursue his own moral and political agendas. He had a thing about people with long hair and drinking and breaking the Sabbath. He basically said that when a disaster happens, that's God telling us not to do these things. The politics of disaster is one in which people in positions of influence very early on come to realize that disasters can be very useful for capturing hold of the people's attention.

OR: But isn't catastrophe an economic obstacle for those in power?

KR: As early as the 17th century, you see disasters turning out to have economic benefits. For example, in 1676, there's the Boston Fire. It burned down a lot of obsolete and inefficient buildings and enabled the city to step in and rebuild more efficiently laid out roads. The people whose homes and businesses burned down tend not to be quite so excited by a disaster unless they have good insurance, but what does often seem to be the case is that a lot of the disasters, especially in the 19th century, were urban conflagrations, and they tended to hit downtown areas and business districts. They often wiped out decaying and crumbling infrastructure and basically cleared space so that you could build on top of them.