92 The Diggers [advocated] “working together, and feeding together”: Ger rard Winstanley, et al. True Leveller’s Standard Advanced: or, The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men (London: 1649; http://www.bilderberg.org/land/diggers.htm#True, and many other sites).
94 “and for a longer period in several of the American States”: Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, in Virginia Hodgkinson and Michael W. Foley eds., The Civil Society Reader (Medford, MA: Tufts University Press, 2003), 64.
96 “a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle”: Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1959; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 99.
96 “a dangerous misconception”: Ibid., 105.
From the Blitz and the Bomb to Vietnam
98 Over the course of the war about sixty thousand British civilians: Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (London: Longmans, Green, 1950), 224.
99 “The experts foretold a mass outbreak”: Ibid., 338.
99 Eighteen “eminent psychiatrists . . . privately warned”: In Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 175.
99 “Once a raid has been experienced”: In Tom Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 21.
99 “The British working class was thought to be particularly susceptible”: In Mark Connelly, We Can Take It!: Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow, England: Pearson, Longman, 2004), 138.
100 “The people’s role in their own defense”: Ibid., 140.
100 “On the first night of the Blitz I put out an incendiary bomb”: In Olivia Cockett, Love and War in London: A Woman’s Diary 1939-1942, ed. Robert W. Malcolmson (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005), 150.
101 “I feel much more certainty”: Ibid., 151.
101 “from the time when she literally:” Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf (Fort Washington, PA: Harvest Books, 1974), 217.
101 “in particular, been a massive, largely unconscious cover-up”: In Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz, 13.
101 “blitz was a terrible experience for millions”: Ibid., 280.
101 “The courage, humor, and kindliness of ordinary people”: Molly Panter-Downs, London War Notes 1939-1945, ed. William Shawn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 105.
101 “Once you’ve been through three nights”: Shephard, War of Nerves, 176.
102 “The tune for today is Serenade in the Night, please”: Cockett, Love and War, 133.
102 “the English were discovering each other”: Ibid., 133.
102 “New tolerances are born between people”: Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, 350.
102 “just for something to do”: In Harrison, Living Through the Blitz, 78-81.
104 “As a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II”: Charles Fritz, “Disasters and Mental Health: Therapeutic Principles Drawn from Disaster Studies,” University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, 1996, 2. This report is available online at http://www.udel.edu/DRC/preliminary/hande10.pdf.
104 “Under those conditions, one might expect to find”: Ibid., 3-4.
104 “my access to British family life was greatly enhanced”: Ibid., 2.
105 “Under ruthless Nazi control they showed surprising resistance”: “United States Strategic Bombing Survey: Summary Report (European War), September 30, 1945” (available at http://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm/), 16.
105 “people living in heavily bombed cities had significantly higher morale than people in the lightly bombed cities”: Fritz, “Disasters and Mental Health,” 6.
105 “neither organic neurologic disease nor psychiatric disorders”: Ibid., 7.
106 “Herd Reaction, Panic, Emergence of Leaders, and Recommendations for Guidance and Control of Masses”: in E. L. Quarantelli, “The Earliest Interest in Disasters and the Earliest Social Science of Disasters: A Sociology of Knowledge Approach,” (University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, 2005), 24. This report is unpublished, but is available from the research center.
106 “From oral histories obtained later from key officials involved”: Ibid., 30.
106 “there are mass panics and wild stampedes. People trample one another”: Charles Fritz, “Disaster,” in Contemporary Social Problems: An Introduction to the Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Social Disorganization, ed. Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (New York: Harcourt, 1961), 672.
107 “these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted”: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 21.
107 “profound disorientation, extreme fear and anxiety, and collective regression”: Ibid., 42. Klein is talking about the effects of the September 11, 2001, disaster on New Yorkers.
107 In a public talk: Sponsored by City Lights Books and held at the First Unitarian Church, San Francisco, September 26, 2007. She can also be seen on The Colbert Report, October 2, 2008, where she opened with a comparison of societies in crisis to a tortured prisoner who will “do whatever you want.” “Whole societies go into shock, they don’t know what’s going on and they’ll do whatever people in authority want them to do. What happens to you when you’re in a state of shock is you regress, you become childlike and you start thinking Rudy Giuliani is your daddy and Dick Cheney will take care of you,” http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/186550/october-02-2008/naomi-k lein/.
107 “The traditional contrast between ‘normal’ and ‘disaster’ almost always ignores”: Fritz, “Disasters and Mental Health,” 25.
108 “Thus while the natural or human forces that created or precipitated”: Ibid., 68.
108 “Disasters provide a temporary liberation”: Ibid., 63.
108 “An essential feature of disaster is that the threats and dangers”: Ibid., 55.
109 “Disaster provides a form of societal shock which disrupts habitual, institutionalized patterns”: Ibid., 57.
109 “The prevention and control of panics in time of attack are important tasks of civil defense”: In Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red: Civilian Defense and American Political Development During the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001), 59.
110 “the thin veneer”: Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 111.
110 “Gun Thy Neighbor”: Time, August 18, 1961.
110 “slowly but surely millions of Americans were coming to the conclusion”: Walter Karp, “When Bunkers Last in the Doorway Bloomed: The Fallout-Shelter Craze of 1961,” American Heritage, February-March 1980. Accessible at http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1980/2/1980_2_84.shtml/.
111 “The indirect effects [of] the bombing on the will of the North Vietnamese”: In a document whose front page reads “TOP SECRET—NOFORN U.S. BOMBING IN VIETNAM” and stamped “DECLASSIFIED 8/26/96.” Supplied by the brilliant Vietnam War historian Nick Turse to the author. The second-page title is “The Effects of U.S. Bombing on North Vietnam’s Ability to Support Military Operations in South Vietnam and Laos: Retrospect and Prospect,” with more assertions about its top-secret status. The passage appears on p. vi11. Fritz is credited as one of four researchers who prepared the report.
Hobbes in Hollywood, or the Few Versus the Many
123 “I wrote a master’s thesis”: Enrico Quarantelli, in interview with the author, June 2007.
123 “In fact, most of the disaster funding”: Ibid.
123 “If by panic”: Ibid.
124 “instead of ruthless competition”: E. L. Quarantelli, “The Sociology of Panic,” 8. Available online from the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, labeled “to be published in Smelser and Baites, eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences in 2001.”
124 more than seven hundred studies: Quarantelli, cited in Lee Clarke, “Panic: Myth or Reality?” in Contexts (Fall 2
002): 24.
124 two thousand people in more than nine hundred fires: Erik Auf der Heide, “Common Misconceptions About Disasters: Panic, the ‘Disaster Syndrome,’ and Looting,” in The First 72 Hours: A Community Approach to Disaster Preparedness , ed. Margaret O’Leary (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse Publishing, 2004), 343.
125 “Bureaucracy depends on routine and schedules and paperwork and etc.”: Quarantelli, in interview with the author, June 2007.
125 “reinforce our cultural belief in individualism”: E. L. Quarantelli, “The Study of Disaster Movies: Research Problems, Findings, and Implications” (Newark: University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, 1980), 11.
125 “Disaster movies . . . usually portray the problem”: Ibid., 12.
127 “Elites fear disruption”: Kathleen Tierney, notes by the author from talk at University of California, Berkeley, 2006.
127 “fear of social disorder”: Ibid.
127 “The media emphasis on lawlessness”: Kathleen Tierney et al., “Metaphors Matter: Disaster Myths, Media Frames, and Their Consequences in Hurricane Katrina,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2006). Available at http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/framedreprint/604/1/57/.
128 “whereas, in the poor immigrant sections”: Judith W. Leavitt, “Public Resistance or Cooperation? Historical Experiences with Smallpox,” transcript of talk from the conference “The Public as an Asset, Not a Problem: A Summit on Leadership During Bioterrism,” Center for Biosecurity, published online at http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/events/2003_public-as-asset/leavitt/leavitt_trans.html/.
128 “There were signs and buttons”: Ibid.
128 “The drug companies”: Ibid.
128 in 2005, federal officials speculated that a militarily enforced quarantine would be required. See Jennifer Loven, “Military Might Enforce Quarantines in a Flu Epidemic,” Associated Press, October 4, 2005, opening, “President Bush, increasingly concerned about a possible avian flu pandemic, revealed today that any part of the country where the virus breaks out could likely be quarantined and that he is considering using the military to enforce it.” Also see Jeanne Guillemin, “Terrorism and Dispelling the Myth of a Panic Prone Public,” Journal of Public Health Policy (2006). “In 1999, the new Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense (reinvented later as the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh) took the lead in defining the bioterrorism threat as distinct from either chemical or radiological attacks. In the Center’s published scenarios, the unwitting public succumbs to panic when the necessary vaccines or antibiotics prove insufficient; invariably the military is called in to restore order.”
128 Indiana National Guard, 2007: The article is no longer on the Web site.
129 “Caron said: to heck with this idea”: Lee Clarke, in interview with the author, July 2007.
130 “Disaster myths are not politically neutral”: Lee Clarke, introduction to Terrorism and Disaster, Vol. 11: New Threats, New Ideas (Stamford, CT: JAI Press, 2003), 5.
131 “It has made me far more interested”: Kathleen Tierney, in interview with the author, 2007.
III. CARNIVAL AND REVOLUTION: MEXICO CITY’S EARTHQUAKE
Power from Below
135 Marisol Hernandez: In interview with the author, April 2007.
137 A maternity ward collapsed. . . . Eight infants: In Julia Preston, Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 107.
137 “I want to state that”: Judith Garcia, quoted in Elena Poniatowska, Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake, trans. Aurora Camacho de Schmidt and Arthur Schmidt (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 83.
137 “ran on the stairway”: Margarita Aguilar, quoted in Poniatowska, Nothing, Nobody, 146.
138 “Looking back, the seamstresses pinpoint”: Phoebe McKinney, “Fighting to Survive: Mexico’s 19th of September Union,” Women and Labor 10, no. 9 (September 1989), and http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1989/09/mckinney.html/.
139 “It’s absurd to suggest”: Victoria Adato, quoted in Preston, Opening Mexico, 113.
140 “The streets were cordoned off ”: Alessandro Miranda, in interview with the author, Mexico City, April 2007.
141 “From many sectors”: Hernandez, in interview with the author, April 2007.
141 “They began to have sit-ins”: Laura Carlsen, in interview with the author, Mexico City, April 2007.
141 “When the stories started coming out”: Ibid.
142 “In many cases”: Ibid.
142 They were for a time “the moral center”: Carlos Monsiváis, “No Sin Nosotros”: Los Días del Terremoto 1985-2005, trans. Brian Whitener, for the author (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2005), 136.
142 “At the beginning before we organized”: Hernandez, in interview with the author, April 2007.
142 “One of the seamstresses told me”: Carlsen, quoted in “Mexico City Seamstresses Remember: Two Decades of Aftershocks from Mexico’s 1985 Earthquake,” IRC Americas, www.americaspolicy.org, 1985.
142 “The word ‘crisis’ is of Greek origin”: Prince, Catastrophe and Social Change, 16.
143 “since during the time that it took”: Miguel de la Madrid, quoted in Dianne E. Davis, “Reverberations: Mexico City’s 1985 Earthquake and the Transformation of the Capital,” in Resilient Cities: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 265.
143 A skinny young man . . . “participated in that brigade”: Poniatowska, Nothing, Nobody, 142.
145 Michael Edwards: Civil Society (Cambridge, England: Polity, 2004), 86.
145 “I am clearly convinced”: Gustavo Esteva, in interview with the author, Oaxaca, Mexico, January 2008. He wrote about Tepito’s self-government and autonomy in “Tepito: No Thanks, First World,” Reclaiming Politics (Fall-Winter 1991).
145 “As far as I can see”: Ibid.
145 “a society in which citizens participate”: Václav Havel, in a speech at Mac alester College, Minneapolis, April 26, 1999, and online at http://www.eng.yabloko.ru/Publ/Archive/Speech/gavel-260499.html.
146 Barrios like Tepito: See Harry Cleaver, “The Uses of an Earthquake,” which draws extensively on Gustavo Esteva’s work in and writings on Tepito. Cleaver’s essay can be found online at many Web sites.
146 “During the months”: Monsiváis, “No Sin Nosotros,” 86.
146 “Not even the power of the state”: Monsiváis, introduction to Poniatowska, Nothing, Nobody, xvii.
147 “norms of participation are different”: Edwards, Civil Society, 30.
148 “The individual, the isolated self was dead”: Pauline Jacobson, “How It Feels to Be a Refugee,” Bulletin, April 29, 1906.
149 One such young man: José Luis Pacho Paredo, in interview with the author, Mexico City, April 2007.
149 “promote social contact, collective life, and public engagement”: Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 91.
150 “Residents of the most”: Ibid., 127.
Losing the Mandate of Heaven
152 “Disasters overload political systems”: A. Cooper Drury and Richard Stuart Olson, “Disasters and Political Unrest: An Empirical Investigation,” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 6 (September 1998): 4.
153 Russell Dynes: “The Lisbon Earthquake in 1755: Contested Meanings in the First Modern Disaster” (Newark: University of Delaware Disaster Research Center), 3.
154 the earthquake that . . . devastated Nicaragua’s capital: See Richard Stuart Olson and Vincent T. Gawronski, “Disasters as Critical Junctures? Managua, Nicaragua 1972 and Mexico City 1985,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 21, no. 1 (March 2003): 3-35.
155 “It is such a shock”: Gioconda Belli, in interview with the author, Santa Monica, California, April 2007.
156 “kleptocracy”: Olson and Gawronski,” “Disasters as Critical Junct
ures,” 10.
159 “The nuclear meltdown”: Mikhail Gorbachev, “Turning Point at Chernobyl,” http://economistsview.typpepad.com/economistsview/2006/04/gorbachev_chern.html/.
160 “Insurrections by a ‘nature’ that had seemed”: Mark Healey, “The Fragility of the Moment: Politics and Class in the Aftermath of the 1944 Argentine Earthquake,” International Labor and Working Class Journal, no. 62 (Fall 2002): 5.
161 secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover: In John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).
161 “The provision of relief”: Healey, “The Fragility of the Moment,” 53.
162 the public rose up chanting, “Que se vayan todos!”: Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 22.
162 On New Year’s Eve of 2001 the American secretary of state: Benjamin Black-well, “Micropolitics and the Cooking Pot Revolution in Argentina,” on Znet, http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/11740.
162 “What began angrily”: Sitrin, Horizontalism, 26.
162 “I also remember the feeling”: Ibid., 27.
163 Jonathan Schell points out that: “Political theory as well as common sense suggests that overthrow, an act of destruction, should require violence. It seems equally obvious that the subsequent stage of foundation of the new regime, an act of creation, should be peaceful. However, the historical record shows that the reverse has much more often been the case. The overthrow has often been carried out with little or no bloodshed, while the foundation—and the revolutionary rule that follows it—has been bathed in blood.” The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 144-45.
Standing on Top of Golden Hours
167 “He hath put down the mighty”: Max Harris, Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 119.
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 40