Appetite for destruction

KEVIN ROZARIO opens “The Culture of Calamity: Disaster & the Making of Modern America” by invoking Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel “White Noise.” It’s a telling reference, for “White Noise” is among DeLillo’s broadest efforts: accessible, funny, a satire on the disassociation endemic to American life. In it, a Midwestern professor named Jack Gladney meditates on the power of images, especially apocalyptic ones, to pierce the veil of daily artifice. “Only a catastrophe gets our attention,” DeLillo writes in a line Rozario uses to open his introduction. “We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.”

Despite the acuity of such a statement, it offers an ironic comment on Rozario’s efforts, since it is not disaster DeLillo means to get at but distance, our inability to feel things on their own terms. For DeLillo, calamity is less the point than a kind of metaphor, a reminder that, in mass culture, we not so much act as are acted upon. What’s important, in such a formulation, is not the disaster but how it is interpreted and read.

And yet, Rozario’s own sense of disconnect, of disengagement, is the most frustrating thing about “The Culture of Calamity,” which seeks to frame disaster as a transformative social and economic engine in America since Colonial times. It’s a fascinating idea, but in the end, Rozario stands at too great a remove. Part of the problem is his academic approach; an assistant professor of American studies at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., he writes prose here that is often cluttered with the jargon of the lecture hall.

“[A]ny history of disaster,” he notes, “that fails to take into account contexts of modernization and capitalist development is doomed to leave its data cold and inert, bereft of interpretive force and significance.” Content aside, this line makes for an almost perfect illustration of Rozario’s problems as a writer -- a voice that is (yes) cold and inert itself, even as it suggests a framework in which catastrophe has become a central force in American life. In short, there is no blood here, no sense of disaster as anything more than an intellectual construct, no notion that for calamity to affect us, it must touch our emotions.

That’s unfortunate, because Rozario clearly knows the territory of disaster, especially its history in America, beginning with a 1638 New England earthquake and a fire that destroyed “about fifty homes, stores, and warehouses” in Boston’s North End on Nov. 27, 1676. This is the best stuff in the book, not just because it’s largely obscure (an earthquake in New England?) but also because it allows Rozario to get at the issue of national identity when it was still in nascent form.

What’s important about these early disasters, he suggests, is that they fulfilled a Puritan belief in nature as a matter of divine expression from which we might learn to better ourselves. As a result, the Boston churchman Increase Mather (father of the more famous Cotton) interpreted the 1676 fire as “a mild rebuke to inspire the people of New England to acts of moral and spiritual reformation that alone would make them worthy of salvation.” This, in turn, helped establish a cultural context in which disaster would be seen in terms of possibility, an opportunity for improvement in the private and the public sphere.

As America grew increasingly industrial, these improvements became less spiritual than commercial, with catastrophes like the 1835 fire that destroyed 17 blocks in lower Manhattan triggering “business activity and economic growth.” Perhaps the most profound example of this is the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, in which more than 500 blocks and 28,000 buildings were obliterated, leaving much of the city to be rebuilt.

It’s with the 1906 earthquake, however, that Rozario runs into trouble, because of his insistence on defining it as a modernist event. This is the kind of intellectual overlay that gives his book its distance, forcing the facts to fit an argument rather than allowing them to stand for themselves. For Rozario, the earthquake helped institutionalize disaster as a form of entertainment by recasting it as spectacle.

That’s a nice enough idea, but much too narrow to account for the reality on the ground. Yes, the 1906 earthquake was the first modern disaster, but not because mass culture framed it as entertainment; rather, mass culture gave us the tools to see it plain. All those photographs (“once the immediate danger was past, amateur photographers were everywhere, flashing away with their portable Kodak Specials” ) are compelling not because they distance us but because they draw us in. Rozario does touch on that briefly: “The earthquake and fire carried people out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary, opening them to intense, barely recognizable, emotions.” Still, he backs away almost immediately, calling this “a fleeting transcendence” and arguing that many people “were glad simply of the excitement.”

Even when it comes to economics, Rozario paints a limited portrait, suggesting that while “some prospective investors were concerned about future earthquakes, there was general agreement that San Francisco would recover because it was a ‘natural metropolis.’ ” Maybe so, but civic leaders were sufficiently worried to recast the earthquake as the San Francisco fire to make it more palatable to Eastern business interests, a fact Rozario overlooks. And as for spectacle, it’s not the illusion that moves us -- the idea that “stated most boldly and abstractly, ... modernity created a ‘love’ of disasters” -- but the notion that what happened was absolutely real.

Perhaps nowhere is Rozario’s argument more problematic than when it comes to Sept. 11, which “The Culture of Calamity” deconstructs at length. Although he makes cogent points about the rise of the national security state and the role that catastrophe (and terrorism) has played in such a process, his insistence on seeing our reactions as manufactured undermines his case. Indeed, his argument -- that our response to the disaster was mediated by decades of exposure to mass media that left us unsure of the line between reality and illusion -- comes off as another intellectual contrivance, with little connection to what that day was like. Think back: Was there anything other than confusion, an abiding sense that things were unfathomable, that we were in a landscape where we’d never been? As CNN anchor Judy Woodruff later explained, “It looked so simple: aircraft goes into building, destruction, fire, and smoke. But your mind tried to grab hold of what was happening inside, and it was beyond comprehension.”

This is the key -- that disasters on this scale are beyond comprehension, that we watch footage of them over and over because we can’t believe what we have seen. To suggest, as Rozario does, that “[m]any of those who first saw images of the attacks on television -- from television personality Larry King to Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein -- recalled that they were initially uncertain whether they were watching news coverage or a movie trailer” is to buy into a sweeping generalization of how disaster works. Not only does this seem misguided, but since when are King and Hussein a representative sample?

In the end, what “The Culture of Calamity” lacks is a sense of awe, of how (and why) disasters stir us -- not as academic exercises but as events in the world. Anyone who has ever been through one will understand: When the earth moves, or the towers fall, we are drawn outside ourselves by the magnitude of the experience, by the notion that there is no real security, no true safety, that anything can happen at any time. For some, this is exhilarating; for others, terrifying, the kind of existential drama that leads to dread. Either way, that is the condition to which catastrophe leads us, not a disassociation from the real but an intense connection to it, a sense that we have seen the underpinnings of how things are.

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david.ulin@latimes.com