Hurricane Hysterics

Hurricane Hysterics

— Michael Novak

My first recoverable memory is of sitting on the back porch under candlelight in the spring of 1936, the evening after the flood of that year, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. This was not the first Johnstown flood (there were six or so before 1889), nor the last (1977), nor the biggest (1889), but my father had been downtown at work when it hit, and he was missing. I remember the feeling of worry among the adults on the porch. I was not yet three years old.

In 1889, when downtown Johnstown was a city of 12,000 people, a wall of water 30-feet high hurtled down the Conemaugh valley with a horrible roar and smashed the entire flatlands on which the city stood, between two rivers, hemmed in closely by steep, towering hills. At a narrow neck between two huge hills where the two rivers converged, a strong stone bridge held, and formed a dam against which huge mounds of broken houses piled up, and after a few hours burst into flame. Many-ton railroad cars, trees, and other unbelievable flotsam were borne along on the raging waters and kept slamming into the burning heap. Between water and fire there followed a night of terror. The tower of St. John Gualbert Parish Church burst aflame against the night sky.

When at last the waters subsided a week or so later, some 2,280 dead bodies had been counted, 777 of them never to be identified. These Unknown Victims now lie under diagonal rows of markers, up on the dominating hilltop on which Memorial Cemetery silently thrusts its tombstones to the sky. The departed of many of Johnstown's families lie buried there, and so these graves are visited often.

For this reason, never far from my consciousness has been the power of nature's fury to take away an entire city's life in an instant. (The flood of 1889 may have had some human causes, in neglect of the huge earthen dam at South Fork; but earlier and later floods did not.) You learn about the fragility of life just from growing up in Johnstown.

That may be why I have been thinking, during the hysterical media tirades since the hurricane struck New Orleans at the end of August, that the media may be exaggerating almost everything. They certainly did in Johnstown in 1889. Many rumors then reported as fact that "Hungarians" (read immigrants) were cutting fingers bearing wedding bands from the dead; which, like other things, turned out to have been fevered imaginings (perhaps partly malicious).

My main reason for suspicion is that most of our television reporters may possibly be too highly educated, hothouse protected, delicate, and inexperienced in the horrors of our world, to maintain a hardened eye on dreadful events. They are too easily shocked, too easily blown away. Maybe it is only a matter of appearances, but they seem to me not to have been permanently toughened by such horrors as World War II and so many other hellholes of our lifetime. One feels they actually believe that this world is a benign and kindly place, arranged with lawns behind neatly clipped hedges, and seem surprised that a Hobbesian world waits explosively, just below its skin — here in America, just as in any other place human beings live.

New Orleans seemed to threaten the illusions of some. To ward that off, they sought out somebody they didn't like, to blame — making the horror manageable, projecting it away.

http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak200509140828.asp