LEFT BEHIND, or And I Alone Am Escaped To Tell Thee

Probably most Americans these days are familiar with the “Left Behind” series of evangelical apocalyptic novels. I worked my way through them (except for the last one, which I no longer have the heart to read) on the recommendation of one of my students. In some ways they are merely a specialized example of the larger genre of apocalyptic fiction, most of which gets filed under “sci-fi” or “speculative fiction” these days. Basic requirements: Civilization As We Know It gets wiped out by one or another dreadful device of nature, warfare, or toxic blowup. Our Hero (who is usually but not always male) survives (sometimes by dumb luck, sometimes by intelligence and courage), builds a community, and hunkers in to rebuild civilization (with varying degrees of success.) The reader is encouraged to identify with Our Hero and thus to believe that s/he too could survive some dread device that kills almost everybody else. In the Left Behind series, of course, the Good Guys survive, spiritually if not always physically, by virtue of having the right beliefs and spiritual commitments.

Speculative fiction writer Martin Gidron sent me an e-mail today, under the heading “Alas Babylon,” in which he points out, “what many of us long suspected about the utter futility of Cold War era evacuation plans in the event of nuclear war turns out to have been absolutely correct. Just look at the chaos and staggering death toll from an event for which there were several days of warning, not 20 minutes!” (Alas Babylon is the title of one of the better examples of apocalyptic fiction, written in the 1950s by Pat Frank; Frank’s hero and his community survive by virtue of living in a backwater too far away from any potential target to be worth bombing. Read it if you can find it. The backwater in question, by the way, is now in one of the fastest-growing sections of the country.)

All of this, of course, is related to the “Hurricane Pam” disaster planning exercise conducted in New Orleans last summer, long before Hurricane Katrina was even a tropical depression. Martin Shlepstein, environmental reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, who attended the exercise, now tells us that the planners worked out a solid plan for evacuating the 80% of the population of the city who could drive their own cars out. That plan, in fact, was put into effect earlier this week, and worked splendidly. But, he also tells us, the planners were well aware that the rest of the population, a number they estimated at 112,000 households, would not be able to evacuate. They made no alternative provision for that group, consisting mostly of those who were too old, too disabled, or too poor to own or drive cars. They did discuss, briefly, using trains and cruise ships to evacuate the carless, and then dropped the subject. They made a half-baked attempt to get the churches to set up a “buddy plan” to encourage their members to offer rides to the carless, but it never really got off the ground.

In fiction, you can disregard an entire universe of possible characters without risking anything worse than a bad review. In real life, the consequences are another thing entirely. The officials of New Orleans seemed astonished that the un-evacuated citizens of their city have now turned to looting and far worse in the absence of food, water, medical care, shelter, sanitation, information, and any evidence that the city, state, and federal authorities give a flogging damn about them. That astonishment, I suspect, reflects something far darker. I think the city authorities did not expect the un-evacuated to survive at all, much less to resort to unauthorized methods of attempting to keep hand and mouth together. I think that’s what happens when people in power confuse plans of collective action with speculative fiction.

Not exactly to cheer anybody up, but to end at least on a more appropriate note, I’d like to close with another piece of quasi-apocalyptic literature with a less elitist and more compassionate tone: the folk song “Mighty Day,” about the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 (the 105th anniversary of which falls on September 8), the greatest natural disaster, by number of deaths, in United States history: 8,000 by accepted figures, perhaps as many as 12,000. The tragedy killed more Americans than any other natural disaster, indeed, more than the legendary Johnstown Flood , the San Francisco Earthquake, the 1938 New England Hurricane and the Chicago Fire combined.

I remember down in Galveston
when the storm winds swept the town
The high tide from the ocean
pushed the water all around.

There was a sea-wall there in Galveston
To keep the waters down,
But the high tide from the ocean, Lord,
Put water in the town.

The trumpets warned the people,
"You'd better leave this place!"
But they never meant to leave their homes
Till death was in their face.

The waters, like some river,
Came a-rushing to and fro;
I saw my father drowning,
God, I watched my mother go!

Now death, your hands are icy;
You've got them on my knee.
You took away my mother,
Now you're coming after me!

The trains they all were loaded
With people leaving town;
The tracks gave way to the ocean, Lord,
And the trains they went on down.

The seas began to rolling,
The ships they could not land;
I heard a Captain crying,
"God, please save a drowning man!"

It was a mighty day, a mighty day
A mighty day, great god, that morn
when the storm winds swept the town.