Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? George Bush, the Jazz Funeral, and the Politics of Memory

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

– James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son²

On September 15, 2005 George W. Bush addressed the nation from New Orleans in an attempt to quell the still rising tide of anger at his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina. The speech, which was notable in part for his recognition of the government’s failures and his unusual acceptance of responsibility for mistakes made, ended with an upbeat vision of a revived Gulf Coast, and a metaphor that drew for inspiration upon local tradition. “In this place,” declared the President, “there’s a custom for the funerals of jazz musicians. The funeral procession parades slowly through the streets, followed by a band playing a mournful dirge as it moves to the cemetery. Once the casket has been laid in place, the band breaks into a joyful ‘second line’ – symbolizing the triumph of the spirit over death. Tonight the Gulf Coast is still coming through the dirge – yet we will live to see the second line.”³ In so doing, Bush offered a model of memory and mourning that, this paper argues, stood in stark contrast to the model of memory and mourning that his administration adopted following the other great crisis of its tenure, the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Turning to the Greeks to identify and elucidate the distinction between the two models, the paper argues that while one seeks to exploit memory and mourning to perpetuate a particular kind of grief-wrath, the other seeks to negate, distance, and defuse such wrath in the interests of a democratic forgetting. The paper seeks first, to demonstrate the ways in which the Bush administration has sought to manage memory and mourning as a deliberate political strategy; and second, to identify potentially negative consequences of the approach.

In book 18 of the Iliad, Hephaestus draws two cities on the shield of Achilles: one in which the inhabitants are engaged in the peacetime activities of marriage and justice, the other in which its citizens confront a war outside their gates. In this, suggests Loraux, the “ideal figure of the polis can be distinguished in outline: warlike outside its gates, civil and peaceful within.”⁴ Indeed, much of Loraux’s work in her book The Divided City is concerned to show how these two visions of the city are simply ideal types, with the truth about the city lying somewhere between. This juxtaposition of binary opposites was, of course, something of a Greek trope: evident as much in its ubiquity in their prose as in Thucydides’ similar juxtaposition of two Athens – that of the funeral oration and that of the plague – in Book 2 of his History of the Peloponnesian War.⁵ Indeed, much of the dialectical potential of Greek texts appears to lie in the attempt to synthesize the perspectives offered by such juxtapositions. In order to establish the typology that will structure the remainder of the analysis I consider the ideal types of the city at war and the city at peace, tracing the connection between these visions and their respective approaches to memory and mourning.

Private grief was heavily regulated in Athens. Most obviously associated with women, there was a distinct fear that it would spill over into the public sphere where it could not be controlled. In Mothers in Mourning Loraux offers a detailed account of the regulation of women’s role in the funeral ceremonies. She notes that the women who laid out and prepared the body were considered contaminated and kept apart even from those women who attended the graveside, and that the women who attended at the graveside left before the men lest the unbridled emotionalism of their laments were permitted to have the last word over the ceremony.⁶ Thus, pénthos oikeîon– the intimate mourning of the household – was subordinated to...