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Thursday
A number of people have noted that the recent train disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, which sent up toxic fumes and forced mass evacuations, resembles the one in Don DeLillo’s 1985 White Noise, the postmodern classic recently made into a Netflix movie. Indeed, although DeLillo doesn’t say in which state the drama occurs, it has a Midwest rust-belt feel to it, which is why the filmmakers set it in northeast Ohio. It so happens that the filming sites were just over an hour’s drive from East Palestine.
At any rate, those who have read the novel may have had a sense of déjà vu upon seeing footage of the Norfolk Southern accident. (I say this because déjà vu is one of the symptoms that arises from exposure to the poisonous gas in White Noise.) Here’s a character describing what he can see of the wreck:
The radio said a tank car derailed. But I don’t think it derailed from what I could see. I think it got rammed and something punched a hole in it. There’s a lot of smoke and I don’t like the looks of it.
DeLillo is masterful at describing the many forms denial takes amongst Blacksmith’s residents, including Jack Gladney, Professor of Hitler Studies at College-on-the-Hill. While the family tries to eat dinner to assure themselves all is well, there’s an underlying tension. Their conversation includes such rationalizations as the following:
“They’re not calling it the feathery plume anymore,” he said, not meeting my eyes, as if to spare himself the pain of my embarrassment.
“I already knew that.”
“Good.”
“Why is that good?”
“It means they’re looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They’re on top of the situation.”
But the authorities are no more on top of the situation than Ohio Governor Mike DeWine was in East Palestine. At one point, DeWine was swallowing the false assurances of the railway company and acting accordingly, only to learn that the situation is far worse.
In the novel, no one knows what or who to believe, which means that rumors fly wildly:
It was said that we would be allowed to go home first thing in the morning; that the government was engaged in a cover-up; that a helicopter had entered the toxic cloud and never reappeared; that the dogs had arrived from New Mexico, parachuting into a meadow in a daring night drop; that the town of Farmington would be uninhabitable for forty years.
Remarks existed in a state of permanent flotation. No one thing was either more or less plausible than any other thing. As people jolted out of reality, we were released from the need to distinguish.
In this environment, people who have long predicted the apocalypse, including a Jehovah’s witness, get their moment of glory. After talking to the man, Gladney reflects on those excited about the end of the world:
I wondered about his eerie self-assurance, his freedom from doubt. Is this the point of Armageddon? No ambiguity, no more doubt. He was ready to run into the next world. He was forcing the next world to seep into my consciousness, stupendous events that seemed matter-of-fact to him, self-evident, reasonable, imminent, true. I did not feel Armageddon in my bones but I worried about all those people who did, who were ready for it, wishing hard, making phone calls and bank withdrawals. If enough people want it to happen, will it happen? How many people are enough people?
White Noise is a postmodern masterpiece in part because DeLillo foresaw how social media would create its own force field. Remember, he’s writing at a time when television, radio, and the National Inquirer still dominated. Although the internet was only in its infancy and iPhones, Twitter, TikTok, and President Donald Trump have not yet happened, he described their effect with uncanny accuracy.
He ends the toxic cloud episode with an interesting question: if media coverage determines the importance of an event, then does absence of coverage render it insignificant? In other words, does social media determine reality? A man tracking the television coverage raises the issue in a rant:
“There’s nothing on network,” he said to us. “Not a word, not a picture. On the Glassboro channel we rate fifty-two words by actual count. No film footage, no live report. Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore? Don’t those people know what we’ve been through? We were scared to death. We still are. We left our homes, we drove through blizzards, we saw the cloud. It was a deadly specter, right there above us. Is it possible nobody gives substantial coverage to such a thing? Half a minute, twenty seconds? Are they telling us it was insignificant, it was piddling? Are they so callous? Are they so bored by spills and contaminations and wastes? Do they think this is just television? ‘There’s too much television already—why show more?’ Don’t they know it’s real? Shouldn’t the streets be crawling with cameramen and soundmen and reporters? Shouldn’t we be yelling out the window at the reporteers, ‘Leave us alone, we’ve been through enough, get out of here with your vile instruments of intrusion.’ Do they have to have two hundred dead, rare disaster footage, before they come flocking to a given site in their helicopters and network limos? What exactly has to happen before they stick microphones in our faces and hound us to the doorsteps of our homes, camping out on our lawns, creating the usual media circus? Haven’t we earned the right to despise their idiot questions. Look at us in this place. We are quarantined. We are like lepers in medieval times. They won’t let us out of here. They leave food at the foot of the stairs and tiptoe away to safety. This is the most terrifying time of our lives. Everything we love and have worked for is under serious thread. But we look around and see no response from the official organs of the media. The airborne toxic event is a horrifying thing. Our fear is enormous. Even if there hasn’t been great loss of life, don’t we deserve some attention for our suffering, our human worry, our terror? Isn’t fear news?”
Now, it so happens that the rightwing media is trying to gin up fear about East Palestine, but it’s got nothing to do with understaffed railways, gutted regulations, greedy corporations, and corporate bribes to the GOP. Instead, it’s claiming that the Biden administration doesn’t care when poisonous gasses kill white people (Trump was a 70-30 winner in this part of Ohio). If Fox News can make reality, then this will be how some come to regard the train disaster.
Seeing American reality clearly, DeLillo would not be surprised by the crazed conspiracy theories and Obama birtherism and election denialism that have seized parts of America since 1985. And because denial of reality is an integral part of the authoritarian playbook, it makes sense that the protagonist of White Noise would be a Professor of Hitler Studies.