The PenOpticon

It is strange and peculiar that a large swath of Queens and La Guardia airport in NY has been without electricity for five days. Utility workers are  repairing feeder lines and transformers, but they have not yet found the root cause of the failure. Con Edison officials told the New York Times that damage was “significant and extensive.”

So where has all the power gone? If I didn’t know better, I’d guess that the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man just might know the answer. Ellison’s guy is alive and well and living near Harlem, but in order to survive, the Invisible Man must live underground, must operate beneath the radar of a dominant culture that refuses to include him. He writes:

I have been carrying on a fight with Monopolated Light and Power for some time now. I use their service and pay them nothing at all, and they don’t know it. Oh, they suspect that power is being drained off, but they don’t know where. All they know is that according to the master meter back there in their power station a hell of a lot of free current is disappearing somewhere into the jungle of Harlem… My hole is warm and full of light. Yes full of light. I doubt there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer’s dream night.

In many ways the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and almost everyone in southern Lebanon seem to be invisible these days. How else can one explain the indiscriminate way in which Israel has been pulverizing Beirut? Who would drop bombs on young children if they were not invisible? Of course, Hezbollah and Hamas are living in a dream world if they do not believe in Israel’s right to exist. But, at the same time, the only way Israel can truly disarm these militant factions is by offering Palestinians a full share of life in the region. They could start with an equitable distribution of water and electricity. Since israel bombed a power station serving Gaza City, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have gone with out electricity and without enough water (since electricity is required in order to pump it). As far as water goes, it is interesting that Israel wants to push Hezbollah north of the Litani river. As Marq De Villiers noted in Water:

The Israelis have never really given up thinking of the Litani as rightfully theirs. And since almost half the water used in Israel is already captured, diverted, or pre-empted from its neighbors, why stop there?

Although much of the electricity in Queens, Lebanon and Gaza has gone “missing” of late, it will ultimately be restored with the help of engineers and line workers. But these electrical repairs will only be temporary fixes unless we also repair cultural and economic circuit breakers. Anything less and the global grid will remain broken and increasingly unreliable. The displaced and the invisible will get some of what they need one way or another.