Obscenity: I Know it When I See It
by zunguzungu
Maria Gunnoe is a West Virginia coalfield activist, and this video is one version of her story. It always makes me tear up; I’ve seen it a half dozen times, and I just watched it again, and have the sniffles as a result. Watch it if you have a few minutes. My mother is the founder of the organization that Maria works with — she makes an appearance in the video at about minute 3:20 — and this is the part of the country I grew up in, so I can never tell how much the way it makes me feel comes from my emotional connection to her story. But I think there’s plenty of rage-sadness to go around.
Anyway, I want to tell a slightly different story. Yesterday, Maria went to Washington to testify in front of the House Committee on Natural Resources (the subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources). She delivered these remarks (.pdf), describing the kind of devastation that has accompanied the expansion of mountain-top removal surface mining in southern West Virginia. She accompanied her remarks with this slideshow, including this picture of a creek near her home polluted by surface mining:
One way to understand what those photos mean is to think about how much heavy metal poison is safely buried under mountains, so far below the water table that it never has the chance to get into our bodies. There’s a lot of arsenic in the earth’s crust, but until human beings start digging into on a massive scale, your chance of, say, bathing in it, or drinking it, are pretty slim. In the coalfields, on the other hand, this is often what comes out of the faucet:
Another way to understand what that kind of water pollution means is to remember that well water is the only source of water most coalfield residents have, people who live far from any municipal water supply. In most of these communities, city water juts isn’t an option, and buying containers of drinking water is expensive. As a result, for so many people, this is the water they drink, the water they bathe in, the water they use to live. Human beings require a lot of water, and while you can distill and filter it, this is still the water you’re stuck with, the water that comes out of the ground. When that water gets poisoned, that’s the water you put in your body.
But that’s not the story I wanted to tell either. This is it: Maria was going to show another picture to the House subcommittee yesterday, this photo, which is a photo of a five year old child bathing in that kind of brown, poisonous water. The child is naked, as you normally are when you bathe. I’d invite you to click that link, and think about what, if anything, distresses you about it.
The photo was taken by photojournalist Katie Falkenberg, who gave it this caption:
Erica and Rully Urias must bathe their daughter, Makayla, age 5, in contaminated water that is the color of tea. Their water has been tested and contains high levels of arsenic. The family attributes this water problem primarily to the blasting which they believe has disrupted the water table and cracked the casing in their well, allowing seepage of heavy metals into their water, and also to the runoff from the mountaintop removal sites surrounding their home. The coal company that mines the land around their home has never admitted to causing this problem, but they do supply the family with bottled water for drinking and cooking. Contaminated and colored water in has occurred in other coalfield communities as well where mountaintop mining is practiced.
Now, that photo of Makayla Urias is a photograph of a naked child, a child exactly as naked as nine-year-old Kim Phuc was when, forty years ago, an Associated Press photographer snapped a picture of her, while she was running and crying from American napalm. You’ve probably seen that photo. It’s iconic. The photographer got a Pulitzer prize for taking it.
Yesterday, on the other hand, Maria was told that she would not be allowed to show that photo. It was not appropriate. She had the blessing of the child’s parents, but Republicans on the subcommittee alerted the capitol police (according to Spencer Pederson, a spokesman for GOP panel members), and after the hearing, the capitol police took Maria aside for questioning about “child pornography.”
Now, this is just what it was, and no more. Coalfield activists like Maria face threats, intimidation, and vandalism regularly; she’s received verbal threats to her life, her children have been harassed at school, “wanted” posters of Gunnoe have appeared in local convenience stores, and so forth. This is a strong lady, and I suspect I’m not wrong to say that it’s far from the worst of the shit she’s faced for daring to be strong in a part of the country where Coal is King. It was just the kind of insulting humiliation that it was meant to be. Coal-friendly congresspeople were using the resources at their disposal to harass someone who had the nerve to speak out against the industry they shill for, to try to intimidate someone like Maria who speaks for (and is) one of the people that industry poisons.
But it’s pretty clarifying, don’t you think? The real obscenity is that people drink that water, that they have no choice but to bathe in it, and to bathe their children in it. You know that, and I know that. But if a massive surface mining operation in the vicinity of your house poisons your water table, and if your well water runs brown with coal sludge and heavy metal particulate, well, that’s just the cost of doing business in America, a cost that will be paid by the Appalachians who only live there. It’s regrettable, at best. You can’t call the police and the state doesn’t want to know. And if you dare to take a picture of child’s exposure to that poison, if you have the nerve to walk into the halls of Congress and show them the obscenity that is a child that must wash herself with poison every day, they will call you a child pornographer. They will call the police.
Not to invoke Zuma and “The Spear,” again, but the GOP’s Congresspeople’s reaction to the photo reminds me of ANC’s reaction to Brett Murray’s painting—less shock that Zuma is portrayed as Lenin, pure outrage that his willy is out and about.
Here we get less shock that a kid is covered in arsenic, and outrage that a kid is naked.
Kewli: In a way, it’s really the kid’s fault. What was she doing taking a bath? I mean, really. And where are the parents!?
Do you not bathe? Seems it would be a remiss parent who did not bathe their children.
I swear, every day brings another outrage to our attention. These authoritarians/psychopaths are really moving fast on all fronts. They must be stopped. Unless we rise up in huge numbers in the streets we don’t make an iota of difference, and if we were to do so, come the drones to surveil us (and worse?) and coercive weaponry to deafen or stun us (perhaps lethally) and the cops to abuse and arrest us. Too many of us “know what we know” and are too resentful and uncaring of others to give a damn. The number of people who read web sites like yours and other sites on the Left is relatively small and the media ignore such threats to our privacy, well-being, and freedom.
Matt Stoller has a piece describing a truly Orwellian offshoot of the private prison industry. It is at
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/matt-stoller-profit-driven-surveillance-and-the-spectrum-of-freedom-we-will-offer-electronic-monitoring-services-in-every-state.html
How can we know which of the two authoritarians to vote for. Perhaps Obama is better and I will have to hold my nose to vote again for him, but he is ignoring or is fully agreeable to any authoritarian move against the populace. They both seem to be willing to ignore anything the corporations do, no matter how harmful to our culture and civilization.
Developments in technology are allowing the evil, the wicked, the power hungry, the greedy endless sport for their machinations.
[…] extraordinary and outrageous story behind that photo can be read here: Obscenity: I Know it When I See It: Now, that photo of Makayla Urias is a photograph of a naked child, a child exactly as naked as […]
obscenity is a country that gives abundantly to the wealthy and takes from the sick, the poor, and the elderly. Ugly water is a form of taking. Greed has ruined the United States.
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A strong, heartfelt post, in your usual fine Zunguzungian prose, It is beautifully done. Yet I suggest that your point is weakened when you end it by painting your outrage in partisan colors, because the reality is far more significant than party politics.
I agree, actually; in fact I hadn’t been thinking of this post in partisan terms at all, not least because West Virginia Democrats are in no sense better about coal than the Republicans. It *was* the GOP members of the committee who were behind these particular shenanigans — in fact, the panel was entitled something like “The Effect of Obama’s Job-Killing Regulation on the West Virginian Economy,” according to my mom — but it’s not the (R) next to their names that accounts for that, I think.
I’ve got a link to the hearing and to the article which cites the R. committee member at my post: http://bethwellington.blogspot.com/2012/06/more-coal-porn.html
I can’t know the details, obviously, but Maria should have tried to find a way to show that image anyway. It is so clearly not pornographic, and so clearly political, that it was clearly a bluff. Now, after the fact, we should mail copies of it to those committee members that should have seen it, with a cover letter.
http://naturalresources.house.gov/Subcommittees/Subcommittee/?SubcommitteeID=5062
What?
I am trying to confirm this data. I refuse to post this in my blog unless I get somme hard evfidence. Do you have proof that Spencer Pederson really did make such an announcement?
Thank you.
It’s behind a paywall, but Manuel Quinones of E&E publishing reported that, in an article called “Capitol Police Question activist about photo brought to House hearing.”: http://www.eenews.net/search?keyword=maria+gunnoe&commit=go%21
I’m at a university computer, but my link APPEARS to work and is not behind a paywall. Click on the word “questioned” in the photo caption and let me know if it doesn’t work…
http://bethwellington.blogspot.com/2012/06/more-coal-porn.html
Your post cauptres the issue perfectly!
tQBolo bqwyozyvddrm
I just came across your blog, I think from reddit. I don’t have anything to add, just wanted to voice my sentiments. I, too, grew up in Appalachia, mostly Logan to be exact, but live in the PNW now. It’s so frustrating to even try to have a conversation about coal, the environment, and health with anyone that lives there and depends on coal for their livelihood. “Mountain top removal is fine, they reclaim it with parks and stuff. Oh, those people are crazy thinking this is bad. There’s nothing wrong with our water,” etc., etc. Even though everyone knows the mining companies control everything, they’re still seen as OK. I was out of the region for years before I was able to understand the level of brainwashing that goes on. Thanks for bringing more attention to this subject.
Extremely sad how lobby groups paid by corporate interests can twist things. And because they themselves are not affected, the truth languishes in oblivion. I think you / or someone connected to this should start a facebook group and upload these pictures, and begin gathering support for this. Its awful! The world needs to know about this!
Hi, I saw this week the documentary film about the mountain-top mining in the Appallachean mountains. Only one mountain is left so far but the plans to “use” the coal-depot are already there. My heart aches seeing this horrible destroying of a whole environment. I know many, many people have got there”live-bread” through times, but they worked in a different way to get the coal. Now the company exclude workers by using machines.
I am thinking of the norwegian raindeer shepard said. “We can use scooters and helicopters but we can never be without the dogs. And we live through nature, we can not rule over it.”. May God bless your efforts to change the wrongs into right. A dutch lady in Sweden.
I am saddened by your reply. You seem to read and believe without looking for true facts. Go to Google Earth and look at WV, it is not level. As for the lack of workers needed, that is untrue, yes we have machines now, run by operators. Coal used to be dug by hand, at the cost of lives and many injuries. It is safer, and more economical to use the machines. Thirty years ago you could mine coal for $15/ton, today it costs at least $45.
Hey Zung – I posted the photo and link to the photographer’s and your blog, with a nasty little story of my own it remidend me of (it is all about me!):
http://www.wolfenotes.com/2012/06/they-know-no-shame/
Got a take down request from the photographer.
Your thoughts?
Is it fair use?
Wolfe,
Thanks for the post. As for what you’re asking, I don’t know what the law is, really. Internet publishing is a tricky thing; once it’s up, it’s up, and you can’t really control where it goes, so I’m always surprised when people try to control it (I guess I hang out too much with the “information wants to be free” people). Still, I’d always take down someone else’s photo if asked, if only for good karma; if she doesn’t like other people displaying her work, I wouldn’t want to be the person displaying it.
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Thank you for sharing and bringing this story to light. That photo was definitely obscene, all not, but not because the child was naked.
There are so many untruths here, I don’t know where to start or finish. The photo of the girl, location unknown, is appaling. So we blame the coal industry. Could we at least look at the fact that the well is pulling water from the surface, and not an aquifer 100 feet deep. Any runoff that is on the surface is going into that well, road salt, vehicle residues, and old mine runoff. The bad practices of the industry in the past, have not all been corrected. If you think that all wrongs need to be corrected overnight,, we then all become the United States of the Indian Nations. It is better today, nothings perfect, and mistakes happen. Blasting practises are a science, not some guys blowing crap up. It has been studied and researched to produce safe and better means of blasting. To say that the casing cracked because of blasting is an impossibility, unless close in blasting was done, and it is not allowed by State and federal law.Yes, past practices did harm, but todays methods are producing a product that is needed, and is done more environmentally friendly. If you think mountaintop mining is bad, consider where you live. Was it once a forest, meadow, marshland, do you even contemplate the origin of your own surroundings. How did you get to work or the store, what was that road once, did they raise a neighborhood to create that road. What creates the power to your house? We use every day, a mined product, toothpaste contains flouride, salt for our food, any metal that you use, we could not survive without mining, but some would wish it to go away.When the alternatives are there, we will switch, today we do the best we can.
Professional politicians!
Totally and utterly craven, and removed from the concerns of their electorate.
What would really interesting would be to get those fine Congressmen and women to wash themselves for a day in that water.
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