In Everything is Broken, Nargis, and principally the government’s response to the crisis, is taken as a lens through which the reader is invited to view a broader expanse of recent Burmese history.
In the politically charged post-Nargis atmosphere, Larkin observes, “Images of people killed by natural disaster became atrocity pictures used as evidence to portray the callous neglect of an already vilified regime.” As such, advocacy in support of humanitarian intervention for the sake of helping people was often quickly dispensed with in favor of a politically laden human rights discourse. The author ruminates of working pacts made between international NGOs and the military government, “It seemed to me that righteous moral indignation had been traded in for a shoddy compromise with the regime.” Tellingly, she later finds aid workers in the delta uninterested in discussing perceived moral ramifications associated with their work.
A theme running throughout the course of the narrative concerns Burma’s rampant rumor mill, an industry greatly abetted by the lack of reliable information available to its citizens. “What becomes important,” she writes, “is not whether they (the rumors) are true but whether people believe them to be true.” An apt observation, though largely leaving it up to the reader (who more often than not will have little else to go on other than the author’s words) to discern just how much weight to assign to the myriad of rumors and superstitions. Was Rangoon really on the verge of running out of water in the wake of the cyclone? Did the regime really deploy snipers to pick off demonstration leaders in September 2007 ?