ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin is rightly regarded as the twentieth century's greatest prophet of catastrophe, even if his famous "Angel of History" was compelled to look backward into the past rather than forward to the future. Historian Ted Steinberg points to the important juxtaposition between poor planning and poor luck. The latter is used to excuse the former. Tornadoes being especially drawn to trailer parks are the refashioned fallacy of the adage that insisted that rain follows the plough. Poverty and vulnerability to disasters are frequent companions. This is a fact of history: marginalized groups pushed to the margins. Karl Marx and his Marxism have inspired generations of historians to recount histories, wherein market forces and capitalist power structures have foisted upon society a declensionist narrative in which successes have come upon the broken backs of the proletariat or the subaltern or the forsook.
