Book blogs' buzz grows louder
By Randy Dotinga
Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

Just a year ago, screenwriter and aspiring novelist Mark Sarvas had a lot of explaining to do. When he talked up his fledgling book blog at a publishing conference, marketers had just one question for him: Huh?

But this year, Mr. Sarvas returned to the same conference and found that publicists weren't mystified by blogs anymore. Instead, they wanted to know what they could do for him. "We are not the strange, unfamiliar beast we may have been before," says Sarvas, creator of a blog called The Elegant Variation.

Although no one's exactly sure how influential they are, bloggers like Sarvas have become the new darlings of the publishing industry. They're getting free review copies, landing interviews with prestigious authors, and trying to boost obscure writers - especially writers in the literary fiction world where John Irving is a bigger name than John Grisham.

Still, plenty of sophisticated readers don't know a blog from a podcast. "For people who aren't Internet-savvy, [a blog] sounds like something they'll never understand," sighs Robert Gray, a Vermont bookseller and the creator of a blog called Fresh Eyes.

Blogs (short for "web logs") are online journals that can be updated as often as the blogger likes. What you'll find on a book blog runs the gamut from novel reviews and personal essays to musings and links to news stories. Website visitors typically get to add their own comments, too, creating an ongoing conversation.

If this sounds dry to you, the fact is that book blogs can be vibrant and sharply opinionated, full of odes to favorite authors and jibes at everything from "cheesy" bestsellers to the shrinking book review sections of major newspapers.

Book blogs aren't without their quirks, however. Like readers and reviewers, they can be snobbish or parochial. And they're hardly egalitarian: Most are run by one person with dictatorial powers over what gets reviewed and by whom.

Add to this mix the Internet's inescapable cranks, who might respond to an innocent post about the blueness of the sky with a rant about the stupidity of anybody who doesn't know it's azure.

In the world of book blogs, the anonymity of such "postings" allows for vitriol that can "be somewhat hurtful to an author," says Reagan Arthur, a senior editor at Little, Brown.

"There are a few crazies," admits Jessa Crispin, the Chicago-based creator of a high-profile blog with a risqué name ("book" plus a vulgar term for a woman of loose morals). "I have gotten the odd marriage proposal - four or five," she adds.

On the whole, though, Ms. Crispin said her blog's patrons are a likeable, if geeky, bunch of bookworms. Like her, they're attracted by serious conversations about books. She started the site on a whim while holding down a boring job and spending late nights debating literature with her sister and a friend.

Crispin's blog sells advertising and pays writers for feature stories but not reviews; for those, contributors get free books. In return, reviewers get a chance to spotlight their heroes. "We do make an effort to cover and interview the less-well-known authors," Crispin says. "I really wanted to let the writers write about who they love and interview the authors they love."

As a result, professional book reviewers are losing a bit of their dominance over publishing "buzz." The blogs "democratize and level the playing field," says Peter Handel, an independent book publicist in Berkeley, Calif.

In years past, literary discussions were largely limited to academia and the occasional book club, says Sarvas of The Elegant Variation. "What the blogs have really done is encourage inclusion, encourage people from all walks of life to join the conversation...."

But is anyone listening? Many book bloggers seem to be talking only to themselves, judging by the dearth of postings by outsiders on their sites. And it's hard to tell if bloggers' mash notes translate into sales at Barnes & Noble.

Even when Sarvas and 20 other bloggers combined forces and chose a single novel to promote during the spring ("Case Histories," by British author Kate Atkinson), their impact was unclear. The book's sales remained steady for months after its release last year, said Ms. Arthur, its editor, but it's anyone's guess as to why.

A sample of bookish blogs

Looking for book reviews, publishing gossip, and impassioned debate? Here's a sampling of book blogs. Note: Some of these blogs tackle adult topics.

Beatrice

www.beatrice.com.

Daily literary news and musings by Ron Hogan, a writer and frequent reviewer. Daily literary news and musings by Ron Hogan, a writer and frequent reviewer.

Booksquare

www.booksquare.com.

Stresses "news and views of authors."

Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

www.sarahweinman.com.

Sarah Weinman is the crime fiction editor for The Baltimore Sun.

The Elegant Variation

www.marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar

Writer Mark Sarvas lives in Los Angeles.

Fresh Eyes

www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/shire15.

Robert Gray is a bookseller in Vermont.

Galleycat

www.mediabistro.com/galleycat.

Natalie Chicha blogs on books and publishing.

Litblog co-op

www.lbc.typepad.com/blog.

Aims to unite literary weblogs to promote the 'best' of contemporary fiction.

From The New York Times:
September 8, 2005

Seeking Justice, of Gods or the Politicians
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

In the history of humankind, there has rarely been a disaster like the New Orleans flood without a theodicy to go along with it. The word "theodicy," coined in the 18th century by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, derives from Greek roots invoking the "justice of the gods." A theodicy is an attempt to show that such justice exists, to prove that we really do live in what Leibniz insisted was the "best of all possible worlds."

So theodicies have been plentiful after earthquakes, floods and droughts. Explanations are readily offered: disasters are the wages of sin, they herald an apocalyptic age, they cleanse the earth of evil. Theodicies aim to demonstrate that devastation does not really disrupt or overturn our understanding of the moral and social order. Instead, disorder provides evidence of order. The theodicy is that order. It explains forces that seem to lie beyond human powers, evils that lie beyond human cause.

Theodicies are not casual matters, and in the weeks after Katrina, they are bound to evolve, even in secular culture, even when they may not resemble the ones that Leibniz had in mind. So they need to be better understood.

The classic theodicies in the West are biblical. The flood of Noah's time, for example, is a reflection of the divine will, cleansing the earth of humanity's evil. A more powerful theodicy later evolved out of the trials of the ancient Israelites, in which destruction and exile were treated not as random accidents of history, but as forms of retribution for violating the Mosaic law and its ethical consequences. Suffering could become proof of divine attention and not its opposite.

Scholars like Norman Cohn have shown how in medieval Europe the worst human trauma could be interpreted as proof of imminent apocalypse and redemption, inspiring millennial expectations and movements. Meanwhile, the theodicy of divine retribution still thrives today and was invoked by some fundamentalist believers after Katrina.

But between medieval Europe and contemporary America something profound changed in the way natural disasters are interpreted and the kinds of theodicies they inspire. And one of the turning points, as many scholars have argued, was the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon. It destroyed perhaps a third of the city's population, with deaths in the tens of thousands. It overturned the confidence of European royalty and seemed to drive a wedge between the earthly and divine realms.

For the growing forces of the Enlightenment, it also seemed to overturn the very idea that a theodicy could account for the disaster. Voltaire, who had once seen nature as benevolent, was whipped into a rationalist fury by the experience. Leibniz, he believed, had been refuted by nature. Voltaire wrote a "Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon" in which the quake's victims are called "Tormented atoms on a heap of muck/ That death devours and that fate trips up." His character Candide watches the earthquake from a distance, seeing it as morally blind, killing the good and preserving the wicked.

In a sense, the earthquake actually ended up strengthening the hand of the Enlightenment, as if a replacement theodicy had fallen into place. Kant wrote about the quake. Scientific investigation took place. The response of Portugal's prime minister to the disaster was practical, not religious. "We will bury the dead," he said, "and take care of the living."

Recently, the philosopher Susan Neiman argued in "Evil in Modern Thought" that the Lisbon earthquake also destroyed an ancient idea that nature could itself be evil. After Lisbon, she argued, moral evil was distinguished from natural disaster. Earthquakes and floods could no longer be fitted into traditional religious theodicies.

But this did not mean, of course, that theodicies faded away. Ms. Neiman argued that for philosophers theology had been replaced by history. The fates of peoples and nations reflected other forces, and disruptions were given other forms of explanation. Hegel saw history as an evolutionary series of transformations in which destruction was as inevitable as birth. Marx believed other kinds of economic and human laws accounted for destruction and evolution. This mostly left natural disasters for the growing realm of science: if they couldn't be prevented, at least their origins could be understood.

Now though, with the prospect of thousands of dead becoming plausible with reports from New Orleans, other forms of theodicy also taking shape. Much debate is taking place about the scale of human tragedy, about procedures and planning and responsibility. And none of that should be ignored. But it is remarkable how this natural disaster has almost imperceptibly come to seem the result of human agency, as if failures in planning were almost evidence of cause, as if forces of nature were subject to human oversight. The hurricane has been humanized.

I don't want to push this too far, of course; human actions, as the Portuguese prime minister knew, are crucial. But this is still an important change in our views of the natural world. In a way, it inflates human knowledge. It confidently extends scientific and political power into the realm of nature. It doesn't really explain catastrophe, but it attempts to explain why we are forced to experience it: because of human failings.

There is a theodicy at work here, in the ways in which the reaction to natural catastrophe so readily becomes political. Nature becomes something to be managed or mismanaged; it lies within the political order, not outside it. Theodicy, if successful, does not overturn belief but confirms it. So, for some commentators, the flood and its aftermath provided confirmation of their previous doubts about the Bush adminstration.

Actually, in some respects, this theodicy has gone even beyond the political: just as a religious theodicy might have shown natural catastrophe to be the result of human misdeed, many of the early commentators about the flood did the same, creating a kind of scientific/moral theodicy in which human sin is still a dominant factor. Last week, for example, Germany's minister of the environment, Jürgen Trittin, said: "The American president has closed his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes such as Katrina - in other words, disasters caused by a lack of climate protection measures - can visit on his country."

All of these explanations are subject to examination and debate of course, but in the heart of a secular age, they are also something else. They are theodicies. And in the face of nature's awesome and horrific powers, the prospect of political retribution is as prevalent as the promise of divine retribution once was.

From The New York Sun:

September 10 , 2005
From Katrina To Sept.11
By John Avlon

The devastation of the city of New Orleans hangs inescapably over the fourth anniversary of September 11.

The suddenness of the destruction, the shattering of old assumptions, the assimilation of previously unimaginable loss, all evoke unwelcome old emotions at a time when summer turns to fall. But the damage visited upon the two cities is fundamentally different.

I am always angry when people refer the “tragic events” of September 11. My dictionary defines "tragedy" as a time when a subject "is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances."

September 11 was an act of war; there was no tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope evident in the root of the attack or in our response. In fact, just the opposite: The latent greatness of our city and nation was brought to the surface in response to the man-made disaster.

In contrast, the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster, un-plotted and largely unavoidable. What was tragically avoidable, however, is the estimated 10,000 deaths that occurred after the levees broke, and the subsequent breakdown of civil society. In a time of heightened awareness of homeland security, the horror that has engulfed the city of New Orleans forces us to confront the lessons learned and lessons lost in the aftermath of September 11.

Out of the ashes of the World Trade Center, there were small redemptions that helped us find the strength to go on. There was the example of the rescuers' selfless courage. There was also the example of our city itself - once so easily divided, we became fundamentally more unified in the face of a common crisis.

These hopeful reactions to September 11 have been heartbreakingly absent in aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Looting was virtually nonexistent on September 11; it has been rampant in New Orleans. Far from being appreciated, police officers and rescue workers are being shot at by roving gangs and sniper fire. One precinct has taken to calling itself "Fort Apache." Under siege and understaffed, the police were unable to control the literally fluid perimeter of the destruction. The supposedly safe zone of the Superdome was transformed into Thunderdome, with rampant shootings and rapes - even, police Chief Eddie Compass told Oprah Winfrey, the rapes of babies. The despondent chief public information officer of the city police committed suicide in his automobile one week after the hurricane, as the death toll steadily grew from the initial day's estimate of 65.

In the aftermath of September 11, there was - however briefly - political unity. Democrats and Republicans stood on the steps of Capitol Hill and spontaneously sang "God Bless America." Now the partisan political attacks have been immediate. The city, state, and federal governments appear to be feuding on the ground and in the highest corridors of power, as the mayor criticizes the governor and the governor criticizes the president.

Even the causes of the storm have been anthropomorphized and demonized: Robert Kennedy Jr. blamed the storm on Mississippi's governor, Haley Barbour, and the administration's abandonment of the Kyoto Treaty; a Kuwaiti government official quickly forgot that we had saved his country from invasion and mused upon how "The Terrorist Katrina is One of the Soldiers of Allah"; here in America, members of the religious right represented by organizations such as RepentAmerica.com and Columbia Christians for Life attributed the storm to acts of God designed to destroy a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah where abortions are held and decadence celebrated.

This is as absurd as personally blaming the president for the storm; but despite administration talking points decrying "the blame game," there needs to be accountability for the unnecessary level of suffering and destruction that has occurred. The president was certainly mistaken when he said to Diane Sawyer, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." In 2002, the Times-Picayune published a five-part series warning of the devastation that could be caused by a major hurricane, while an eerily prescient National Geographic article from October 2004 anticipated a storm scenario where some 200,000 poor residents failed to be evacuated, and 80% of the city was flooded "in a murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste ... the worst national disaster in the history of the United States."

In other words, the breaking of the levees was both predictable and preventable. No adequate contingency plans were in place at a local, state, or federal level. There was consequently "inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances."

Terrorists are the most clear and present danger facing the nation, but a holistic definition of homeland defense attempts to protect us from both natural and man-made disasters. There is now the sense that in the allocation of homeland defense resources, we may have been committing the classic sin of generals always preparing to fight the last war. Since September 11, we have spent less than $550 million to safeguard bus, subway, ferry, and rail service, compared to more than $22 billion on airline security. Likewise, our ports are not adequately protected from the full range of threats they face. In any case, funding for terrorist attack contingencies and natural disaster response should be largely complimentary - focusing on prevention, mitigation and the safe evacuation of citizens.

This September 11, as we confront this still unfolding national tragedy, say a prayer not only for the brave individuals we lost four years ago, but also for the more than 10,000 who may be lost in New Orleans today. Say a prayer for the continued strength and resilience of our city of New York, and say a prayer that these same blessings may in time be absorbed by a resurgent city of New Orleans. Our country has suffered a great deal in this difficult decade, but if we are willing to learn from heartbreak, we can emerge better prepared and fundamentally more unified.

Echo & The Bunnymen Emerge From 'Siberia'
By Steve Adams, London

Some 26 years into their career, legendary U.K. rock act Echo & the Bunnymen are still going strong on their new album, "Siberia" (Cooking Vinyl). Since its Sept. 5 U.K. release, the set has been rolling out globally through regional distributors. It will arrive Sept. 20 in the United States on Cooking Vinyl USA.

Lead singer Ian McCulloch believes longtime fans are likely to be especially pleased with the 11-track album, which is highlighted by the jangling, nostalgic opener "Stormy Weather," the self-searching, strident "Parthenon Drive" and the classic Bunnymen rocker "Sideways Eight."

The video for "Stormy Weather" can be viewed on the band's official Web site.

"The band we've got around us now are the closest to the old Bunnymen we've ever had," he tells Billboard. "Not that we've intentionally set out to capture the past in any way. We've tried to be a little less structured in the songwriting, but not forgetting the importance of a good song. We've got the balance here, I think."

The recruitment of producer Hugh Jones is also a nod to the band's past -- he last worked with the act on 1981's sophomore set, "Heaven Up Here." "Having Hugh on board has been great -- it's as if he's a sort of glue fitting everything together," says guitarist Will Sergeant. "We haven't had that luxury for a while, because we've produced ourselves the last few times."

McCulloch and company kick off a 15-date U.K. and European tour Oct. 22 in Nottingham, England, followed by 16 North American dates beginning Nov. 18 in Washington, D.C. The label says live work will continue through summer 2006.

'They Are All So Wrong'
Four years after 9/11, Washington keeps courting strategic error.
BY MARK HELPRIN

Friday, September 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

September 11 was not so much a discrete event as part of a continuum. It was the result of broad strategic failures that, preceding it by decades, continue to this day and are likely to continue on. It is as if the country has lost, as exemplified by the Left now out of power, a great deal of the will to self-preservation, and, as exemplified by the Right now in charge, not a little of its capacity for self-defense. Our politics and policies have somehow been parceled out to opportunists like Michael Moore--purveyor of conspiracy theories and hatreds, whose presentation, unclean in every respect, is honored nonetheless by the controlling rump of Democrats--and to Bushmen like "Kip" Hawley of Homeland Security, father of the proposal to allow carry-on ice-picks, bows and arrows, and knives with blades up to five-inches long.


For more than 20 years prior to September 11, Islamic terrorists imprisoned and murdered our diplomats and military personnel, destroyed our civil aviation, machine-gunned our civilians, razed our embassies, attacked an American warship and, in 1993, the U.S. itself. For varying reasons, none legitimate, we hesitated to mount an offensive against the terrorists' infrastructure, hunt them down, eliminate a single rogue regime that supported them, or properly disconcert our fatted allies whose robes they infested. This was comparable in its way to Munich. Only in 2001, when it became obvious to any rational being that we must, did we retaliate, but even then in the face of domestic pressure to judicialize the response, which was exactly what we had done all along.

The underlying corollary to this reflex of appeasement is the notion that our military options are constrained financially, as if we are not a nation of stupendous wealth and it has not been the American tradition since the Civil War to spend, in support of war, with the intensity of war itself. In 1945, we devoted 38.5% of GNP to defense, the equivalent of $4.76 trillion now. The current $400 billion defense budget is a twelfth of that and only 3.2% of GDP, as opposed to the average of 5.7% of GNP in the peacetime years between 1940 and 2000. A false sense of constraint has arisen in every quarter of society. It is the ethos of the administration, the press, the civilian side of the Pentagon, and many of the prominent uniformed military brought to high rank in recent years.

They are all so wrong. In violating established tradition and throwing aside advantage and elemental common sense, they waste American lives. And for what? What moral construction would allow anyone to spend more than 2,000 dead and tens of thousands of wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan--so far--while insisting without major exception that cutting costs is a virtue? When is holding back from one's troops at war the reinforcements, armor and basic equipment they need a virtue rather than a sin?

Is it not the duty of the secretary of defense, his chiefs, and the wide array of generals to press energetically--even to the point of resignation--for whatever is necessary (not the minimum, but a safe surplus) to support the armies in the field? If they do not, who will? Had the president gone to Congress on September 12 and asked for almost anything, he would have been granted it. But he never did. This was a fundamental strategic error. If you must go to war, do not do so hesitantly, with half a heart. And in answer to the rationale that the casualties of this war are relatively light, one does not decently measure casualties against those of previous wars, but in terms of whether they can be avoided.

Apart from the paucity of armored vehicles, body armor, and other staples of battle, the chief problem of prosecuting the Iraq war has been the size and scale of the force. Despite inaccurate claims of unprecedented speed in the advance to Baghdad, the three weeks of halting action it took to get there, with lines of supply that are to this day poorly protected, were both spur and instruction for the insurgency. In what is only apparently a paradox, the military objective should have been less the conquest of territory and echelons than of morale, and, to accomplish this, territory and echelons would have to have been subdued with the blinding speed, shock and awe of the Six-Day and Gulf wars. The instant the Arab world realized that the promised shock and awe had not materialized, the insurgency was born.

We then nurtured it by deploying a fraction of the ratio (10:1) long experience indicates is necessary for suppression; by dismissing the enemy as mere "thugs," when, although they are thugs and worse, they have the thousand-year motivation of their civilization defending its heartland from Persians, Mongols, Shiites, and now Christians; and by gratuitously elevating our aims from the purely defensive to the transcendental, while steadily diluting the little power we have in the hope of forcing the entire Arab and Muslim worlds to a new politics. From a country where they have been held down in their beleaguered enclaves for two-and-a-half years, how are 140,000 soldiers to transform the highly aggressive and deeply rooted political cultures of 1.2 billion people?


Ceaselessly, we court strategic error. At the end of the Cold War, assuming that history had concluded, we discarded too much military power. This continues through the present, rationalized by reference to transformation. But it is yet further error to believe that military-technical evolution can make up for the kind of deficiencies and poor strategic judgments from which no machine can save an army. Continual and remarkable innovation is both indispensable and expensive, but President Clinton required budgetary choice between innovation and everything else, and his successor has yet to disagree. The root of the error that offers transformation as a substitute for so much that is crucial is the conviction that having both would exceed reasonable military expenditures and somehow break the common weal.
Having made many wrong choices, we find ourselves at yet another strategic crossroads, where invisibly to the general public we are about to choose wrongly again. We are reshaping the military into a gendarmerie, configured for small wars, counterinsurgency, peacekeeping and nation-building, all at the expense of the type of force that could deter or defeat a rising China. Although we need a gendarmerie, we cannot do without heavy formations and the many additional ships required for a navy--now less than half the size of the Reagan fleet and shrinking--to exploit our natural advantage in the Pacific.

The U.S. will chase every terrorist mouse (which is good, unless it means also neglecting the core competencies of the armed forces), while lessening and dispersing its power, and moving from previous centers of gravity (Europe, the Western Pacific) to Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. This will create a long and open alley through which China will run. Among other things, by placing markers in every trouble spot, we will probably be tied down and distracted, taxingly and often, to our enemies' delight.

When China completes its run up the broad alley we have afforded it, it will much sooner be the other pole in a once-again bipolar world, which will create the opportunity for terrorists in the guise of liberation movements to gather under its wing, as they did with the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. Ironically, in reconfiguring the military to focus primarily on terrorism, we may not only give China a great opening, but create for the terrorists a new lease on life.

The war in Iraq has been poorly planned and executed from the beginning, and now, like a hurricane over warm water, the insurgency is in a position to take immense energy from the fundamental divisions in that nation. The rise of Chinese military power, although lately noted, has met with no response. America's borders are open, its cities vulnerable, its civil defense nonexistent, its armies stretched thin. We have taken only deeply inadequate steps to prepare for and forestall a viral pandemic that by the testimony of experts is a high probability and could kill scores of millions in this country alone. That we do not see relatively simple and necessary courses of action, and are not led and inspired to them, represents a catastrophic failure of leadership that bridges party lines.

Perhaps this and previous administrations have had an effective policy just too difficult to comprehend because they have ingeniously sheltered it under the pretense of their incompetence. But failing that, the legacy of this generation's presidents will be promiscuous declarations and alliances, badly defined war aims, opportunities inexplicably forgone, ill-supported troops sent into the field, a country at risk without adequate civil protections, and a military shaped to fight neither the last war nor this one nor the next.

Mr. Helprin, a Wall Street Journal contributing editor, is Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and Distinguished Visiting Fellow of Hillsdale College. He is the author, most recently, of "Freddy and Fredericka" (Penguin, 2005).

Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.

From Slate:

Don't Refloat
The case against rebuilding the sunken city of New Orleans.
By Jack Shafer

Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 12:19 PM PT

What's to rebuild?

Nobody can deny New Orleans' cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding levees that may not hold back the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let's investigate what sort of place Katrina destroyed.

The city's romance is not the reality for most who live there. It's a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it's a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. When you overlap this New York Times map, which illustrates how the hurricane's floodwaters inundated 80 percent of the city, with this demographic map from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which shows where the black population lives, and this one that shows where the poverty cases live, it's transparent whom Katrina hit the hardest.

New Orleans' public schools, which are 93 percent black, have failed their citizens. The state of Louisiana rates 47 percent of New Orleans schools as "Academically Unacceptable" and another 26 percent are under "Academic Warning." About 25 percent of adults have no high-school diploma.

The police inspire so little trust that witnesses often refuse to testify in court. University researchers enlisted the police in an experiment last year, having them fire 700 blank gun rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood one afternoon. Nobody picked up the phone to report the shootings. Little wonder the city's homicide rate stands at 10 times the national average.

This city counts 188,000 occupied dwellings, with about half occupied by renters and half by owners. The housing stock is much older than the national average, with 43 percent built in 1949 or earlier (compared with 22 percent for the United States) and only 11 percent of them built since 1980 (compared with 35 for the United States). As we've observed, many of the flooded homes are modest to Spartan to ramshackle and will have to be demolished if toxic mold or fire don't take them first.

New Orleans puts the "D" into dysfunctional. Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this concentration of poverty, crime, and deplorable schools. Yet that's what New Orleans' cheerleaders—both natives and beignet-eating tourists—are advocating. They predict that once they drain the water and scrub the city clean, they'll restore New Orleans to its former "glory."

Only one politician, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, dared question the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans as it was, where it was. On Wednesday, Aug. 31, while meeting with the editorial board of the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill., he cited the geographical insanity of rebuilding New Orleans. "That doesn't make sense to me. … And it's a question that certainly we should ask."

"It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," Hastert added.

For his candor and wisdom, Hastert was shouted down. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., and others interpreted his remarks as evidence of the Republican appetite for destruction when it comes to disaster victims. But if you read the entire interview—reproduced here courtesy of the Daily Herald—you might conclude that Hastert was speaking heresy, but he wasn't saying anything ugly or even Swiftian. Klaus Jacob seconded Hastert yesterday (Sept. 6) in a Washington Post op-ed. A geophysicist by training, he noted that Katrina wasn't even a worst-case scenario. Had the storm passed a little west of New Orleans rather than a little east, the "city would have flooded faster, and the loss of life would have been greater."

Nobody disputes the geographical and oceanographic odds against New Orleans: that the Gulf of Mexico is a perfect breeding ground for hurricanes; that re-engineering the Mississippi River to control flooding has made New Orleans more vulnerable by denying it the deposits of sediment it needs to keep its head above water; that the aggressive extraction of oil and gas from the area has undermined the stability of its land.

"New Orleans naturally wants to be a lake," St. Louis University professor of earth and atmospheric sciences Timothy Kusky told Time this week. "A city should never have been built there in the first place," he said to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Why was it? Settlers built the original city on a curve of high flood land that the Mississippi River had deposited over eons, hence the nickname "Crescent City." But starting in the late 1800s and continuing into the early 20th century, developers began clearing and draining swamps behind the crescent, even dumping landfill into Lake Pontchartrain to extend the city.

To chart the aggressive reclamation, compare this map from 1798 with this one from 1908. Many of New Orleans' lower-lying neighborhoods, such as Navarre, the Lower Ninth Ward, Lake Terrace, and Pontchartrain Park, were rescued from the low-lying muck. The Lower Ninth Ward, clobbered by Katrina, started out as a cypress swamp, and by 1950 it was only half developed, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Even such "high" land as City Park suffered from flooding before the engineers intervened. By the historical standards of the 400-year-old city, many of the heavily flooded neighborhoods are fresh off the boat.

The call to rebuild New Orleans' levee system may be mooted if its evacuated residents decide not to return. The federal government, which runs the flood-insurance business, sold only 85,000 residential and commercial policies—this in a city of 188,000 occupied dwellings. Coverage is limited to $250,000 for building property and $100,000 for personal property. Because the insured can use the money elsewhere, there is no guarantee they'll choose to rebuild in New Orleans, which will remain extra-vulnerable until the levees are rebuilt.

Few uninsured landlords and poor home owners have the wherewithal to rebuild—or the desire. And how many of the city's well-off and wealthy workers—the folks who provide the city's tax base—will return? Will the doctors, lawyers, accountants, and professors have jobs to return to? According to the Wall Street Journal, many businesses are expected to relocate completely. Unless the federal government adopts New Orleans as its ward and pays all its bills for the next 20 years—an unlikely to absurd proposition—the place won't be rebuilt.

Barbara Bush will be denounced as being insensitive and condescending for saying yesterday that many of the evacuees she met in the Astrodome would prefer to stay in Texas. But she probably got it right. The destruction wrought by Katrina may turn out to be "creative destruction," to crib from Joseph Schumpeter, for many of New Orleans' displaced and dispossessed. Unless the government works mightily to reverse migration, a positive side-effect of the uprooting of thousands of lives will to be to deconcentrate one of the worst pockets of ghetto poverty in the United States.

Page One of today's New York Times illustrates better than I can how the economic calculations of individuals battered by Katrina may contribute to the city's ultimate doom:

In her 19 years, all spent living in downtown New Orleans, Chavon Allen had never ventured farther than her bus fare would allow, and that was one trip last year to Baton Rouge. But now that she has seen Houston, she is planning to stay.

"This is a whole new beginning, a whole new start. I mean, why pass up a good opportunity, to go back to something that you know has problems?" asked Ms. Allen, who had been earning $5.15 an hour serving chicken in a Popeyes restaurant.

New Orleans won't disappear overnight, of course. The French Quarter, the Garden District, West Riverside, Black Pearl, and other elevated parts of the city will survive until the ultimate storm takes them out—and maybe even thrive as tourist destinations and places to live the good life. But it would be a mistake to raise the American Atlantis. It's gone.

******

Apologies to Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Ernie K-Doe, Allen Toussaint, Tipitina's, Dr. John, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Jelly Roll Morton, Jessie Hill, Lee Dorsey, the Meters, Robert Parker, Alvin Robinson, Joe "King" Oliver, Kid Stormy Weather, Huey "Piano" Smith, Aaron Neville and his brothers (falsetto is the highest expression of male emotion), Frankie Ford, Chris Kenner, Professor Longhair, Wynton Marsalis and family, Sidney Bechet, and Marshall Faulk. I await your hate mail at slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

From The Washington Post:

Where to Point the Fingers
By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, September 9, 2005

In less enlightened times there was no catastrophe independent of human agency. When the plague or some other natural disaster struck, witches were burned, Jews were massacred and all felt better (except the witches and Jews).

A few centuries later, our progressive thinkers have progressed not an inch. No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy. The three current favorites are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush.

This kind of stupidity merits no attention whatsoever, but I'll give it a paragraph. There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes. Period. The problem with the evacuation of New Orleans is not that National Guardsmen in Iraq could not get to New Orleans but that National Guardsmen in Louisiana did not get to New Orleans. As for the Bush tax cuts, administration budget requests for New Orleans flood control during the five Bush years exceed those of the five preceding Clinton years. The notion that the allegedly missing revenue would have been spent wisely by Congress, targeted precisely to the levees of New Orleans, and that the reconstruction would have been completed in time, is a threefold fallacy. The argument ends when you realize that, as The Post noted, "the levees that failed were already completed projects."

Let's be clear. The author of this calamity was, first and foremost, Nature (or if you prefer, Nature's God). The suffering was augmented, aided and abetted in descending order of culpability by the following:

1. The mayor of New Orleans. He knows the city. He knows the danger. He knows that during Hurricane Georges in 1998, the use of the Superdome was a disaster and fully two-thirds of residents never got out of the city. Nothing was done. He declared a mandatory evacuation only 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit. He did not even declare a voluntary evacuation until the day before that, at 5 p.m. At that time, he explained that he needed to study his legal authority to call a mandatory evacuation and was hesitating to do so lest the city be sued by hotels and other businesses.

2. The governor. It's her job to call up the National Guard and get it to where it has to go. Where the Guard was in the first few days is a mystery. Indeed, she issued an authorization for the National Guard to commandeer school buses to evacuate people on Wednesday afternoon -- more than two days after the hurricane hit and after much of the fleet had already drowned in its parking lots.

3. The head of FEMA. Late, slow and in way over his head. On Thursday, Sept. 2, he said on national television that he didn't even know there were people in the convention center, when anybody watching television could see them there, destitute and desperate. Maybe in his vast bureaucracy he can assign three 20-year-olds to watch cable news and give him updates every hour on what in hell is going on.

4. The president. Late, slow, and simply out of tune with the urgency and magnitude of the disaster. The second he heard that the levees had been breached in New Orleans, he should have canceled his schedule and addressed the country on national television to mobilize it both emotionally and physically to assist in the disaster. His flyover on the way to Washington was the worst possible symbolism. And his Friday visit was so tone-deaf and politically disastrous that he had to fly back three days later.

5. Congress. Now as always playing holier-than-thou. Perhaps it might ask itself who created the Department of Homeland Security in the first place. The congressional response to all crises is the same -- rearrange the bureaucratic boxes, but be sure to add one extra layer. The past four years of DHS have been spent principally on bureaucratic reorganization (and real estate) instead of, say, a workable plan for as predictable a disaster as a Gulf Coast hurricane.

6. The American people. They have made it impossible for any politician to make any responsible energy policy over the past 30 years -- but that is a column for another day. Now is not the time for constructive suggestions. Now is the time for blame, recrimination and sheer astonishment. Mayor Ray Nagin has announced that, as bodies are still being found and as a public health catastrophe descends upon the city, he is sending 60 percent of his cops on city funds for a little R&R, mostly to Vegas hotels. Asked if it was appropriate to party in these circumstances, he responded: "New Orleans is a party town. Get over it."

From Captain's Quarters:

New Orleans And Louisiana Blocking Aid To Refugees In City

Hugh Hewitt had Fox News reporter Major Garrett on his show tonight (transcript at Radioblogger) to explain his breaking story that Governor Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin have blocked aid from reaching the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that buried New Orleans. Blanco and Nagin apparently did not want to encourage people to stay in New Orleans, even though neither one did anything to assist them to leave during the mandatory evacuation:

HH: You just broke a pretty big story. I was watching up on the corner television in my studio, and it's headlined that the Red Cross was blocked from delivering supplies to the Superdome, Major Garrett. Tell us what you found out.

MG: Well, the Red Cross, Hugh, had pre-positioned a literal vanguard of trucks with water, food, blankets and hygiene items. They're not really big into medical response items, but those are the three biggies that we saw people at the New Orleans Superdom, and the convention center, needing most accutely. And all of us in America, I think, reasonably asked ourselves, geez. You know, I watch hurricanes all the time. And I see correspondents standing among rubble and refugees and evacuaees. But I always either see that Red Cross or Salvation Army truck nearby. Why don't I see that?

HH: And the answer is?

MG: The answer is the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security, that is the state agency responsible for that state's homeland security, told the Red Cross explicitly, you cannot come.

HH: Now Major Garrett, on what day did they block the delivery? Do you know specifically?

MG: I am told by the Red Cross, immediately after the storm passed.

HH: Okay, so that would be on Monday afternoon.

MG: That would have been Monday or Tuesday. The exact time, the hour, I don't have. But clearly, they had an evacuee situation at the Superdome, and of course, people gravitated to the convention center on an ad hoc basis. They sort of invented that as another place to go, because they couldn't stand the conditions at the Superdome. ...

HH: I also have to conclude from what you're telling me, Major Garrett, is that had they been allowed to deliver when they wanted to deliver, which is at least a little bit prior to the levee, or at least prior to the waters rising, the supplies would have been pre-positioned, and the relief...you know, the people in the Superdome, and possibly at the convention center, I want to come back to that, would have been spared the worst of their misery.

MG: They would have been spared the lack of food, water and hygiene. I don't think there's any doubt that they would not have been spared the indignity of having nor workable bathrooms in short order.


The Red Cross confirms this on their own web site. Their FAQ makes clear that they will not move forward with their assistance without approval from the authorities in charge. Note, too, that the Red Cross recognizes that the people in charge of the New Orleans disaster area are state and local officials, not the feds (emphases mine):

Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

* Acess [sic] to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.

* The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city. ...

* The Red Cross shares the nation’s anguish over the worsening situation inside the city. We will continue to work under the direction of the military, state and local authorities and to focus all our efforts on our lifesaving mission of feeding and sheltering.

* The Red Cross does not conduct search and rescue operations. We are an organization of civilian volunteers and cannot get relief aid into any location until the local authorities say it is safe and provide us with security and access.


It's worth noting that the Red Cross agrees with the decision to make the Superdome available to those residents seeking refuge from the storm, an endorsement of Nagin's decision to open the arena. However, to open the Dome and then refuse to allow the Red Cross to stock it with the supplies necessary to keep the people inside healthy makes no sense whatsoever.

It's also worth noting that the Red Cross gets more access to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay than the people still stuck inside New Orleans.

Once again, we have more evidence that the problems in getting relief to Louisianans stuck inside the New Orleans basin directly relate to decisions made at the state and local level, not federal -- and that the people in charge of the overall effort have been and continue to be Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco. The meme blaming Bush for Hurricane Katrina continues to fall apart, even without wide coverage of the facts by the Exempt Media.

From Mere Comments, a Touchstone blog:

Katrina & the Apocalypse Maybe
By James M. Kushiner

Did I miss something? It seems a lot of what I hear in the wake of Katrina is about how the government failed to respond afterwards in a timely and appropriate manner. There were very likely serious errors made, maybe even many that should lead to the firing of certain individuals or worse. But since I have heard that eventually there will be hearings into the handling of the crisis, I think it best to wait to hear what needs to be said in order to make a sound assessment of the failures, to the extent that I care to follow this in detail. After all, if someone is already guilty based on what we know now, then we don't need any hearings.

What is most puzzling, and somewhat troubling to me, are the underlying assumptions being made, or rather underlying assumptions that should have been made but have been ignored: the preparation in advance of the storm, i.e., evacuations.

I do not watch a lot of television or listen to news talk programs (and I don't have cable), but in the past year or two--and this is most important--the week before Katrina hit, I heard about the apocalyptic scenario to which New Orleans was susceptible. And not just susceptible in a fairy tale sort of way, but based on raw numbers: a category 5 hurricane, storm surge of so many feet, a city so many feet below sea level, once swamped would retain the water for days on end, producing a toxic mix, and kill many left therein.

This was repeatedly talked about lately and just before Katrina hit. Now a question: are we so used to hype in the media about potential hazards, syndromes, and doomsday scenarios that we take them all with a grain of salt? Remember the Y2K Apocalypse that was supposed to bring the global village back to the stone age--or at least play havoc with the bank accounts? Didn't happen. Are we so used to seeing Power Point graphics on scene depicting various scenarios in Virtual Reality that we can picture an onscreen Plague being reversed by a quick injection of a computer patch, wiped out just as a digital computer countdown reaches the number 1 just like the world is saved in a string of Hollywood apocalypses from Armeggedon to Sudden Impact? In other words, do we take these things seriously or have we lost of the line between reality and virtual reality that we can just exit by hitting the ESC button on our computers?

If we don't take scenarios such as the New Orleans Apocalypse seriously, then how should these warnings be communicated so that people take them seriously? For the real problem is not government response, but something prior: an avoidable catastrophic situation that could have been avoided in the first place. If this were not true, then why issue evacuation orders? The vast majority of what we saw in New Orleans would have not been there for TV cameras to film had the full population evacuated. In short, the primary problem was that the evacuation policy, procedure, and practice were abysmal and deadly. Without the failure of a life-saving evacuation, we might not be talking about the failure of the government to respond.

There still are undoutedbly many failures here: what about the sick who cannot leave? What about poor people who have no means to get out? That's where an real evacuation plan comes in: you account for all needs possible. Make round trips with the city's buses. Might it not make sense to bring in the national guard in advance of a storm when an evacuation is necessary? And I know for myself, give me two days notice and I can surely walk 50 miles.

As to government plans in the future to respond to events like Katrina (God forbid another), it seems that our excellent weather forecasting abilities should enable wise evacuations to take place. Anyone who chooses to "ride out a storm" that is deemed worthy of evacuation has simply made a deadly choice. Like a man who chooses to climb Everest, breaks a leg, then complains about how long it took for rescuers to find him.


Not everyone by any means in New Orleans was there simply to ride it out: the evacuation plan was the major failure, it seems to me. I mean, maybe I did miss it, but I never heard the folks in the know on television and in news talk about a plan for New Orleans like this: first, a category 5 hits, then a huge storm surge, levees break, all power is lost, most of the city floods with no place for the water to go, the water quickly becomes toxic with chemicals and dead animals, and then at that point the plan is to go into New Orleans and evacuate tens of thousands of people who either through their own fault or no fault of their own stayed there while the Apocalypse we said was coming, in fact came. If that was the plan, that's just crazy.

For now, the time is well upon us for simply showing mercy to the many who have suffered, regardless of the causes. The Salvation Army, the American Red Cross, and many others are accepting donations, and in some cases volunteers. Nature is not virtual reality, but a force to be respected and sometimes feared. There is no shame in fleeing its wrath.

But in asking how the government should have responded in the aftermath, we might bear in mind that the expectations of some critics might only be met in the future by founding a government agency called something like Apocalypse Management Agency. In a true prophetic moment, experts said an "apocalypse of biblical proportions" awaited New Orleans.  God forbid, we could face on our shores an unexpected catastrophe, but Katrina was expected. Why evacuation orders were so late,  why so many stayed, and died, we may never know, or understand. Lord, have mercy.

From Opinion Journal:

Blame Amid the Tragedy
Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin failed their constituents.
By Bob Williams

Wednesday, September 7, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

As the devastation of Hurricane Katrina continues to shock and sadden the nation, the question on many lips is, Who is to blame for the inadequate response?

As a former state legislator who represented the legislative district most impacted by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, I can fully understand and empathize with the people and public officials over the loss of life and property.

Many in the media are turning their eyes toward the federal government, rather than considering the culpability of city and state officials. I am fully aware of the challenges of having a quick and responsive emergency response to a major disaster. And there is definitely a time for accountability; but what isn't fair is to dump on the federal officials and avoid those most responsible--local and state officials who failed to do their job as the first responders. The plain fact is, lives were needlessly lost in New Orleans due to the failure of Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Blanco, and the city's mayor, Ray Nagin.

The primary responsibility for dealing with emergencies does not belong to the federal government. It belongs to local and state officials who are charged by law with the management of the crucial first response to disasters. First response should be carried out by local and state emergency personnel under the supervision of the state governor and his emergency operations center.

The actions and inactions of Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin are a national disgrace due to their failure to implement the previously established evacuation plans of the state and city. Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin cannot claim that they were surprised by the extent of the damage and the need to evacuate so many people. Detailed written plans were already in place to evacuate more than a million people. The plans projected that 300,000 people would need transportation in the event of a hurricane like Katrina. If the plans had been implemented, thousands of lives would likely have been saved.

In addition to the plans, local, state and federal officials held a simulated hurricane drill 13 months ago, in which widespread flooding supposedly trapped 300,000 people inside New Orleans. The exercise simulated the evacuation of more than a million residents. The problems identified in the simulation apparently were not solved.

A year ago, as Hurricane Ivan approached, New Orleans ordered an evacuation but did not use city or school buses to help people evacuate. As a result many of the poorest citizens were unable to evacuate. Fortunately, the hurricane changed course and did not hit New Orleans, but both Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin acknowledged the need for a better evacuation plan. Again, they did not take corrective actions. In 1998, during a threat by Hurricane George, 14,000 people were sent to the Superdome and theft and vandalism were rampant due to inadequate security. Again, these problems were not corrected.

The New Orleans contingency plan is still, as of this writing, on the city's Web site, and states: "The safe evacuation of threatened populations is one of the principle [sic] reasons for developing a Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan." But the plan was apparently ignored.

Mayor Nagin was responsible for giving the order for mandatory evacuation and supervising the actual evacuation: His Office of Emergency Preparedness (not the federal government) must coordinate with the state on elements of evacuation and assist in directing the transportation of evacuees to staging areas. Mayor Nagin had to be encouraged by the governor to contact the National Hurricane Center before he finally, belatedly, issued the order for mandatory evacuation. And sadly, it apparently took a personal call from the president to urge the governor to order the mandatory evacuation.

The city's evacuation plan states: "The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas." But even though the city has enough school and transit buses to evacuate 12,000 citizens per fleet run, the mayor did not use them. To compound the problem, the buses were not moved to high ground and were flooded. The plan also states that "special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific lifesaving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedures as needed." This was not done.

The evacuation plan warned that "if an evacuation order is issued without the mechanisms needed to disseminate the information to the affected persons, then we face the possibility of having large numbers of people either stranded and left to the mercy of a storm, or left in an area impacted by toxic materials." That is precisely what happened because of the mayor's failure.

Instead of evacuating the people, the mayor ordered the refugees to the Superdome and Convention Center without adequate security and no provisions for food, water and sanitary conditions. As a result people died, and there was even rape committed, in these facilities. Mayor Nagin failed in his responsibility to provide public safety and to manage the orderly evacuation of the citizens of New Orleans. Now he wants to blame Gov. Blanco and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In an emergency the first requirement is for the city's emergency center to be linked to the state emergency operations center. This was not done.

The federal government does not have the authority to intervene in a state emergency without the request of a governor. President Bush declared an emergency prior to Katrina hitting New Orleans, so the only action needed for federal assistance was for Gov. Blanco to request the specific type of assistance she needed. She failed to send a timely request for specific aid.

In addition, unlike the governors of New York, Oklahoma and California in past disasters, Gov. Blanco failed to take charge of the situation and ensure that the state emergency operation facility was in constant contact with Mayor Nagin and FEMA. It is likely that thousands of people died because of the failure of Gov. Blanco to implement the state plan, which mentions the possible need to evacuate up to one million people. The plan clearly gives the governor the authority for declaring an emergency, sending in state resources to the disaster area and requesting necessary federal assistance.

State legislators and governors nationwide need to update their contingency plans and the operation procedures for state emergency centers. Hurricane Katrina had been forecast for days, but that will not always be the case with a disaster (think of terrorist attacks). It must be made clear that the governor and locally elected officials are in charge of the "first response."

I am not attempting to excuse some of the delays in FEMA's response. Congress and the president need to take corrective action there, also. However, if citizens expect FEMA to be a first responder to terrorist attacks or other local emergencies (earthquakes, forest fires, volcanoes), they will be disappointed. The federal government's role is to offer aid upon request.

The Louisiana Legislature should conduct an immediate investigation into the failures of state and local officials to implement the written emergency plans. The tragedy is not over, and real leadership in the state and local government are essential in the months to come. More importantly, the hurricane season is still upon us, and local and state officials must stay focused on the jobs for which they were elected--and not on the deadly game of passing the emergency buck.

Mr. Williams is president of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a free market public policy research organization in Olympia, Wash.

Fox News Interview: Brit Hume with Major Garrett
Sept. 7, 2005

Fox News' Brit Hume: First, the focus of all of the attention has been FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency, what is FEMA?

Fox News' Major Garrett: Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2,500 full time employees, 4,000 stand by employees. The mission statement very simple: prepare, respond, help, recover, reduce risk. How does it do it? By coordinating with state and local entities and other groups The Salvation Army, Red Cross, dedicated to helping the needy when disaster strikes.

Hume: So FEMA is relatively, it isn't very labor intensive it mostly works through other agencies?

Garrett: It works through other agencies. But it has been moved into the Department of Homeland Security. And in this crisis, It is a bit a victim of its own bureaucratic boastfulness. Earlier this year the new national response plan released by the Department of Homeland Security promised this - "seemless integration of the federal government when an incident exceeds local and state capabilities." In the minds of many Americans, this one did. And FEMA, at least initially, in the minds of some, did not respond enough.

Hume: The words seamless don't exactly spring to mind. But look, they are down there, The Red Cross, for example, is there.

Garrett: Standing by, ready.

Hume: Standing by, ready. Why didn't FEMA send The Red Cross into New Orleans when we had all of the people there on that bridge overpass and elsewhere. Why not?

Garrett: First of all, no jurisdiction. FEMA works with The Red Cross, The Salvation Army and other organizations but it has no control to order them to go one place or the other. Secondarily, The Red Cross was ready. I got off the phone with one of their officials. They had a vanguard, Brit, of trucks with water, food, hygiene equipment, all sorts of things ready to go where? To the Superdome and convention center. Why weren't they there? The Louisiana Department of Homeland Security told them they could not go.

Hume: This is isn't the Louisiana branch of the federal Homeland Security? This is --

Garrett: The state's own agency devoted to the state's homeland security. They told them you cannot go there. Why? The Red Cross tells me that state agency in Louisiana said, look, we do not want to create a magnet for more people to come to the Superdome or convention center, we want to get them out. So at the same time local officials were screaming where is the food, where is the water? The Red Cross was standing by ready, the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security said you can't go.

Hume: FEMA does, presumably at some point, have some jurisdiction over some military forces. Of course, the first responders there are the National Guard. Why didn't FEMA send the National Guard in? You heard that cry from many people.

Garrett: FEMA does not have jurisdictional control over any state's National Guard, only the governor does. The governor in this case, Kathleen Blanco, A democrat, did use the Louisiana National Guard for some purposes, did not deploy them in massive numbers initially and they were not used to move any of these relief organizations in and they could have been for the very same reason I talked about earlier, the state decided they didn't want the relief organizations where the people needed it most because they wanted those people to get out.

Hume: But even today we know that Governor Blanco has now decided that a mandatory evacuation may not be necessarily after all. But we can go into that later. What about the use by her of the National Guard to impose law and order during the early looting and all of that?

Garrett: She had a choice, as I am told. She could have taken up the offer from FEMA to federalize all of the activities in Louisiana, meaning that FEMA would be in control of everything. Not only law enforcement, but everything else. She declined to give them that authority. So essentially FEMA was trapped between two bureaucracies. One the Department Of Homeland Security where many of its decisions have to be reviewed and in some cases approved, and a recalcitrant state bureaucracy that wasn't going to give them the authority they needed to make things happen, among them, the National Guard.

Hume: What about this evacuation problem? It's clearly was something that New Orleans faced, knew it faced to some extent.

Garrett: And the city [sic] of Louisiana. They have a whole plan that contemplates dealing with an evacuation in the effect of a hurricane three, four or five. Their own plan says, 100,000 residents minimum from the New Orleans area will have to be evacuated. This plan makes it clear ...

Hume: You mean, can't get out on their own.

Garrett: These people will have not have their own vehicles. Not only that, It stipulate that these people are disproportionately poor, sick and in need of special transportation assistance. Brit, I think in these circumstances, bureaucratic language is important. Let's go to this. This is what the state says: "the Department of Health and Hospitals has the primary responsibility for providing medical coordination for all of the special-needs populations, i.e. hospital and nursing home patients, persons on home health care, elderly persons and other persons with physical or mental disabilities." Brit, I don't think you can come up with a better description of the people we saw, day in and day out, at the Superdome and the convention center, than this very population that the state's own plan said needed to be transported to a safe place and provided services.

Hume: Apparently no plan, no provision, no facility for doing that.

Garrett: No facility for doing that. Not only that, those who reviewed the plans the state put together before were critical of it. In 2002 the New Orleans Times Picayune had a whole story about this saying no one believes the evacuation plans are possible, feasible or will be carried out. They proved to be accurate.

Hume: It sounds like the state will have much to answer for in the investigation coming before Congress as well as the federal government.

Garrett: It appears to be.

From The Corner:

DOSTOEVSKY AMONG THE LOOTERS
[Rod Dreher]

"The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: "You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don't be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires." That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants."

-- from "The Brothers Karamazov"

Complacency and Survival
By Tony Blankley

Putting aside, for the moment only, which individuals are guilty of malfeasance in office, it is undeniable that the system America established for disaster relief failed miserably last week -- and thousands of Americans died because of it.

In varying degrees, the responsibility for the calamity runs from the president of the United States, to state and local officials, to bureaucrats, to individual citizens of the Gulf who were able to but didn't evacuate, to current and prior presidents and Congresses who failed to fund projects, to the media prior to the event, which failed to adequately chastise politicians and inform the public of the coming danger.

While officials high and low must -- and will -- be held accountable for their share of the fault, the big lesson learned is that the American system, with all its wealth, capacity, checks and balances, and vigorous free speech, failed to avoid the disaster.

Many individuals shouted loudly, in advance (sometimes for years), about the coming danger, but one can distill America's overall, collective failure to a number of misjudgments.

Collectively, the country: 1) failed to listen to credible warnings, 2) assumed that our good luck would continue unabated, 3) failed to adequately assess the magnitude and likelihood of the danger, and 4) permitted the compelling pressures and benefits of business as usual to drive from its mind a serious consideration of a radical, bad change from the status quo.

In short, we were complacent. Actually preparing -- and paying for -- prevention or protection from a likely calamitous event was so appalling that we simply ignored it. Psychologists call it denial. The news calls it 10,000 or more dead Americans.

Many commentators, and members of the public, have quickly noted that if emergency services are so rotten for a hurricane or flood, what does this say about our preparations for terrorist attacks in the future. They rightly ask what the federal government has been doing these last four years since Sept. 11.

These thoughts about the terrorist threat have been troubling me for some time, as my regular readers and viewers are aware. And by chance, my book on this topic, "The West's Last Chance" (Regnery Publishing), is to be published this weekend, Sept. 11. But the danger of muddled thinking and preparation for the terrorist threat goes far beyond even the major responsibilities and failures of FEMA.

Because, as heartbreaking, appalling and disgraceful as this event covering an area the size of Kansas is, it is merely a warning, writ small, of the danger facing the entire country (indeed, our entire Western civilization) if we continue to face the Islamist threat with the same complacency with which we have faced the threat to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Complacency is easy to spot after the fact. Today, we are all indignant with the complacency of our governments concerning the conditions in New Orleans. And yet, how many of us, honestly, had given a moment's thought to this until sometime last Tuesday morning? Perhaps we assumed our governments were handling such matters? We were wrong.

We Americans are proud of our self-reliance. But today, that self-reliance requires each citizen to think for himself or herself about other dangers, such as the Islamist terrorist threat, and to inquire whether our government is complacent or seized with a sense of urgency to protect America.

I happen to think that regarding the Islamist threat, President Bush has shown more concern and provided more action than most of politicians and journalists. But even the president's actions and thoughts are very dangerously short of what is needed. As much as he has done, it still falls within the category of complacency if one seriously thinks about the threat.

The mortal danger we face comes not merely from Osama bin Laden and a few thousand terrorists. Rather, we are confronted with the Islamic world -- one-fifth of mankind -- in turmoil and insurgent as it has not been in at least 500 (if not 1,500) years.

We don't yet know whether this passion has touched 1 percent, 10 percent or 50 percent of over a billion souls. But combined with the sudden and untimely availability of weapons of mass destruction to any sufficiently determined large group of people -- and facilitated by the dangerously interconnected globalized world -- the threat to us all must be as urgently dealt with today, as New Orleans should have been last week and last year and last decade.

I argue that across the board -- from cargo containers searched, to Arab translators hired, to borders guarded, to domestic and foreign intelligence collected, to rational scrutiny of Arab and Muslim young men, to political correctness snubbed, to the size of our military, to our (and Europe's) willingness to defend our culture from Islamist intimidation, to our international diplomacy -- we remain as complacent and exposed to mortal threat today as were the poor dead souls of New Orleans last week.

But at least we, the still-living, have been given a providential warning.

Summer Is Over for America
By Pat Buchanan

Friday night, the Bush presidency was in grave trouble.

TV reporters at the New Orleans convention center and Superdome were fairly weeping for food and water for the visibly suffering thousands, on the fifth day after Katrina hit.

Saturday, the cavalry had arrived. All day, the truckloads of troops, helicopters and relief columns moved in. By nightfall, the convention center and Superdome had been evacuated, and reporters who had been howling only hours before were cheering.

By Sunday, responsibility for the disaster was being shifted by Bush aides and media allies to the mayor of New Orleans and Louisiana Gov. Blanco. Monday, The Washington Post reported Americans did not blame President Bush for the breakdown and failure of government in New Orleans.

The sudden turnaround left the race hustlers hanging out there. They had been bellowing that Bush did not care about black people, since most of the refugees from Katrina were African-American. But, so, too, were the looters. And a visible majority of those coming to the rescue were white folks. Those who played the race card have been taking a deserved beating on national radio and cable TV. Even their Democratic allies seem to have abandoned them.

Yet, make no mistake. Summer is over for America -- and George Bush. That unifying image of Bush atop the pile of debris in lower Manhattan days after 9-11 has been displaced by ugly accusations and recriminations over who lost New Orleans. Katrina has exposed the limits of federal power and the absence of a serious set of national priorities.

In New Orleans, those who relied on government -- the New Orleans police, the mayor, Gov. Blanco, FEMA -- suffered most. Those who relied on themselves for food, water and safety from marauding mobs of rapists and looters, with guns in their homes, fared best. Ultimately, U.S. and Guard troops had to provide the security before government agencies and volunteers could do their rescue work.

But hour-by-hour coverage of the damage done by Katrina to an area of the South as large as Britain must bring home the truth: We are a self-indulgent nation and an overextended empire.

Before Bush went off on his five-week vacation, he signed a $286 billion highway bill containing $24 billion in pork -- 6,300 earmarked projects, among which was a quarter-billion-dollar bridge from Ketchikan, Alaska, population 8,000, to Gravina Island, population 50. Had half that sum been spent fortifying the levees of Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans would not be underwater today.

With a federal deficit, because of Katrina, rising toward $400 billion, a trade deficit of $700 billion to $800 billion and Americans saving only 1 percent of their income, we can no longer afford such nonsense. And it is not just tax-and-spend liberals who are culpable, but conservatives who believe they have patented a formula for the permanent retention of power: guns, butter and tax cuts, too!

With Medicare and Social Security costs about to soar as the first wave of baby boomers reaches early retirement in 2009, with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with troops in 100 countries, from the Balkans to Central Asia, from the Persian Gulf to Guam, with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens breaking in yearly, we are stumbling toward national crisis.

If any major act of terrorism, or urban riot, is ever traced to criminal elements who came across the Mexican Border, the Bush presidency will be as busted as Lyndon Johnson's in 1968. The tax cuts, or the welfare-warfare state, or the New American Empire has to go. We cannot afford them all.

With Marines and Army troops headed for third tours in Iraq, and the Guard and Reserve reaching the breaking point, how would we fight another war in any of the 50 countries we are committed to defend? And what are 37,000 U.S. troops still doing on a DMZ defending South Korea from a country with one-half its population and 3 percent of its economic wealth?

We wail about the cost of fuel and electricity and our dependence on Middle East oil -- yet, we have oil and gas waiting to be tapped in Alaska and off the coasts of California and Florida, but refuse to go after it. We have not built a nuclear power plant or a refinery in 25 years, because we were frightened by Three Mile Island and no one wants a refinery in his backyard. Yet, since the death of the Soviet Empire, we have indulged in years of self-congratulatory braggadocio about being the "last superpower" and "indispensable nation."

With 9-11, we got a wake-up call. With Katrina, the smoke alarm went off. America needs today an authentic conservatism that will end our Asian wars, shed this empire, bring the budgets back into balance, no matter the political cost, and make demands on us all for sacrifices.

Yes, the lazy, lovely days of summer are over.

The Big Easy rocked, but didn't roll
By Mark Steyn

Readers may recall my words from a week ago on the approaching Katrina: "We relish the opportunity to rise to the occasion. And on the whole we do. Oh, to be sure, there are always folks who panic or loot. But most people don't, and many are capable of extraordinary acts of hastily improvised heroism."

What the hell was I thinking? I should be fired for that. Well, someone should be fired. I say that in the spirit of the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, the Anti-Giuliani, a Mayor Culpa who always knows where to point the finger.

For some reason, I failed to consider the possibility that the panickers would include Hizzoner the Mayor and the looters would include significant numbers of the police department, though in fairness I wasn't the only one. As General Blum said at Saturday's Defence Department briefing: "No one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans."

Indeed, they eroded faster than the levees. Several hundred cops are reported to have walked off the job. To give the city credit, it has a lovely "Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan" for hurricanes. The only flaw in the plan is that the person charged with putting it into effect is the mayor. And he didn't.

But I don't want to blame any single figure: the anti-Bush crowd have that act pretty much sewn up. I'd say New Orleans's political failure is symptomatic of a broader failure.

I got an e-mail over the weekend from a US Army surgeon just back in Afghanistan after his wedding. Changing planes in Kuwait for the final leg to Bagram and confronted by yet another charity box for Katrina relief, he decided that this time he'd pass. "I'd had it up to here," he wrote, "with the passivity, the whining, and the when-are-they-going-to-do-something blame game."

Let it be said that no one should die in a 100F windowless attic because he fled upstairs when the flood waters rose and now can't get out. But, in his general characterisation of "the Big Easy", my correspondent is not wrong. The point is, what are you like when it's not so easy?

Congressman Billy Tauzin once said of his state: "One half of Louisiana is under water and the other half is under indictment." Last week, four fifths of New Orleans was under water and the other four fifths should be under indictment - which is the kind of arithmetic the state's deeply entrenched kleptocrat political culture will have no trouble making add up.

Consider the signature image of the flood: an aerial shot of 255 school buses neatly parked at one city lot, their fuel tanks leaking gasoline into the urban lake. An enterprising blogger, Bryan Preston, worked out that each bus had 66 seats, which meant that the vehicles at just that one lot could have ferried out 16,830 people. Instead of entrusting its most vulnerable citizens to the gang-infested faecal hell of the Superdome, New Orleans had more than enough municipal transport on hand to have got almost everyone out in a couple of runs last Sunday.

Why didn't they? Well, the mayor didn't give the order. OK, but how about school board officials, or the fellows with the public schools transportation department, or the guy who runs that motor pool, or the individual bus drivers? If it ever occurred to any of them that these were potentially useful evacuation assets, they kept it to themselves.

So the first school bus to escape New Orleans and make it to safety in Texas was one that had been abandoned on a city street. A party of sodden citizens, ranging from the elderly to an eight-day-old baby, were desperate to get out, hopped aboard and got teenager Jabbor Gibson to drive them 13 hours non-stop to Houston. He'd never driven a bus before, and the authorities back in New Orleans may yet prosecute him. For rescuing people without a permit?

My Afghanistan army guy's observations on "passivity" reminded me of something I wrote for this paper a few days after 9/11, about how the airline cabin was the embodiment of the "culture of passivity". It's the most regulated environment most of us ever enter.

So on three of those flights everyone faithfully followed the Federal Aviation Administration's 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late. On the fourth plane, Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Thomas Burnett, Mark Bingham and other forgotten heroes figured out what was going on and rushed their hijackers, preventing the plane from proceeding to its target - believed to be the White House or Congress. On a morning when the government did nothing for those passengers, those passengers did something for the government.

On 9/11, the federal government failed the people; last week, local and state government failed the people. On 9/11, they stuck to the 30-year-old plan; last week, they didn't bother implementing the state-of-the-art 21st-century plan. Why argue about which level of bureaucracy you prefer to be let down by?

My mistake was to think that the citizenry of the Big Easy would rise to the great rallying cry of Todd Beamer: "Are you ready, guys? Let's roll!" Instead, the spirit of the week was summed up by a gentleman called Mike Franklin, taking time out of his hectic schedule of looting to speak to the Associated Press: "People who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society."

Unlike 9/11, when the cult of victimhood was temporarily suspended in honour of the many real, actual victims under the rubble, in New Orleans everyone claimed the mantle of victim, from the incompetent mayor to the "oppressed" guys wading through the water with new DVD players under each arm.

Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.

New Orleans is a party town in the middle of a welfare swamp and, like many parties, it doesn't look so good when someone puts the lights up. I'll always be grateful to a burg that gave us Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima, and I'll always love Satch's great record of Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? But, after this last week, I'm not sure I would.

From VDare.com:

Racial Reality And The New Orleans Nightmare
By Steve Sailer

It was the Perfect Storm.

No, not Hurricane Katrina. That could have been much worse. Back in the 1990s, my friend Rob Brennan wrote an unpublished novel called Category 5 about a ferocious hurricane that strikes New Orleans at the worst possible angle. Katrina, in contrast, was a Category 4 hurricane and hit New Orleans only a glancing blow.

No, the perfect storm was actually the combination of social and governmental incompetence at local, state, and federal levels—and unmentionable racial reality.

Republican Presidents are supposed to provide adult supervision for crooked Democratic urban machines. But the White House is now occupied by George W. Bush, a politician so irresponsible, so uninterested in proficiency and honesty among his minions that late last year he tried to appoint as Secretary of Homeland Security the egregious Bernie Kerik.

Mr. Bush shows no evidence of holding his appointees accountable, so long as they remain loyal to him personally. Just as he has never vetoed a bill, he almost never fires anyone for poor performance. 

VDARE.com readers are familiar with the contempt with which Mr. Bush treats his sworn duties to uphold the laws against illegal immigration. Now the whole country is starting to catch on to his disregard for his duties in his pursuit of image over effectiveness.

His invade-the-world-invite-the-world policies have left America unprepared for predictable domestic troubles, as Paul Craig Roberts recently pointed out here.

The ineptitude displayed by the Louisiana state government is also unsurprising. The state is unique in having a Latin political tradition (it uses the Code Napoleon rather than the English common law, even though Napoleon didn't release his code until the year after he sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson), a culture in which the Argentinean demagogue Juan Peron would have felt at home.

The unofficial state motto is "Laissez les bons temps rouler" or "Let the good times roll." Compare that to New Hampshire's official motto of "Live free or die," which display a rather different understanding of freedom. Louisiana's reigning philosophy is freedom from responsibility.

It's a general rule that the tastier the indigenous cuisine, the lousier the government. Its culture has provided America with jazz, A Street Car Named Desire, and the great American comic novel of the 20th Century, A Confederacy of Dunces. New Orleans is a nice place to visit. But you wouldn't want to raise your kids there.

All this is now common parlance, more or less. What you won’t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.

New Orleans itself is two-thirds black. It has had nothing but black mayors since 1978. All four of them are from the light-skinned "creole of color" elite, including the notorious Marc H. Morial, now head of the National Urban League. The city government is corrupt and lackadaisical. While the police department has perhaps rebounded from the depths it reached a decade ago when an officer was condemned to death for having a mother of three rubbed out by drug gangstas in his employ, nobody should be surprised that last week numerous officers ran away, and some even freelanced as looters.

In a racially diverse democracy like New Orleans, voting for good government takes a backseat to voting for your tribe's representatives in the eternal ethnic tussle over slices of the pie. As the ultra-competent but not terribly democratic founder of the state of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, noted in a recent interview:

"In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion."

For instance, after blacks took control of New Orleans, they required new police recruits to live in the city itself as a way to exclude white cops. Dean M. Shapiro writes for Court TV's "Crime Library":

"The department was being depleted of experienced officers and the numbers within the ranks were decreasing as crime stats were rising at an alarming rate… In order to beef up the rapidly dwindling numbers of NOPD, the department was forced to lower its acceptance standards. Recruits with criminal records, DWIs, unfavorable employment records and dishonorable discharges from the Armed Forces were allowed to enter the Police Academy, whereas they had previously been excluded… Their records were expunged and, on completion of their training, they were issued badges, guns and patrol cars and turned loose on the street… These new officers were expected to suddenly straighten up and begin enforcing the laws they had not-so-long-ago been breaking. They were expected to arrest those suspected of crimes, even if those accused had once been their street buddies. But this was an unrealistic expectation."

The state's Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan made all the right noises about evacuating residents without cars by school bus. But state and local authorities apparently failed to execute, as the famous picture of about 200 New Orleans school buses neatly lined up in a flooded parking lot shows.

It also should have been expected that a large fraction of New Orleans's lower class blacks would not evacuate before a disaster. Many are too poor to own a car, or too untrustworthy to get a ride with neighbors, or too shortsighted to worry.

Judging from their economic and educational statistics, New Orleans' blacks are not even an above-average group of African-Americans, such as you find in Atlanta or Seattle, but more like Miami's or Milwaukee's. About half are below the poverty line. With the national black average IQ around 85, New Orleans' mean black IQ would probably be in the lower 80s or upper 70s.

And of course nobody, despite what they may say, is all that much startled that, when the city's whites and more prosperous and/or foresightful blacks left, New Orleans quickly turned into its demographic analog, Haiti—where 2004's Tropical Storm Jeanne unleashed similar mayhem and chaos.

Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola of New Orleans who represents political prisoners in Haiti, stayed behind with his wife, who is a nurse. He noted:

"I had always hoped that Haiti would become more like New Orleans, but what's happened is New Orleans has become more like Haiti here recently."

In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan—because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks. For example, the per capita imprisonment rate for Asian-Americans is about 1/30th that of African-Americans.

Nor is it surprising that the black refugees at the Superdome and the convention center failed to get themselves organized to make conditions more livable. Poor black people seldom cooperate well with each other because they don't trust other blacks much, for the perfectly rational reason that they commit large numbers of crimes against each other.

Indeed, as Francis Fukuyama's best book, Trust, makes clear, in most of the world—outside Japan and the more British-Germanic-Nordic parts of Europe and their overseas offspring like America—people seldom trust fellow citizens beyond their extended families enough to voluntarily come together to solve community problems. Force is generally needed to get them to work with each other. Which is why "civic society" is relatively rare.

(Why Mr. Bush wants to import vast numbers of additional immigrants from cultures where unrelated residents have no tradition of self-organizing as free individuals is a mystery for another day.)

But if all these disasters in New Orleans should have been expected, why did nobody at any level of government act as if they expected them?

Because to anticipate the problems would require noticing that racial differences are relevant. And that can ruin one's career.

Governmental bodies naturally decay rapidly in competence, especially when free discussion of unpleasant realities is suppressed.

New Orleans should remind us that we still live in a harsh world. The make-believe that passes for public discourse, even at the elite level, simply isn't adequate for protecting American citizens.

Leviathan in Louisiana

It is likely that Katrina's lingering reverberations will alter
the makeup of the nation's mind far more than 9/11 did.

By George F. Will

Sept. 12, 2005 issue - Americans tend to believe in God and to disbelieve in government. Time will tell how many are moved to rethink one or both of those tendencies in the aftermath of Katrina. It is, however, likely that the storm's lingering reverberations will alter the nation's mind far more than 9/11 did.

For some it will be today's version of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, when perhaps 60,000 deaths stirred doubts about the existence, or at least the benevolence, of a God that could will or allow such random misery. The theologically serious and mordantly witty Peter De Vries wrote in one of his novels about a Connecticut river flood to which a local pastor responded by praying "that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring." At any rate, until the raping, looting and gunfire abate, it will be difficult to continue this summer's argument about whether we and our habitat have been intelligently designed.

Regardless of where individual Americans begin or end in fitting Katrina into their interpretation of reality, the storm's furies and, even more, the social furies it unleashed will deepen Americans' sense that, in Aristophanes' words, "whirl is King, having driven out Zeus." In the dystopia that is New Orleans as this is written, martial law is a utopian aspiration. Granted, countless acts, recorded and unrecorded, of selflessness and heroism attest to the human capacity for nobility. But this, too, is true: The swiftness of New Orleans' descent from chaos into barbarism must compound the nation's nagging anxiety that more irrationality is rampant in the world just now than this nation has the power to subdue or even keep at bay.

Which is to say, Katrina will condition the debate about Iraq. Here is why.

Politics is a distinctively human activity, but it arises from something not distinctively human—from anxiety about security, and fear of violent death. On the firm foundation of this brute fact, Thomas Hobbes erected a political philosophy that last week reacquired urgent pertinence.

In 1651, in "Leviathan," Hobbes said that in "the state of nature," meaning in the absence of a civil society sustained by government, mankind's natural sociability, if any, is so tenuous that life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Thoughtful conservatives—meaning those whose conservatism arises from reflections deeper than an aversion to high marginal tax rates—are conservative because they understand how thin and perishable is the crust of civilization, and hence how always near society's surface are the molten passions that must be checked by force when they cannot be tamed by socialization.

Katrina drove from the nation's television screens numbing pictures of daily carnage in Iraq, where—speaking of how quickly crowds can become mobs—last week perhaps 950 Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death in a panic induced by a rumor about a suicide bomber. Iraq's insurgents, the creators of an atmosphere of deadly suggestibility, are now attacking the power grid and other elements of urban infrastructure, an attempt, not unsuccessful, to create a Hobbesian state of nature. Their hope is that Iraqis will demand a Leviathan—any authoritarian regime capable of imposing order.

America's "reconstruction" of Iraq is an attempt, now in its third year, to conjure from the desert air something that Katrina dispersed in New Orleans in a few hours—civility. It will not be long until, and will not be unreasonable or mean-spirited when, many Americans wonder whether rebuilding schools and sewage-treatment facilities in Iraq competes with rebuilding them on America's Gulf Coast.

Urban disasters can have beneficial effects. London's Great Fire of 1666 cleared ground for genius—for a rebuilt St. Paul's Cathedral and other Christopher Wren churches. The fire that swept central Chicago in 1871 produced three ingredients of that city's architectural fecundity—many vacant spaces, an openness to builders with novel visions and an eagerness to build with nonflammable materials. Soon structural steel, plate glass and the elevator made Chicago the great pioneer of tall buildings.

But it is hard to imagine New Orleans benefiting in any way, or even recovering, from Katrina. The city relied for its prosperity too much on merchandisable charm—tourism, conventions, gambling—that may be impossible to revive for Americans who have seen the bodies floating in the sewage. Neither Newark nor Detroit has really recovered from the 1967 rioting.

In Katrina's collision with New Orleans, the essence of primitivism, howling nature, met one of mankind's most sophisticated works, a modern city. But what makes cities such marvels—the specializations and divisions of labor that sustain myriad webs of dependencies—also makes them fragile. Forgetting that is hubris, an ingredient of tragedy.

So Katrina has provided a teaching moment. This is a liberal hour in that it illustrates the indispensability, and dignity, of the public sector. It also is a conservative hour, dramatizing the prudence of pessimism, and the fact that the first business of government, on which everything depends, is security.