Disaster lays bare America's dark side

September 6, 2005

Reaction to the flood could change the shape of US society, writes Jonathan Freedland.

THE water flows in and the water flows out, washing away all that once lay on the surface — and revealing what lies beneath. So it is with all floods in all places, but now it is America that stands exposed. And neither America nor the world likes what it sees.

The first revelation was not spoken in words, but written on the faces of those left behind. Television viewers from Brussels to Bangalore could not help but notice it, and Americans from Buffalo to Bakersfield could not deny it. The women pleading for their lives in handwritten signs, the children clinging to tree branches, the prisoners herded on to a jail roof — they were overwhelmingly black.

This will not be news to most Americans. They know that a racial divide still haunts their country, as it has from its very founding. Like a character in a Shakespearean tragedy, race is America's fatal flaw, the weakness that so often brings it low.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, could see the danger. "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just," he wrote in 1785, reflecting on the crime that was slavery. "His justice cannot sleep forever."

Time and again, America has been forced to wake up to the racial injustice that has been its historic curse. It was the source of a civil war in the 19th century and of repeated battles through the 20th. From the desegregation and civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s to the Los Angeles riots and even the O.J. Simpson trial of the 1990s, America has undergone periodic reminders that it is in the relationship between black and white that it has failed to honour its own, animating ideals.

Katrina has rammed home that message once more, with lacerating force. White Americans, who regarded New Orleans as a kind of playground, a place to enjoy the carnal pleasures of music, food, drink and more, have learned things about that city — and therefore their society — that they would probably have preferred not to know. They have discovered that it was mainly white folks who lived on the higher, safer ground, while poorer, black families had to huddle in the cheaper, low-lying housing — that race, in other words, determined who got hit.

They have also learned that 35 per cent of black households in the area did not have a car. Or that the staff and guests of the Hyatt Hotel were evacuated first, while the rest, the mainly poor and black, were at the back of the queue. Or that 28 per cent of the people of New Orleans live in poverty and that 84 per cent of those are black. Or that some people in that city were so poor they did not have the money even to catch a bus out of town — that race, in other words, determined who got left behind.

Most Americans want to believe that kind of inequality belongs in the past, in the school textbooks. But Katrina has shaken them from that delusion.

They have had to face another painful truth. Their Government has proved itself incompetent. Yes, it could act quickly once it had decided to act — but it idled for days. This disastrous performance will surely saddle the remainder of George Bush's presidency, just as the botched Desert One rescue of American hostages from the besieged US embassy in Tehran hobbled that of Jimmy Carter.

But the shock may do more than shift perceptions of the current administration. For 25 years, the dominant US ideology has been to shrink the state. "Government is not the solution to our problem," declared Ronald Reagan. "Government is the problem." That defined the limits for state activism thereafter. After decades of energetic government programs, from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s, the state was compelled to retreat. Taxes would go down and the government would do less.

Mr Bush personifies that ideology with more vigour than anyone since Reagan. Yet now, after Katrina, the national mood might alter. Americans have seen where small government leads. The authorities in Louisiana, including the military, pleaded long ago with Washington to reinforce the levees. The Army Corps of Engineers asked for $US105 million ($A137 million): the White House gave them $US40 million.

It is conceivable that Americans will now call a halt to their quarter-century experiment in limited government — and the neglected infrastructure that has entailed. There are some tasks, they may conclude, which neither individuals nor private companies can do alone — and evacuating tens of thousands of people from a drowning city is one of them.

Yesterday The New York Times' resident conservative columnist, David Brooks, wondered if there could now be a "progressive resurgence". There is a precedent. After an earlier Louisiana disaster, the flood of 1927, there was public outrage that not a single federal dollar had gone to feed or shelter the victims: the army had even demanded reimbursement from the Red Cross for the use of its tents. From now on, the public resolved, the federal government would have to protect the vulnerable. That shift paved the way for the activism of Franklin Roosevelt and all that followed. Nearly 80 years on, history might be about to repeat itself.

Finally, America will have to get over the shock of seeing itself in a new, unflattering light. It is not just the lawlessness, violence and gun culture that has been on show in New Orleans. It is also that America likes to think of itself as the "indispensable nation", the strongest, richest, most capable country on earth.

That belief had already taken a few blows. The vulnerability exposed on 9/11 was one. The struggle in Iraq — where America has become a Gulliver, tied down — is another. But now the giant has been hit again, its weak spot exposed. When corpses float in the streets for five days, the indispensable nation looks like a society that cannot take care of its own. When Sri Lanka offers to send emergency aid, the humiliation is complete.

That could lead to a shift in priorities, a sense that too much energy was diverted to Iraq and Afghanistan. It could even see the US retreating from the world.

But don't count on it. In the 1970s, US confidence was also shaken — by defeat in Vietnam, by the serial failure (and worse) of government institutions. What followed, after the interval of the Carter presidency, was a period of gung-ho bullishness that became the Reagan era. It may look battered — but only a fool would count America out.

GUARDIAN

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