George Will has a column in this week’s edition of Newsweek
on the breakdown in social order that happened after Katrina and what it means for American politics.
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.
The main reason for this, of course, is the almost unprecedented manner in which the city of New Orleans transformed itself from a modern American city into something resembling Berlin after World War II or Beirut in the 1970s. In addition to the death and disease that are part of the headlines this week, it is the one thing about Katrina that will reverberate in the national memory for years to come. As Will points out, it will even have an impact on the war in Iraq.
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.
Not long at all. In fact, I can see it happening soon. It will start with the folks over at MoveOn.org, but will soon be repeated by the Nancy Pelosi’s and Hillary Clinton’s of the world. It will, I think, become an issue in the 2006 Congressional elections.
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.
The question is what lessons have we actually learned from Katrina ?
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