Receding Floodwaters
Expose
The Dark Side Of America
By Jonathan Freedland
05 September, 2005
The
Guardian
The
waters flow in and the waters flow 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 which stands exposed. And neither
America nor the world much likes what it sees.
The first revelation
was not spoken in words, but written in the faces of those left behind.
Television viewers from Bradford 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
Shakespearean tragedy, race is America's fatal flaw, the weakness which
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 time again,
America has been forced to wake up to the racial injustice which 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 OJ 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% 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% of the people of New Orleans live in poverty and that 84%
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. Americans expect competence from their leader as a
minimum requirement. And if an image of a crashed helicopter in the
Iranian desert could undo one president, surely pictures of an American
city reduced to a Somali or Bangladeshi kind of chaos spell disaster
for this one.
But the shock may
well 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
programmes, 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 that were designed
to save New Orleans from a great flood. The Army Corps of Engineers
asked for $105m (£57m): the White House gave them $40m.
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 floods 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 FDR 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 the face of the 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
- was 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 many energies were diverted
to Iraq and Afghanistan and away from the home front. It could even
see the US retreating from the world and hunkering down.
But don't count
on it. At the end of the 1970s, American 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 Unlimited
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005