"The reconstruction of New Orleans and the South will be our New Deal."

Sometimes it's like Athenae reads my mind.

I was thinking this afternoon, in a quiet moment, that Louisiana flooded in 1927. Randy Newman memorialized the perceived response years later: "President Coolidge came down in a railroad train/With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand/
The President say, "Little fat man isn't it a shame/what the river has
done to this poor crackers land." Substitute Bush for Coolidge, and you have the picture.

Of course, Herbert Hoover was Secretary of Commerce for those floods, and unlike the current Administrators, knew what he was doing. But that situation was not ended with camps and efficiency, and resentments and racial problems arising from how blacks were treated in those camps, lingered. Then, in 1929, the stock market crashed.

These things don't happen in a vacuum, and the two events are not entirely unrelated. The belief that the federal government had a responsibility to its citizens, or had no responsibility to them, is exemplified in the work of Hoover, the caricature of Coolidge. The tension between those two philosophies, political positions, what-have-you, nearly led to a socialist revolution in the Great Depression. FDR headed that off only by doing something Bill Clinton would do have a century later: stealing all their best ideas and putting them into practice.

Today, we call that the "New Deal."

Much has been made of privatization of government, and how much of our disaster relief has been "quietly" privatized in the past four years. I remember a plane wreck shortly after Reagan took office, where a brave citizen arrived first on the scene and daringly rescued some of the passengers. The rest were saved by rescue crews, men and women on the public payroll, paid by us to help protect us. But it suited Ronald Reagan's agenda to promote the individual initiative of that one man, to use him as a metaphor for what privatization could do. But, as Michael Kinsley pointed out, a private individual saved a few people; and the government employees saved everyone else on the plane.

That part was conveniently overlooked. It can't be overlooked now.

David Brooks sees this; although I think he sees a different result arising. This will be another tipping point for our country, if not a breaking point. Already, Texas has reached its limit of refugees, and is looking for other states to take up the burden. FEMA, as reported below, is not yet answering phone calls, much less dispensing the $10 billion that Congress just appropriated: but people are hungry and thirsty and tired now. Their needs can't be put on hold until the paperwork is cleared.

And an entire city is gone. Wiped out. The largest port in the country, closed. Even if it is physically reopened tomorrow, where do the workers live? How does a port operate without employees, but where do they go at night? Where do they buy food to eat? When will the city have potable water again, electricity, communications?

Make no mistake about it. Athenae is right. This will be our New Deal.

We won't have any choice about it.