Where Y'at?

Let's start with what Anne Rice wrote, in the New York Times:

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.

Nothing could be more protypically American than to enjoy "sin" while simultaneously decrying it. What do you think has made Hollywood so rich? We love to hate the celebrities we love to drool over, to see naked on the big screen, to read about doing all the things we never do in our drab, quotidian lives. That's American culture pure, distilled to its essence: people as consumable goods.

Then we have the rest of our "culture," and mostly, that means the South. We despise Southern "rednecks," even as our corporations sponsor NASCAR cars and drivers and lap up the money the "rubes" put down. We love the blues, the "roots" music of "rock 'n' roll" (itself a blues term for sexual intercourse), but we don't want to be reminded that the blues was not written for our entertainment: it was born because life in the agricultural, rural, poor South, was bone hard. And paying no attention to this, is absolutely nothing new:

As a matter of social policy, the catastrophic lack of response in New Orleans is exceptional only in its scale and immediacy. When it comes to caring for our fellow countrymen, we all know that America has never ranked very high. We are, of course, the only democracy in the developed world that doesn't offer health care to its citizens as a matter of right. We rank 34th among nations in infant mortality rates, behind such rival superpowers as Cyprus, Andorra and Brunei.

But these are chronic conditions, and even many of us who argue for universal health coverage have grown inured to that distinctly American indifference to the common good, to our radical lack of solidarity with our fellow citizens. Besides, the poor generally have the decency to die discreetly, and discretely -- not conspicuously, not in droves. Come rain or come shine, we leave millions of beleaguered Americans to fend for themselves on a daily basis. It's just a lot more noticeable in a horrific rain, and when the ordinary lack of access to medical care is augmented by an extraordinary lack of access to emergency services.

Harold Meyerson.

And the poor that don't die discreetly, have the grace to be in "Third World" countries. The ones where people dig mud by hand to fill wicker baskets, the mud containing a mineral essential to the cell phone that sits on the desk beside me right now. No mud, no cell phone. It's as necessary as the gasoline I just put in my car. But the workers who dig that mud live half a world away, and corruption around just that "industry" is rampant; poverty is endemic, and the fact that they don't even work in "sweat shops" producing something as unnecessary as $200 sneakers, means they don't rise to our level of awareness at all.

Which means the major difference between Europe, and us, is that the Europeans, by and large, try to treat their own citizens well, even as they exploit the "Third World," too. But that only makes us worse. As Harold Meyerson sees it:

By which measures, precisely, do we lead the world? Caring for our countrymen? You jest. A first-class physical infrastructure? Tell that to New Orleans. Throwing so much money at the rich that we've got nothing left over to promote the general welfare? Now you're talking.

And now, the world sees it, too. It has become undeniable:

In fact, the spectacle of the hurricane causing a disaster of third-world proportions in the United States seems to have provoked a sort of dismay among Europeans, mingling with the sorrow. As a reporter on BBC Television argued on Friday, not able to keep the anger from his voice, the looting, the armed gangs, the gunplay and, especially, the arrogance, in his view, that the mostly white police displayed toward mostly black residents represented "the dark underbelly of life in this country." There was something shameful, he said, about the way a natural disaster has produced behavior that, for example, the tsunami didn't produce in the third-world countries it hit. And it is painful to be a witness to somebody else's shame.

"Why should hundreds die, mostly African-Americans, in a predicted disaster in the richest nation on earth" was one expression of a widespread feeling in Europe, this one appearing Friday in a letter in the British newspaper The Guardian.

There were many comments to the effect that earlier predictions of the disaster did not lead public officials to make sure the levees would withstand any possible onslaught, and there was the unspoken opinion that such would not have been the case, say, with the dikes of the Netherlands, or in any of the rich European countries.

"These are incredible scenes from the richest and the biggest country in the world," Jean-Pierre Pernaud, the anchorman on one of the main midday French news programs, said on Friday. A program on the competing channel ran an interview with a specialist on the United States, Nicole Bacharan, who said, "These images reveal to the world the reality in the Southern states: the poverty of 37 million Americans."

It's that reality we Americans don't want to see, yet can't look away from. I remember the marches on Selma, in the '60's. "Bull" Connor did more for the Civil Rights marchers than Martin Luther King was able to do, to that point: he treated the mostly African-American marchers the way the South had always treated "trouble-makers," who were always "black." He turned the dogs and the water cannon on them. Bu this time, the cameras were there. We saw it. We saw who we were. And slowly, very slowly, too slowly: the sight made us sick.

Sick enough to do something; not sick enough to do enough. But it made us sick that government would treat its own citizens that way, that government would take positive action to assault harmless people in such a brutal manner. Now government has assaulted its people by default, by neglect, by incompetence, by sheer bureaucratic bumbling. This time it is the opposite failure of government, the failure to protect against a "natural" enemy. This is a failure of what our "Founding Fathers" understood as the "Social Contract." And the world sees it, again:

What we are witnessing in New Orleans is nothing less than the abject failure of government at the one task it is supposed to do, deal with problems too big for private enterprise to handle. We pay taxes, we follow rules, and get things that we normally would not do for ourselves in return. It is a social contract, and in the wake of hurricane Katrina, it was a worthless piece of paper.

Even if we'll never win the national-greatness sweepstakes for solidarity, though, we've long been the model of the world in matters infrastructural, in roads, bridges and dams and the like. But the America in which Eisenhower the Good decreed the construction of the interstate highway system now seems a far-off land in which even conservatives believed in public expenditures for the public good. The radical-capitalist conservatives of the past quarter-century not only haven't supported the public expenditures, they don't even believe there is such a thing as the public good. Let the Dutch build their dikes through some socialistic scheme of taxing and spending; that isn't the American way. Here, the business of government is to let the private sector create wealth -- even if that wealth doesn't circulate where it's most needed. So George W. Bush threw trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, and what did they do with it? Did the Walton family up in Bentonville raise the levees in New Orleans? Did the Bass family over in Texas write a tax-deductible check to the Mennonites for the billions of dollars they would need to rescue the elderly from inundated nursing homes?

From The Inquirer (UK). The Civil Rights struggle exposed government corrupted by hatred and racism. New Orleans exposes government corrupted by indifference to the very job it is supposed to do, and still corrupted by racism.

It isn't just government, of course, nor just a governmental problem. It's a cultural problem, a social problem, a spiritual problem. When Barbara Bush says:

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas," Barbara Bush said in an interview on Monday with the radio program "Marketplace." "Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality."

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway," she said, "so this is working very well for them."

It is appalling mostly because we know so many people who undoubtedly agree with her. The attempts to "blame the victim" coming out of Washington are likely to work only because this is the way America works: your life is your business, and your responsibility. If you are poor, it must be your fault. But it's about to become our responsibility. The Secretary of Education, in front of the TV cameras, said the schools should just focus on enrolling students and giving them, presumably, everything once principal was listing off earlier in the report: books, supplies, clothes, desks, teachers, classrooms, etc. Focus on that, she said; payment will come later.

Except, of course, suppliers, teachers, food providers, etc., won't wait until Tuesday to be paid for the hamburger we need today. And people in "Dome City," as they are now calling the area around the Astrodome where 30,000 people are living, are all going to be looking for housing. It's going to be a slow, painful process. Money needs to flow. BBC is reporting right now that people who need help from FEMA are being told they'll have to wait 10-14 days; without cash, without housing, unless they are already in "Dome City."

This is the greatest country on earth? This is the richest country in the history of the planet? Now we see what our "greatness" and our wealth and our comfort rest on. Microsoft is rich because many people buy its product, because lots of dollars from lots of people flow to one pocket. The people with those deep pockets enjoyed the culture of New Orleans: the blues, the jazz, the food. I did, too, at one time; and wanted to, again; and still want to. But our system depends on people so poor they must play in the streets of the French Quarter, like the young boy I saw there, 15 years ago now. A boy younger than my daughter now, playing the trumpet to make Wynton Marsalis weep with envy, for the pennies in his cap. That was New Orleans. That is America.

We need New Orleans to sell cheap to us its most precious resources, for our pleasure, for our comfort, the same way we need armies of workers at DisneyLand or in the restaurants or making our cars, clothes, shoes, building our houses, mowing our lawns. We need them to work cheap, so we can "afford" it, so we can enjoy it. And we need them not to remind us that their labor is hard; that their music comes from a life more grievous and brutal than we can imagine, that even their brilliant talent might not be enough to make them "rich and famous."

We need them so we don't have to look in the mirror, and see who we are, and how many poor, weak, and dark-skinned, shoulders we stand on.

We need them to put the rock back down, to put things back the way they were. But that's precisely what we don't need: to go back to things the way they were.