What does Katrina, and its aftermath, look like from South Africa?
Horror travels surprisingly well, it seems. People here are stunned by it, of course, as they are everywhere, and far too many South Africans remain, even today, conversant with despair; though this tongue, they would have thought, is but rarely spoken in America. (When South Africa’s ETV recently reported, in a CNN-style bottom-of-screen headline scroll, the continuing increase in the number of poor Americans, the word “poverty” was enclosed in quotes.) I’m not sure I can understand this disaster from this distance. To understand what it means to anyone who has lost a home, a livelihood, a loved one, a city, one would have to go to New Orleans. But to understand what it means to the soul (”soul”?) of America, one must watch American TV, probably. So perhaps I cannot understand; though I shall try.
As I write, at the top of the LA Times “most e-mailed stories” list is a Robert Scheer column, The real costs of a culture of greed:
Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina’s destruction grew longer with each hour’s grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.
Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans’ flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long’s ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.
We find ourselves at a moment when shame, and shaming, has deep resonance. But this raging bitterness that inflicts our nation (or can it be only half of it? Still?)—what is to be done with it? Even David Brooks, who maintained an amazingly determined optimism right on into the second term of a cynical administration whose incompetence defies belief, sees that we’re in a dark time:
The scrapbook of history accords but a few pages to each decade, and it is already clear that the pages devoted to this one will be grisly. There will be pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers, beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq and corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them.
It’s already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade. Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil.
What’s more, Brooks does not believe this will simply blow over:
Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.
Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970’s. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.
If our official culture has succumbed to greed, many ordinary Americans, opening their wallets and even their homes to provide relief to desperate strangers, have not. New Orleans will be rebuilt, but we must not stop there.
Letting go is hard.
Shoppers “will continue to benefit from regional buying that remains attuned to local preferences and lifestyles, plus enjoy the distinctive merchandise and shopping experience that’s part of the Macy’s brand,” Federated Chairman Terry J. Lundgren said.
While Chicagoans are understandably sickened, Minneapolis has been through this already. Dayton’s we cared about, but now it hardly matters. Why not drop all the old family names? Call Macy’s “Federated Price Point 1″ and Bloomingdale’s “Federated Price Point 2.”
When people fall in love, they should tell the world. 
Ice cream for dogs is now the