Time's Joe Klein: Listen to What Katrina Is Saying

[question everything]

Sunday, Sep. 04, 2005

Listen to What Katrina Is Saying

The latest natural disaster to hit the Gulf Coast has a message for the entire U.S.
By JOE KLEIN

As the floodwaters rose in New Orleans last week, a group called Columbia Christians for Life announced that it had discerned God's purpose in the storm: the destruction of the five abortion clinics in the city. The proof was a radar photograph showing that the hurricane "looks like a fetus facing to the left (west) in the womb, in the early weeks of gestation." A photo of a 6-week fetus was helpfully provided for comparison.

(snip)

The Chinese believe that natural disasters signal the fall of empires, a shift in the "Mandate of Heaven." The 1976 Tangshan earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people, for example, was said to portend the end of Mao's reign. This may be akin to seeing a fetus in the shape of a hurricane, but the Chinese do have a point: we have had two catastrophes in the past four years—9/11 and Katrina—and taken together, they send a signal that America's remarkable late-20th century run may not be perpetual. Modifications in the way we live may be necessary. Certainly, the terrorist attacks have changed little things, like the way we ride airplanes, and profound things, like the basic assumptions of American foreign policy. And now there is New Orleans, which, at the very least, should spark a reconsideration of what has become a casual disdain for the essentials of governance and our common public life.

There was, last week, an immediate and furious debate about the racial implications of the tragedy, since most of the victims we saw on television were poor and black. There were recriminations about the lack of preparedness for the disaster, the corroded infrastructure, the mind-boggling swiftness of a city's collapse into anarchy. But those arguments can be neatly folded into a larger discussion about the radical turn toward what is inaccurately described as "conservatism" that American politics took in the late 20th century. There were good reasons for the turn: a new understanding of the inefficiencies of socialism and initiative-stifling government bureaucracies. But there were terrible reasons as well. Starting in the 1960s, Republicans exploited Southern opposition to integration, as the G.O.P. National Committee chairman, Ken Mehlman, recently admitted. This implicit racism evolved into a tacit unwillingness to rethink problems of poverty and race—an unwillingness shared by Democrats, who clung to old bureaucratic solutions and cosmetic remedies like affirmative action—and worse, to the denigration of a basic governmental role: the need to plan for the future, to anticipate crises. The new philosophy of governance was stated most crudely in 1987 by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: "There is no such thing as society ... There are individual men and women, and there are families."

There was no such thing as society in New Orleans last week.

Government cannot prevent hurricanes, of course, but the prevailing haplessness reflected 25 years of distorted priorities. In a civilized community, there is a need for collective thinking and preparation—not just for immediate risks like a natural catastrophe but also for more abstract concerns like the environmental issues that worry Robert Kennedy, as well as for eternal problems like poverty. Having celebrated our individuality to a fault for half a century, we now should pay greater attention to the common weal. As Kennedy's uncle said in his 1961 Inaugural Address, "Here on earth God's work must truly be our own."

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,1101282,00.html

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