Katrina rips Bush a new one Forget Iraq, the Supreme Court nominations, and Social Security - it took a hurricane to wake up the press, raise the issue of race and class, and redefine the political landscape. BY MARK JURKOWITZ
	Humiliation and heroism The moment hijacked jetliners slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, September 11 burned into the national psyche as myth. Olympian in scale, the catastrophe was impossible to compass in mere mortal terms, prompting a near-desperate longing for heroes. We found them, too, in abundance: firefighters and police officers, local elected officials, ordinary people who faced certain death to avert further disaster, even the president himself (some would argue), once he found his feet. Hurricane Katrina, though it came as less of a shock and, literally, in waves, will most certainly turn out to be just as catastrophic, and has already been described over and over as a calamity "of biblical proportions." But this is hardly the stuff of myth. Rather, Katrina put Americans face-to-face with nothing more ennobling than George W. Bush’s man-made free-market dystopia. An act of god or an evil enemy is humbling, even as it raises up heroes and sharpens courage and resolve. The encounter with Katrina was nothing short of humiliating. Even our will to see heroism in the carnage has been sapped, amid a spectacle of chaos that reduces everyone involved — including those of us helplessly looking on in horror — to either victims or villains. That’s not to say that bravery and personal sacrifice, scrappy resourcefulness and basic human kindness have been in short supply. But how do we make sense of it? The old categories don’t hold. Are looters improvisational aid workers or lawless thugs? Are police officers who abandon their posts deserving of our respect as well as our compassion? Are emotional reporters acting as badly needed conduits for the besieged or abdicating their responsibilities as objective journalists? Are nearly hysterical Democratic local officials performing their public duty under the most dire conditions imaginable or taking advantage of partisan politics and time-worn tensions over federal-versus-local authority? In each case, there are probably shades of truth in both views. But how to frame these stories — individually and collectively? In Bush’s free-market dystopia, it’s all crony capitalism and Christian-conservative-base watch: clean-up projects go to Dick Cheney’s pals over at Halliburton, oil executives are asked to "give," but not to even think about cutting their profits for a few months, and when the White House initially posted a list of relief charities for a public frantic to help, its first instinct was to prioritize faith-based programs. Bush’s ghastly insensitivity — flying out to San Diego to compare himself with FDR and yukking it up with reporters about looking forward to sitting on Trent Lott’s reconstructed porch as poor black people were dying in the watery hell of New Orleans — combined with his transparently forced show of compassion were truly villainous, by any measure. Meanwhile, Mayor Nagin, who stayed with his people, holed up in a downtown hotel crying out for help, was ineffectual — a victim. No, we don’t hear much hero-talk this time around. Heroism arises out of disorder of mysterious origins; contending with human corruption of this scope and dimension is merely humiliating. When a small, indecent man spits in your face, it hardly enlarges the spirit. - Catherine Tumber

Hurricane Katrina did not simply destroy physical infrastructure, social fabric, and countless lives on America’s Gulf Coast. It blew away the ground rules that had defined post-9/11 American politics and protected the most polarizing administration in recent history — one that failed to articulate a coherent domestic agenda, tossed gasoline on the smoldering culture wars, and dragged the country into a divisive and very likely disastrous war in Iraq.

All the elements that George W. Bush and Karl Rove had exploited for political gain — a timid and kowtowing mainstream media, a deafening silence about America’s growing underclass, the fear that criticizing the White House in the era of Al Qaeda was tantamount to treason, and Bush’s can-do, cowboy image — were shattered by the same winds and rains that savaged casinos in Biloxi and homes in Jefferson Parish.

What emerged from the rubble — with the nation’s collective psyche now a toxic stew of shock, shame, fear, and anger — were the hard truths about our society’s frightening inequities and our government’s horrifying incompetence.

• Rapper Kanye West, appearing during a NBC concert/fundraiser, stared straight into the camera and declared that "George Bush doesn’t care about black people."

• Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard openly sobbed during a television interview in which he declared that the "bureaucracy has committed murder here in the Greater New Orleans area."

• A grim-faced Tim Russert, appearing barely to conceal his fury, opened a Meet the Press interview with Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff by demanding: "Are you, or anyone who reports to you, contemplating resignation?"

• Reporting from New Orleans, Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera stiff-armed bloviating Bill O’Reilly’s efforts to shift responsibility away from the White House by declaring: "This is Dante’s Inferno, Bill. There is no way to sugarcoat it. This is the worst thing I’ve seen in a civilized nation."

THIS IS ABOUT RACE AND CLASS

In an interview with Fox News, Chertoff warned that "we need to prepare the country for what’s coming. It is going to be about as ugly a scene as you can imagine." He was referring to the many rotting corpses that will be unearthed when New Orleans is drained of floodwater. But he could have also been speaking about the much deeper national trauma to come.

Yes, the cameras will be on hand for the grisly scenes when the dead are finally found. And survivors will eventually tell their wrenching tales of death and delay on the TV newsmagazines. But there will also be shocks to the economy. There will be serious political implications for the White House. And there will be what columnist David Brooks, quoting historian John Barry, called the "human storm," a social backlash to Katrina that will highlight the yawning chasms and simmering resentments of race and class.

What happened in New Orleans, when a largely minority underclass was trapped in a drowning city to suffer, die, and, on occasion, engage in criminal violence, not only reinforced the notion that our society is deeply divided by color and money. It sent the inescapable message that the third world exists right here in 21st-century America.

Jesse Jackson drove that point home with blunt-force trauma when he assessed the scene in New Orleans and declared that "it looks like Africans in the hull of a slave ship." Musician and New Orleans native Wynton Marsalis eloquently, albeit more subtly, raised the specter of different treatment for different classes when he said that "we hear a lot of words, but we don’t see a lot of action."

There were some smaller race-based brushfires that leapt up from the ruins of the storm in the media. A controversy erupted over two photographs, one that described a black youth with groceries as a looter and another of two lighter-skinned people described has having found groceries. There was a debate over the use of the word "refugee" to describe the displaced residents, with some arguing that the word connotes second-class status. But those battles only direct our attention to the overriding issue, illustrated by statistics from a New York Times story on racial disparity in New Orleans: 35 percent of the city’s black residents — almost 110,000 people — lived in poverty, according to the 2000 census. More than half of the impoverished black households in that city did not have an automobile — and thus had little hope of escape from Katrina.

Surveying the displaced poor who have been shipped off to the Houston Superdome, Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren put it succinctly. "The rich people are lucky," she said. "These people aren’t."