Whether or not one agrees with Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s strategy of introducing thirty-five articles of impeachment (pdf) against President Bush on the floor of the House last night — I don’t know how anyone could deny that Kucinich’s list provides a devastating indictment of the Bush administration’s misuse and abuse of power over the past eight years:

See the second part of his floor speech here.

If what the Bush administration has done to our global credibility, our legal foundations, our promise to safeguard all of our citizens is not impeachable, what is? And, from all accounts (including now from inside Bush’s own inner circle), this recklessness and neglect was and is the extension of a premeditated, systematic agenda. A Reagan-like ignorance or faulty memory can never be an excuse here.

What’s most interesting about these articles of impeachment from a cultural standpoint is how they barely register in the mainstream media — the same media that failed to report on most of the offenses that they now begrudgingly admit are true.

Admitting the gravity of these offenses, of course, would make a mockery of all the vacuous pundit-driven shows that have come to dominate the media landscape. True investigative reporting has been replaced by off-the-top-of-the-head reactions to packaged political events.

This has all been said before, I know. But when Rep. Kucinich exposes the mechanisms of power so blatantly, I feel it’s independent media’s obligation to spread the word.

Why would it take a presidential debate directed by African Americans and focused on issues of particular concern to African Americans to ask the questions that everyone should be asking of the presidential candidates?

Well, it’s because race still matters in America. It’s the single greatest factor dividing America, and as a result, it’s the best site from which we see how inequality — in all racial, sexual and economic forms — is defining America.

In that context, we shouldn’t be surprised that the first “All-American Presidential Forum” last Thursday on PBS, moderated by Tavis Smiley and centered around the 10 issues expressed in The Covenant with Black America, was so successful — so revealing and meaningful.

Bill Richardson, in response a question about poverty and education, said it was the first time in the multiple debates they have had that any of the candidates had been asked formally about educational issues.

Smiley told Maryland professor Sherrilyn Ifill, “Tonight, we asked 9 questions — this was the first time I’ve heard the candidates asked about Darfur and about Katrina. That was the point of tonight.” Check out Ifill’s live debate analysis at blackprof.com (a not-to-be-missed site, by the way, for accessible but informed cultural and political analysis).

We also shouldn’t be surprised, though, that many of us didn’t even know the debate was happening. Some PBS stations showed other programming — and the mainstream media almost completely ignored it (although, it should be noted, everyone can still catch the PBS webcast).

We just don’t like to talk about issues that force us to face the uncomfortable realities of America — especially when they deal with race.

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Last month marked the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the 10-year anniversary of President Clinton’s signing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act, better know simply as welfare reform. Poverty and renewal were, once again, hot news topics. The most revealing story, though, is this country?s persistent lack of commitment to helping those in need — much like President Bush’s fleeting flirtation with confronting the poverty of New Orleans with “bold action.”

Welfare legislation radically changed the nation’s welfare program for families which had begun in 1935 along with social security. Modeled after states widows pension programs and spearheaded by FDR’s key advisor Harry Hopkins, the legislation clearly broke with the idea that combating poverty was the province of private charities and states and localities.

It was bitterly opposed not only by conservatives but also by charities and social workers who argued that federal involvement would make welfare a “right” and reduce the likelihood that the poor would adopt the moral values and work habits to raise themselves out of poverty.

(more…)

The final weeks of 2005 marked a period of fervent reading, if not fervent posting. Time to honor the resolution of writing more frequently in 2006. But first, a brief review of bits of culture that came to an end.

A moment of silence, please, for the death of ?the old Mainstream Mass Culture,? which gave way to the rise of ?new, fragmented technoculture,? and, more importantly, the ?empowerment of the American consumer ? which isn’t quite the same as the American citizen?; ?the beginning of the end of serendipity,? thanks to that ability to customize culture; and don?t forget the mainstream media itself.

Farewell to great TV theme songs — and the formely reasonable expectation that you?ll know everything about a TV character if you watch every episode.

Goodbye to Renee Graham, who ended her ?Life in the Pop Lane? column with a look back at memorable moments of 2005 and ?those folks who through their remarkably stupid, illegal, and publicity-hungry actions made writing this column so easy for the past six years.?

(more…)

When something ephemeral begins to fade, you rarely notice it. But if you stop and become self-aware before it disappears, it can be the strangest sensation — like reaching out in a dream.

Have you thought about New Orleans today?

Probably not.

Don’t feel guilty, though. You’re not supposed to be. We’re moving on.

Yes, we are still hearing periodic stories on the nightly newcasts — but they are becoming fewer and farther between. And while losing our emotional investment is sad, the accompanying loss of political will is even sadder … and much more devastating.

The moment seems to have passed — not only to have an honest discussion about race, class and prejudice in American culture and media but also — ironically, a much more simpler task — to save New Orleans. What will be the legacy of Hurricane Katrina? It appears to be a not-fully-analyzed racist hysteria and a never-to-return city in ruins.

Can we change that legacy? Well, let’s at least go down trying. In a mediated culture that is on the constant search for the “new” to grab more eyeballs, we need to assert the power of remembering.

No one is doing that better than National Public Radio. While I’m not always the biggest fan of the NPR — believing they substitute quirkiness for depth far too often and reduce factual realities to murky “political issues” by attempting to represent “both sides” — they have been at their best the last couple of months. Not a day goes by when we are not taken into the communities of the Gulf Coast to be reminded of the lives that have been disheveled and displaced. In the words of the victims themselves, we understand how much home and community means and how irresponsible and cavalier it would be for us to deprioritize them.

To take only the most recent example, during Friday’s Morning Edition Anthony Brooks took us into the still-neglected 9th Ward, the poorest neighborhood of New Orleans, and not surprisingly, the last to re-open.

NPR has not stopped at this field reporting, however. They have consistently attempted to give a context to the social and political struggles that Gulf Coast residents face locally and all concerned American face nationally. On Friday’s All Things Considered, Melissa Block (in what was close to a 30-minute piece) looked at the short and long-term effects of flash floods in West Virginia in 2001. While it offered a testimony to the power of community and its ability to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles, it did not shy away from letting us feel what was irretrievably lost.

Let’s not let our members of Congress block out these stories. Keep up yourself with the latest bills and remind them how a community votes.

There are times when I wonder whether the president of the United States thinks the American people are a mass of blithering idiots, or if he is simply so dense himself, he can’t see the most obvious idiocy in his own words. Iraq aside, the past few weeks have offered truckloads of such words.

In interviews and public statements during the crisis over Katrina the president at various times claimed that no one could possibly have anticipated what happened in New Orleans. Apparently he did not know that several members of his administration familiar with the work of their agencies were fully briefed on the potential disaster.

When the president finally appeared in hurricane-ravaged areas, he congratulated his ill-informed FEMA Director that he was doing a great job. A tape loop of “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” [full transcript] belongs in a time capsule.

Trying to show his connections to the city of New Orleans in the middle of this disaster, the president recalled that New Orleans was special to him because he frequently went there and got stoned. What a sentimentalist!

After realizing that things were not going very well, the president became omnipresent in the Crescent City and along the Gulf Coast hugging people, looking serious, and staging a nighttime speech at considerable cost and effort. The spectacle of Bush in New Orleans alone will be enough to reserve a special place for him in history’s Hall of Fools.

So a few weeks pass. A second hurricane comes and goes without total disaster. Progress! A successful confirmation of the new Chief Justice goes well. Then indictments begin falling from the sky on Republican insiders and cronies across the Bushwacked Landscape. The president will not comment. Of course.

The next historic development is the second Supreme Court nomination. This time, as his feckless father once did, the president tells us that after a search far and wide across the land, he has found the very best and most qualified person for the job. That person would be Harriet Miers. Really?

Seemingly Ms. Miers has three major qualifications: she comes out of a big time Dallas law firm, she was and still is the president’s lawyer, and she is a born again Christian. In addition, she is also a born again Democrat.

The major qualification of Ms. Miers seems to be that she is a Bush loyalist. Cronyism anyone? At least she isn’t Michael Brown.

Her intellectual brilliance comes immediately into question when Ms. Miers is quoted as saying that George W. Bush was the most brilliant person she has ever known. Perhaps Ms. Miers doesn’t get out much.

Most amazing of all are Bush’s reassurances to his neo-con base. He insists that Ms. Miers is a strict constructionist and a conservative and “would stay that way.” Are you sure Mr. President?

“I’ve known her long enough to know she’s not going to change, that 20 years from now she will be the same person with the same judicial philosophy she has today.”

How Bush knows this is a mystery. Perhaps he looked into to her soul as he once did with Vladimir Putin.

What we know, and apparently the president doesn’t know, is that Ms. Miers has made several significant and profound changes in her life, not the least of which involves her religion. Born and raised a Roman Catholic somehow and in some way the woman who will not change, changed, from Catholic to Evangelical. This is no small development in anyone’s life whether you view it from the Catholic or the Evangelical end of the story.

We know, and apparently the president doesn’t know, that Ms. Miers was once a Texas Democract, and then changed to become a Texas Republican. For Texas Republicans this may not be a major change, but I assure you that for Texas Democrats it is.

We know, and apparently the president doesn’t know, that as a young woman Ms. Miers believed in the right of women to have an abortion, and then later came to an anti-abortion position.

It seems to me that in this latest walk around the block the president has walked in ignorance or he simply thinks the public is at such a level of idiocy they will believe anything he says.

What the president seems to have forgotten is that Hurricane Katrina pulled back the curtain on his fantasy world. The public got a very candid look at this man of limited vision, protected from reality by a life of privilege, who at one time appeared as nothing less than a Wizard and now stands exposed as a man of stunning incompetence.

Update 10.07: The Washington Post reports that the unfounded rumors of violence in New Orleans probably slowed down aid from coming into the city.

I guess we would call that a very sad example of real life imitating art — or at least the fictional narrative that the media constructed and that the rest of America ate up. If anyone doubts the power of the racism that subtly and silently undergirds many of our cultural conversations, this should put that myth to rest.

I’ve been reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with my students over the past few weeks. I cannot help but see how it speaks to the latest news out of New Orleans.

Conrad’s story is a tale of a European man, Marlow, making a trip up the Congo River during the height of Belgium’s imperialist project in the late 19th century. He sees himself as entering the “heart of darkness” — a place of savagery that has degraded and ruined at least one other European man, Kurtz.

While the novel is certainly a damning critique of King Leopold’s genocidal methods and a more universal exploration into the “darkness” that is part of every human soul, it is also a tale of entrenched prejudice and blindness.

Marlow, despite his often enlightened introspection, represents the native Africans as little more than savages, at home only in the “wild and passionate” jungle and out of place in the “civilized” world. Although he admits repeatedly and obsessively that he cannot “see” into the jungle and, presumably, into the individuals lives and societies that populate it, he never questions the “truth” of his representation.

It appears as if the 21st-century American media works from the same imaginary premise and has been infected, even more unexcusably, with the same systemic blindness.

Almost all of those reports — about the rapes, murders, shootings and riots in the Superdome, the Convention Center, and on the streets of New Orleans in the days following Hurricane Katrina — well, uh, how do I say it?

They weren’t true.

Yep — no kidding — they were made up. They were lies to feed the media frenzy.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has done amazing work in cataloging and contextualizing all that it and others got wrong.

What is most remarkable as you read through the list is the massive distance between the truth and reality

“I think 99 percent of it is bulls—,” said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. “Don’t get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn’t see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. … Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved.”

And to say race didn’t play a role in the coverage would be perpetuating another kind of blindness.

The Los Angeles Times offered a shorter report on the latest revelations, but it includes a revealing interview with Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss:

Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.

“If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people,” Amoss said, “it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.”

David Carr’s piece in The New York Times, “More Horrible Than Truth: News Reports,” doesn’t make such a pointed critique, but the stories speak for themselves:

”I talked to a friend and, after the flood, they heard on the radio that a gang of 400 armed black looters were coming over the bridge to Hanrahan, where he lived,” said Ken Bode, a professor of journalism at DePauw University and a former correspondent for NBC. ”He and his neighbors were sitting in the street with guns and they decided to load up all they could and caravan out. He said the looters never got there because the National Guard turned them back.”

There was no band of looters coming their way.

“There is a timeless primordial appeal of the story of a city in chaos and people running loose,” Carl Smith, a professor of English and American studies at Northwestern University and the author of Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief, tells the NYT. Urban chaos narratives, he adds, offer “the fulfillment of some timely ideas and prejudices about the current social order.”

The best antidote for this disturbing media mea culpa might be taking refuge in honesty — an admission of our own prejudice and how it shapes our behavior. In the Times-Picayune report, for example, a National Guardsman experiences a productive cognitive dissonance about those “thugs” he had heard about:

As the authorities finally mobilized buses to evacuate the Dome on Sept. 2, many evacuees were nearing the breaking point. [Maj. David] Baldwin said soldiers could not have controlled the crowd much longer. They ejected a handful of people attempting to start a riot, screaming at soldiers and pushing crowds to revolt.

“We’re not prisoners of war - y’all are treating us like evacuees and detainees!” he recalled one of them shouting.

But many others sought to quiet such voices. On the deck outside the Dome on Sept. 1, the day before buses arrived, preachers took it upon themselves to lead the agitated crowd in prayer and song.

“Everybody needs to help the soldiers,” Baldwin recalled one of them saying. “We’re all family here.”

About 15 others joined the medical operation, as people collapsed from heat and exhaustion every few minutes, Baldwin said.

“Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around their asses,” he said. “But they were working their asses off, grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena” next door, which housed the medical operation.

If only more of us could step through the mediated jungle we live in and emerge on the other side — in the light of day.

The New York Times‘ Week in Review section featured a terrific cartoon by Dan Wasserman that shows the media “rediscovering” the poor. Magazine cover stories abound, from Fortune’s “Temp Jobs: Can You Ever Have Too Many?” to Food & Wine’s “All-Purpose Flour: The All-Purpose Food!” Meanwhile, a television announcer promotes a new series, Lifestyles of the Poor and Anonymous.

And it’s not just the media.

“All of a sudden the poor have emerged from the shadows of invisibility, lifted onto a temporary pedestal by natural disaster. Whether it is because of guilt, pity or the nation’s generosity in times of crisis, those who lost everything — many of whom had little to begin with — find themselves in a strange wonderland of recognition,” Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher wrote in a Washington Post front-page story last week that detailed how relocated Hurricane victims were being offered jobs, financial support and attention that is rarely paid to the poor — creating a dividing line between the poor themselves.

The destitute people sent fleeing by Katrina have been offered free housing, free clothing, free cars, free toys, special admission to universities and preferential job treatment. Athletes come to them , bestowing jerseys and autographs. Entertainers sing for them, and Bennigan’s restaurants here and in Houston announced Katrina’s kids could eat without paying for a while.

This is what it’s like for the celebrity poor, a new subculture created by Hurricane Katrina. [...]

How far this compassion should extend — and what it should look like over time — is looming as the next great social policy debate. What began as a response to the most devastating hurricane in the country’s history is segueing to a grander discussion about the treatment of those who live on the margins.

I wouldn’t say that the “celebrity poor” are a completely new subculture. Our cultural texts — novels, films, etc. — have long attempted to bring the plight of the poor into our consciousness. Unfortunately, while texts like Les Miserables, The Jungle and The Grapes of Wrath (to name a few oldies but goodies) had good intentions — and at times even forced changes in social policy — they relied upon a glorification of the poor to make their point, making it easy for the broader public to see them as charity cases rather than human beings.

And while mainstream hip hop in the present-day (both in music and film) claims to speak from the street, it is frequently riddled with stereotypes of the poor that that are then used as justification for their marginalization.

The paucity of exceptions to these two extremes of representations, of course, proves the rule — but the exceptions also point to a cultural path for redemption. Like a Dickens serial novel from the 19th century — but with much more complex characters — HBO’s The Wire patiently but persistently reveals the many sides of life for the poor in Baltimore — their desires and disappointments. In other words, it shows their full humanity.

Underground hip hop, of course, has served as a vital correction to its mainstream brethren. For a recent example, check out “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” — the latest track from The Legendary K.O. — in which we see Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of the disregarded.

In discussing the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina, John Leland also mentions Marquise Lee, a freelance video producer, who heard the song and created a video using scenes of African-Americans in New Orleans, images of the president and scenes from one of Kanye West’s video. “It was a first-person account of the struggle — ‘Come down and help me,’” said Lee.

Also in the Week in Review (yes, it’s filled with good stories), Leslie Kaufman notes that the United States is about to embark on a social experiment: “Will moving the poor out of New Orleans help them rise?”

Social scientists are interested in collecting evidence on whether relocation is sound public policy. Two previous small-scale relocation programs mentioned seem to indicate that the poor will do better if they’re separated and scattered among communities with lower concentrated poverty levels. They may, however, end up concentrated together under FEMA’s plan to house evacuees of New Orleans in trailer park encampments.

“Politicians of all stripes have already condemned this plan, fearing that the trailer camps will become ‘FEMA ghettos,’ economically and socially isolated from communities and jobs,” writes Kaufman, adding:

Of course, the New Orleans diaspora of the poor may pose other challenges - like political disempowerment. And while the poor may become less visible, their problems don’t disappear, said Margaret Simms, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research group based in Washington.

“Circumstances that make people poor — like low education and chronic disabilities — don’t disappear when you move them someplace else,” she said.

Nor when they reach celebrity status.

It’s hard to see the news channels continuing their fascination with a segment of our population that executives don’t see as a very profitable demographic, but it’s not much of a stretch to imagine the reality TV possibilities of tracking one family given a voucher to start over in a middle-class suburb and another assigned to living in sub-standard conditions.

Plus: “The Week in Television” notes that new sitcom My Name is Earl “about a low-life seeking redemption” was a hit for NBC.

While enjoyable on many levels, the first episode of Earl unfortunately relies on playing up the stereotypes of the working class and poor — often for satirical effect — rather than breaking them down. Earl and his brother, even though they are “good guys,” lack intelligence and common sense. And while both of them overcome their homophobia by the end of the first episode, the basis of that homophobia is never really questioned — and the stereotypes of gay men, on a side note, are never complicated.

And if the $100,000 winning lottery ticket seems like a stretch, remember that when it comes to poverty we always like to think there’s an easy way out.

Think Progress offers a breakdown of right-wing myths about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The well-researched media guide sets the record straight once and for all.

Pandagon points to conspiracy theories on who’s to blame for Katrina, including Amanda’s keen observation that it’s really the fault of single mothers.

*cross-posted from Ms. magazine’s “ms.musings” blog.

Thanks to everyone who wished us luck on our pet pick-up trip. Your e-mails and comments meant a lot.

We switched off driving throughout the night, and after a quick breakfast at the local Waffle House — where we were greeted with lots appreciation and discussion about the failure of the government to take care of its people — we put in a full day temperament-testing dozens of dogs and cats that might be fostered and/or adopted in the Chicago area. The husband of one of the Arkansas shelter volunteers is in Louisiana, helping to evacuate pets left behind or turned in by their owners after Hurricane Katrina. Those animals will then be housed in the many cages left vacant by the dogs and cats we selected.

We’re going to try to get a couple of hours of sleep and then start the journey home. I’ll add lots more tomorrow after another nap.

Plus: Today’s Feminist Wire notes that New Orleans police officers searching for survivors are in desperate need of supplies — everything from toiletries to flashlights. If you can help, please contact mmoore@feminist.org. The Feminist Majority Foundation’s National Center for Women and Policing will provide information on how to get these supplies delivered.

*cross-posted from msmusings.net

Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle states what many of us critics are loathe to admit: mainstream TV coverage of the aftermath, the response and the broadening context of Hurricane Katrina has been pretty darn good.

Although the initial coverage ranged from poor to horrible, once the news channels were able to step back and gain perspective, they began to shine. It was refreshing, in particular, to see producers and reporters take to heart the criticism of their representations of looting — and of race and class in general. We saw a genuine willingness to self-evaluate and adapt.

Certain reporters, furthermore, became transformed by the moment — right in front of our eyes — and discovered some passion we never knew they had.

Of course, as Goodman notes, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule — and plenty of lessons to be learned and issues still to be vigilant about.

For example, although many reporters have been taking the Bush administration to task, few mainstream media outlets disclosed the contrived nature of Bush’s visit to the disaster area. German TV (via Washington Monthly via Laura Rozen) told a very different story:

ZDF News reported that the president’s visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of ‘news people’ had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

Commentators searching for a silver lining in the cloudy haze still lingering more than a week after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast are finding it in the unprecedented response of the hip hop community toward the tragedy. Renee Graham of the Boston Globe articulates her reasons to hope:

Perhaps this rapid response to Hurricane Katrina will push the hip-hop community toward an era of renewed concern beyond material things. Certainly, its members are reacting to horror in their own backyards but also to the reality that communities of their fans are in desperate and dire need.

These articles place Kanye West’s emotional plea/indictment last Friday night in a nice context, revealing that the emotion — and the anger — isn’t isolated or easily dismissed.

The generosity and social awareness of the hip hop community is a complicated phenomenon, of course. All you to do is take a close look at Mr. West himself.

And most of us see the noisy involvement of celebrities at these moments to be a double-edged sword, at best. It’s hard to separate those seeking a great photo-op and those being genuinely altruistic — or to even draw that line for people who make their living by being famous.

In fact, many Ms. readers may be … but first I’m going to Arkansas.

I’m part of a pet rescue group that got the call today to pack up because we’re hitting the road. We’ll be retrieving dogs and cats from a shelter in Arkansas so they have room to take in pets that have been affected by Hurricane Katrina. A number of animals were rescued this weekend; others were turned in by residents who, now homeless, can no longer keep them. At least for now, those animals will be in need of foster homes, and shelters around the country are coming to their aid.

For more on these efforts, visit Best Friends Animal Society, the Humane Society of the United States, Noah’s Wish, United Animal Nations, or the International Fund for Animal Welfare. All of these groups are working in the disaster areas.

To offer general support, contact your local or national Red Cross. And don’t forget Ms.’ list of women’s health clinics and domestic violence shelters that need your help.

I should be back online fully by Thursday. I’ll try to post from the road — and will of course report on the trip as soon as I can.

*cross-posted from msmusings.net

More recent coverage of Hurricane Katrina has revealed with increasing complexity our attitudes toward and representations of race and class.

Kanye West did his part during NBC’s relief concert (and it’s nice to see that despite NBC’s rushed statement disavowing West, not everyone at MSNBC backed away from it). And I appreciated Sen. Barak Obama’s nuanced remarks, as told to the Chicago Sun-Times Washington bureau chief.

Those interested in reading what reporters and others in the news industry are writing about the use of the word “looting” and other hotly debated issues might want to take a look at Romenesko, particularly the letters section.

ThinkProgress looked at early cable news coverage of race and class issues and found the coverage lacking.

The New York Times yesterday looked at how two families — one white and middle-class, and one black and poor — are coping with starting over.

According to Barbara Bush, things are just swell in Houston — and if it isn’t, how would the people there know? “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them,” the former first lady said in remarks first aired on American Public Media’s Marketplace (via Editor & Publisher)

*cross-posted from msmusings.net

People are still dying on the streets of New Orleans. Parts of the devastated Mississippi coast have not yet been visited by any aid. Animals of all kinds have been left in homes, on farms or wandering the streets.

It’s hard to think of the future at a time like this.

But many of us feel desperate and disempowered with our inability to help. We have posted futile messages offering shelter and more on every website we could find. We have offered to volunteer and are still awaiting a response. We have contemplated making independent trips down South but have jobs or people that are impossible to leave behind or are afraid we’d run out of gas before we got there.

In our case, let me make a suggestion.

Keep the anger alive.

Amidst the incomprehensible tragedy, there is a great opportunity for change — for renewal and reform — on two fronts.

First, it is now clear what we long suspected: the rhetoric of homeland security was smoke and mirrors — fomenting fear and domestic support for a policy of American neo-imperialism. I know that sounds like a cliched line from a left-wing academic. But, guess what, the winds of Katrina have exposed the administration — and the left-wing academics were right all along.

The clear neglect of FEMA as an organization, the dismissal of calls from engineers and congressmen to prioritize flood control in New Orleans, and the dispassionate and delayed response from the President have been irrefutable evidence in slow motion this week.

So — let’s never let this happen again. Let’s have the most prepared and precise emergency response organization in history. Let’s have it stand as a model for the world.

To do that, this administration needs to pay a price. A big price.

Second, New Orleans must be built again — from the ground up in many areas. With America shamed into facing its dirty little secret — the stark inequity between classes and races — maybe, just maybe, we can demand that the new New Orleans can become a place where everyone lives with dignity and respect.

Consider truly mixed income communities. A network of supported and coordinated social services that are accessible to all. Stellar public transportation. Healthcare for all. Great schools for all.

Why not?

I can’t imagine a better monument to all of those who have lost their lives.