The New York Times
September
4, 2005
The
Bursting Point [ or The
Anti-9/11 ]
By DAVID
BROOKS
As Ross Douthat observed on his blog, The American Scene,
Katrina was the anti-9/11.
On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government
response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor
suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united
and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.
Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took
control. Authority was diffuse and action was
ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were
abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans
squabbled while the nation was ashamed.
The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of
crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving
the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of
leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder
confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.
And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge
cultural moment is this: Last week's national humiliation
comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking
institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the
nation's psyche.
Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence
failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find
W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar
planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and
corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals
at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in
baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib.
Public confidence has been shaken too by the steady rain
of suicide bombings, the grisly horror of Beslan and the
world's inability to do anything about rising oil prices.
Each institutional failure and sign of helplessness is
another blow to national morale. The sour mood builds on
itself, the outraged and defensive reaction to one event
serving as the emotional groundwork for the next.
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.
As a result, it is beginning to feel a bit like the
1970's, another decade in which people lost faith in
their institutions and lost a sense of confidence about
the future.
"Rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown/What a mess!
This town's in tatters/I've been shattered," Mick
Jagger sang in 1978.
Midge Decter woke up the morning after the night of
looting during the New York blackout of 1977 feeling as
if she had "been given a sudden glimpse into the
foundations of one's house and seen, with horror, that it
was utterly infested and rotting away."
Americans in 2005 are not quite in that bad a shape,
since the fundamental realities of everyday life are
good. The economy and the moral culture are strong. But
there is a loss of confidence in institutions. In case
after case there has been a failure of administration, of
sheer competence. Hence, polls show a widespread feeling
the country is headed in the wrong direction.
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.
We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting
point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it
anymore.
E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com
Copyright
2005 The New York Times Company
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