At times I can be a disaster junkie, I'll admit it. Four years ago when the planes hit the towers, Sal and I were awake watching the World As We Knew It became a darker and harsher place. Back in the early 90s, I spent a week watching TV in my St Kilda flat as Gulf War One happened. Now, as New Orleans lies a flooded and lawless urban swamp, I find that an hour or so of it is as much as I can endure in one go. Maybe it's because I'm at home feeling ratshit with my mystery lurgie, but I think it's something else.
Dig this. We're talking abou the wealthiest nation that this planet has ever produced. The bastion of liberty, the light on the hill of democracy. So why are so many poor black people sitting on freeway overpasses above the floodwaters under a hot sun dying of thirst?  The more I watched, the more it became clear that anyone in New Orleans who had the money to travel lit out inland when it became obvious that the place was going to become a toxic soup-bowl. Only bus-riders were left behind, along with the hospital staff. Overwhelmingly black folks. Babies dying in the heat, old women laying alongside the blanket covered corpses of their husbands. Why should this bother me more than any natural disaster anywhere in the World? I don't know, but it does.

Waiting for a Leader

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.

Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.

While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?

It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America "will be a stronger place" for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal.