Hurricane Katrina was a Political Epiphany

James Carroll
Katrina's truths

[The first epiphany is American poverty exposed.]

The spectacle of failure, how for days the government was powerless to help such people, only put on display how government was already failing them and everyone else. Here was Katrina's second main epiphany -- what it means that the United States, after a generation of tax-cutting and downsizing, has eviscerated the public sector's capacity for supporting the common good. The neglect of civic infrastructure, the destruction of social services, the abandonment of the safety net, the myth of ''privatization," the perverse idea, dating to the Reagan era, that government is the enemy: It all adds up to what we saw last week -- government not as the enemy, but as the incompetent, impotent bystander. The bystander-in-chief, of course, is George W. Bush, whose whining self-obsession perfectly embodies what America has done to itself.

One cannot see the devastated cities or that river of refugees or those harried National Guard soldiers without seeing something even more disturbing -- Katrina's third epiphany. This is what war looks like, and the harsh reality is that the United States has been the source of exactly such devastation elsewhere. Obliterated cities, populations pushed into refugee camps, young American soldiers overwhelmed by the impossibility of their mission -- this is Iraq today. Oil is part of the Gulf Coast story and part of Iraq's story, too. We are at war for oil, a war we cannot win. Four dollar gasoline. The truth is crashing over us, a tsunami of it.

James Carroll is an interesting guy. He was ordained as a priest in 1969, worked as chaplain at Boston University from 1972-1974 where he was also an antiwar protester, left the priesthood in 1974 and has been a writer ever since. His father, Joseph Carroll, was a lieutenant general in the Air Force who was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam War, a top advisor to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and a key figure in the US Air Force bombing campaign in Vietnam. James Carroll has written an autobiography about his struggles with his father, entitled God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us, which received the 1996 National Book Award in nonfiction.