THE LAST HURRAH

America's dark underbelly (Tim Harper, Toronto Star, September 10th 2005)

America's underclass dies prematurely every day.

They perish from diseases that take them before those who can afford better health care. They succumb to the violence that takes the young in too many neighbourhoods. They are casualties of rampant drug use born of despair.

But, until last week, they did not die in such numbers, 24 hours per day on cable TV news. Their bodies didn't lie unattended on city streets or wash up in floodwaters. They weren't herded into areas of unimaginable squalor because they didn't have the means to do better.

Hurricane Katrina has exposed America's cursed underbelly, its multitudes of poverty-stricken and hopeless, forgotten by a government bent on offering tax breaks to the wealthy.

Already, there are suggestions Katrina could help swing a social pendulum back in the United States, a pendulum that has swung in favour of less tax, smaller government and cutbacks on entitlement programs since the late '60s, a philosophy that flourished with the 1980 inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

"This has the potential to be a watershed moment," says Rosa Brooks, a professor and social commentator at Georgetown Law School in Washington.

"Just as the Pentagon quite smartly embedded reporters with soldiers in Iraq to ensure they get the soldiers' point of view, Katrina embedded hundreds of reporters in poverty, watching poor people suffer in the dark. They are powerful images. The reading and viewing public is responding to something it has not seen in the mainstream media."

Ronald Walters of the University of Maryland, an author and expert on class and racial politics, is also optimistic that the images of the poor suffering in New Orleans could spark a national debate on an issue that has been ignored for too long.

"This hurricane dredged it all up and shoved it in people's faces like nothing before in our history," he said. "I am reasonably confident that some type of sea change could be afoot. What you're seeing here is the blowback of the failure to deal with social policy over the years."

Even as they are still finding corpses, one can sense the drooling of intellectuals on the left at the prospect of a return to Great Society days. It’s hard to believe the brighter and more historically attuned among them really think larger welfare checks and a myriad of new government initiatives will do much, but perhaps that is not what is really exciting them. Having been marginalized for years by the religious right and the wicked neo-cons, America’s mainstream academic community, manned in large part by Boomers-in-twilight, now senses a last shot at relevancy, respectability and star-billing from a new national focus on something called “social policy”. Visions of books, conferences, workshops, demonstrations, lawsuits, community outreach initiatives, lucrative consulting fees and the adoration of the young must be dancing in a lot of academic heads these days. One shouldn’t throw charges of hypocrisy around without cogent evidence, but surely more than a few of them must be well aware from experience that America’s “soft underbelly” is decidedly hard ass.