Speaking of anarchy, a few words about New Orleans. Not the most current of subjects, I suppose, but I haven't had a chance to write much lately.

I have been interested by the shocked tone evident in certain articles saying that in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the United States looked like a Third World country. I wasn't shocked. The United States is a Third World country. When I think of the Third World, I don't think of places of universal, desperate poverty, places like Bangladesh, Somalia and Haiti. Those places are Fourth World. When I think of the Third World, I think of Mexico. I think of Brazil. I think of Malaysia, where my father grew up, and India, where he spent his early childhood and where he owns land. "In India," he once told me, "you look down street and on one side of street you see rich engineers who drive fancy car and work in big glass towers and on other side of street you see old woman sitting in dirt breaking stone into smaller stones for dollar a day." In other words, a slightly exaggerated version of Orange County, where I would drive behind a tall stucco wall to tutor kids who lived in McMansions and then emerge to find myself among shacks with metal roofs inhabited by immigrants who picked strawberries for a living. In Mexico, in Brazil, in India, in the United States, you have pockets of affluence cheek-by-jowl with frightening slums. That's the Third World.

The region Hurricane Katrina hit was Third World even by American standards. I've been to Louisiana. I've been to Mississippi. I've been to Alabama. I hope never to go back. Since New Orleans was destroyed, I've read many paeans to the place — it's everyone's favorite city on earth, it seems. Not mine. As Liza Daly once declared, "New Orleans is a hole." When I think of Louisiana, I think of casinos and oil rigs, festering swamps full of moldering buildings without hot water, little old ladies lined up at the gas station mini-mart at ten in the morning to buy liquor. Mississippi and Alabama were more of the same only with more billboards about hellfire and radio shows fulminating against "the homosexual agenda." This is the region that Tennessee's "Instapundit" wants me to believe is more developed than Sweden. Now, I haven't been to Sweden. But I did just get back from a country right next to Sweden up near the top of the Human Development Index, namely Canada. Specifically, I spent a few days in Montreal, which is a lot like New Orleans in some ways: French heritage, scads of restaurants and specialty shops, lots of drinking establishments and sex clubs for those into that sort of thing. I saw a lot of graffiti, a few seedy stretches, some homeless guys. But what I didn't see were vast swaths of desperate poverty. No South Bronxes, no Bed-Stuys, no Comptons, no 9th Wards, no Holyokes. This jibes with my previous trips to Canada. I figure there have to be slums, but I haven't been able to find them. I've been taken to the supposedly bad neighborhoods of Vancouver: they're not glitzy, but they've struck me as safe, clean, and full of decent housing.

Also, if a Canadian were to come down with a kidney infection in mid-July, he would not have to wait until the middle of August and fly three thousand miles in order to get it checked out due to lack of insurance, no matter what his income might be.

And somehow I have to think that if a major Canadian city were struck by a natural disaster, the government might actually do something.

Earlier this year the New York Times ran an article scoffing at the idea that Norway (which again leads the Human Development Index) is better off than the United States, because Norwegian office workers bring sandwiches from home to eat for lunch. Actually, this is hilarious enough that I'm going to just reprint it here:

One image in particular sticks in my mind. In a Norwegian language class, my teacher illustrated the meaning of the word matpakke — "packed lunch" — by reaching into her backpack and pulling out a hero sandwich wrapped in wax paper. It was her lunch. She held it up for all to see. Yes, teachers are underpaid everywhere. But in Norway the matpakke is ubiquitous, from classroom to boardroom. In New York, an office worker might pop out at lunchtime to a deli; in Paris, she might enjoy quiche and a glass of wine at a brasserie. In Norway, she will sit at her desk with a sandwich from home.

Oh, the humanity! Forget about famine in Niger — these poor wretches are in such dire straits that they have to eat sandwiches for lunch... ones they made at home! I love the way this author describes the teacher showing off her sandwich as if it were a leg she'd had blown off by a land mine. Elsewhere he marvels that in Norway people are so hard up that they'll drive the same car for several years. He goes on to argue Norway isn't even as well off as Spain. His sole criterion? In Spain the drinks are cheaper.

	Libertarianism in action

This is Third World thinking. It's all about what people can get individually — cars, booze — rather than collectively: health care, mass transit. (Montreal had a clean and efficient metro system. New Orleans, not so much.) The United States may not have a ceiling on how rich you can get, but neither did Zaire — ask Mobutu Sese Seko. A truly developed country is more concerned about the floor. A First World nation provides its citizens with what the Swedes call trygghet: security, the sense that you inhabit a space where you can't come to harm. That it's not sink or swim. In a Third World nation like the US, it's very much sink or swim. In the case of New Orleans, that turned out to be literal.

Why was New Orleans destroyed? I don't believe in a god, so unlike certain preachers, I don't think it's divine retribution for Mardi Gras... but I do believe in karma. Not in the sense that you get what you deserve, but in the sense that what you put into a system tends to pop out again somewhere down the line. The proximate cause of the disaster was raiding the Army Corps of Engineers' budget, but letting the levee project stall out is just a hint of the extent to which we've let our infrastructure crumble. Whether it's big things like parceling out the federal budget surplus to people who already have more than enough and trying to dismantle Social Security, or smaller things like Oregon voters choosing to close schools weeks early and Kentucky releasing prisoners years early rather than accepting even small tax increases, we as a society have been chipping away at the state. It's a dream come true for the libertarians, or at least for the libertarians who can afford private schools and private health insurance and an investment portfolio for retirement and flood insurance and a car to get out of town — oh yeah, guess you'll also need a private weather satellite to know when the hurricane's coming — and a credit card to pay for the gas and the hotels and stuff. For those who can't, well, glub glub.

Even if you can cheerfully watch your fellow citizens drown, though, there's another problem with the "I got mine" mentality. In the aftermath of the hurricane, the right-wing media was shocked and appalled to see that there was looting going on, and commentators such as Peggy Noonan and Michelle Malkin demanded that looters be shot on sight. We saw lots of pictures of white guys sitting in front of their businesses and homes with shotguns at the ready. This has pretty much been standard policy in the South since, at least, Haitian independence: defend against slave revolt. You've got yours, they don't have anything, so hover around your stuff with whips and guns and make sure they don't take it. Here's the thing, though. I grew up in a pretty affluent household. Yet we didn't need to sit out on the driveway with shotguns, or even to put a huge wall around the neighborhood with a rent-a-cop at the gate. Instead, we tended to leave the garage door open and the door inside the garage unlocked, often a little ajar. Anyone in the neighborhood could have sauntered in and helped himself or herself to all sorts of valuables. Never happened. Why not? Because everyone around was sufficiently well-off that no one had the impulse to steal. That is how a developed country works. You wouldn't have seen people in New Orleans running off with cheap jewelry and televisions if they hadn't been so poor that the shelves of a fricking Wal-Mart looked like a trove of unattainable treasures. Narrowing the gap between rich and poor isn't just about compassion. It's also about trygghet. If you feel the need to defend your property, then by definition your trygghet is somewhat lacking.

This is not to say that the cause of the looting was solely economic. Culture comes into play as well. This isn't Salt Lake City we're talking about — it's New Freaking Orleans, America's own temple to Dionysus. Even the editorials at the Times-Picayune admitted that the culture of lawlessness had a lot to do with why New Orleans fell apart instead of pulling together: it's pretty much the last place in the country you'd expect to pull off an orderly evacuation with everyone accounted for. When hurricanes come calling, New Orleans is used to ordering up beer and barbecues, not buses and bottled water. New Orleans is also notoriously corrupt, with much of the money allotted to civic projects finding its way into officials' pockets. But the US as a whole has been moving in New Orleans's direction. New Orleans may be, as they say in V for Vendetta, the Land of Do As You Please, but the agenda of the Bush Administration has been Consume As You Please, Pollute As You Please, Pay Workers As You Please. And as for corruption? Answer me this: if it's looting to break into a Wal-Mart and steal a TV, what do you call it when you're working for Halliburton under a cushy no-bid contract and, as in Iraq, conveniently "lose" several billion dollars, part of which you use to go buy a TV? Any chance of Peggy Noonan coming to your house and shooting you? Yeah, I didn't think so.

It seems that looting, on whatever scale, is not just a matter of economic calculus. Yes, poverty is to blame, and yes, alleviating poverty is a big part of the solution, but the looters at Halliburton aren't poor. Their goals are more along the lines of having five vacation homes instead of merely three. This is another aspect of being a First World nation: no Third World kleptocracy. It is no coincidence that the nations most concerned with trygghet are also the ones with the least corruption. Finland comes out best on this count (and has the best schools in the world as well). Joining the Finns atop the list are places like Iceland, Denmark, Sweden. Singapore's there too, and there you don't even have to worry about stepping in gum. It must be nice to have a government that's actually interested in governing instead of feeding at the trough, whether it be the Halliburton mess, or Tom DeLay's endless ethics infractions, or important jobs getting handed to the college roommates of political operatives... by the time you throw in "Jeff Gannon" and John Bolton and Karl Rove and realize that these are just a few of the scandals of 2005 — not talking about any other year, or about, y'know, policy — it's hard not to wonder along with Bob Dole, "Where's the outrage?" (By the way, who's in charge of handing out the Katrina money? Oh, right, Karl Rove. That should knock the US a few pegs further down on the Global Corruption Index by itself. But we're still ahead of Nigeria! And maybe Paraguay.)

Behold, the power of prayer

As long as we're talking about cultural factors, here's one that I didn't hear mentioned on Fox News: why did people stay behind in New Orleans? Yes, most who stayed couldn't afford to go; others were too sick; some were just stubborn. But I was pretty obsessive in following the New Orleans coverage, read article after article from nola.com and elsewhere, and they were packed with quotes from those who stayed, as related by family members. I would be surprised if there was even one that didn't have to do with God, Jesus and prayer. My favorite: "I'm not running from God. I'm going to sit right here and let King Jesus ride on." King Jesus! Is that like the king from Burger King, only nailed to a cross? Seriously, you want to stop blaming the Third World economy and (lack of) government and start talking about cultural factors? Start with a religious culture that encourages sheeplike fatalism and, when it does come time to actually take action, suggests wishing really hard at a 2000-year-old schizophrenic. Here's another good one: "I just kept saying 'Hold that water! Hold that water, Jesus!'" A burnt offering to Poseidon might have been more appropriate, and just as effective. The thing of it is, you had people all over the city praying, "Hold that water, Jesus!" Some discovered that this doesn't accomplish anything, but they're dead now. The rest think that God came through yet again. It's like the old trick where you write to 6400 people, telling half that a stock'll go up, the other half that it'll go down. Then to the 3200 winners you do the same thing. Eventually you end up with 100 people who've seen you get six right in a row and think you're a genius.

And again, it's not like New Orleans is anomalous these days. What's worse than a city full of people thinking they can pray away a hurricane is a government whose response when those prayers proved utterly futile is... that's right, a National Day of Prayer!

In the Princeton Review SAT manual there is a sentence completion question — not of my own devising — that says, "Shaken by two decades of virtual anarchy, the majority of people was ready to buy ------- at any price." A lot of students fill in exactly the wrong answer and borrow the Bush Administration's all-purpose reply: "Freedom?" NO. Here's hoping that having watched New Orleans suffer from a week of virtual anarchy, they start to realize what we need: order, stability, government, trygghet... civilization. When the government is oppressive, it's easy to take a cue from Alan Moore and daydream about putting on a Guy Fawkes mask and burning down Parliament. But the problem with the current American regime is less oppression than negligence. People voted for the "daddy party" and it turned out to be full of deadbeat dads. What do you blow up then?

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