bits drop off and float away

So the hurricane strikes and all of us foreigners watch the footage on the news with concern but without much anxiety. It’s just a matter of time before can-do America rolls up its sleeves and cleans up the mess, right?

Time goes by and then the Mayor of New Orleans pops up on the BBC talking about bodies floating down the streets and suddenly the estimate of deaths goes up into the thousands. It’s like watching someone jump out of an aeroplane and slowly realising that that person does not, in fact, have a parachute.

What’s really bizarre about this is that the US has established a huge federal bureaucracy over the past few years which is supposedly devoted to preventing or at least preparing for catastrophic attacks on American cities. Then a predictable natural disaster strikes a major city which turns out to be more or less completely unprepared for the consequences.

There’s something weirdly soviet about all this. We’re seeing this immensely powerful country which has somehow stopped working. There’s sand in the joints and the parts don’t fit together properly. There’s a general air of sluggishness and fatalism. No-one in authority seems to know what to do about anything, or if they do, they don’t have the resources. The president looks on with vague stupefaction as bits drop off and float away.

Comments

[CKR]

I think you've got it right, Jamie. Sadly enough.