Katrina (the Storm) goes, in part, a long way in illustrating just how a cautious military foreign policy can strategically prevent a nation?s flanks being exposed in the event of domestic catastrophe. There can be no doubt expeditious life-saving national guard response was delayed in going to the aid of New Orleans due to our huge commitment in Iraq.

But particularly when one also considers the enormous pork barrel spending of the Republicans in congress recently, it is quite clear ?conservatism? no longer equates with ?caution.?

To further illustrate this historic(al) incongruity, I was thinking about having grown up absurd on the Plains, baptized several times in a variety of Protestant denominations, as, I suppose, God sought to get it right in a problematic case. I, naturally, heard many things in those drab, dreary cathedrals, but I never heard even one of those relatively humble ministers ever approach espousing violence, much less the assassination of a national leader, as the Rev. Pat Robertson recently did for Pres. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela on his ?700 Club.? Talk about throwing caution out the window. Underlying his call, of course, is the complete rejection of independence of both thought and action on the part of Latin American governments. We, meaning the U.S., has reacted phobically throughout our history to the least suggestion of any and all political self-determination on their part, excepting those that pass our scrutiny?while extolling ?what we stand for?: which, apparently, is solely our own hegemony over not only the Americas but any of the rest of the world, when it comes right down to it.

The real, endemic problem with the disaster in New Orleans is that it exposes our social Darwinism, which we have wrapped in the various success fables of bourgeois capitalism?the Horatio Alger myths, for example. I would certainly hesitate to call Bush a racist, but the whole fabric of our society is based, at bottom, on class, and class discrimination can rightfully be said to have begun in racism, even slavery, and it is not surprising if one is black and poor, or white and poor, that he or she might indeed die of thirst inside the Superdome during the dog days of summer.

The South, especially, the Deep South of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are particularly egregious in this respect. In stopping and thinking about what has happened in NO since the Katrina landfall, can anyone be surprised that the gang underclass has not stopped looting and shooting? We have no apprenticeship programs in this country, at least worthy of the name, as is the case in, say, modern Germany. So one enters, to be successful at it, anyway, a trade through nepotistic machinations?and forever there afterwards can hypocritically claim he or she owes their relative success to their own hard work and industry.

I will never forget the rich cotton farmers on those Plains excoriating our welfare system?while themselves pocketing, as they still do, huge U.S. treasury checks for not growing crops, or for crops that had no appreciable markets, etc., etc. My father would grimace when I would brazenly confront them at times with their hypocrisy and duplicity?and undoubtedly apologize for me when I was out of sight.

So, they?ve finally moved, in any case, to get the refugees into the Astrodome and other similar venues, but I would strongly suggest they begin yesterday to assemble trailers or reconstitute the Projects in NO before too many more days pass. I?d give them 90 days, tops, before the riots or near-riots begin in the elbow-to-elbow cots and conditions of these very temporary arrangements. Long-term, I return to my theme about reviewing the social democracies of Europe for hints on how we might more humanely deal in our own country?for its own good, and the survival of us all as we might begin to see in them vital economic and social pacts, and the initiation of social equity as more a national survival strategy than as an enemy of the state, negatively characterizing it as ?liberal,? ?socialist,? or ?communist? for political advantage.