The chasm between us

Katrina has exposed the scale of US inequality

Polly Toynbee, The Guardian - Friday September 9, 2005

Remember shock and awe? It was meant to shine from a might never seen before on the face of the earth. Armed as no power has ever been, as great as only Rome before it, America the all-conquering would spread democracy across the globe by the force of its invincible weapons.

Now the shock is something else. It is the shock of discovering that America has no magic power. It can't actually do anything useful after all. The hollow superpower stands exposed, and it is in need of urgent revision. Iraq has shown that smart missiles, heavy-metal techno-tricks and soldiers whose helmets are electronically controlled, are virtually useless, and failure and disaster stare the White House in the face.

This the world has seen unfold every night on the news as civil war engulfs Iraq, exactly as forewarned by all the war's opponents. As the US finds that the power to break nations is useless without the power to make them, shock and awe is over.

But it took Hurricane Katrina to expose the real emptiness under the US shell. No wonder governing Iraq was far too difficult for a nation so weakly governed within its own borders. How does a state where half the voters don't believe in government, run anything well? A nation that believes in non-government is bound to crumble at the core. Rome had no doubts how important government was.

What the great Louisiana catastrophe has revealed is a country that is not a country at all, but lots of individuals living parallel lives, with nothing but a flag to unite them. For the poor at the bottom of the New Orleans mud heap, there never was even the American dream to cling to. They always lived in another country.

But it took the mother of the nation, Barbara Bush, to perfectly summarize rich America's distance from the scene. Visiting refugees in the Houston Astrodome, she said they were lucky: "So many of the people were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." And she added her fears: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas." Katrina shows how the rich don't live in the same nation with the rest.

So to talk of "average" incomes or GDP per capita in the US is meaningless: there is no "average", only first world and third world, with virtually no mobility between the two. Such figures on health, wealth or employment should all be reconfigured to describe where the money lies within nations. If Bill Gates moved to Albania its GDP would soar meaninglessly. A statisticians' joke says that a man with his head in the oven and his feet in the fridge is on average OK: in reality he's dead. (text shortened to 466 words; if you are interested, the original text is here)