It Really Is the Economy, Stupid
Musings on the Reflections in the Toxic Surface
of Lake George, Lousiana

Whence compassion? Where does compassion come from?

Maybe different levels of compassion are meted out genetically. Maybe some people are just born more readily compassionate that others.

Even so, there’s clearly a tendency toward, or at least an ability for, compassion in just about all of us. If things go well in our lives, we do the minimum—tithe, give to the occasional charity, undertake some few good works, etc.

Only if things go very badly do we begin to evince that behavior which goody-two-shoes commentators like to refer to as "bringing out the best in people."

Which is why in the United States we now have such a long run of jungle-world, dog-eat-dog, to-the-victor-go-the-spoils governance.

Following the Great Depression—which did produce a lot of suffering and a pretty good run of compassionate governance, the tsunami of American affluence built and built and built. So that, by the end of the 20th century, you had a double effect:

1. Unprecedented accumulations of wealth in the hand of a few, and

2. Access, through ready credit, to the crumbs of that wealth for the less-well-off many.

The Roman rulers famously kept the mob at bay with bread and circuses. The American rulers have kept the mob at bay with credit cards and cars.

You were working for near-slave wages? No prob. Here comes another credit card in the day’s mail. Need a car? No prob. Your friendly local car dealer will gladly arrange a loan at an exorbitant interest rate.

Swamped with images of lovely stuff and the beautiful life on TV, all but the very poorest could acquire at least pieces of The American Dream.

What’s not visible in the ruins of New Orleans is the mountain of debt left behind as people fled in their SUV’s bought on time at outrageous interest rates.

Now, most of those people—and I’m talking about not just the poor—must endure, in addition to the hell of loss of home and hearth, eviction from the charmed life of The True American. No more credit, at least not for a long time. No more "I want that and I can have it TODAY on my credit card."

Over the long run, the world has a way of humanizing us, as the Katrina victims are learning at great emotional expense. And, of course, many of us have our own compassion genes kick in as we watch their suffering.

But it is, you may be sure, a temporary thing. We’ll help the victims—we’ll help them a lot, and we’ll even rebuild their cities.

But the exploitative behavior on the part of greed-centered American governance that compounded the tragedy (why spend all those billions to save the wetlands south of New Orleans, why spend all those billions to build the best levees when that money can be used for more immediate gratification such as invading the country that threatened the life of Dear Leader’s father?), that large-scale exploitative behavior will change only when the suffering extends far beyond a small crescent of the Gulf coast.

To be sure, the Republicans from top to bottom are deeply implicated in the dangerous wrong-doings that put this country at ever-greater risk. But so too are the Democrats, especially those at the top.

They are as enmeshed in, and enamored by, the concentrations of wealth and power at the heart of America as are the Republicans. Which is why, none—note that—NONE of the Democratic leaders have risen to the occasion and given the only proper response.