Just when you think you've buried the nastier human impulses beneath a stack of government incentives and initiatives, you find -- as at the New Orleans Convention Center and the Superdome -- that here those impulses come again, nastier than ever.

 The perfection of human behavior must be the oldest political obsession anywhere -- and the most futile. The one-time history graduate student in me begs to report that no one has ever gone broke betting against good behavior's eclipsing for long the bad, the rotten and the vile. They used to call it "original sin" or "evil." I don't know what they call it in political/bureaucratic circles, now that the old religious understandings no longer get much of a hearing in intellectual circles.

 No one, when the New Orleans unpleasantness started, was going to treat looters as the National Guard had treated their ilk during the aftermath of Galveston's catastrophic 1900 storm. That is, no one was going to shoot them on sight. Not in front of the TV cameras. Not with Al Sharpton and the ACLU watching for signs of cruelty with a racial tint.

 If that's where we've come, that's where we've come. Let's just not too angrily blame the president. We might even give some thought to non-bureaucratic methods of reviving respect for the institutions on which we used to depend for moral instruction -- notably the churches; yea, the Scriptures themselves. What a man is never taught he is highly unlikely ever to learn. On the other hand, one instinct never fades. That's the instinct to recognize it as the president's fault. Whatever "it" is. Whoever the president may be.