The levees were supposed to check nature's destructive power in New Orleans, and the Army Corps of Engineers has said that they failed due to unforeseen circumstances. This is cold comfort, since the world specializes in producing the unforeseen. One engineering expert who has studied the levee failure has said he personally wouldn't live in New Orleans, because it is simply too risky. This represents human ingenuity's white flag.
Half of the city has heeded it, and not returned. It doesn't help that a squabbling New Orleans officialdom still doesn't have a rebuilding plan, or that it has been unable to control gangland violence that has necessitated the return of the National Guard to the city. Federal aid has been slow to flow to the city, and the rental-assistance checks FEMA did rapidly hand out have been ripped off to the tune of $1.4 billion.
The Gulf Coast disaster exists against the backdrop of the Iraq War, where America has been seemingly powerless to impose order on the country's warring factions or rebuild a country devastated by 30 years of tyranny and now a budding civil war. If there were a theme to the past two years it would be Ralph Waldo Emerson's "events are in the saddle, and ride mankind." Nothing is so damaging to a political leader. Bush's presidency will remain diminished until he finds a way to vindicate human ingenuity's power over events, and show that he again is in the saddle.