On this, the second anniversary of Katrina, there will be many forms of attention to the specifics of that event, of the current parlous circumstances of New Orleans, or the handling of the ongoing aftermath by George W. Bush, the Republican party, and the institutional racism in which they swim. The destruction of individual lives and communities will be detailed; testimonials from current and former residents will serve as indictments. Specific addresses, that is, will call out specific betrayals.
Little of this commentary will be mistaken. We wish only to add a soupçon of longue durée to the pungent local details. Following Mike Davis's argument in Ecology of Fear (and Paul Virilio's regarding "accidents" in the contemporary world) we would first note the error of considering Katrina's destruction to be either a "natural disaster" or a "singular event." It is instead an amplified example of what is one eventual outcome of elaborate human calculations, most obviously regarding where and how to build dwellings, and how to protect and maintain them against chronic and acute — but predictable — ecological events. Katrina is, one might say, the inverse event of the inevitable destruction when view-lot homes are built, underpinned by the promise of imported water, in wildfire corridors.
Again, it should be stressed that this realization in no way forgives the shameful and murderous response to the disaster. It is merely to try to understand both the event and the response historically. For it is similarly crucial to understand not just the destruction itself but the failure to rebuild New Orleans — the writing off of a major city and its populace — as a historical event, with a structuration that is not accidental or unique.
In 1970, the United States was ruled by a corrupt Republican regime; it is hard to suppose that there was substantially less institutionalized racism at that juncture then now. Nonetheless, it seems likely from here that, had the same event happened then, New Orleans would have been well en route to a rebuilt renaissance by 1972. This is a fairly simple economic deduction: that infrastructural repair and reinvestment would have been a lot easier to come by before the long economic downturn that began in 1973. Or, to rephrase the matter in terms of Giovanni Arrighi's Braudelian analysis of the United States' "long Twentieth century," wherein he holds that the peak of the US cycle of accumulation was 1973: the seemingly singular decision not to rebuild New Orleans is exactly the mark of an empire in decline. It's structural, not singular at all. The abandonment of a great city to time and tide is indeed both symptom and mark of empire on its downhill slide; it bears noting as well that pathetic, delusional and desperate regimes are equally an indicator of this decline.
That New Orleans was the first city to go (or was it Detroit?) means, among other things, that it won't be the last; when "Ozymandias" is written about us, the busted statue will not be found near the desert of ocean lapping over the Delta, but in the lone and level sands of Los Angeles, or New York, or Las Vegas.