Dark Night

Hot air hangs like a dead man
From a white oak tree
People sitting on porches
Thinking how things used to be
Dark night
It's a dark night
(The Blasters)

According to Senator Rick Santorum there was too much sitting on porches going on when Hurricane Katrina showed up. He has expressed the view that in future there should be tougher penalties on people that ignore the warnings and decide to ride out the storm.

Amongst those that paid the greatest penalty was the mother of a New York man who told a local radio station how he kept up regular contact with her between last Tuesday and Friday as the waters rose at the St Bernard nursing home. "Somebody's coming to get you" he reassured her every day, until she drowned.

Pre-empting the conspiracy theorists by several days V immediately observed that the levees had probably been holed by opportunistic officials keen to clear out all the negritos. Guatemalans have a knack for sensing the hidden motions of the underhand, but these stories are always easier to believe when its clear that the officials had the intent regardless of whether or not circumstances conspired to lend them a hand. "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed", House Speaker Dennis Hastert has tellingly remarked to reporters.

For us the most heart-rending image in the immediate aftermath of the storm was that of someone's pet dog stuck up in a tree surrounded by flood waters staring up at the helicopters with a look of inconsolable terror. There's a video piece on the Dallas News which shows how some of these abandoned animals are being shot by armed police. Some 50,000 dogs have been rescued though, and owners have been given a month to claim them.

Dan Barry's memorable article in the New York Times last week told us that "what is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable." He reported on his visit to the Williams supermarket stripped of everything by looters except postcards and wine (!), and how the news-stands on deserted street corners still carried the news of August 28 - "Katrina takes Aim", eerily reminiscent of the opening scenes of 28 Days Later.

Most poignant of all was Barry's brief encounter with a man calling himself Strangebone who resiliently enthused about his blacked-out city - "You're able to see the stars, it's wonderful".

Resilience doesn't necessarily come that easily to the septics. Gregarious they may be, but they don't come together in a crisis like the British are said to do. A few years ago Channel 4 aired a programme in which four sets of tourists belonging to four separate nationalities were secretly filmed on holiday while the producers engineered a series of situations in order to expose the workings of national character. One of these involved a boat adrift on a lake and sure enough the Brits responded pluckily, but the Americans just bickered amongst themselves.