Despite the glorious aura of football's return to the Superdome, the truth that no one wants to admit is that New Orleans must carry the blame for its own demise.  A centuries-old legacy of bad choices, corrupt government, and party-all-the-time laxness, under the brand name "The Big Easy", was the fallacy that reductio ad absurdum led to the vast suffering post-Katrina.

People talk about Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans, as if the city were struck from the sky by some meteor, but Katrina was not an epic disaster in and of itself.  It took human incompetence to make it that way.  On its own, Katrina was only a Category 3 hurricane at landfall, without the destructive winds or the storm surge that plenty of other coastal cities have withstood.  Was it bad?  Yes.  Should it have been cataclysmic?  Hardly.

The death of New Orleans that we have seen was simply this:  the culmination of perfectly bad government.  What sane person would have believed it was a fine idea to have half a city built below sea level, surrounded by a levee that could be breached with only a moderate hurricane at best, and do nothing about it?

The prior residents had these options: 1) Move out of town and relinquish their heritage,  2) Elect effective government, or 3) Put their heads in the sand.  Unfortunately they ended up collectively choosing Option #3.  It's no secret that drug use and alcoholism were rampant in New Orleans, the best way ever created to avoid confronting a real danger.  In a city where anything goes, everything went.  Like a modern day equivalent of Aesop's fable of The Grasshopper and the Ant, they chose to be the Grasshopper.

Regrettably, the people are not changing their government even now.  They thought it fine to re-elect Ray Nagin, the mayor so brutally outsmarted by the tag team of Mother Nature and Bad Engineering.

So apparently being irresponsible is okay in the Big Easy, even when you are in the city's single most important position of Mayor.  No doubt a lot of blame was thrown around as a decoy until it hit the Federal level, but New Orleans seemed to prefer only to fire their football coach, rather than their mayor.  We've yet to see how they'll handle their Governor.

Any quick look at the crowd at last night's game showed a pack of rich white people nursing their injured civic pride.  Something about the blatent disparity of the demographic mix of the happy fans, versus last September's tortured refugees, makes the Superdome the perfect symbol for how sick New Orleans was, is, and will continue to be. You can only spread so much sauce over rotten meat.

The unspeakable truth is that New Orleans is an embarrassing example of where democracy failed:  the inevitable consequence of entrusting important decision making to everyone, simply because they reside within a jurisdiction. 

This debacle was a laboratory experiment to show what can happen to a community of people not savvy enough, or involved enough, or powerful enough, to elect effective government.  While the only important issue in New Orleans for the last 100 years should have been "Hey let's build some higher walls around our below-sea-level homes", for whatever reason, that issue was ignored.

In a word I believe the problem is complacency.  The people of New Orleans were too complacent to learn about issues and vote on them, too complacent to scrutinize leaders, too complacent to demand safety, too complacent that the ineffective government they elected would somehow save them.  They took the Big Easy concept to its extreme, and had to suffer its horrific conclusion.

The city failed in its duty to protect itself.  Certainly questioning the responsiveness of FEMA and Bush himself after the incident is a valid debate, but it is really moot.  A response has nothing to do with a failure of a city to protect its citizens beforehand.  Spike Lee may hate and blame George W. Bush, but half the city still would have been underwater regardless of who was President. 

That any human beings would have to suffer what some in New Orleans have dealt with is gut-wrenching.  While I believe it is the logical natural result to be expected from the choices they themselves had made, it does not make me weep any less for the people whose lives have been destroyed.  Truly a dismal time, but by analyzing it, we can seek to prevent it from happening elsewhere. 

The ins-and-outs of why such ineffective government ruled that city and killed it are important on a national level as well.  First, we are banking our foreign policy under the Bush/neo-Con ideal that democracies are peaceful and benefit the entire world.  This assumption is proving out quite questionable when highlighted in Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon, with their hate-mongering of Israel and succumbery to Islamic Supremacists.  Even the established democracies of Western Europe turn a despicably blind eye to the future of the world, preferring the easy way out of letting America alone worry about tomorrow while they themselves earn a fast buck. 

Second, and this may be even more important long-term, there's an irrational supposition that any resident is capable of making the best choice for their future.  This was clearly not the case in New Orleans.  They elected state and local officials that did not protect them. 

Watch any episode of Cops, and when a 19-year-old unwed mother of 3 on food stamps and welfare, living in a trailer park, just gets beaten up by her alcoholic boyfriend for the umpteenth time, consider that her vote has every bit as much weight as yours.  You cannot tell me that this is a person who is good at making decisions.  She can't even make simple ones for herself, let alone figure out who should control power over the future of the world.

The end result is that you get the best-looking candidates in office rather than the smartest.  Real decision making is too hard.  Instead the public elects the candidates that most remind them of actors who play Presidents in the movies.  We even had a real actor elected President, who luck would have it turned out to be a great one.  On the other hand, let's not forget we also got a smiling saxophone player, who philandered his way through his tenure and slept while our enemies got stronger, bequeathing us a superpower China, a nuclear North Korea and Pakistan, and a worldwide group of powerful Islamic Supremacists wielding terror as their first weapon. 

It will take a mind far smarter than mine to come up with an effective structure to move citizens finally to choose a government wisely, while still safeguarding fairness toward all. 

While I do not have an answer, the problem is clear when more people care about American Idol than an American military victory overseas.  2008 will be a referendum for the American people to show they are worth saving.  If we end up with a President Smiles-A-Lot, and not a President Newt Gingrich let's say, it will show we only favor looks over smarts, and at that point God help all of us.

New Orleans had similar referendums time and again, but failed themselves.  Today we can all see the kinds of consequences that can result. 

Make no mistake, that's what all of America is facing from here on out.  It's time to wake up:  We can either choose to be the Grasshopper like New Orleans did, or choose to be the Ant. 

Here's hoping for the Ant.