But any effort commanding widespread support will have to proceed on the basis of sober and disinterested realism, with complete honesty about the risks, and costs, and tradeoffs involved.

And there’s the rub: in the fractious atmosphere of contemporary American public discourse, sober and disinterested realism seems well on the way to becoming extinct. In particular, our understanding of what happened with Katrina has been so tainted and distorted by sensationalism, emotional oversimplification, and ideological opportunism that it may require a miracle for Americans to think through clearly what needs to be done.

Perhaps the foremost culprit in this regard are the mainstream mass media. If one had no evidence beyond the wild journalistic coverage of events as they were unfolding, one would have thought that the fury and carnage of Hurricane Katrina, and the widespread suffering in its aftermath, rather than representing what used to be called an “act of God,” could be blamed entirely on the crimes of commission and omission perpetrated by political leaders, and chiefly President George W. Bush. . . .