America is distressed by Hurricane Katrina. Two weeks after the hurricane struck Louisiana and Mississippi, America is just beginning to emerge from the phase of raw bewilderment, in which the crisis is not just a threat to lives and livelihoods but also to the nation’s political imagination. Watching some television footage in an electronics store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a young black man was saying randomly to shoppers, ‘I’m from there… I’m from there. If it happened here, it wouldn’t be allowed.’ His incoherence reflected not just his trauma, but his inability to find meaning or explanation. President George W. Bush’s more public speechlessness illustrated something comparable. This wasn’t scripted. [...]