YOU CANNOT SAY the city of New Orleans was unprepared for tragedy. Only last year, when Hurricane Ivan threatened to strike, a Louisiana official admitted the state had prepared in advance: 10,000 body bags were stored and ready to go. Benign neglect is the political term for this pragmatism, coined by Pat Moynihan, the New York Democrat senator.

With no idea how to improve a situation, government, instead of assuming responsibility for resolving it, turns a blind eye. In Moynihan’s time, benign neglect took the form of a triage system for emergency calls to the New York Fire Department, overwhelmed by the number of arson attacks in poor black areas. New Orleans has existed under the not-so-watchful eye of benign neglect for decades.

The satirical magazine The Onion once published a mocking travelogue. “Woman who ‘loves Brazil’ has only seen four square miles of it”, read the headline. Some of the syrupy tributes to Nawlins from writers who couldn’t tell a housing project from a science project were reminiscent of that. The obituaries were all Tipitina’s, voodoo, streetcars named Desire and give my regards to Bourbon Street. Package-deal country, in other words.

Professor Longhair has been dead 25 years, folks. Louis Armstrong’s trumpet sells Kodak cameras now. Essex produces more good bands and if you want to see Dr John he’s at the Royal Festival Hall and you can walk home without an armed guard. New Orleans’ French Quarter keeps the spring breakers and tequila-slammed weekenders amused but the reality is a tiny, claustrophobic tourist trap. Every visitor is given a map of a grid the size of Romford and warned never to venture outside. Beyond that lies the true city, only visited in colourless government surveys and reports, coldly documenting a place beyond care, while doing nothing to address its disease.

Last year, a plain-clothes police deputation fired 700 rounds of blanks in a New Orleans ghetto as an experiment. Nobody reported gunfire. There were 265 murders in the city in 2004 and 192 up to mid-August this year.

For every four citizens arrested for murder, only one is convicted because of the difficulty obtaining witness statements. The murder rate is ten times the national average (incredibly, an improvement on the mid-1990s, when it was 15) and of the 78 worst schools in Louisiana, 55 are in New Orleans. Of the black community that accounts for 67 per cent of the population, half exist below the poverty line.

There is no minimum wage and the waiters and dishwashers propping up the tourist trade are not well rewarded. Still, there is some good news. “The city has one of the highest murder rates in the country, but 99 per cent of it occurs in the projects,” announces an estate agent’s website, cheerily. So that’s all right, then.

The suggestion has been that the breakdown of society witnessed in New Orleans could not happen elsewhere. Wrong. The city has extreme problems of violence and deprivation, but the economic apartheid inflicted on America is a wrong turn away in most cities. Go west of Constitution between central Washington and the RFK Stadium, walk the length of Broadway, get lost in Detroit. The all-consuming civilisation that America wishes to export globally is no more than a pretty theory. Like Marxism, in practice it mutates horribly.

The New Orleans flood was not an accident waiting to happen. It had happened, 78 years ago. In 1927, the Mississippi River broke its banks in 145 places, depositing water at depths of up to 30ft over 27,000 square miles of land. Arkansas became 13 per cent water; 246 people died and 700,000 were displaced. The disaster changed American society, shifting hundreds of thousands of delta-dwelling blacks into northern cities and cementing the divisions and suspicions that benign neglect has ensured remain today. New Orleans’ (mainly white) business class pressurised the state to dynamite a levee upstream, releasing water into (mainly black) areas of the delta. Black workers were forced to work on flood relief at gunpoint, like slaves.

In his book Rising Tide, John M. Barry writes of the Mississippi tragedy: “Their struggle began as Man against nature. It became one of man against man. The flood brought with it a human storm. Honour and money collided. White and black collided. Regional and national power structures collided. The collisions shook America.” Not enough, though. Poor blacks from the South merely became poor blacks in the North. Rural poor became urban poor.

Inequality does not explain why anyone faced with the present crisis should wish to sexually assault a seven-year-old, as happened in the Louisiana Superdome, but it may help to rationalise the communal disintegration of the past week. Many of the boasts made on behalf of Western civilisation are just a handy by-product of Western money. We get along because we can afford to; in New Orleans, wealth was removed from the equation, and what values were left? This was not just a failure for central government but for social scientists, educators, mentors, role models, the supposed civilising influence we wish to impose around the world.

The estimated cost of rebuilding New Orleans and its environs is at least $26 billion (to finish the levee projects would have cost $208 million, of which the Bush Administration sent $10 million, giving new meaning to the term voodoo economics). All that remains of the city is its legacy of benign neglect. Perhaps better it stays washed away than rises once more with sickness at its failing heart.

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