The world's richest, most powerful nation is reeling from its worst natural disaster in history, yet its leadership failed miserably when the people needed them most.

Reduced to homeless, starving, frightened refugees, Greater New Orleans' 1.4 million citizens are asking hard questions and demanding honest answers from those in charge - particularly the man at the top - President George W. Bush.

Sadly, hollow excuses in place of decisive action just don't cut it when - with each terrifying passing hour - you feel your country has abandoned you.

New Orleans: A Made in Washington Tragedy

They don't have a clue what's going on down here. They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn, excuse my French, everybody in America, but I am pissed.— New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin

On Thursday night New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin gave an interview to a local radio station, WWL-AM, and its correspondent, Garland Robinette. It makes for tough listening, particularly the ending, when Robinette falls to tears, and finds himself struggling with his sign-off.

Robinette had asked the question everyone would want to ask: What had the mayor said to U.S. President George W. Bush, who had not, at least not then, made an appearance on the ground in the besieged city? "I told him we had an incredible crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice," the mayor told Robinette.

Nagin was referring to the president's ceremonial airborne viewing of the Gulf Coast and the devastation delivered by Hurricane Katrina. After the flypast, the president had held a Rose Garden press briefing in which he quantified shelters (78,000), and tarps (10,400) and ice (3.4 million pounds) and promised that, with time, "New Orleans will be back on its feet." The scene seemed a mere pit stop amid a five-week "working vacation" at the ranch, the one down the road from where the mother mourned the death of her soldier son.

How do you reckon that, when your citizens are dead, and stuck in attics, and on rooftops and there is no optimism anywhere to be spotted in the landscape? "You pull off the doggone ventilator vent and you look down there and they're standing in there in water up to their freaking necks," said Nagin. And then the lootings and the shootings and the rapes. "You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that's the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drugstores. They're looking for something to take the edge off their jones, if you will. And right now, they don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns."

How do you reckon that you've not being given the help you need? "We authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq lickety-quick ... Now, you mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through, a place that is so unique when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody's eyes light up — you mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need?"

Nagin figured that Bush, and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, had better "get their ass on a plane." By the end of the interview, neither man could speak.

Yesterday, Bush quick-stepped across the emerald green veldt of the White House lawn — suit, white shirt, blue tie — on his way to make a personal connection with the people of Mobile and Biloxi and New Orleans. It was time. Four days after the fact. "The results," he said of aid and rescue efforts, "were unacceptable."

The words, flat as fetid water, came too late. In this, one of the worst disasters to be visited upon the richest nation in the world, the president failed the test of leadership and could not, even after excoriating criticism started to mount in the media, show himself to be emotionally touched by the events before him. The New York Times had deemed Bush's Rose Garden speech "casual to the point of carelessness."

Howell Raines, ex of the Times, compared the "dilatory" performance of the president to that of the president's father. "George H.W. Bush couldn't quite connect to the victims of Hurricane Andrew, nor did he mind being photographed tooling his golf cart around Kennebunkport while American troops died in the first Iraq war," wrote Raines. "After pre-emptively declaring a state of emergency, the younger Bush seemed equally determined to show his successors how to vacation through an apocalypse."

The evocation of Joseph Conrad (who wrote "Heart of Darkness.") was fitting. As once-tranquil waterways delivered Conrad's "immense darkness," images of the Gulf Coast bore an eerie resemblance to lawlessness in Sierra Leone or Liberia. Almost as eerie are the premonitions, now being sifted like entrails, which forewarned of this very apocalypse.

A single spare fact, cited by Scientific American, makes the point: every 24 minutes, Louisiana loses an acre of land. The deterioration of the coastal wetlands, the patchwork efforts to maintain canals and pumping stations, the constant reallocation of water in the below-sea-level city, was a delicate balance sustainable only by the infusion of massive amounts of capital and the absence of any major disaster. Full-scale restoration was pegged at $14 billion (U.S.)

The capital did not come.

When the worst did come, the attachment of blame, or what the first Bush president called "the blame game," predictably commenced. The assessed ineptitude of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in charge of disaster response, has come in for widespread criticism, but that, too, leads back to Washington, as FEMA has been rolled into the Homeland Security Department, and has perhaps become emasculated, or at least disorganized, in the process.

Governor Blanco was inexplicably slow to invoke the activation of the executive order that allowed out-of-jurisdiction law enforcement officers to enter the disaster area. That order wasn't issued until Thursday, the same day President Bush laggardly requested $10.5 billion in emergency aid.

New Orleans Mayor Nagin blamed FEMA, the governor and Homeland Security for taking perilous decisions about the city's pumping stations.

The itemization of blunders and mishandlings is bound to continue.

The person destined to remain in the eye of the storm is Bush himself. Not since the release of the infamous photos of Abu Ghraib has the phrase "failure of leadership" had such currency. Those best positioned to assess that charge are the victims themselves. Some of those in the Big Easy may harken back to the days of Louisiana governor Huey Long, a demagogue and a corrupt demagogue at that, but one who championed the state's poor.

By the end of the day yesterday, Bush, arisen from his torpor, had been given an eyeful. As proof of leadership it was too little, too late.

New Orleans' throbbing hearts: Nowhere else in U.S. have African Americans known more freedom, pain, oppression

Oppression from the hand of slave owners — the French, the Spanish, the French again, then the Americans — from poverty and from the unique geography of the Crescent City. And now from Hurricane Katrina. Yet the highly complex, nuanced relations between the races in the city's early years, a dynamic unique to New Orleans and nowhere else, allowed blacks some room to flourish.

This city, its streets now floating graveyards, is arguably the heart of black American culture. This is how Carroll Case sees it. Case, 65, who retreated from his New Orleans apartment to his home in southwest Mississippi, is a tour guide based in the French Quarter in one of only five cities in the country that require its guides to enrol in a city history course to become certified, he says.

What follows is his attempt to explain what Katrina threatens to rip away.

To a place with the same latitude as Cairo, the first slaves were shipped in pens like cattle to a plantation, an area now known as Algiers on the West Bank, directly across the Mississippi River from Canal Street.

"As many as 10,000 blacks came into New Orleans," Case says. "Those that were not suitable were either shipped back or beaten or killed. They were conquered, basically."

Among this melting pot of French and Spanish landowners, gamblers, whores and European rejects, the slaves fought alongside everyone else for survival in "The Town That Care Forgot," a freewheeling, violent, hot and disease-ridden place where not many expected to live past 30.

"Diversity breeds violence. New Orleans from the very beginning has been extremely violent. The whites were terrified of the fact that the blacks may get together and massacre the whites," Case says.

"They passed laws that would not let any of the black people get together. If a slave owner let his slaves get together, if he was caught letting them, he was branded with the fleur-de-lis."

Yet, despite the societal rigidity, lust blurred the lines, spawning classes of mulattos, quadroons and octoroons.

"The blacks were more accepted there than anywhere else in America. They were so ingrained into the system," Case says.

There were also "free people of colour" in New Orleans, some of whom bought their freedom and some who even owned their own slaves.

But that acceptance, of course, had its limits, with blacks forced into the bottom of society and into Roman Catholic baptisms.

To what is now Louis Armstrong Park alongside the French Quarter, slaves would sneak off to secret voodoo meetings in Congo Square, sometimes right after leaving the Catholic Church.

Case calls it the most historic gathering place for blacks in New Orleans. Where the religion was nurtured behind a screen of banana and ginger plants.

Where they built fires, banged bones off stretched deer hides, danced the bamboula and calinda. White men were known to commit suicide when they heard a police raid found their wives fornicating with black men in Congo Square.

That sense of rebellion remained intact, even when the races grew further apart, with the well-heeled whites stealing away in the Garden District, with the French, Spanish and slaves in the French Quarter, leaving the "free people of colour," the skilled artisans, to settle what is now the Ninth Ward area in the early 1900s.

The land was cheap, presumably in part because the land was low. "Who would want it?' Case says.

President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration built the Desire housing project there in the 1930s, but back then, "those were wonderful places to live. They didn't even lock their doors in the projects. It was just a community and everyone trusted each other."

But the fight for civil rights and the enduring poverty of the blacks living there fuelled an eruption.

"The Ninth Ward has always been the nest of the underprivileged people. It's the soul of the city. It's the tenderloin district."

But it's also the heart of the city's gang wars and drug trade, Case says.

Those problems took a strong hold in the early 1960s.

"That turned the projects into a basic hellhole and they would literally take the dead people they shot during the gang wars, they would take them to other projects and leave the bodies. That created tensions between the different projects in the Ninth Ward."

Hurricane Betsy hit this neighbourhood in 1965 and then like now, it flooded the Ninth Ward — the lowest, poorest and blackest part of town.

There's speculation that officials dynamited levees near the projects to siphon water away from white neighbourhoods.

"I don't know of any place that is so interwoven with good and evil," he says.

"They will go back and try their best to make sure that culture never goes away. Their roots go deeper than anyone's roots."

-Both articles are from Saturday's Toronto Star