Jammin’ With Gabriel

By BOB HERBERT

Published: August 25, 2007

They were rambunctious geniuses — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Max Roach — the nucleus of a group of immensely talented musicians who engineered a revolution in jazz as wondrous and profound as the birth of Cubism in painting.

Max was a tall, skinny kid who had grown up in Brooklyn and was so gifted a percussionist by his early 20s that Dizzy would express the mock fear that the angel Gabriel (the only trumpeter who could rival Dizzy at the time) might try to steal Max to play drums in some heavenly band.

He warned Max to stay put if Gabriel came to call.

I imagine they’re all jammin’ with Gabriel now. Max, the last survivor of that rowdy crew that created bebop, the stunningly complex and sophisticated music that ignited modern jazz, was buried yesterday. My great fear is that the music, underappreciated and poorly understood, is dying, too.

Max had an easy surface personality, which belied the torments he had to fight through as he adhered obsessively to the highest artistic standards, and the lifelong resentment he felt about the way the music was treated.

Elegant, husky-voiced and quick to smile, he was full of stories about the titans of jazz. I remember him chuckling one afternoon as he pointed to an elaborately carved straight-backed chair in his apartment on Central Park West. He was telling a story about Charlie Parker that went back to the 1940s.

Bird, peerless on the saxophone, was not only addicted to heroin, he was also phenomenally charismatic. His personal habits were as closely imitated by other musicians as his music.

“The guys would flop at my house in Brooklyn,” Max said. “My mother did day work, so we’d be there by ourselves all day. Now Bird was clever. He knew my mother was very religious and as soon as he’d hear her putting that key in the door, he’d pick up the Bible, jump in that chair and pretend he was reading it.

“My mother would say to me, ‘Why can’t you be like that nice Charlie Parker?’ I’d say to myself, ‘That’s my problem.’ ”

Like so many others in Bird’s orbit, Max became addicted, too. Bird would die at 34 from the effects of heroin addiction and alcoholism. Max was able to kick his habit. He then advanced the triumph of bebop with the creation of a stunning new sound — dubbed “hard bop” — that emerged from his alliance with the trumpeter Clifford Brown.

By the mid-’50s, Max was standing atop a pinnacle. Compulsively creative and an absolute virtuoso, he had almost single-handedly dragged the drums out of the shadows and demonstrated that they were much more than a mechanism to keep time for the rest of the band. They could be the expressive equal of any of the other instruments in the jazz repertoire.

And he was the co-leader, with Brown, of a phenomenal quintet that was recognized by critics and fans alike as a genuine artistic achievement. Brown, a modest, soft-spoken young man with a warm and powerful sound, was being hailed as the most talented trumpet player to emerge since Gillespie.

“Oh, man, he was something else,” Max said. “He was going to set the world on fire.”

The quintet was booked to play a gig in Chicago in the early summer of 1956. Brown, who was 25, and the band’s pianist, Richie Powell (Bud Powell’s younger brother), were to drive from Philadelphia to Chicago to meet Max and the rest of the band there.

Not long after midnight on June 26 the car in which they were traveling, driven by Powell’s wife, Nancy, careened off the rain-swept Pennsylvania Turnpike and plunged down an embankment. All three occupants died.

Max went into a tailspin. He drank heavily and sank into a depression.

But there was always the music, his recovery mechanism, and it was always fresh and inventive. “His artistic integrity was always intact and operating at a high pitch,” said Shannon Gibbons, a singer who was close to Max for many years.

Jazz no longer commands the attention it once did, and many of its greatest practitioners have slipped into the realm of the forgotten. (Your average person has never heard of Clifford Brown.)

Once when I was talking with Max in his living room, I noticed that his gaze had shifted to a spot over my shoulder, and there was an odd look in his eyes. Behind me, over the sofa, was a large photo of Max with Bird and Diz, Bud Powell and the bassist Charles Mingus.

Dizzy had only recently died. Remembering when they had all been young and wild and great together, Max said, “Damn, now all of those cats are gone.”

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Hooked on Violence

By BOB HERBERT

Published: April 26, 2007

Two days after the massacre at Virginia Tech, a mentally disturbed man with a .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun opened fire in a house in Queens, killing his mother, his mother’s disabled companion and the disabled man’s health care aide. The gunman then killed himself.

Sixteen months ago, in the basement of a private home in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, four aspiring rappers, aged 19 to 22, were summarily executed in a barrage of semiautomatic gunfire. Two teenagers were arrested five months later, and one was charged as the gunman.

I had coffee the other day with Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and she mentioned that since the murders of Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, well over a million Americans have been killed by firearms in the United States. That’s more than the combined U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in all of American history.

“We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence,” she said. “As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”

The first step in overcoming an addiction is to acknowledge it. Americans are addicted to violence, specifically gun violence. We profess to be appalled at every gruesome outbreak of mass murder (it’s no big deal when just two, three or four people are killed at a time), but there’s no evidence that we have the will to pull the guns out of circulation, or even to register the weapons and properly screen and train their owners.

On the day after Christmas in 2000, an employee of Edgewater Technology, a private company in Wakefield, Mass., showed up at work with an assault rifle and a .12-gauge shotgun. Around 11 a.m. he began methodically killing co-workers. He didn’t stop until seven were dead.

An employee who had not been at work that day spoke movingly to a reporter from The Boston Globe about the men and women who lost their lives. “They were some of the sweetest, smartest people I’ve ever had the chance to work with,” he said. “The cream of the crop.”

The continuing carnage has roused at least one group of public officials to action: mayors. “We see the violence that is happening in America today,” said Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston. “Illegal guns are rampant. Go into almost any classroom in Boston — sixth and seventh grade, eighth grade, high school — and 50 percent of those kids know somebody who had a gun.”

The mayor noted that since the beginning of the year, more than 100 people have already been killed in Philadelphia, and nearly 80 in Baltimore. Most of the victims were shot to death.

Last year Mayor Menino and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, at a meeting they hosted at Gracie Mansion, organized a group of mayors committed to fighting against illegal firearms in the U.S. “It is time for national leadership in the war on gun violence,” Mr. Bloomberg said at the time. “And if that leadership won’t come from Congress or come from the White House, then it has to come from us.”

The campaign has grown. There were 15 mayors at that first gathering. Now more than 200 mayors from cities in 46 states have signed on.

When asked why Mayor Bloomberg had become so militant about the gun issue, John Feinblatt, the city’s criminal justice coordinator, mentioned the “human element.” He said: “I think it’s because he’s watched eight police officers be shot. And because, like all mayors, he’s the one who gets awakened, along with the police commissioner, at 3 in the morning and 4 in the morning, and has to rush to the hospital and break the news that can break somebody’s heart.”

Those who are interested in the safety and well-being of children should keep in mind that only motor vehicle accidents and cancer kill more children in the U.S. than firearms. A study released a few years ago by the Harvard School of Public Health compared firearm mortality rates among youngsters 5 to 14 years old in the five states with the highest rates of gun ownership with those in the five states with the lowest rates.

The results were chilling. Children in the states with the highest rates of gun ownership were 16 times as likely to die from an accidental gunshot wound, nearly seven times as likely to commit suicide with a gun, and more than three times as likely to be murdered with a firearm.

Only a lunatic could seriously believe that more guns in more homes is good for America’s children.

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Words as Weapons

By BOB HERBERT

Published: April 23, 2007

Just days after Don Imus was taken off the air for a slur hurled at members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team, a police sergeant conducting a roll call at a precinct in Brooklyn is reported to have called the three female officers in the room “hos” as he gave them an order to stand up.

The women, two of whom are black and one a Latina, refused to stand.

Another officer, unable to resist the great “fun” of mocking his female colleagues, is reported to have called out, “No, sergeant, not just hos, but nappy-headed hos.”

The women said they were stunned almost to the point of disbelief by the comments. They were the only women in the gathering of 17 police officers in the room, including the supervising sergeant. There was a sickening quality to the moment. The women said they felt violated, hurt and humiliated.

The incident occurred on April 15, a Sunday, at the 70th Precinct, which gained national notoriety in 1997 as the precinct in which Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, was sodomized by police officers with a broken broomstick.

The three women, Tronnette Jackson, 36, Karen Nelson, 31, and Maria Gomez, 29, said they were attending a routine roll call session when Sgt. Carlos Mateo, referring to them, said, “Stand up, hos.”

The Imus controversy, in which Mr. Imus had referred to the Rutgers players as “nappy-headed hos,” was still big news and on everyone’s mind. The three women remained seated.

They said another police officer, Ralph Montanez, then chimed in: “No, sergeant, not just hos, but nappy-headed hos.”

The women remained silent, and seated.

Sergeant Mateo is reported to have said, “Jackson and Gomez, why aren’t you standing?”

Another police officer said to the sergeant, “They are offended and they are protesting that you called them hos.”

This is just one example of the myriad ways in which racist and sexist comments like Mr. Imus’s help to poison the atmosphere all around us. Another example occurred two days prior to this incident when a narcotics sergeant in Queens is alleged to have “jokingly” said to a black female officer, “Don’t give me no lip or I’ll have to call you a nappy-headed ho.”

One of the toughest points to get across in this society is that racism and sexism are always contemptible, and are never harmless. The targets of racist and sexist comments should not just swallow the insults. They should react as if they’d been slapped in the face.

The three women in the 70th Precinct case have decided to fight back. Their initial complaint to Sergeant Mateo, immediately after the roll call, was brushed aside, they said. They then complained to the precinct’s integrity control officer and hired a lawyer, Bonita Zelman.

This morning they will file a complaint in federal court, asserting that the degrading comments at the roll call amounted to illegal discrimination against them based on their gender and ethnic background. This is not a small matter. It’s fair to wonder, for example, how eager a supervisor might be to recommend a major promotion for an employee he refers to as a “ho.”

“We have tremendous concern about the effect of language like this on women police officers,” said Ms. Zelman, “particularly women of color trying to make their way in the largely white male bureaucracy of a police department.”

Also concerned about the effect of language like this is the police commissioner, Ray Kelly. Discussing the 70th Precinct case, he told me yesterday that he found the comments “despicable.” He declined to go into much detail because the matter is being investigated by the department’s Equal Employment Opportunity division.

But the department let it be known that Sergeant Mateo had been transferred out of the 70th Precinct and would no longer be serving in a supervisory position. Both he and Officer Montanez could be subject to disciplinary charges.

Commissioner Kelly said he found the entire matter “very, very disturbing” because the city had worked hard over the past few years to make the Police Department a place where women and minorities “could feel at home.”

The Queens narcotics sergeant is also likely to face disciplinary action by the department, which has been infected, like other organizations around the country, with what Ms. Zelman calls the “Imus virus.”

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6-Year-Olds Under Arrest

By BOB HERBERT

Published: April 9, 2007

Avon Park, Fla.
When 6-year-old Desre’e Watson threw a tantrum in her kindergarten class a couple of weeks ago she could not have known that the full force of the law would be brought down on her and that she would be carted off by the police as a felon.

But that’s what happened in this small, backward city in central Florida. According to the authorities, there were no other options.

“The student became violent,” said Frank Mercurio, the no-nonsense chief of the Avon Park police. “She was yelling, screaming — just being uncontrollable. Defiant.”

“But she was 6,” I said.

The chief’s reply came faster than a speeding bullet: “Do you think this is the first 6-year-old we’ve arrested?”

The child’s tantrum occurred on the morning of March 28 at the Avon Elementary School. According to the police report, “Watson was upset and crying and wailing and would not leave the classroom to let them study, causing a disruption of the normal class activities.”

After a few minutes, Desre’e was, in fact, taken to another room. She was “isolated,” the chief said. But she would not calm down. She flailed away at the teachers who tried to control her. She pulled one woman’s hair. She was kicking.

I asked the chief if anyone had been hurt. “Yes,” he said. At least one woman reported “some redness.”

After 20 minutes of this “uncontrollable” behavior, the police were called in. At the sight of the two officers, Chief Mercurio said, Desre’e “tried to take flight.”

She went under a table. One of the police officers went after her. Each time the officer tried to grab her to drag her out, Desre’e would pull her legs away, the chief said.

Ultimately the child was no match for Avon Park’s finest. The cops pulled her from under the table and handcuffed her. The officers were not fooling around. In the eyes of the cops the 6-year-old was a criminal, and in Avon Park she would be treated like any other felon.

There was a problem, though. The handcuffs were not manufactured with kindergarten kids in mind. The chief explained: “You can’t handcuff them on their wrists because their wrists are too small, so you have to handcuff them up by their biceps.”

As I sat listening to Chief Mercurio in a spotless, air-conditioned conference room at the Avon Park police headquarters, I had the feeling that I had somehow stumbled into the middle of a skit on “Saturday Night Live.” The chief seemed like the most reasonable of men, but what was coming out of his mouth was madness.

He handed me a copy of the police report: black female. Six years old. Thin build. Dark complexion.

Desre’e was put in the back of a patrol car and driven to the police station. “Then,” said Chief Mercurio, “she was transported to central booking, which is the county jail.”

The child was fingerprinted and a mug shot was taken. “Those are the normal procedures for anyone who is arrested,” the chief said.

Desre’e was charged with battery on a school official, which is a felony, and two misdemeanors: disruption of a school function and resisting a law enforcement officer. After a brief stay at the county jail, she was released to the custody of her mother.

The arrest of this child, who should have been placed in the care of competent, comforting professionals rather than being hauled off to jail, is part of an outlandish trend of criminalizing very young children that has spread to many school districts and law enforcement agencies across the country.

A highly disproportionate number of those youngsters, like Desre’e, are black. In Baltimore last month, the police arrested, handcuffed and hauled away a 7-year-old black boy for allegedly riding a dirt bike on the sidewalk. The youngster was released and the mayor, Sheila Dixon, apologized for the incident, saying the arrest was inappropriate.

Last spring a number of civil rights organizations collaborated on a study of disciplinary practices in Florida schools and concluded that many of them, “like many districts in other states, have turned away from traditional education-based disciplinary methods — such as counseling, after-school detention, or extra homework assignments — and are looking to the legal system to handle even the most minor transgressions.”

Once you adopt the mindset that ordinary childhood misbehavior is criminal behavior, it’s easy to start seeing young children as somehow monstrous.

“Believe me when I tell you,” said Chief Mercurio, “a 6-year-old can inflict injury to you just as much as any other person.”

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A Death in Destrehan

By BOB HERBERT

Published: February 1, 2007
The New York Times

Destrehan, La. On the afternoon of Oct. 7, 1974, a mob of 200 enraged whites, many of them students, closed in on a bus filled with black students that was trying to pull away from the local high school. The people in the mob were in a high-pitched frenzy. They screamed racial epithets and bombarded the bus with rocks and bottles. The students on the bus were terrified.

When a shot was heard, the kids on the bus dived for cover. But it was a 13-year-old white boy standing near the bus, not far from his mother, who toppled to the ground with a bullet wound in his head. The boy, a freshman named Timothy Weber, died a few hours later.

That single shot in this rural town about 25 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans set in motion a tale of appalling injustice that has lasted to the present day.

Destrehan was in turmoil in 1974 over school integration. The Supreme Court’s historic desegregation ruling was already 20 years old — time enough, the courts said, for Destrehan and the surrounding area to comply. But the Ku Klux Klan was still welcome in Destrehan in those days, and David Duke, its one-time imperial wizard, was an admired figure. White families in the region wanted no part of integration.

When black students were admitted to Destrehan High, they were greeted with taunts, various forms of humiliation and violence. Some of the black students fought back, and in the period leading up to the shooting there had been racial fights at a football game and inside the school.

While the Weber boy was being taken to a hospital, authorities ordered the black students off the bus and searched each one. The bus was also thoroughly searched. No weapon was found, and there was no evidence to indicate that the shot had come from the bus. The bus driver insisted it had not come from the bus, but from someone firing at the bus.

One of the black youngsters, a 16-year-old named Gary Tyler, was arrested for disturbing the peace after he talked back to a sheriff’s deputy — one of the few deputies in St. Charles Parish who was black. It may have been young Tyler’s impudence that doomed him. He was branded on the spot as the designated killer.

(Later, at a trial, the deputy, Nelson Coleman, was asked whose peace had been disturbed by Mr. Tyler’s comments. “Mine,” he replied.)

Matters moved amazingly fast after the shooting. Racial tension gave way to racial hysteria. A white boy had been killed and some black had to pay. Mr. Tyler, as good a black as any, was taken to a sheriff’s substation where he was beaten unmercifully amid shouted commands that he confess. He would not.

It didn’t matter. In just a little over a year he would be tried, convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death by electrocution.

The efficiency of the process was chilling. Evidence began to miraculously appear. Investigators “found” a .45-caliber pistol. Never mind that there were no fingerprints on it and it turned out to have been stolen from a firing range used by the sheriff’s deputies. (Or that it subsequently disappeared as conveniently as it was found.) The authorities said they found the gun on the bus, despite the fact that the initial search had turned up nothing.

The authorities found witnesses who said that Mr. Tyler had been the gunman. Never mind that the main witness, a former girlfriend of Mr. Tyler’s, was a troubled youngster who had been under the care of a psychiatrist and had a history of reporting phony crimes to the police, including a false report of a kidnapping. She and every other witness who fingered Mr. Tyler would later recant, charging that they had been terrorized into testifying falsely by the police.

A sworn affidavit from Larry Dabney, who was seated by Mr. Tyler on the bus, was typical. He said his treatment by the police was the “scariest thing” he’d ever experienced. “They didn’t even ask me what I saw,” he said. “They told me flat out that I was going to be their key witness. ... They told me I was going to testify that I saw Gary with a gun right after I heard the shot and that a few minutes later I had seen him hide it in a slit in the seat. That was not true. I didn’t see Gary or anybody else in that bus with a gun.”

Mr. Tyler was spared electrocution when the Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s death penalty unconstitutional. But in many ways he has in fact paid with his life. He’ll turn 50 this year in the state penitentiary at Angola, where he is serving out his sentence of life without parole for the murder of Timothy Weber

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Long on Rhetoric, Short on Sorrow

By BOB HERBERT

Published: January 25, 2007
The New York Times

President Bush showed what he does well at the beginning of the State of the Union ceremony when he graciously acknowledged and introduced Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House of Representatives. He seemed both generous and sincere, and it was the right touch for a genuinely historic moment.

At the end of his speech he introduced four Americans of whom the nation can be proud, including Wesley Autrey, a New Yorker who made like a Hollywood stunt man to save the life of a stricken passenger who had fallen onto the tracks in front of an oncoming subway train.

The rest of the evening was a study in governmental dysfunction. The audience kept mindlessly applauding — up and down, like marionettes — when in fact there was nothing to applaud. The state of the union is wretched, which is why the president’s approval ratings are the worst since Nixon and Carter.

If Mr. Bush is bothered by his fall from political grace, it wasn’t showing on Tuesday night. He seemed as relaxed as ever, smiling, signing autographs, glad-handing.

I wanted to hear him talk about the suffering of the soldiers he has put in harm’s way, and the plight of the residents of New Orleans. I wanted to hear him express a little in the way of sorrow for the many thousands who have died unnecessarily on his watch. I wanted to see him slip the surly bonds of narcissism and at least acknowledge the human wreckage that is the sum and substance of his sustained folly.

But this is a president who runs when empathy calls. While others are monitoring the casualty lists, he’s off to the gym. At least Lyndon Johnson had the decency to agonize over the losses he unleashed in Vietnam.

The State of the Union speech was boilerplate at a time when much of the country, with good reason, is boiling mad. The United States, the most powerful nation in the history of the world, seems paralyzed. It can’t extricate itself from the war in Iraq, can’t rebuild the lost city of New Orleans, can’t provide health care for all of its citizens, can’t come up with a sane energy policy in the era of global warming, can’t even develop a thriving public school system.

If it’s true, as President Bush told his audience, that “much is asked of us,” it’s equally true that very little has been delivered.

The Democrats, delighted by the wounded Bush presidency, believe this is their time. Like an ostentation of peacocks, an extraordinary crowd of excited candidates is gathering in hopes of succeeding Mr. Bush.

But such a timid crowd!

Ask a potential Democratic president what he or she would do about the war, and you’ll get a doctoral dissertation about the importance of diplomacy, the possibility of a phased withdrawal (but not too quick), the need for Iraqis to help themselves and figure out a way to divvy up the oil, and so on and so forth.

A straight answer? Surely you jest. The Democrats remind me of the boxer in the Bonnie Raitt lyric who was “afraid to throw a punch that might land.”

There’s a hole in the American system where the leadership used to be. The country that led the miraculous rebuilding effort in the aftermath of World War II can’t even build an adequate system of levees on its own Gulf Coast.

The most effective answer to this leadership vacuum would be a new era of political activism by ordinary citizens. The biggest, most far-reaching changes of the past century — the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement — were not primarily the result of elective politics, but rather the hard work of committed citizen-activists fed up with the status quo.

It’s time for thoughtful citizens to turn off their TVs and step into the public arena. Protest. Attend meetings. Circulate petitions. Run for office. I suspect the public right now is way ahead of the politicians when it comes to ideas about creating a more peaceful, more equitable, more intelligent society.

The candidates for the most part are listening to their handlers and gurus and fat-cat contributors, which is the antithesis of democracy. It’s not easy for ordinary men and women to be heard above that self-serving din, but it can be done.

Voters should listen to Dwight Eisenhower, who said in 1954:

“Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.”

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Your MasterCard or Your Life

By BOB HERBERT

Published: January 22, 2007
The New York Times

Americans are increasingly living in a house of cards — credit cards.

A disturbing new report shows that with health care costs continuing their sharp rise, low- and middle-income patients are reaching for their credit cards with alarming frequency to cover treatment that they otherwise would be unable to afford.

This medical debt, to be paid off in many cases at sky-high interest rates, is being loaded onto consumer debt that is already at dangerously high levels. Many families have been crushed by the load, driven from their homes, forced into bankruptcy, and worse.

The report, released last week, was jointly compiled by Demos, a public policy group in New York, and the Access Project, which is affiliated with a health policy institute at Brandeis University and is trying to broaden the availability of health care in the U.S.

Imagine for a moment the seriously ill patient who needs to be hospitalized. In the cold new world of health care, the primary message to such patients is often “Show me the money!”

In many instances, of course, the patient does not have the money. What the report found is that even people with health insurance are being drained by health care costs to the point where the credit card seems the only option.

“As deductibles and co-payments increase,” the report said, “hospitals are finding more patients unable to pay their medical bills. Some hospital management analysts are expecting an increase in self-pay patients and are bracing for higher levels of bad debt.

“In recognition of the evolving payment landscape and the risk of hospital bad debt, health care providers are more aggressively seeking upfront collection of co-pays and deductibles. A component of this strategy is to encourage patients to use third-party lenders such as credit cards to pay for medical expenses they cannot afford, which families frequently do to meet high medical bills.”

It’s one thing to reach for your Visa or MasterCard to pay for a Barbie doll or flat-screen TV. It’s way different to pull out the plastic because you’ve just learned you have cancer or heart disease, and you don’t have any other way to pay for treatment that would prevent a premature trip to the great beyond.

A society is seriously out of whack when legalized loan sharks are encouraged to close in on those who are broke and desperately ill.

This medical indebtedness is hardly surprising. Health care costs continue to rise much faster than family income and inflation, and Americans (who have stopped saving altogether) were already mired in staggering amounts of personal debt. Some families have been putting their groceries on credit cards. Many have taken the financially disastrous step of using home equity loans to bring down credit card balances.

A serious illness for people already in shaky economic circumstances can be the final push into bankruptcy.

According to the report, called “Borrowing to Stay Healthy,” about 29 percent of low- and middle-income families with credit card debt reported using their credit cards to pay medical expenses — in most cases for major medical problems.

Over all, a full 20 percent of low- and middle-income families with credit card debt said they had used their cards to cover major medical expenses over the prior three years.

This indebtedness — subject to monthly late fees and penalties, and interest rates that can reach 30 percent — only adds to the trauma of serious illness.

It’s believed that 29 million Americans are burdened with medical debt of one form or another. Individuals who are already saddled with medical bills that they can’t pay are much more likely to avoid further medical treatment and to leave drug prescriptions unfilled. Such decisions often have life-threatening consequences.

There is an epidemic of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. and medical factors are believed to play a role in as many as half of them.

These are problems that cry out for reform — of the American health care system and the American way of debt, both of which seriously threaten the American way of life. At the very least, in the short term, we need to protect financially vulnerable patients from a credit card universe in which there are no legal limits on fees or interest, and where the abuse of customers is the norm.

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Descending to New Depths

By BOB HERBERT
Published: January 15, 2007
New Orleans
The New York Times

I was surprised recently by a sudden shift in the tone of a veteran cabdriver, Stanley Taylor, who had been kind enough to take me on a nearly four-hour tour of the flood-wrecked regions of the city.

For most of the afternoon, Mr. Taylor had been wonderfully informative and polite, and his comments had been filled with sympathy for those who had lost so much to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

But as we headed back to my hotel, and darkness began to fall over the eerily still neighborhoods, his tone became unmistakably bitter. We had been talking casually about the thousands of extremely poor evacuees, most of them black, who were still stranded outside New Orleans, some of them scattered to the far reaches of the United States.

Mr. Taylor, who is black, snapped that maybe it would be better if some of them didn’t come back. “The poor people that’s gone,” he said, “they’re gonna have to stay gone. That’s where all the crime was coming from, see? Folks here want people to come back, but they want people with money to come back. The criminals? Shame on ’em. Sorry for ’em.”

During the immediate post-Katrina period, there were essentially two visions of a resurgent New Orleans. One, widely decried as racist, saw the new, improved New Orleans as smaller, whiter and more prosperous.

This was openly advocated. Just a few days after the storm, a wealthy member of the city’s power elite, James Reiss, told The Wall Street Journal: “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically.”

Mr. Reiss, who is white and served in Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s administration as chairman of the Regional Transit Authority (he has since left the government), said that he and many of his colleagues would leave town if New Orleans did not become a city with better services and fewer poor people.

An alternative (and more widely desired) model of the city coincided with the approach that President Bush seemed to be taking when he made his dramatic appearance in floodlit Jackson Square in mid-September 2005. Mr. Bush promised not just to help rebuild New Orleans, but to confront the long-simmering problems of race and poverty with “bold action.”

Supporters of this approach envisioned an effort that would bring desperately needed assistance to the hurricane victims, helping to get them housed and back on their feet, while at the same time constructively engaging the contentious issues that have kept America’s blacks and whites in a state of perpetual hostility, and much of the poor in an all-but-permanent morass of ignorance and deprivation.

What is actually happening is worse than anyone had imagined.

New Orleans is a mess. It was brought to its knees by Katrina, and is being kept there by a toxic combination of federal neglect and colossal, mind-numbing ineptitude at the local level.

The police department here is a sour joke, and crime is out of control. More than 16 months after the storm, children roam the streets with impunity during school hours. Debris still covers much of the city. Doctors, hospitals and mental-health facilities are in woefully short supply. Thousands of residents are still living in trailers, and many thousands more are stuck more or less permanently out of town.

The result is that blacks and whites, feeling unsafe physically and frightened by the long-term prospect of dwindling opportunities, are eyeing the exits.

Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who lost the mayoral race last May to Mr. Nagin, offered a grim assessment. While the ethnic breakdown may remain roughly the same, he said, the city is on its way to becoming “smaller, poorer and worse than it was before.”

Class, at the moment, is trumping race, which is how Mr. Reiss and Mr. Taylor, the cabdriver, came unwittingly to similar stereotyped conclusions. Unless the foundations of a livable city can be put in place — and they are not being put in place now — those with the ability to leave will do so. The poor, neglected as always, will be left behind.

“The same thing is moving African-Americans as is moving whites,” Mr. Landrieu said. “Everyone is asking: ‘Is it safe? What’s the school situation? Can my kids play outside? What does the future hold for them?’ ”

Without a creative new plan and energetic new leadership, New Orleans will be unable to save itself. Right now it’s a city sinking to ever more tragic depths.

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"Descending to New Depths" >>