The alienation of the poor of New Orleans prior to the hurricane is as much a calamity as the displacement of this permanent underclass in the wake of Katrina's floodwaters.

It took this force of nature to expose for all the world the man-made myth of Crescent City harmony. This yarn had N'alins as a racial jambalaya synchronized by cool jazz, brotherhood and mint juleps. The drinks on Bourbon Street, it seeped out last spring, cost blacks nearly twice as much as white imbibers. Still, the lumpen-proletarians of the 67 percent African-American majority lived tucked away in the suppressed squalor of the ghetto wards.

The terrible winds of Katrina drove the invisible black masses out into plain view. God knows too many of them died. Others scribbled and waved flags atop their flooded rooftops as the lucky ones got rescued and huddled together in the Superdome.

It is a given that most of the alienated in New Orleans would be black. Granted, it is the birthplace of the blues, the whites and the beige, the Creoles, the Cajuns and a half-dozen shades of mulatto-roons. Still, this flooded urban cup is America. In this partying town, for example, only the poor blacks of the racial bouillabaisse have been excluded from Mardi Gras. Traditionally, they are barred from the bigoted crews that build the gaudy floats as a Gomorrah excuse for springtime debauchery in the French Quarter. It's been swept away, this Mardi Gras, along with the gambling boats that plied the Mississippi draining rent money from the suckers.

This displacement of the poor recalls "The Grapes of Wrath" as written by novelist John Steinbeck. The farming Joads of Oklahoma have been uprooted by tractors during the Great Depression and make their way to California seeking fruit-picking jobs.

Their creaky jalopy joins an endless caravan of the dispossessed streaming as far as the eye can see toward the golden hills of California. As poor as they might have been in Oklahoma, the Joads loved the land and departed with great reluctance. The grandfather dies en route and the father shortly afterward as the family meets extraordinary hostility and endures.

President George W. Bush was introduced to the film "The Grapes of Wrath" as a student at the Harvard Business School, where he got admitted on his family's name. "I wanted to give the class a visual reference for poverty and a sense of historical empathy," macroeconomics professor Yoshi Tsurumi told a researcher for Kitty Kelley's book, "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty."

"George Bush came up to me and said, 'Why are you going to show us that commie movie?'" Tsurumi recalled. "I laughed because I thought he was kidding, but he wasn't. After we viewed the film, I called on him to discuss the Depression and how he thought it affected people. [Bush] said, 'Look, people are poor because they are lazy.' A number of students pounced on him and demanded that he support his statement with facts and statistics. He quickly backed down because he could not sustain his broadside."

The incident and a semester of exposure burned into Tsurumi's memory a disturbing view of the future president. "His strong prejudices soon set him apart.... Most business students are conservative, but they are not inhumane or unprincipled. George Bush came across as totally lacking compassion, with no sense of history, completely devoid of social responsibility and unconcerned with the welfare of others."

The Harvard professor's recollection of his "abysmal" student is not inconsistent with what we have since learned about Bush as president. How else could a sitting president remain deafeningly silent on vacation for four days as a major city was destroyed by the greatest natural disaster ever to hit the continental United States?

In a public relations attempt to obscure the wasteland that is their eldest son's heart, Bush 41 and his wife, Barbara, took to the hustings last week to do damage control. Instead, the mother served only to reveal the maternal link to the president's view of the less well-off. Gazing upon the flood-displaced poor in the Astrodome who had been bused penniless from their homes in New Orleans with barely the clothes on their backs, the president's mother saw only Texas hospitality.

"Almost everyone I've talked to says, 'We're going to move to Texas,'" she said. "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this," she said with a chuckle, "this is working very well for them."

Steinbeck must have recoiled in his grave.

© 2005 Newsday, Inc.

###