In the shadowy twilight of a cool September evening, I watch a rough wind blow through the leaves outside my living room window. For days, I've wrestled with a rank despair born of a president's non-response to a devastating hurricane in New Orleans and of presidential indifference to an endless, immoral war in Iraq. I am nauseous from the undisguised, ugly neglect of the American ideal by those entrusted to protect and defend it. And I no longer know what to say or do.

I move away from the window and walk to a short pine cabinet where, looking for some solace in music, I shuffle through my CDs and find Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan. Always cryptic, yet starkly prescient, Dylan's music fits this unsettling moment and mood, and so I open the plastic case, place the disc in a small wood and steel player, and turn the sound up - loud.

The crash of the first drumbeat is followed by a storm wave of organ and electric guitar, and over the top sings Dylan: "Once upon a time, you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime, in your prime, didn't you?" And as the question hangs in the air, I think of America.

In 1776, both a nation and an ideal were born. America was to be the land of "We the People," of equal opportunity, a land where every American had an equal chance of finding success. And so too this American ideal said to all - rich and poor, black and white - that we were, in the deepest and richest sense of community, in this together.

And for the next 225 years, when the truth of America fell short of its professed ideal - be it slavery, or the disenfranchisement of women, or a pernicious racism - it was the ideal of America, of "We the People," that always emboldened the downtrodden of America to challenge the elites, and to right America's moral wrongs. And though the elites always fought back, never quite relinquishing their controlling grasp on America, they knew they would be held to account and, to ensure the continuance of their privileged place, begrudgingly gave ground to the American ideal - an ideal that remained an immutable force for good.

That is, until the elections of 2000.

Then Dylan sings, "People call, say beware doll, you're bound to fall, you thought they were all a-kiddin' you."

In late 2000, "We the People" came under attack when the elites of America no longer felt compelled to show their begrudging deference to the American ideal. Just one vote, from one conservative judge (with nervous elites collectively holding their breath to see what would happen) tipped the scales and brushed aside the democratic will of the American majority. Like the unexpected fall of two steel and glass towers, the American ideal collapsed into worthless rubble.

Then came the post-9/11, Pax Americana Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars sold to the American people - in the darkest of ironies - with the words of our own American ideal. So we Americans clung desperately to the belief that there must be something moral to these wars. We had to. What else could we do? How could we give up our national ideal, our moral compass? And yet, in retrospect, we knew, down deep, that something had gone terribly wrong in America.

Didn't we?

"You're invisible now," sings Dylan, "you've got no secrets to conceal."

Then finally, with full warning of its destructive power, Hurricane Katrina roared across the Gulf of Mexico. And when Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, it stripped bare not just New Orleans and then Biloxi. It stripped bare all of America, leaving behind no illusions about what remained of the American ideal.

In the first few days after the hurricane, President Bush made it clear: we were not in this together. His casual and callous reactions to the hardships facing Americans - his endless vacationing in the face of an immoral war and his guitar playing on the heels of a catastrophic national disaster - peeled away the American president's pretence to representing and protecting "We the People."

"How does it feel," snaps Dylan derisively, "to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone."

It feels terrible.

But know this: Americans are free now. Free to see the stark truth of America. Free to disregard the meaningless paeans to the poor. Free to decline the Rockefeller dimes thrown to "bums." Americans are now liberated by the dark truth: powerful people run America for other powerful people - and for no one else.

And Dylan sings, "When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose."

America, today, is like a rolling stone, stripped bare of all its illusions. Yet Americans, as always, are prepared to confront this truth, and rediscover a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people.

With nothing left to lose, Americans may yet have an ideal to regain.

Steven Laffoley is the author of Mr. Bush, Angus and Me: Notes of an American-Canadian in the Age of Unreason. You may write him at stevenlaffoley@yahoo.ca or steven_laffoley@yahoo.com.

###