The United States, this great bustling, guzzling, achieving, self-confident, richest country on earth, is touched today with uncommon uncertainty.

You see it right across the nation, four years after the disaster of September 11, 2001, and almost five weeks after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina.

You see it at the Greyhound bus station for Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, about an hour's drive from Peoria, thrice elected the All-America city. Producers of vaudeville tried their shows here before taking them to New York; new consumer goods are tested here; Richard Nixon famously asked his aides of the merit of certain policies: "Will it play in Peoria?"

At the bus station, the African-American driver's blunt manner draws disapproval from two white males. "He's got attitude," one says. The second drawls: "In the South we still hang people like that." The driver appears to have no worse attitude than any of his passengers. He orders a girl who looks about 16, with a baby in her arms, and her equally young-looking partner off the bus. They don't have the fare to travel on to Chicago. They accept the order without challenge, eyes downcast. They have come from God knows where in this God-loving country; now they are heading nowhere.

Such scenes have played out for years. But one positive point about Katrina is that Americans are now more aware of the poverty in their communities. And the racism. President George Bush admitted as much, saying poverty "has roots in a history of racial discrimination which cut off generations from the opportunity of America".

The Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III, president of a coalition of mainly black churches, said: "Katrina has posed a challenge to the White House and the country regarding the great divide, which is race and class in America."

Poverty rates have risen for each of the past four years. The US Census Bureau reported this month that 1.1 million more Americans lived in poverty in 2004. The number of poor people has risen 17 per cent under Bush, to 12.7 per cent of the population.

The great divide in this land of extremes is perhaps best illustrated by two facts. First, Bush wants Americans back on the moon and to push on to Mars. Michael Griffin, the NASA administrator, this week set a tentative goal of 2018 for a return to the moon, at a cost of more than $US100 billion ($131 billion).

Second, the infant mortality rate in Washington is twice as high as that in Beijing. While Bush prepares to cut taxes, lack of health insurance kills many more Americans each year than September 11 and Katrina combined.

You can see and hear the nation's uncertainty on Amtrak's California Zephyr, the train that runs daily between San Francisco and Chicago. Paul Schacht, a cotton grower in Bush's home state of Texas, has "a bad feeling" about Sacramento, California, where he boarded with his wife.

The bad feeling springs from the letters to the local newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, which are overwhelmingly condemnatory of the Government's handling of the Katrina disaster.

What's more, the taxi driver to the railway station had suggested that Fidel Castro would "sort it out" - and a youth was wearing a T-shirt sporting the hammer and sickle. "At least we are a free people," Schacht says, "and free to be stupid."

His wife says Katrina was unpredictable, like the Indian Ocean tsunami. Sure, Katrina was a brutal natural disaster - "nature's 9/11", The New York Times's Thomas L. Friedman called it - but it touched off a man-made disaster of chaos and mismanagement.

National Geographic magazine forecast the disaster last October; New Orleans authorities and media had repeatedly urged the building of defensive public works; the Federal Government cut the budget for such works; National Guard personnel, who might have helped, were in Iraq.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr asked 25 years ago whether an elected government aspiring to the highest ideals of a secular republic could survive. Greece and Rome did not.

Yet Americans demonstrate more clearly a faith in themselves, their politicians and their God than do Australians.

Passengers read Bibles on Amtrak; Stars and Stripes fly from flagpoles outside the mobile homes of the poor; and survivors of Katrina praise God for sparing them, rather than question why their neighbors were taken.

Schlesinger wondered in The New York Times this week why, when evangelical Christians had such a powerful presence in this "faith-based" presidency, Reinhold Niebuhr, the supreme American theologian of the 20th century, had dropped out of religious discourse. Niebuhr emphasized human nature's mixed character - of both creative and destructive impulses, and the temptation to play God to history. Religion, he warned, could be a source of error as well as wisdom and light.

Despite the traditional respect held by Americans for their presidents, Bush's approval rating has slumped to about 40 per cent. The taxi driver in Springfield, when asked if Bush could fix things, replies: "He couldn't fix lunch." Susan Callahan, retired from the University of Vermont, says in Burlington: "The jig is up."

In New York, few write off Bush as a lame duck, but it will be increasingly tough for him to save the world and shoot for Mars while so many Americans await salvation at home.

Tony Stephens, a Herald journalist, has been traveling across America.

© Copyright 2005 Sydney Morning Herald