Democracy disaster: the story of Katrina demonstrates how linked government is to life and death and how, in this crisis, it didn't work.

• Author: Marmillion, Valsin A.

Americans like their headlines juicy. So the topics of representative democracy or federalism rarely make the cut for interesting news. While Katrina was the biggest story in years with an angle riveting for a political scientist or historian, it was all but untold in the context of federalism. In one event you had the agony and ecstasy, miracles and tragedies, political intrigue and suspicions, with life hanging in the balance--all in the glare of a world press picking through the debris. This was not your typical story about federalism.

At first, many people wanted to tell the story of Katrina as a tale of two cities, New Orleans and New York after 9/11, New Orleans and San Francisco after the great fire. But this is a tale of two contexts--personal and statistical--that demonstrates how clearly linked government and federalism are to life, death and survival in 21st century America.

Hidden under the rubble a year later is a sad tale of failure and collapse, not just of a city, but of our system of democratic federalism. FEMA, the federal agency empowered to act in a disaster, imploded, its future uncertain. The governor of a state asks the White House to "give us everything you've got," and the feds later say that the request lacked specificity. And the self-described "lone-wolf" mayor of New Orleans comes face-to-face with realities of governance that he never faced as a former business executive. One universal failure would rise above the rest: the collapse of cooperation and communication that could support E Pluribus Unum, one cooperative answer to a complicated disaster. USA TODAY laid out the riveting personal context in a Nov. 11, 2005, article by Jill Lawrence, "Behind an iconic photo, one family's tale of grief." It explored the mishaps and missteps that destroyed Lillian and Edgar Hollingsworth's lives.

"When she saw the picture in the newspaper, she couldn't speak. There was her front porch, bare of the hanging spider plants she had taken down for the storm. And there in the arms of a soldier lay her husband, emaciated and unconscious, hooked up to oxygen and fluids. It was 17 days after she had kissed him goodbye, 16 days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, 15 days after the floodwaters rose to fill the bowl that is New Orleans. 'I just held the paper and looked at it for a while. I was hoping they had rescued him.'"

The photograph Lillian refers to was taken by Bruce Chambers of The Orange County (Calif.) Register. It became a symbol of all that went terribly wrong in the wake of Katrina.

"Lillian and Edgar Hollingsworth lived a modest version of the American Dream. She was a secretary, and he worked at an A&P warehouse.... Like many city residents, the...