What's Right.

Do Tell, Isabel

If you read the Drudge Report, you know all about Hurricane Isabel. Or maybe not: Maybe you are one of those who shrug off "weather hype" and skip past Drudge's weather headlines down to the political and celebrity items. What, after all, is there to say about a storm? It comes; it knocks down some trees; it goes.

I used to number myself with the weather skeptics. No more. Drudge is right: Storms are news. More than news: Hurricane Isabel exposed some of Washington's social realities more vividly than a dozen episodes of The West Wing.

Two mornings after the storm hit, I was driving on one of the city's main arteries, River Road. All its street lights were still out of commission. A flare was burning in the center of a big intersection, and cars were patiently taking turns to cross. The cars were moving even slower than you might expect, because one of the intersection's lanes was blocked by a police car -- with two members of D.C.'s finest inside, watching the traffic trying to crawl past them. In another city, the cops might have parked so that they did not snarl traffic; they might possibly even have stepped out of the car and directed traffic. In another city, they might have found Chandra too. But that's not how things are done in Washington!

How are things done in Washington? Well, the night before, my wife and I had taken our dogs for a walk along a street that borders one of the city's ravines. It's a windy, wooded street that plunges from almost the highest point in the city almost to the river valley -- and, of course, it was hit hard by the storm. The row of very grand houses that line it from top to bottom were all plunged in black.

Well, not quite all: About a third of the way down, we passed the imposing mansion of the elected president of Washington's school board, Peggy Cooper Cafritz, lights blazing, air conditioning whirring. There was no sound of a generator. Perhaps she'd gotten lucky. Or perhaps the people at the local utility had drawn the same lesson I'd drawn from watching this large, fierce woman on local cable programming: This is a woman you cross at your peril -- and out they had come to fix her lights, pronto.

Washington is two cities, one overlaid atop the other: the federal city that governs the country, and the local city that is barely able to govern itself. The local city is a network of deals and special privileges that those of us who live and work in the federal city seldom understand. But if you do understand it, there are fortunes to be made in it: Alexis Herman, before she became President Clinton's labor secretary, made herself a wealthy woman by accepting slices of the action from real-estate developers who felt that having a local partner might improve their chances of getting zoning approval. And though the local city serves most of its residents very badly -- the city's schools, for example, rank among both the costliest and the very worst in the nation -- it clearly serves some of its residents very well.

The local city dislikes and distrusts the federal city. And even the federal city's mightiest residents can have trouble getting the local city's attention. A few paces beyond the Cafritz mansion is the understated home of Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve. By any definition, Greenspan is a high-priority case: If the dollar tumbles in overnight trading, you want the Fed chairman to be able to talk on the telephone and pull up an Excel file. Yet nobody had been out to fix his wires.

Instead, somebody had driven what looked like a Winnebago onto his property and tethered it to the side of his house. Inside the Winnebago was a generator that looked big enough to power a small shopping mall.

We returned to our pitch-black house. I couldn't claim with a straight face to be any higher a priority than any of the other 3 million homes that were reportedly darkened by Isabel. Still, I've got my grievances. Isabel was my second major blackout in a month -- I'd been in Toronto when large chunks of North America were hit by the great August power failure. Two blackouts during the final 30 days of a book deadline seems rather more than one's fair share of technological misfortune.

Still, here's something else I noticed in two blackouts in two great cities: Torontonians handled their August blackdown with marvelous efficiency. Power was restored to just about everyone within 24 hours, following a clear and logical system of priorities. At crowded intersections, citizen volunteers directed traffic -- and drivers conscientiously obeyed. Everything lived up to Peter Ustinov's famous quip about Toronto: "New York run by the Swiss."

The Swiss, however, have never been famous for their spirit of neighborliness, and so it was in the great Toronto blackout. No block parties, few stories of neighbors whose power arrived early helping neighbors whose power arrived late. To the contrary: When the provincial authorities requested that citizens turn down their air conditioners, the airwaves burned with 24 hours of talk radio about whether it was okay to snoop on your neighbors' power use.

Not so south of the 49th parallel. In his new history of the Americas, the Anglo-Spanish historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto ridicules the claim that the United States is an individualistic society. "People in the United States," the dyspeptic professor observes, "are cloyingly gregarious, profoundly communitarian, boringly conformist. They get glutinously embedded in any community they can. . . . Civic-mindedness, not individualism, is what makes 'America' great."

Shear away the adjectives, and all one say is, "Well, duh, professor." Individualistic America is also civic-minded America -- civic-minded precisely because it is individualistic, just as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out all those years ago, just as Hurricane Isabel reminds us one more time.