Apparently there is a move afoot to change the Red Cross emblem to something "less religious." One proposal is to change the cross to a red crystal.

Who the hell is Harold Evans over at the BBC? He claims (sounding a tad like Don Quixote, methinks) that Katrina will finally wipe the last vestiges of Social Darwinism from American shores. Read, for instance:

America has long been entranced by stories of fortunes made by hard work and perseverance without help from government. More tellingly many of them come true, truer in America than anywhere else. It is just that they are not the whole story. When people fail it leaves, exposed as a raw nerve, the question of moral duty in a civilized society.

So Social Darwinism has remained in the American psyche, sometimes submerged in the current, sometimes coming to the surface like a log in a fast-flowing river. [President Grover]Cleveland's sentiments might have popped up any time in the 1980s on Ronald Reagan's teleprompter. His remark that "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem" was an echo of Cleveland and many presidencies thereafter.

The log came clearly into view again when turbulence in the wake of 9/11 led to the re-election of George W Bush. His instinct for low taxes and small government has been neatly encapsulated by the evangelical tax cutter Grover Norquist: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

My judgment is that the log of Social Darwinism will disappear again under the toxic flood waters of New Orleans. The corpses floating face down in the muddy overflow from broken Mississippi levees are too shocking a sight for Americans of all classes and parties. They are too kindly a people. They will look once again for vigour and compassion in government, even at the price of higher taxes.

Apart from my amazement of his using Grover Cleveland, this is fighting paper tigers. As he readily admits, Americans are a most charitable and kindly people, itself deflating the central factor of Social Darwinism that people ought to be allowed to fail and fail hard, without much compassion and concern from the rest of us. We have the lovely mixture, which works well in a federal system, of distrust of centralized government (which has zero to do with compassion, by the way -- few things are more cold than a national bureaucracy filing paperwork and filling patronage) and individual and neighborhood acts of compassion.

We fear national incompetence -- well-established here and elsewhere over these many, many years of New Deals and Great Societies -- and embrace private initiative and the acts of those governments closest to us. When they fail, then and only then are the feds invited and welcome. Mr. Evans seeks to upend this, and make the feds welcome first on the basis of a vague, curious, and frightening "compassion in government." Governments can love us too much, and when they do they take more than give, talk more than listen, and grow at the expense of individuals and competing institutions. And soon that love is smothering, unwanted, and inescapable. This has absolutely nothing to do with Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and the host of Social Darwinists. It has everything to do with history and the track record of governments.