So, New York Times columnist David Brooks wants to compare the present state of affairs to the malaise of the 1970s.

Brooks is right to point out the number of inexcusable breakdowns in stepping up to the disaster in New Orleans and Mississippi. He is right to point out the putrid response of the government to a catastrophe that, unlike 9/11, the world knew was coming.

But Brooks portrays the events of this summer - and earlier - as watershed events pointing to leadership vacuum and social decay. He equates it with the 1970s.

Memo to David Brooks: Times have changed.

Mr. Brooks, We knew the 1970s. The 1970s were a friend of ours. Mr. Brooks, 2005 is no 1970s.

During the 1970s, there was corruption from the head to the core of American government. Not just the Nixon Administration, either. Remember Abscam?
Though Abscam reached a crescendo in 1980, the FBI sting against congressmen began two years earlier. Everybody then, it seemed, was on the take.

During the 1970s, the gas supply pipeline was so inadequate there were gas lines, Mr. Brooks. Rises in gas prices took a huge chunk out of the American economy - much more on an inflation-adjusted basis than today. In perusing Time Magazine's wonderful archive(subscription required), you can come across this anectdote from February, 1974:

Salvatore Butera, owner of a BP station in Trenton, N.J., signaled his distress in another way. New Jersey stations are now required by the state to put out various colored flags (red for no gas, yellow for limited sales, green for unlimited sales). Butera hoisted a white flag, explaining, "They got me beat any way I turn."

This week, when gasoline prices spiked by as much as 75 cents a gallon on Long Island, where driving is akin to breathing, there were small gas lines at the few stations that kept prices under $3 a gallon until midnight on Tuesday. By Tuesday morning, it was back to normal. No white flags, Mr. Brooks.

Mr. Brooks, you write:

Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib.

In case you forgot, Mr. Brooks, Howard Dean, John Kerry and the rest of the Democratic party used most of those arguments hour by hour, day after day, month after month leading up to last November's presidential election. Sixty million Americans still voted for President Bush and sent him back to the White House. If ever there was a time for the collective American psyche to demonstrate a crisis in confidence it was then. But, unlike the 1970s, America was not inclined to put another Jimmy Carter in the White House.

You write:

Each institutional failure and sign of helplessness is another blow to national morale. The sour mood builds on itself, the outraged and defensive reaction to one event serving as the emotional groundwork for the next.

America has never been perfect. You talk about institutional failures. For daily aggravation and scandal back in the day: Remember 3-hour lines at the DMV? Remember $900 toilet seats at the Pentagon? Remember Serpico? Remember the joys of dealing with the phone company - a government-protected monopoly?

During the 1970s, the Cold War sapped our tax dollars and sent us on a race to what we were told would be nuclear oblivion. "How could anybody vote for Reagan?" a lot of people asked. "He'll just get us into a nuclear war with the Soviets." Remember the Soviets, Mr. Brooks? They don't exist anymore. But there was no Armageddon, and we've come to understand since then that Reagan, and America, was right to fight what was then a totally non-sensical war.

Only now we won't have to wait another fifteen or 20 years for validation on the Iraq war like we did with the Cold War. Saddam Hussein's trial starts soon. We'll hear a lot about his WMD attacks, torture and rape on his own people. Mr. Brooks, Stalin and Brezhnev never had to stand trial, with the world looking on in real time. Saddam does. All the institutional failures won't overshadow the larger truth on Iraq: America was right. And we won't have to wait for the history books to find that out.

You write:

As a result, it is beginning to feel a bit like the 1970's, another decade in which people lost faith in their institutions and lost a sense of confidence about the future.

"Rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown/What a mess! This town's in tatters/I've been shattered," Mick Jagger sang in 1978.

How dare you? How dare you? Besides the fact that you Dowdified the quote (The lyrics also note of New York: "Don't you know the crime rate is going up, up, up, up, up/To live in this town you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough!"), you don't get out as much in Manhattan as you ought to.

Granted, you write for The New York Times, but you could still step out of the building and take a look at New York City once in a while. The rat population on the West Side ain't what it used to be, Mr. Brooks. The town's not in tatters. New York was once a model of American social and urban decay. The Bronx was burning, to hearken back to Howard Cosell. It's now, quite possibly, one of the cleanest, safest big cities in the world. We were wrong about New York's ability to rebound during the 1970s, and we remember how wrong we were. When it comes to rebuilding, New Orleans can look to New York and take heart.

You write:

Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.

There has already been a reaction, Mr. Brooks. It came in the form of the ridiculous Kanye West. See how far that goes. And the angry Left has never stopped reacting since the 2000 recount. It's white noise to most Americans.

One more thought about the 1970s, Mr. Brooks. Hurricane Agnes ravaged the East Coast in 1972. People died. Thousands were left homeless. Pennsylvania was submerged. Did the American spirit - the spirit you suggest has been left in tatters, a la Mick Jagger - come anywhere near as close as this kind of response?

After the "crisis in confidence" and malaise of the 1970s, Ronald Reagan taught us something that everyone should remember. When it comes to America, the best is yet to come.

Save the bad 1970s flashbacks for TVLand.