Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Katrina's racial dimension, discussed earlier today, isn't the only theme in the global reaction to America's natural disaster. There's also a muted sense of satisfaction.

For some, Katrina provides occasion to boast. In impoverished, monsoon-prone Bangladesh, Asma Akhter brags that, when it comes to flood recovery, "We have a better record than the Americans."

For others, it is time to remind Americans they are not invincible. In El Salvador’s La Prensa Grafica, a conservative and pro-American newspaper, TV newsman Jorge Ramos Ávalos, observes (in Spanish) that since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 Americans have believed that they can do anything they put their minds to. “With Katrina,” he concludes, “came the day when America couldn’t.”

And still others admit that Katrina has generated some schadenfreude, a German word for taking pleasure in the suffering of others. Liberal Britons, quick to give to tsunami victims or starving Africans, balk at Katrina contributions, writes Julian Baggini in a piece published both in South Africa and Britain. “We don’t want to plug the gaping hole created by inegalitarian American social policy because we want to expose it for what it is, and shatter the US’s self-image as the most fair and free country in the world,” he says.

For a world that often hears about “the only superpower,” there seems to be a measure of pleasure in noting that its powers are not always so super.