Some people will tell you that this is a very real disaster of our own making.
We forget that being a child — being that powerless — is often its very own disaster.
Hector V. Barreto, the administrator of the S.B.A., told the House Committee on Small Business on Thursday that the loan approval statistics were a result of what was a very different disaster.
Little Nicky, especially, was a very costly disaster, even garnering five nominations for the Razzies which are awarded annually to the worst films in Hollywood.
Paul Kenny, GMB general secretary, said: "Tory housing policy has turned out to be a very expensive disaster for both UK taxpayers and for people on lower incomes who depend on social housing.
Both men had served in the Clinton administration (with Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, who would later join Citigroup as a senior adviser and board member); their actions, Mr. Suskind contends, "had contributed to the very financial disaster they were hired to solve".
"This is a very major disaster, on the same scale as the earthquake of 2005," Maurizio Giuliano, public information officer for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said in a statement.
The administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, W. Craig Fugate, described the situation in Louisiana as "a very large disaster," and the East Baton Rouge Parish authorities imposed a curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
A resolute high Modernist, he was out of sympathy with many of the aesthetic waves that came after the great achievements of the New York School, notably Pop ("a very great disaster"), Conceptual art ("scrapbook art") and postmodernism ("modernism with a sneer, a giggle, modernism without any animating faith in the nobility and pertinence of its cultural mandate").
We can be thankful that he carried on, because he has given us an enthralling chronicle of that distant and very different disaster, which left its own profound mark on the city and taught lessons that we are badly in need of remembering.
