Long before Katrina, the South functioned in the social imaginary to contain racism and poverty, and the Mason-Dixon acts then in the national imagination as a buffer to safeguard the nation from the taint of such undemocratic realities. More and more, in many countries of America, a system known as "neoliberalism" prevails; based on a purely economic conception of the human person….At times this system has become the ideological justification for certain attitudes and behavior in the social and political spheres leading to the neglect of the weaker members of society. Indeed, the poor are becoming ever more numerous, victims of specific policies and structures which are often unjust. The uniform overlay of social neoliberalism on public discourse as reflected in mainstream media results in a "tightly controlled visual landscape" (Giroux 172) in which people living in poverty in the U.S. most often emerge as antagonists in the broad narrative of contemporary American life. Narrative can not exist without antagonism and conflict, good guys and bad guys, a sense of "us vs. them." While Hurricane Katrina's devastating appearance on the physical landscape of the Gulf Coast held the potential to disrupt the visual and narrative landscape created in the post-Reagan U.S., and to open up difficult, long overdue discussions about race and class in the U.S. in short order, the dominant discourse soon reverted to familiar patterns. In this article, the authors analyze the facts that have been represented of social neoliberalism and Hurricane Katrina.