New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has Singapore and hurricane Katrina on his mind.

That is certainly the sense I got after observing the Katrina debacle from half a world away here in Singapore - a city-state that, if it believes in anything, believes in good governance. It may roll up the sidewalks pretty early here, and it may even fine you if you spit out your gum, but if you had to choose anywhere in Asia you would want to be caught in a typhoon, it would be Singapore. Trust me, the head of Civil Defense here is not simply someone's college roommate.

At a point when we are contemplating how to rebuild a mostly destroyed city, invoking Singapore is intriguing. The Disney Land of nation-states, Singapore can best be framed in the context of its airlines. There is one size dress all the flight attendants wear. Either the fit in the dress, or they don't fit in the job. Its one way to run a society, and when you only have one city and 4.4 million people involved, it can work. I'll admit to having found the vision of Raffels somewhat appealing when sitting in the 1st class section named after him cruising at 40 thousand feet while enjoying the most complete booze selection of any airline servicing asia-pac.

"In the areas that are critical to our survival, like Defense, Finance and the Ministry of Home Affairs, we look for the best talent," said Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy. "You lose New Orleans, and you have 100 other cities just like it. But we're a city-state. We lose Singapore and there is nothing else. ... [So] the standards of discipline are very high. There is a very high degree of accountability in Singapore."

Accountability Singapore style can be pretty brutal. Lets just say you best dispose of your bubble-gum properly. Either way, they are pretty much telling us we suck, and they actually have a point or two. Granted they kill people over drug offenses, yet are still one of the major transit ports in the south-east asian heroin trade and a major venue for money laundering. I guess that's what comes with having the largest port in the world in terms of tonnage and being a major outpost in the free market.

We let the families of the victims of 9/11 redesign our intelligence organizations, and our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured. Our economy seems to be fueled lately by either suing each other or selling each other houses. Our government launched a war in Iraq without any real plan for the morning after, and it cut taxes in the middle of that war, ensuring that future generations would get the bill.

Speaking of Katrina, Sumiko Tan, a columnist for the Sunday edition of The Straits Times in Singapore, wrote: "We were shocked at what we saw. Death and destruction from natural disaster is par for the course. But the pictures of dead people left uncollected on the streets, armed looters ransacking shops, survivors desperate to be rescued, racial divisions - these were truly out of sync with what we'd imagined the land of the free to be, even if we had encountered homelessness and violence on visits there. ... If America becomes so unglued when bad things happen in its own backyard, how can it fulfill its role as leader of the world?"

Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. "Today's conservatives," he wrote, "differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday's conservatives: the latter believed in small government, but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.

"The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government that it does have. ... [But] it is not only government that doesn't show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn't show up either, sacrifice doesn't show up, pulling together doesn't show up, 'we're all in this together' doesn't show up."

You will not see that take on things coming from FoxNews.

More Friedman on the way.. I am very dismayed at the fact that Friedman may soon wind up behind a subscription wall. I don't have a birthday coming up, but if I did, I'd ask for a Thomas Friedman blog.

Singapore and Katrina - Thomas Friedman