“Ready or Not, Katrina Victims Lose Temporary Housing,” was a headline in the New York Times on Thursday. “Though more than 4,000 Louisiana homeowners have received rebuilding money only in the last six months, or are struggling with inadequate grants or no money at all,” the Times reported, “FEMA is intent on taking away their trailers by the end of May.”

These people are still in FEMA trailers? It’s been almost four years since Hurricane Katrina. What have they been doing?

One man has been collecting pop cans. The New York Times leads their story with a description and photo of this man, who has been scavenging garbage to finance the repair of his house. He has a room full of pop cans, stacked chest-high. The trouble is, pop cans aren’t worth much, and less now because aluminum has gone down in value. This man might have sold the cans when the price was high and got a bit more, but he didn’t. He piled them up and their value went down. Anyway, he needs lots and lots and lots more cans before he can fix his house, and therefore he wants to stay in a FEMA trailer at taxpayer’s expense a little while longer. Maybe a big while longer: the story does not say how old this man, now 70, will be when he collects enough pop cans.

Collecting pop cans is a wino’s job. It is no way to finance the repair of a building. And the story says this man owns the building. He’s the landlord. Why doesn’t he put a mortgage on it? If that’s not doable, then why not sell it? But it’s not rational behavior to hold on to flood-damaged real estate for four years while living in a FEMA trailer and piling up a hill of pop cans.

Here is the problem with “objective journalism,” meaning here non-judgmental journalism. If this man says his business plan is to rebuild his life with pop cans, the New York Times reports that as a fact. Don’t ask him why he’s doing it that way; don’t raise your journalistic eyebrows and suggest, ever so subtly, that he’s out of his mind. Indeed—use his story to introduce a whole compendium of hard-luck stories, in all of which helpless victims are asking to stay in their (free?) FEMA trailers. Then quote the hard, cold, Scroogelike dollar-conscious U.S. government P.R. guy saying, “this is a temporary program, it was always intended as a temporary program, and at a certain point all temporary programs must end.”

I agree with the government guy. The program must end--and if the pop-can collector is the strongest case for keeping the program going, then the time to end it is now.