Your “What Went Wrong” post is a starting point in outlining the ways in which this tragedy is at least partially human-made, at least to the extent that government policies devalued the lives of hundereds of thousands of people by not maintaining the levees.  I’m also disturbed by the degree to which people seem to be continuing their lives without any kind of mourning or grief.  To take one trivial comparison, the NFL, college football, and major league baseball completely shut down for a week or two (I can’t remember exactly) after 9/11.  THe opposite seems to be happening here, as if there is a will-not-to-grieve.

I spent several summers in New Orleans when I was an undergraduate.  I remember reading Hemingway’s _A Moveable Feast_ and drinking peach tea on Julia St; being awed by the mausoleums; endlessly fascinated with the street bands, magicians, and fortune tellers; and starstruck by Mickey Rourke, who was filming Johnny Handsome in the French Quarter while I was there (”you’re shaking like a leaf,” he said when I finally mustered the courage to ask for an autograph).  I can understand why you love the city so; and I’m so glad to hear that your family is okay.

Looking on tv, houses are flooded, people are on the streets.  A few people loot.  It looks like a bad riot or something—nothing to worry about.  Let’s also remember that American’s haven’t fully cast off their adherance to race and class bias—and the bulk of people left in the city (and in the pictuers) are the poorest of the black population, while the white people on tv all have boats and are loving god and helping one another.

The bulk of the country has no idea about the true extent of damage, or how mob violence and looting has turned deadly and insane.

http://sophos.com/virusinfo/articles/katrina.html

With the caveat that you’ve already said that you’re not pointing fingers, I’m still sorry if I seemed insensitive (I did my best to ward that off, but it was probably not possible)–my point was certainly not that this isn’t a tragedy, because it is, and I’m following developing events with increasing sadness and concern. But absurdity in media remains, and that was really my main subject there. I sort of regret comparing the casualty numbers, since it’s ended up as the focus of a lot of criticism of me as a big jerk/cold-hearted robot/insensitive prick, but I wrote what I wrote and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.

At any rate, things there seem to be getting worse and worse and if I knew yesterday what I know today I would have been a lot more hesitant to make light of it.