New Orleans Today.....

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The ever vigilant and direct Charles Pierce on the current state of New Orleans (and the U.S. as a whole);

....it should be noted Tom Joyner did a first-class radio broadcast from the Ninth Ward on Wednesday morning. Things got so heated about the presidential photo-op later in the day that Mayor Ray Nagin started to sound very uncomfortable. (He does, after all, still have to deal with this pack of thooleramawns for a living.) Excellent radio all the way around. Meanwhile, here's some of the latest from the indomitable Times-Picayune. The numbers are mind-blowing, at least to me -- I mean, 105,000 buildings lost -- most of them residential structures -- and $14 billion-with-a-B in damages. In an American city. In my lifetime. And not just any American city, but one that is more important to the cultural identity of this country than any other except (maybe) New York. My favorite word in all the world is "self-evident," as in, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Mr. Jefferson is saying that the monumental heresies to follow -- all men created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienables, etc., etc. -- are so obvious that they almost don't need to be explained, but that he will explain them anyway. That word set freedom itself free, which was the case in New Orleans more than it was in any other place I can name. An America without a New Orleans is just Great Britain with better beachfront property.

This, I believe, is in no small part why an administration with a cramped and vicious vision of the country, an administration dedicated to the depths of its rotted, vestigial soul to making this country less free, an administration that has us seriously debating how much torture is enough and whether the president should be forced to abide by the laws he signed, an administration that would sell the entire constitutional order down the river for a three-point bump in a poll full of fools, would allow this particular city to be so grievously wounded and then die in recovery. What are we to make of a country that allows these soulless, vacant fools to govern it with impunity? We are all in New Orleans, now, standing in the wreckage of a graveyard. The sun rises hot and merciless. The help never comes. And New Orleans, the birthplace of our national soul, just turns out to be the place where they took our national soul to die.