“That was a good speech, Mr. President. Not exactly your bullhorn moment in New York, but close …”

“Thanks, Carl. By the way is that with a ‘C’ or ‘K’? ‘K’ sounds awfully European and existential, I think.”

“You promised them much ado, Mr. President.”

“Yes, I promised them Habitat For Humanity; every piece of federal land that doesn’t have either a mounted statue of Old Hickory or Lafayette on it; five thousand dollar educational amounts just like ones for enlisted personnel who plan on attending either Harvard or Yale; my fondest wishes and most fervent prayers; I’d have thrown in those two-thousand dollar debit cards but they went away with FEMA’s Brownie; I don’t know what else I could have given them.”

“Kerry thought they should have gotten some of the 60B you ordered.”

“You mean Kucinich?”

“Maybe it was Kastenbaum?”

“K,K,K, that’s all I ever hear. Besides, that’s all going to infrastructure.”

“Our Contractors.”

“The agreement says half is for ‘social services.’”

“We’ll divert some of the sand bags from the levees; it’ll free up eventually. Anyway, it’s our man who’ll be ridin’ herd on the operation.

I’ll have Dick overseeing the whole thang. The most transparent man in the administration, besides myself.”

“Dick, the opaque, I call him, Mr. President.”

“Quite right, Carl.”

An analyst for CNN from Berkeley thinks the demographics of downtown New Orleans have forever changed (which polls bear out), fortuitously for the rich, white city fathers, and the area will take on the character of another Disney World featuring the French Quarter. It’s only racist insofar as whites are completely at sea with poor, black culture and are terrified of young, black men from the ghetto. Toss in a similar sentiment concerning Hispanics, and you’ve pretty much summed up contemporary America’s political demographics. It’s separate and unequal, although abrogated to the extent minorities adapt and assimilate, and not dissimilar to what happens to poor whites in this culture, as well, of whom there is an ever increasing number. Unless they become televangelists. Scratch that, Scotty. Go to warp.

Sadly, the truth is NO’s disaster comes at a propitious time for Bush. Things could hardly be worse in Iraq—so, naturally, things will shortly get worse. His popularity ratings are so low they actually appear to be eating into his base. It’s hard to tell if he’s been personally much affected by what he has seen from Airforce 1 and on TV, but he certainly hasn’t promised the poor anything. (And those that can and do always seem to be in the process of rethinking that decision.) The AG of Mississippi, and, I hear, now Louisiana’s congress, have probably done more real good for people by challenging the insurance companies to pay-up. At least, NO has diverted the media for the past two weeks from the focus on Iraq that

Cindy Sheehan had brought to bear, and that must be a good thing for our Prez, particularly since the line separating the insurgency from general civil war is increasingly blurred. Which means if you’re an American soldier there—you’re surrounded. And the only way out is home.

Underpinning the entire problem, of course, is a lesson to be learned of what happens to a society when the highest levels of its government mirror its lowest common denominators—which is precisely what has occurred in the case of our wealthy, fundamentalist President. Get that? And it can surely be effectively argued that when its culture falters, a nation begins to fail. When a country’s predominant shared goal becomes divine revelation, there are predictably hard times ahead. We’re seeing some of it now. A close conservative friend of mine believes the canary-in-the-mine for our economy—consequently our future—is OPEC’s recent decision to diversify their monetary base, in place of reliance solely on the dollar. (As I recall, possible plans for conversion by Hussein in Iraq from the dollar to the euro, was once offered as one of the “real” reasons for deposing him.) Perhaps these are divine revelations?