Running the Numbers


Bill Quigley chronicles the pain index in New Orleans.

And thanks again to all of people who organized the Rising Tide Conference. They're helping remake the city despite being literally abandoned by the United States.

New Orleans, interestingly and paradoxically, is both as foreign as you can get and still be in the US while simultaneously being perhaps THE most American of cities. New York might be the showcase, DC, at least in public appearance, is a somewhat overly neo-classicist seat of government (and, alas, a major slum), but New Orleans is America in all its glory and fury, celebration and frustration, freedom and dysfunctionality.

In an email I sent to Mark at LeveesNotWar.org I noted, as I'm sure others have, the irony within the tragedy: it took New Orleans, of all places, to sober up a number of American who previously had been intoxicated by the Cheney-Bush-Rove penchant for putting politics above all else.

Believe me, that's NOT a trade I or anyone else I know would have wanted, but you can't go backwards in time.

Anyway, again, thanks, I had a great time, and look forward to Rising Tide IV...and here's hoping one of these days before I'm REALLY an old man there will be decent and reliable alternative transportation between NOLA and Red Stick (I tell folks it's not the distance but the traffic that keeps me from going that way far more often.), i.e., a train.