We Interrupt Our Usual Programming

More tales of Southern class angst to follow, but I want to take a moment and mention one thing about the New Orleans disaster.

I am not normally a disaster news sort of guy, and to a large extent I think I'm in step with the majority of thinking Americans: wall to wall news coverage has made what used to be fairly sensational, say...murder and made it commonplace. The gluttony, the mass consumption of news slays the urge to know what is newsworthy and, in some, replaces it with a reflexive consumption of "breaking story" and "this just in".

Blase does not equal Zola this time around. I've been to New Orleans as a tourist, an intern and as a union organizer, drank thru the Quarter and brushed off fleas that leapt up from the carpet of the former mortuary that was the office of Local 100. I've felt the heat, smelt Bourbon Street wet and steamy after a midday deluge and stood with a mixed drink in my hand at 4am on a Monday morning not ten feet from the golden statue of St. Joan of Arc. And unlike any news story since the beginning of the second Iraq war, I have been totally unable to turn away from the coverage of this Pompeii-class tragedy.

Which is why I'm especially incensed by comments today from Speaker of the House and known Republican Dennis Hastert today that New Orleans should not be rebuilt. Would you be so damn willing, sir, to sacrifice your beloved Chicago to a second Great Fire?

What a horse's ass.