One of the most shocking things I've seen on TV has been the pictures of New Orleans NOW, still looking like the aftermath of a disaster in a third-world country as rebuilding is kept on hold while developers and polticians dream of new, safe, bland, white "revitalization". I'm about as cynical as you can get without becoming a Republican, but the Katrina saga shot right through the blase armor and shook me to my core. Looking at it with a year-long perspective is like having the mask ripped away and seeing the maggoty decay where there should be a face.

What makes it so powerful is that that face is not just Bush or Cheney or the GOP. It's America, and it's not just corruption or incompetence or indifference, but a deadly combination of those and additional qualities that are nearly impossible to pin down and define. Something is really terribly wrong with our country and it goes beyond elections and ideology.

It became a cliche that Sept 11 changed everything. With the benefit of hindsight, I've come to believe that the Katrina story will resonate and shape perceptions about America long after the wounds of Sept 11 have healed.

Sept 11 was seen as mostly about "them", the enemy who attacked us. It was deeply terrifying. It shook our confidence in our security and our place in the world. But there were stories of heroism by public workers and individuals, there was some sense that a response was made (foolish and dishonest tho that response turned out to be in retrospect).

In Katrina, the cause, of course, was a natural disaster, but the real damage came from incompetence and indifference and jockeying for advantage at every level of our own government. I can't recall in my lifetime a clearer revelation of how our class/money obsessions extend even unto life and death decisions about our own people. It calls into question the value of some of our most strongly held beliefs and myths about our society, our economic system, our political system, and our national soul. I think it will percolate through generations, mutating and shaping as it goes, the way the Civil War or WWII still do in this country, or the Ottoman or Roman empires or European imperialism still do elsewhere. It will, now or later, change everything. Those who recognize this will be in  position to affect the shape of that change. Those who do not reckon with it will be lost voices. It's time to respond now, not just to the past, not just to New Orleans and the Gulf, but to the future of this country.

Bush is "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense." --Former Nixon counsel John Dean