Bloggledygook: High And Dry.

I spent the evening shredding credit card offers. Since just about everybody was blogging, reporting, complaining, admiring Bush's speech last night, I decided I would make it my patriotic duty to watch and listen and observe some blog silence while making as certain as I can that the crackheads who like to go through the trash cans in the alley aren't suddenly decked out in Prada sneakers at the courtesy of yours truly.

If you must find out what the buzz and wail sounds like, Joe Gandelman does his usual yeoman work compiling reaction and recoil here. Just so we're clear: this is naked pandering on my part since no one who reads Joe has any reason to come over to my neck of the blogwoods.

Suddenly, we have two new breeds that even genetic engineers couldn't have thought up: fiscally conservative Democrats and New Deal-slash-Great Society Republicans. Estimates on the cost of rebuilding New Orleans start at about a quarter trillion dollars and balloon in DC fantasies to include some real money. Not that it's real money we're talking about. The president did his by now patented just-good-enough promising to buy everybody a new fur coat on the shiny platinum card that just arrived via air mail (traveling at approximately 145 mph on the winds of Katrina).

No mention of the highway bill, or the endless pork butts written into yet another agriculture money grab, or the reality that financing will likely come from central banks around the globe, some friendly some not, which will essentially put NOLA under a mortgage that will be factored at the first sign of weakness. There was no suggestion that maybe this noble and crucial cause would be the better if the nation adopted a pay-as-you-go policy and decided that maybe some of the luxuries would have to wait.

Instead, we got to hear that the president intends to rebuild the Crescent City (somebody mount a protest! what exactly did he mean by Crescent?) only this time he's going higher in an obvious nod to Nigel Tufnel. Since the president's poll numbers are quickly going to eleven, it must be presumed that when Bush said "higher" he meant that the entire lower 9th Ward would now be built on stilts and Mardi Gras would be temporarily relocated to Vermont.

My favorite part of the speech was the beginning. Before the president spoke, in fact. Just as JFK ruined the hat business by appearing bare-headed at his inauguration, this event may signal the final triumph of casual disaster Thursdays. I can't adequately explain my delight upon seeing Mr. Bush walk across a moist Jackson Square with his sleeves rolled up, although I would advise that he be a little more fashion-forward with his footwear. You know, something he can be comfortable in yet would fit nicely up the asses of the hapless apparatchiks who blundered their way through the last two weeks.

Ted Koppel, for one, is not amused. His prime time special beforehand had me at "crisis" but then went on to inform me that the whole mess was indeed a "failure." Thanks, Ted. I was a little fuzzy on the concept until you confirmed my suspicions. After the speech, poor Dean Reynolds got punked by a jury of someone's peers that didn't seem to have gotten the memo. It is informative that while dry, well-fed pundits are implored to get angry, the recently wet and hungry would just as soon give the president the benefit of the doubt.

So we are faced with the promise of a rebuilt New Orleans just as the Washington Post lets us all in on the notion that not everybody is in a rush to return home. The propriety of asking traumatized people anything beyond what they would like for dinner tonight is not necessarily in question, though there might have been a more respectful way of conducting a flash poll on victims of a flash flood. But it is the right of the people to know all, instantly, even if that knowing is questionable as families still separated search for each other and rely upon the kindness of strangers for the very basic of needs.

Will New Orleans be rebuilt? Most certainly, and at great cost, through a mighty effort. It will likely be smaller, higher, drier and sadder than we realize. New Orleans will almost certainly be more self-conscious than it ever was, laissez le bon ton roulez given up to memories of public grief and media-drenched suffering. Will The Big Easy will be that sad lady, beautiful and mysterious, who, after having been violated in the square, cannot bring herself to look anyone in the eye? Or will there be defiance, armed with a fistful of cash and a go-cup?

Yes, New Orleans will be rebuilt. And it will cost. There is no question about that, nor should there be. The more appropriate question is: will we recognize what we have purchased?