Do you recall what was revealed?

There are a number of things I might say about the situation in New Orleans and not one of them is funny. I am reluctant to make any comments on a story so deeply upsetting, but I am equally reluctant to make comments about anything else.

First, I know I am not alone in my shock at how these events have unfolded. As I made my way to work on Monday, reports seemed to indicate that while it had been hit hard by Katrina's high winds and heavy rains, the city had been spared the catastrophic damage it would have suffered if there had been a direct, full-force hit.

It was eerie, then, as reports began to emerge of a steadily worsening situation -- a situation that, it seems, still hasn't improved as much or as quickly as one would hope. Even if some 80% of the city's half million residents had the means to evacuate ahead of time and were able to do so, some 100,000 did not. Of large U.S. cities, New Orleans has the fifth-highest percentage of black residents (67.3%), and the per capita income among blacks there ($11,332) is about a third of what it is among whites. (By comparison, New York's per capita income among blacks is $15,294, or roughly half of the average white income.)

It has been especially interesting to watch the media tip-toe around the unpleasant fact that nearly all of those who remain stuck in the city -- many without adequate food, water, or basic sanitation -- are poor and black, and many of them simply lacked the resources to arrange for accommodation or even to leave the city. The stories of rampant looting and lawlessness -- and the unimaginable horror found inside the Superdome after several days without full electricity or working plumbing -- have a distinct theme that can be brought across without the media needing to say anything: these people are black, and poor, and now desperate.

For the Bush administration, Katrina and her aftermath come at an especially interesting moment. Yesterday's news of nearly a thousand deaths in a Baghdad stampede -- fully a third of 9/11, in terms of loss of life -- was buried by circumstance beneath the equally horrific stories coming out of our own Gulf region. It was also yesterday that the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus released a report showing that the war in Iraq is costing the U.S. $186 million per day -- or roughly $2,000 per second. This news likewise took a backseat to the flooding damage, which by current estimates will take $30 billion and 16 weeks to repair -- that translates to about $268 million per day.

It is reassuring that there still seem to be enough troops on U.S. soil to respond to the relief effort, but one cannot help but wonder how much more readily they might have reached New Orleans had so many of them not been training for -- or returning from -- service in Iraq when the call came. The number of Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard troops diverted to Iraq is especially troubling; it is hard to fathom what they are feeling now, unable to assist at home where they are desperately needed because they are far away, busy being unable to assist where they are not even wanted. But I digress.

What I found most shocking about the last few days was that it was widely understood that a direct hit from a major storm would place the city in jeopardy, as levees and pumping stations proved inadequate to protect the basin from the higher waters surrounding it. Why was the Army Corps of Engineers so slow to respond? Why was no plan in place to quickly repair them when the worst case scenario slowly turned into reality?

Well, as it turns out, hundreds of millions of dollars of improvements to the levees and pumps had to be put on hold so that we could "rebuild" Iraq. This has been well documented. Our Commander-in-Chief has cut short his vacation to oversee relief efforts from Washington -- after his administration had repeatedly insisted that his faculties in Crawford were in no way compromised by its out-of-the-way location. If you can run a war from Texas, why can't you run a relief operation, too? (Crawford is 550 miles from New Orleans).

While President Bush assures us that we can and will rebuild (a message that by now sounds shrill and vacant, no matter what city, foreign or domestic, he happens to be discussing), his people tell us the economic impact of Katrina will be limited. Yes, it will: limited to a few miserable black folks on the bayou, and to the gasoline that will cost us $6 a gallon by the end of the Labor Day weekend. And those terrorists whom we are "fighting abroad, so that we don't have to fight them here"? It turns out all they had to do to hit us hard was drive their Chevy to the levee -- no one was even watching it.