Perhaps New Orleans should be referred to as a city of the undead rather than housing cities of the dead (the cemeteries). I was trying to dredge up old articles from the New York Times responding to the horrors of New Orleans when I came across this article. The writer was commenting on President Bush's speech from three months after the storm.

Bush had said, at the time, the city would not be forgotten. That he--and the government--was paying attention. The author of the piece pleaded with those officials to do something or the city would die. And maybe it has.

It's been a long, slow death for New Orleans. It's been the kind of death staged melodramatically on the silver screen. Even if one counts up all the money and hard work floating around it hasn't amounted to much. Tourism is still down. The people who made up the city, who gave it its life blood, are gone or going, in the process of draining the city of its life. They ooze out of it like blood through an open wound.

New Orleans has been forgotten. New Orleans is dying. And it's going to take far more than another President to patch up her wounds. What strikes me most about the article is that it's basically saying the same thing we're all going on about now, two years later.

One would think in that amount of time--which is a long time, in many ways--something would have been accomplished other than increasing crime and flushing the economy down the toilet.