Honoring the Dead

NYTimes:

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week's hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.

Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.

This drives me almost beyond despair. For the people like me, who loved New Orleans from afar. For the people who grew up there, moved away, and loved it. For the people who still lived there, and love it.

George W. Bush is the first President to lose an entire U.S. city since....well, when? And of all the cities, this one.

The rock is not going to be put back into place soon; or easily.

ADDENDUM: This is why Bush has banned cameras from New Orleans now. Not because bodies will be identified, but because, well...proceed with care.

Maureen Dowd said today, in what could be a caption for that picture: "As the water recedes, more and more decaying bodies will testify to the callous and stumblebum administration response to Katrina's rout of 90,000 square miles of the South."

Well: maybe; maybe not. But we certainly deserve to see them. The dead deserve the honor of our recognition of the reality of their death. We owe them at least that much.