I just saw Geraldo Rivera holding up a baby and crying. He demanded to know why people were forced to stay in the Astrodome; people have been actually prevented from walking away from the hell hole, down the highway and over to the next city. Geraldo shouted at the camera, “let them out of here. Let them out of here.”

O’Reilly and Hannity talked to their Fox correspondents on the street in NO and tried to coax them into finding something positive to say. Instead, the correspondents almost yelled at them. When the Fox network can’t find a kind word for the Bush administration, you know things are bad.

Could this have happened in Detroit? If a disaster of equal proportions hit Detroit, would things have gone so wrong?

I think not. Even if Detroit has its problems, the state government is in working order. The South does not have decent state governments. While the Northern states professionalized in the seventies as a result of humiliations and supreme court cases, the Southern states never did. In some states, the governors have no staff, have one term limits, and have few constitutional checks over the legislature. States, like Kentucky, have legislatures that meet only every other year. The South just doesn’t have the capacity and experience of Northern state governments.

Even if New Orleans was as impoverished and corrupt as some other Northern cities, it also didn’t have a proper state government to step up to the plate.

So much rebuilding is going to happen in the next decade. Professionalizing Southern political infrastructure has to be part of the package deal, I think.

The Fox people were unable to come up with a silver lining tonight. I have one. Chicago 1871.

In Chicago 1871, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow tipped over an oil lamp igniting the hay, the barn, and eventually the whole city. Chicago was raised to the ground. To rebuild the city, city leaders brought in the finest architects and urban planners from the country, who were able test new ideas and create great beauty on a blank canvas. (And yes, I have taken the architectural walking tour of Chicago about a billion times.) I hope that the same will be done in the South.

(I’m blogging this weekend whenever I can sneak away from the guests and get to the computer.)