My temporary club foot and I pace, Ahab-like, back and forth across the well-worn groove in the quarterdeck of my imagining: the seven-foot span between the door to my department’s photocopier room and the window next to the photocopier. Fantasms of my imaginings, conjured by the contrast between days and days without electricity at home and the seeming normality of the scene before me, on the LSU campus, comfortably air conditioned and equipped with photocopies, rise before me...

Why, I ponder, does this Gustav seem like such a middle-class hurricane? And yet, is this storm not a baby step in the middle class’s education on the lower layer of life in America? Isn’t the story on page B1 of the local paper—“Eden Park Still Without Power”—almost irrelevant, in that the poor African-American neighborhood by that name is now slightly less distant from the experience of my white neighbors, trapped (in more “desirable” neighborhoods) in the airtight boxes in which they are slowly cooking themselves, perfect for A/C but less so for the sudden paleolithic reality in which we now find ourselves? Aren’t we all sweltering equally?

But no. When this farce is played and electricity is restored, we in the “good” neighborhoods will return to our air-conditioned, cable-ready isolation, acknowledging our neighbors with a curt nod or not at all, whereas our brethren in places like Eden Park will return to something less under their own control, less handy to Whole Foods (or indeed, to any grocery store at all) and CC’s Gourmet Coffee. When I fell into a hole six days after our visit from the White Whale, Gustav, my wife drove me in our well-serviced, albeit debt encumbered Mazda 6 sport wagon to the LLC where my doctor’s office is located (“we are seeing established patients only”). True, things were in such disarray that the doctor who viewed my X-rays couldn’t lay his hands on any splinting materials, and sent me to the mobile emergency facility set up at the private hospital next door, where solicitous doctors and nurses flown in for the crisis from Massachusetts splinted me and gave me a private tutorial on using crutches. Three days later I was at a private orthopedic clinic, being fitted for a stylish, cyborg-looking walking cast.

I suspect that had I fallen into my hole in Eden Park I would have sat in a sweltering ER at our pride and joy, Earl K. Long Medical Center, where families of rats live in what’s left of the suspended ceiling, and patients are triaged as “GSW” or “Other.” Had I finally seen a doctor, I suspect that I wouldn’t have received so much attention.

And how would I have gotten there? Our vestigial mass transit system didn’t run during the storm’s aftermath. Walked, with a broken bone in my ankle?

Katrina, I brood, as I stump, Hephaistos-like, waiting for my photocopies, blew the cover off the ant hill. For a moment, America saw the ants teeming away in Third-World poverty within its very borders; it saw itself in the ants. The vinyl siding salesman from Akron who once partied in the French Quarter had to admit that he’d never really visited New Orleans. The sales managers from Nebraska and the HR professionals from New Jersey had to allow as how they never knew what was right under their noses the previous fall, when they held their revels on Bourbon Street.

It was America’s slave market, folks. That’s going to leave a mark.

And this week, we had a chance at another, smaller glimpse. They say that too much horror on the TV screen numbs the viewers. Don’t tell people that they’re going to die of lung cancer if they smoke, and this is what it looks like in your lungs. Rather, give it to them in smaller doses, so their minds don’t shut down completely. Gustav should have been a perfect storm: a few tens of thousands of poor Americans without power in the heat, suffering right alongside more telegenic middle class folk: it should have been a perfect story about the Yin and Yang of American life, about Nature and our intrusion thereon as the great leveler, but also as the great revealer of the fundamental iniquities between America’s favorite sons and daughters and her stepchildren.

I’m glad y’all had some berserk chick from Alaska to coo over instead. Sounds like she and her grandfather are going to fix everything so we never have to look at the ant hill again, thanks to the Miracle of Creative Visualization.

I bet Karl Rove has been to a convention in New Orleans.

My walking cast looks so high tech. It has a blow-up thingy that gives me a cushion of air to soothe and immobilize my ankle...sort of the way Fox News and every other damned thing on TV nowadays soothes and immobilizes the middle class. My cast looks positively cybernetic. My ambition is not to have my ankle heal, but rather to replace each part of myself, bit by bit, with similar matte black components, so that eventually I never have to think about the ant hill. I will feel nothing and notice only what my proprietary software brings to my attention. I will not notice that as long as people in Eden Park have to wait in the dark to get their gunshot wounds tended to in a rat-infested joke of a hospital, my tidy little neighborhood a few miles to the south is not fair, and not safe. As long as the kids of Eden Park are stockaded in a school that’s barely better than a holding facility (albeit with positive messages about self-esteem—We! Are! All! Winners! Even If We’re Not Taught Shit! And Say No To Drugs and Stuff.), the good education that my kids are receiving a few miles away represents a theft and a fraud.

My copies are done. Time to stump off and Get Real.