I am an American citizen. I am human. I am angry.

In the rank, oily, brackish, E. coli infested standing water that saturates New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, emergency workers cajole stubborn citizens, unwilling to leave their homes and property, however drenched, dilapidated, and diseased, for the nomadic unknown of diasporic American citizenship. After Superdome starvation, after doctor-sniper privilege, after annihilated infrastructure and broken families and displaced communities, straggler remnants of a working poor metropolis refuse to depart the watery depths that were streets and parks and churches and stores, refuse to leave the abysmal black of neighborhood homes, aged houses, country dining rooms, pastoral porches, Southern bedrooms, slave memories, and human lives. Meanwhile, suburban soccer mom Americana watches Wolf Blitzer on CNN's The Situation Room, wonders aloud among fellow desperate housewives why America's problem people refuse logic to embrace insanity, again. America's problem people inexplicably steal Sony Playstation 2's and Panasonic plasma televisions and AK-47 Kalashnikovs from abandoned Wal-Marts during a natural disaster. America's problem people stay without reason in squalid conditions against the reasonable health concerns of federal emergency personnel. America's problem people complain of media references to 'refugees' when they lack shelter, clothing, food, employment, and hope. America's problem people accuse Americans of racism while they beg America for life support.

America's problem people are the poor, the Black, and the dead.

In truth, Hurricane Katrina has little to do with America's problem people. The vacant stares and hopeless frowns from despondent Negro evacuees who plead desperately with Paula Zahn to reunite with lost loved ones prove that every American politician may count upon cynical American indifference to the unending plight of the dispossessed. No matter how many pickaninnies prime-time on Larry King Live looking for lost mothers, Americans will not be moved to discipline and punish their federal leaders for the recent calamity. The multitude clamors for assistance, for justice, for vengeance, and five days too late our government responds with a bottle of water, a pained Presidential photo-op, and armed National Guardsmen. Political pundits gauge the inevitable fallout from this unnatural leadership disaster, judge with dispassionate prejudice ethereal antagonists like the federal bureaucracy and the welfare state and the war on terror while corporeal Americans suffer without jobs, without homes, and without hope. Living through humanitarian kindness is not living; the jobless and the homeless and the victimized deserve to know why their tax dollars did not ensure prompt assistance and effective rescue. America demands accountability.

We can't provide it. No attitude consensus, no opinion cohesion exists to provide meaning for any American citizen in these troubled times; predictably, the usual bisected political spectrum applies. The Right refuses to acknowledge wrongdoing by anyone except state and local Democrats, differing widely in tone, civility, and vehemence towards all liberals everywhere. If Ann Coulter speculates on an upcoming episode of Hannity & Colmes that the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond planted thousands of poor Black people in the New Orleans Superdome without food, water, or bathroom facilities for five days just to cause President George W. Bush international condemnation and embarrassment, don't say I didn't warn you. In contrast, the Democrats' dismay over President Bush's absent leadership frays into dissonant dissension. Either National Guard overuse in the Iraqi theater caused this urban civic disorder, or Republican good ol' boy cronyism, or basic Bush Administration callousness toward American poverty, or grand old party tax patronage to America's wealthiest ten percent (during wartime), or anti-scientific, anti-intellectual Christian conservative, business-approved Bush Administration ignorance towards global warming, or nonexistent bureaucratic emergency planning and metropolitan evacuation strategy to maintain homeland security, or sheer incompetence, or class warfare, or unabashed racism. The Right exudes unified, fanatical support, the Left flaunts thought plurality without concern for electoral majorities. The Right wins elections and dismantles government services; the Left loses elections and concentrates impotent opposition. Meanwhile, American citizens die; their bloated corpses, soft and brown and impoverished, decompose in Lake New Orleans.

President George W. Bush polarizes for political gain; everyone knows that. Yet Hurricane Katrina unleashed bestial Nature's amoral destruction upon our already charged electorate, released feral winds and savage rain and primal floods upon the magnetic mannequins who populate our divided United States. Katrina mauls the Bush Administration's soft, slack, sloppy emergency measures, rips our phony homeland security hallucinations to rancid, rotting shreds of Cajun barbeque gone sour in muggy Southern heat. To placate Leftists on safari, Michael Brown's FEMA directorship dangles above ravenous reporters at every on-site press conference, yet the balding, incompetent morsel fails to satisfy rabid hunger pangs. Without remorse, pity, or sorrow, once honorable American citizens bite the pulsating jugular of the President we love to hate, lacerate our wounded weekend warrior's second-term agenda, eviscerate our elected sovereign's theoretical ability to purchase public policy bacon for the Christian conservative clogged arteries who deny personal choice yet indulge personal hate. We sense blood. We smell fear.

We fight to live: the electronic, civic, personal, and even physical right to privacy hemorrhages profusely from statuesque flesh torn by fanatical invisible hand conservatives who populate state legislatures and the U.S. Congress, elected by financially despondent social and religious conservatives without decent elementary schools and living wage employment. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy post-traumatic stress disorder Republican pack mentality recoils from homosexual marriage and partial-birth abortion and persistent vegetative states and gangsta rap civil disobedience and rampant Real World: Austin drunken debauchery and child pornographic Calvin Klein fashion advertisements and lascivious Laguna Beach premarital copulation and raunchy Paris Hilton/ R. Kelly sex tapes and bizarre Kobe Bryant/ Michael Jackson show trials and every modern example of American cultural integration, from Eminem to ecstasy, from bukkake to Bowling for Columbine, from abortion to atheism, from death metal to the down low. We choose to battle, battle to choose. And we're losing.

Judge John Roberts, nominated to replace retired Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court of the United States, was recently designated by President George W. Bush as his preference for the recently vacated Chief Justice position. The stellar resume from which no one can derive any legal opinion, save modesty, now desires the utmost judicial position in the United States of America, for life, recommended by the most flagrantly partisan Chief Executive this writer's ever known. Be alarmed, especially if you care for minor conveniences like civil liberties, civil rights, social safety nets, police brutality, free speech, bodily self-control, free elections, ideological plurality, and restrained executive warmongering. Mind you, Judge John Roberts may respect all of these ideas; the Roberts quandary is only that we don't know his general political perspectives at all. No person should receive the highest legal post in the free world just for keeping his mouth shut.

We must speak aloud. No matter how dissonant or irregular, Americans are justified in their myriad critiques of President Bush's butterfingers Hurricane Katrina handling; every gripe mentioned must be investigated fully, from Jacob Weisburg's to Jack Shafer's, from David Brooks' to Frank Rich's, from Howard Dean's to Eugene Robinson's. No matter how contentious or painful or violent, we need a serious, productive, public policy fruitful discussion on race and class in the United States of America, one that includes conservative apathy towards poverty and liberal ignorance of poor people, one that involves instinctive African American rage and learned European American fear, one that involves classic American individual upward mobility and traditional American institutional class stratification. We need to hammer out race and class with respect to both and privilege to neither. And the trophy wife shouldn't impede our efforts.

First Lady Laura Bush, when giving an interview to American Urban Radio Networks, criticized as 'disgusting' comments by Kanye West, Howard Dean, Rev. Jesse Jackson and others that race and class colored federal reluctance to assist hurricane victims along the Gulf Coast.

"I think all of those remarks are disgusting, to be perfectly frank, because of course President Bush cares about everyone in our country," the First Lady said Thursday in an interview with American Urban Radio Networks. "And I know that. I mean, I'm the person who lives with him," she said. "I know what he's like and I know what he thinks and I know how he cares about people."
The First Lady also said: "I do think -- and we all saw this -- that poor people were more vulnerable. They live in poor neighborhoods; their neighborhoods were the ones that were more likely to flood, as we saw in New Orleans. Their housing was more vulnerable, and that what we saw and that's what we want to address in our country."

Is Laura Bush high? How dare the First Stepford denigrate reasonable race questions in such dismissive, discarding fashion! Notice the stark discourse termination attempt here: it's not just that the Kanye West allegation 'George Bush doesn't care about Black people' is simply untrue, or false, or even slanderous. The First Stepford finds such rhetoric so repugnant that it does not warrant discussion, that reasonable Americans debase themselves through such tawdry interrogation. Something disgusting offends the moral senses, nauseates the body human; one cannot function properly with a disgusting smell or taste or sight or idea in close proximity. This genteel Texan librarian connotes the putrid, the contaminated, the repugnant, with her expert dismissal of racial discrimination's very possibility as explanation for despondent federal disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina. Laura Bush semiotically parallels the partially decomposed corpses of poor New Orleans flood victims, beaten and bloated and Black, with any suggestion that they died because of their darker shade. To discuss race is to divide America according to conservative political thought, so real patriotism demands groupthink silence and Maoist political correctness, demands irrational belief in and illogical support for a lethargic Leviathan who leaves all people behind, except for the wealthy and the White. Today, stating the obvious is state treason.

Today, I'm an American Taliban. The mechanical animal who birthed President Bush's personal American Idols disrespects American intelligence with her religious Republican anti-race rhetoric. The prevailing social division in American society throughout our young history is race. Regardless of whose personal feelings are slighted, whose moral sensibilities are insulted, or whose Samaritan charity is questioned, it is possible for reasonable individuals to discuss race in America, including the President of the United States of America. If George Bush cares about Black people, Mrs. Bush, please explain the rampant disenfranchisement of African American voters during Election 2000, the constant refusal of President Bush to discuss African American political issues with Black polemics and statesmen, the general distrust and enmity between African American voters and the Republican Party (8% of Black voters voted Bush/ Cheney in 2000, 11% in 2004), and the starving, mewling, terrorized Black multitudes left without food or water or bathrooms or law enforcement or medical attention or any federal assistance whatsoever in New Orleans for days on President Bush's watch. Rather, don't explain anything: just be willing to have a conversation about massive governmental miscalculation, impropriety, and incompetence that examines all possible causalities. But even beyond that, don't hide in the oppression of your choice.

Americans fail to discuss class inequity in our discourse because of several factors. Sometimes our omnipresent Adam Smith spirit guide sparks revulsion towards any and all collectivist ventures, sometimes financial system so distances rich and poor, upper class and lower class, immigrant and native born, that useful class discussion can not exist. The placid, polite, immaculate Laura Bush, soulless vision of neo-Victorian beauty, assassinates useful class discourse following Hurricane Katrina, using class difference as a bludgeon to batter racial animosity toward her husband. To speak with authority on class while denying race with impunity plays upon well-worn White Northeastern liberal ideology that cements all domestic sociopolitical inequality in rigid economic difference and conceives all possible race prejudice from uneducated backwater Southerners. Further, Lockheed Martin's prototype faith-based initiative ignores an undeniable truth - American poverty has gotten worse under George W. Bush's watch. According to the recent Nicholas D. Kristof column, The Larger Shame, "The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush." Compassionate conservativism translates into cynical capitalism. Laura Bush must realize that in five years as President, her husband has made no real effort to address American poverty; to speak on what he may wish to accomplish rings hollow to all those forced to sit and wait in cavernous sports arenas and stifling homeless shelters for thoughtful citizens to provide economic relief. But that's alright, the poor and the Black and the dead love subsistence living! Just ask your mother-in-law, Barbara.

Laura Bush, a disingenuous social Darwinist with Eurocentric flesh lamination like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator, masks her crafted, sculpted distaste for African American political rage with the impeccable eloquence and perfect diction of a time-lost daughter of Dr. Noonian Soong. She dreams in digital, this mechanical Marie-Antoinette, and one can safely bet that her positronic phantasmagoria portrays no one of African decent. The poor and the Black and the dead - the original American virus - won't rewrite her programming.