Dear New Orleans: Have you heard? The exhibitions, exclamations, exhortations and excoriations — in memorium, et ceterum, ad nauseam? Triggered yet? All these sad songs they keep playing, they’re so damn ... sad. As Dr. John might put it, New Orleans is being traumaticalized , all over again. Deja Vieux Carre.

It’s been 20 years since I wrote a letter like this. That one was addressed to America, introducing our beleaguered friends and neighbors who were fleeing the floodwaters — unknowns bound for elsewhere. Our Exodus. So what is this thing that is happening right now, this ... reckoning? An anniversary? Accurate, but that term always seems to fail this auspicious occasion. A commemoration? A remembrance? That one’s got a touch of proper gravitas.

An apotheosis, perhaps — a collect

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