Although I have still a couple of 192oies New Orleans postcards in my collection, this is the last of them I shall post. The “Big Easy” will live and perhaps prosper: residents and workers are being allowed to return this weekend (according to NPR), the good times will roll, and the party will continue.

All these assurances have a kind of hollow sound to them, though. Many of the evacuees interviewed in the local San Antonio paper are seeking jobs, looking for housing, and putting their children in local schools— no less a person than Mayor Nagin has already done two of those three (albeit in Dallas), and one does wonder if he will be eventually looking for another job, given his performance on national TV over the last three weeks.

Katrina may yet change the political face of New Orleans, given that many of it’s citizens have discovered first hand that the outside world is not so bigoted, flamingly incompetant or politically corrupt as they had assumed it to be, given their experience of living in America’s own Third World city.