Mid-City residents finish their rebuild: Bart and Christie are finished with their post-Katrina rebuild. The Times-Picayune rightly chooses to celebrate the event with not-terribly-subtexted images of fecundity and fertility, Christie being pregnant and the twain the very personification of a hoped-for rebirth of the Crescent City.

It should be noted that New Orleans remains a place with such deep-rooted dysfunction as to boggle the mind, and that Bart and Christie’s neighborhood remains plagued by gun violence and, like much of the city, abandoned and half-destroyed buildings. For all of Bart’s chipper attitude and the Times-Picayune’s boosterism, the couple’s choice is one which at a minimum requires personal bravery and epic quantities of positive thinking.

I corresponded heavily with Bart in the aftermath of Katrina and what I thought at the time remains true: as goes New Orleans, so goes the nation. If post-Katrina New Orleans can effectively transcend our shattered and oligarchically burdened means of governance and commerce, so can the rest of the country. If New Orleans fails, so will the rest of the country.

Bart and Christie have chosen to work for the renaissance of New Orleans, to work to save and cherish the American heart. They are both patriots and heroes, and I feel sure either would be discomfited by my take on this. I admire their choices.