Whoa, whoa, whoa, NOLA

Having seen Act I and Act II of Spike Lee's whine-fest When the Levees Broke about the destruction of New Orleans, my immediate reaction was: what the fuck did they expect?
Did no one remember the Flood of 1927, or even the mini-flood of 1995?
When the National Weather Service said "bad storm coming, get out", did they all shrug and say "we'll ride it out"? If they decided on that foolish course, did they also hear the "no help for 72 hours" warning?

None of this is to excuse the feeble response by the local, state, and federal authorities (especially that old-boy-network-appointee chump Mike Brown at FEMA). It was negligent, bordering on criminal. (My only hero in the whole thing was Russel Honoré, though I still think Mayor Nagin got a bum rap for what was truly an overwhelming situation.) The Third World conditions that the survivors had to endure for nearly a week was unAmerican. We had the capability to do better, we just didn't have either the smarts or the will. (As I understand it, the delay was mostly classic bureaucracy in action. "I can't approve that because..." is the war cry of the bureaucrat, whether in Washington or Baton Rouge.)

However:
It is absolute madness for a city of more than half a million people to exist below sea level.
It is totally obscene that we have funded the Corps of Engineers, to the tune of billions of dollars, for nearly a century to maintain its existence.
It is totally obscene madness that we are considering spending billions more to return the city to its condition prior to Katrina.
Unless everyone in the United States contributes a cubic meter of dirt from their backyards to fill in the whole city to above sea level (I've done the calculations, and it'll take even less than that), New Orleans as it was should not be rebuilt.
Whatever doesn't flood naturally, stays. Past that, let it return to the floodplain it was before we started playing God with the Mississippi. It will eventually silt in and, perhaps a century from now, people can build on it.

Later we'll talk about the madness of letting people build on top of the San Andreas Fault...