Just as the world was mourning the passing of Gilligan we have received word that Thurston Howell III and his wife Lovey are alive and well and flying somewhere about a mile over the rest of the country.

Speaking to American Public Media’s Marketplace yesterday, former First Lady Barbara Bush opined that the people who had been relocated from New Orleans to the Houston Astrodome were better off now.

“So many of the people here, you know, were underpriveleged anyway,” she said, “so this is working very well for them.”

Hey, I always dreamed of trading in my crappy apartment for a bigger place — why not the Astrodome?

Though GWB sent mom and dad out in hopes of putting a friendlier face on his administration’s inept handling of the Katrina disaster, their tone-deaf publicity tour is turning into something of a fiasco. Monday night, speaking to Larry King on CNN, the former President Bush — known as “Poppy” to those in the family, due to all the opium he smoked at Yale — said that he had spent plenty of time on the ground in Mississippi with Republican governor (and former GOP chief) Haley Barbour and that the word Iraq hadn’t come up once!

“Now where does that story come from?” he asked but refused to name names — except for one. “I’ve already said enough. Mr. Sulzberger will be calling in.”

So that’s who’s behind all this negative publicity: the publisher of the New York Times! Should have known. Pinch may not have the Punch that his father did but he can obviously still bend the whole media world to his twisted vision. The elder Bush may be kinder and gentler than his son — and heaven knows his wife is genteel — but first and foremost, they are gentiles.

A friend of mine wrote to ask if anyone was talking about the direct correlation between the money the war in Iraq is costing and the lack of preparedness that left New Orleans so devastated by Hurricane Katrina. I said yes indeed, and pointed her toward a column by Sidney Blumenthal that made just that point. She said that the man in the photo was swimming in as much oil as water and that the environmental impact of the disaster would be a long time in assessing.

Here’s hoping that editorials such as Blumenthal’s will be but the first in a drumbeat of criticism for a president who seems so hopelessly out of touch with life as lived by so much of the rest of the country — the living, dying, suffering that is the lot of those who lost everything in NO, not to mention the parents who lost their sons in Iraq — as to appear psychotic. Did you see his speech yesterday? Flipping through a hastily prepared reamarks like a senior citizen cruising through the menu at Denny’s in search of the dessert page, Bush seemed utterly disconnected from the words he was reading, the implications of loss that the sandbags and soldiers he was promising implied. Small matter that said sandbags and soldiers have yet to arrive. Bush couldn’t wait to get to the part where he gets to smile. Now, back to the ranch.

Bush’s insensitivity may yet be his undoing. His can-do response to what is shaping up to be a national crisis on a scale with 9.11 will only look more and more inane as the hellish conditions on the ground — sorry, water — in NO reach Hieronymous Bosch proportions. In “Lousiana,” his song about that state’s last great flood of 1927, Randy Newman sang

President Coolidge came down on a railroad train
With a little fat man with a notepad in his hand
President Coolidge said, Little fat man, isn’t it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker’s land?

Coolidge, who oversaw the boom in the economy that fueled the Roaring Twenties, famously decided not to run before the stock market crashed and Hoover (and the rest of the nation) reaped the whirlwind during the Great Depression. Elected to a second term, Bush may not be so lucky. If the negative repercussions of Katrina combine with growing impatience over our involvement in Iraq, 2005 may yet provide the perfect storm that could cripple his foundering presidency.

Perhaps the best explanation yet of the behavior of Olympic-bomber Eric Rudolph comes from John Hawthorne, whose wife Alice was killed in the 1996 explosion. “Little person, big bomb,” Hawthorne was quoted as saying by the New York Times, and speaking directly to the misogynist racist homophobe (not to mention redneck urban legend) Rudolph at his sentencing he added, “But you are still a small man.”

Sentenced to life, Rudolph tried out a note of contrition (“I would do anything to take back that night”) that had been sadly lacking from past court appearances. Still, he addressed only the Olympic Park bombing, in which he also wounded over a hundred people, and not the bombings of two women’s health clinics (in which six people were injured) or the bombing of an abortion clinic (in which an off-duty police officer was killed and a nurse injured) or the bombing of a gay bar (in which five people were injured) — presumably because Alice Hawthorne was not a gay woman seeking an abortion. He deeply regrets his error.

That Rudolph might get in touch with the Christian principles he claims to adhere to in prison is perhaps too much to hope for (and the vengeful side of me would rather he got in touch with a sadistic weight-lifter in the prison yard) but you never know. A few years ago, when a Palestinian terrorist decided not to set off the explosives she had strapped to herself in a square in Jerusalem, her Israeli captors elected to have her speak to the American press about her change of heart. What had happened? In English she answered simply: “I look at the people. I look at the sky.”

For some things you don’t need a rocket scientist.

Just as Hollywood once used the dog days of August to dump movies that no one wanted to see (now they do that all summer long) so magazines seem to try new “advertising synergies” in this bleak month, possibly because they hope no one is looking. The New Yorker just published its first single-sponsor issue with Target and though reps for the magazine claimed no one would care, I for one find the effect of nothing but red-and-white-target themed adverts surprisingly monochormatic. I feel like I’m reading something sponsored by the Soviet state.

More suspicious to me is the special pull-out section in the September Vanity Fair (which hit newssstand about a week ago) listing the 50 Greatest Films of All Time. First, there is only one sponsor, Turner Classic Movies, but that could possibly mean that it was just a neat little advertising coup for someone at Conde Nast. (If it had happened at Entertainment Weekly, a Time Warner publication, it would raise no more suspicion than the usual business-as-usual synergistic hand jobs.) But then there is the list itself. Much of it is pedestrian stuff that any freshman film school student would automatically cough up: Amarcord, Casablanca, Grand Illusion… you know. Then there are the exclusions: nothing directed by Truffaut, Scorsese, Huston — and the only Germans mentioned are the ones who came to Hollywood. But most egregious of all are the let us say controversial choices that made the list. Die Hard. Animal House. Old fucking School.

In fairness to VF, the cover of this insert reads “VF Presents the 50 Greatest Films of All Time, Plus Old School,” the latter separated with an asterisk. But something about the whole production stinks. The text seems to have been written by a summer intern (“film critics have been speculating about Blowup’s meaning for decades”); did VF film critic Bruce Handy really sign off on this? Did Graydon Carter? It looks and smells like a piece of advertorial, a kind of smash-and-grab that a magazine like VF, that likes to think of itself as serious about film, should be ashamed of. Instead they plugged the thing on the cover (no one noticed, what with Jennifer Aniston trying on one Brad’s old shirts there) — which is against ASME rules if it’s actually advertiser sponsored editorial. You could look it up.

Sometimes tragedies can bring diverse peoples closer together. Think of this month’s narrowly averted Russian submarine disaster, in which the UK, the US and other nations rallied to rescue the suffocating sailors to avoid a repeat of last year’s Russian sub disaster. (Note to self: stay off Russian subs.) Or the news from Indonesia today that the government has signed a truce with the rebels of the Free Aceh Movement after the longterm enemies were brought together in the wake of the devastation of last December’s tsunami. Or the way in which the rest of the world rallied around the US after 9.11…

Never mind.

After July’s subway bombings in London I read a number of articles about the disaffected youth of the UK that included references to NEET, a term the British govt. uses to define young people Not in Education Employment or Training. Yes, it’s lame and I can’t imagine any but the most pudding-headed bureaucrat thinking that the acronym NEET was neat and not, in fact, hopelessly naff. The context was that the young bombers were supposedly among the Neetniks.

For a minute I thought I had key to unlock the mystery of the lyrics to The Damned’s “Neat Neat Neat.” It was one of England’s first bonafide punk singles and one we used to pogo to in SF with no idea what it was about (“It can’t be found no way at all”). But as anachronistic as it seems, NEET is a post-Thatcher and hence post-punk creation so like most great rock songs, “Neat Neat Neat” remains unresolved. Your guess is as good as mine.

Makes me wonder though: have these disaffected young Muslims considered punk rock as a means of expression? Drummer Rat Scabies conveys plenty of fury on ‘Neat Neat Neat,” even 28 years after the fact, and that kind of rage might actually win these losers some sympathy. Anger is an energy, like Johnny Rotten said, but it’s all in what you do with it.