I’ve been avoiding the television and radio this morning, fearful of the onslaught of words and images that this anniversary will bring. I don’t want to see any stars and stripes, or pictures of the rubble, or yellow ribbons, or bullhorns. I don’t want to hear the language of the GOP convention repeated thoughtlessly. “On that day,” GWB reminded people endlessly in the run up to the last election, “our world changed forever.”

Well, at least until it was changed forever again. As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated once again, disasters change peoples lives, sometimes by ending them. The conclusions we draw about the meaning of those disasters and how we react in their aftermath — how we change — may be the test of our real selves. I was struck by the opening lines in Nicoloai Ouroussoff’s Critic’s Notebook yesterday: “There has been no healing, really. Four years have passed since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and the road to recovery at Ground Zero looks bleaker than ever.”

He was talking about the planned memorial, and the politicization of the process, and how likely it is that what is finally built will be an ugly, schmaltzy mess, but he could just as well have been speaking of the attacks themselves. Four years later the country has gone to its separate corners and posiitons have hardened more quickly than Ozzy Osbourne’s arteries. Those who believe that Iraq had something to do with the attacks — a position that, on the face of it, seems as laughable as Roman sandal movies I watched as a kid, in which Samson and Hercules teamed up to fight Goliath — want nothing to do with those who think our new all-war-all-the-time policy is just creating new Bin Ladens, with the speed that it takes to grow Sea Monkeys. The two sides look at each other from across a gulf, separated by flag decals and Bush Lies bumper stickers. Everyone else tunes into the next Paris Hilton news and worries about their abs, proving that Osama might be right after all, that ours is a civilization in decline. Nice tan, though.

This morning at 8:48 I was in Ft. Greene Park watching the dogs run. There was no sense of memorial, even by the trees that were planted to honor Frank De Martini, who died helping others out of the WTC. (You can read his widow’s story in “Escaped from New York,” on the Articles page.) I recalled walking up Lafayette right across from where the trees are planted that morning. People were already coming across the bridges covered in ash. There in front of me a man broke down on the sidewalk and started to weep and I stood staring at him, mute, unable even to reach out. Another couple did the same thing, all of us frozen in shock.

I’ve forgiven myself for my inaction in the years since. I still like to believe that I — all of us, really — are capable of reacting differently, with less thought and more feeling. Just this morning I got an email from my sister April, who lives in Kingwood, TX, a suburb of Houston. Refugees from New Orleans were everywhere, she said. “The KW United Methodist Church (only Red Cross station in Kingwood) actually acting like a CHURCH should act and providing comfort and a place to stay to those in need,” she wrote. “How odd. All the other zillions of churches here standing around with their thumbs up their holy butts.”

Kingwood, I should note, is as white as the NO refugees are black. We do not need to identify with people to reach out to them, or ask where the mud or the ash came from, or how it came to fall on them. We’ll all get our share in the end.

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.