The plight of Somali-born Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose citizenship may be revoked by weak-kneed Netherlanders, has become an international cause celebre. Hirsi Ali has been under government protection since 2002, due to her criticism of some of the more violent, paternalitic practices of some followers of Islam, and her collaboration with Theo van Gogh on a short film about Muslim violence against women resulted in the director’s murder in 2004. The killer pinned a note to van Gogh’s body, saying she would be next.

I met Ayaan quite by chance last summer. She was in Manhattan, working on her book and appeared, unannounced, at a reading by a mutual acquaintance of ours in Chelsea. She was flanked by her Dutch bodyguards (the Netherlands has since concluded she can keep the protection, for now) and blended in down in uber gay Chelsea like a giraffe at a zebra party. (Her bodyguards, on the other hand, with their military haircuts, tight pants and suit jackets concealing their sidearms, could have passed for a local.) She was soft spoken and polite, and though she has recently been embraced by the right, she was happy to have found a book on Marx in the Chelsea Barnes & Noble.

Her disdain for religion — all religion in as much as it is used as an instrument of censorship and brutality — will probably keep her from getting invited to speak at Liberty University. But the fact that she is being lauded by neocons as evidence of the evils of Islamic fundamentalists does not mean they’re wrong. The Dutch are clearly afraid of a Denmark situation — days of riots and burnings and a number of deaths (all in the middle east) in reaction to the Mohammed cartoons — and are reacting in a somewhat craven fashion. Don’t want to provoke anyone! But Ayaan does want to provoke people, provoke the citizens of western countries out of their slumber. The threat to her is like the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a sign of things to come. It is quite literally a threat to us all.

I have discovered an interesting subtext to this season’s 24, the addictive and insane Fox series in which superagent Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) saves the nation in a series of sleepless, danger-fraught days: It’s all about the presidency.

Not just the fictional presidency of Charles Logan, a chinless wonder with a soul more duplicitous than Nixon’s, but the current president and the man who would have been king. Fox owner Rupert Murdoch is probably as dismayed as every other Republican in the country over the dismal performance of GWB and in Logan the show gives us a president who is even worse: he has already killed the former president, hospitalized the First Lady when she stumbled on the truth of his villainy and sold the nation to a consortium of businessmen who seem intent to run it like Enron. Now who’s the worst president of all time, huh?

Then there’s the casting of William Devane as the Secretary of Defense Heller. Devane, with his lock jaw and patrician accent, is a suitable stand-in for a Kennedy — the actor once played JFK in a TV movie (The Missles of October) — a family that Murdoch loathes. Devane’s Heller is a decent guy, though, and in one of the show’s typically dramatic twists he drove his car off a cliff and into a lake to prevent bad guys from killing him to prevent him from going public with… O, I forget. Anyway he did it to save the country! And, until last week when we learned that he had somehow miraculously survived the accident, it seemed like the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Unlike, say, Chappaquiddick.

So in elevating a Kennedy manque and giving us a president worse than Bush, the Murdoch owned Fox has spun an alternate-universe presidency more satisfying (and less boring) than that of ABC’s Commander-in-Chief. That show would be better if they let David Lynch direct a few episodes, IMHO. I hear he’s a Republican, too.

Meanwhile, can anyone tell me what Jack Bauer is taking to stay up on days like that?

So read a bumper sticker I saw in the Marigny district yesterday though a lot of people in New Orleans seem good and ready to pass judgment. One popular T-shirt says Meet the Fockers and depicts Bush, Brown etc. as the people who focked the Big Easy Hard and a popular mayoral race shirt depicts Willie Nagin and the Chocolate City (“Semi-sweet and a little nuts”). The political races of the future will be won and lost on T-shirts, I fear, but there is a sense that someone should be held accountable, if not for the hurricane then for the fact that no one seems to be in a hurry to clean up the mess.

Jeffrey and I took a drive through the Ninth Ward to see the worst of it and it’s a whole lot worse than it looks on television. Houses on top of cars, buildings condemned, spray paint alerting rescuers to the number of people and animals, dead or alive, who were inside nine months ago. Fats Domino’s publishing business is still standing though his house is a little worse for wear. There were a few random tourists and us, taking photos of the devastation before thinking better of it.

“You would have to be crazy to want to move here,” I heard the concierge in my hotel telling a guest, “especially if you have kids.” Only 30% of the elementary schools are open and I suspect that Baghdad has a better record than that. And a lot more US money being poured into it. The thousands who have descended upon this city for JazzFest are leaving (some are staying for ancillary events like Piano Night at House of Blues tonight, and more will return for the second weekend) and there is a palpable desperation on the part of the store owners and many of the restaurateurs: Don’t leave us!

Of course the culture we’ve come to partake of abides. Out at the fairground’s Bell South Jazz Tent, Troy Andrews aka Trombone Shorty had the crowd in the palm of his 19-year-old hand with a jumped-up version of St. James Infirmary. It was throughline to Louis Armstrong, a new take on one of Satchmo’s signature songs, but there was no pretense, no passing of the mantle stuff (in closing he introduced himself as Wynton Marsalis), just good fun(k). Allen Toussaint made a rare appearance at the Acura Arena and was treated like the royalty he is, sharp and sweat free in his linen suit, and he was joined by Elvis Costello who has a Toussaint produced CD coming out soon. Elvis was in fine form, better than I’d heard him in years — maybe working with the master helped — and when he sang the song Toussaint had penned for Little Feat — “The same people you misuse on your way up/You might meet up with on your way down” — it had a certain je ne sais quoi, as they say.

More judgments to come.

That’s one of the battle cries of the new post-K New Orleans, seen on T-shirts and bumper stickers in a town that still seems traumatized nine months later. “The Big Empty” I heard one DJ call it and downtown at night it can seem that way: what happened to the people? Oh, yeah, right. Except for the tens of thousands at the fairgrounds for JazzFest the streets are most deserted.

The sense of tramua and recovery is still in the air and in a lot of the music. At a benefit for the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic at the Old Point Bar in Algiers Friday night, local singers including Shannon McNally and Arlee Leonard sang songs and read poetry about wading in the water and surviving for another day. “A Change Is Gonna Come” was the theme and the song itself was covered by the amazing sacred-steel band, the Campbell Brothers. That’s gospel funk played on steel guitars, in this case by a quartet of African-American guys from Rochester, NY.

The musical gumbo you find here can’t be diluted, no matter how much water you add. We dashed from Algiers back to to the Maple Leaf to catch local heroes Papa Grows Funk and found the fellow doing the fabulous chikcen-scratch rhythm guitar and Santana like leads was from Japan, while one of the best local blues players, Anders Osbourne, was from Norway. They all found a home in NO: they came, they played, they stayed and ain’t no hurricane going to drive them away.

At Domilise’s Cafe on Saturday, having inhaled a few seafood po’ boys, my friend Jeffrey stopped to say hi to the proprietess, Dot Domilise, 80 something and still going strong. They share a mutual friend in the music business who once, in payback for all the great food he enjoyed when he was living there, wrangled a few connections to get Dot a gold-record that had once belonged to her musical hero, Englebert Humperdinck. (She doesn’t hang it in the cafe anymore, afraid that someone might steal it.) Though she really knew neither of us, Dot was solicitous and happy to learn we had come to town to hear music. “Y’all got a place to stay?” she asked and I’m sure if we had said no she would have found a place in her little house adjacent to cafe, right below the solid gold record.

It is now safe to say that this last season of the Sopranos is the worst. There was a lot of speculation before the season began in March that things might not go out with a bang, if not a bada-bing: David Chase was reluctant to return, some principal cast members had other interests. But like Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in the final, flabby Godfather III, HBO dragged them back in. A big pile of money will do that.

The dilemma may prove resonant, especially to historians of the show: if there is an overarching theme this time out it is corruption, and part of my disppointment might simply stem from seeing Tony et al, having grown fat and complacent, go through the motions of violence and degradation with little discernible enthusiasm for the tasks at hand. Like the tired lap dancers at the Bing, most of the characters seem to be on autopilot, shooting and fucking and stealing because they don’t know anything better. (Actually, is there anything better?)

What gave the early seasons their tang though was the tension that existed between Tony’s waking life and the other reality he sensed in dreams and in therapy. That even as events, and family history, compelled him toward mob bossdom, he knew that part of him flew with the geese that migrated over his swimming pool every year. “My heart goes where the wild geese goes,” as he Holy Modal Rounders used to sing. “No one knows where the wild geese go.”

But in the real world of New Jersey mobsters, wild geese go to Florida — or die trying (see Episode I of this season). And yes, having Tony brought back from the dead, against much of what is left of his will, was a pretty clear statement of the creator’s own position: enough already. But as the following episodes have dragged on we see the continuting moral decay of characters who once seemed conflicted and shrug. Last night Christopher fell off the wagon again, in rather spectacular fashion: doing blow off the ass of some Hollywood hooker, all while dreaming of the swag room Ben Kingsley gave him a glimpse of. Artie lost his shit, not for the first time, falling for some new girl and beating up some soldier in Tony’s army (none too convincingly).

Some of it was good (I agreed with Christopher’s assessment of the hooker’s tits), some of it was bogus (how the hell did Lauren Bacall get snookered into that cameo?) but none of it was new. At this rate the show will have to work hard to make us care if the whole bunch of them gets whacked. At least that way they’d take off a few pounds.