While it may not rival the return of the Palestinians to the Gaza Strip, the news that John Fogerty was returning to Fantasy Records marks a reconciliation that seemed just as unlikely. It was at Fantasy in the late sixties and early seventies that Fogerty’s Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded a string of hits that seems even more remarkable today. “Bad Moon Rising,” “Hey Tonight,” “Fortunate Son,” “Green River” — most songwriters could have retired having written just one of those but on album after album they just kept on coming. (And really, you can’t blame the man for every weak-assed version of “Proud Mary” or “Lodi” you’re heard performed by troubadors everywhere from SF to Katmandu.)

Then in the mid-seventies the well seemingly went dry and in an infamous meeting with Fantasy head and CCR father figure Saul Zaentz, Fogerty threw a fit and ceded the rights to all of his songs to Fantasy just to get out of his contract with them. Even in the addled history of rock ‘n’ roll this seemed to be one of the most bone-headed moves of all time — up there, perhaps, with the Kinks similarly stupid sale of all future song rights though not quite in a league with Sam Phillips releasing Elvis to RCA for $35,000. And for the next decade Zaentz used that money to finance one Oscar-winning picture after another (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus) while Fogerty sulked, going into the studio in his home every day and coming out empty-handed.

I interviewed Zaentz for the Berkeley Monthly about twenty years ago. He was gearing up to produce Phillip Kaufman’s adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and was most agreeable on every subject — except that of John Fogerty. The singer’s dry spell finally ended with the release of a new album, Centerfield, and he opened local shows with not one but two Fuck You, Saul songs, “Zanz Can’t Danz” and “Mr. Greed.” Though John wouldn’t talk to me his brother, Tom Fogerty, wrote to say that Zaentz had always been great to him and the rest of the band and that John was the one with the problem. (Tom died a few years later of tuberculosis.) I had the sense that whatever went down in that boardroom had more to do with the surrogate father-son relationship the producer and the artist had and little to do with Fogerty’s output.

There were numerous lawsuits and counter suits. “Zanz” became “Vanz” as the result of one, and in a a truly bizarre moment, Zaentz and company tried to claim that Fogerty’s 1985 hit “The Old Man Down the Road” was a rewrite of the 1970 CCR song “Run Through the Jungle” — which Fantasy owned, accusing Fogerty in essence of plagiarizing himself. (A jury ultimately disagreed.) Whatever the psychology of the players, this had to be a low point in the art-vs-mammon world of rock business, akin to David Geffen suing Neil Young for making music with no commercial potential.

The stage for Fogerty’s return to Fantasy was set earlier this year when Zaentz sold Fantasy to a consortiium of buyers (including Norman Lear) for $80 million. In November the label will release a retrospective with an apt if stultifyingly unoriginal title: The Long Road Home. An album of orginal material is due in 2006 but don’t expect to hear any songs from it on Zaentz’s next project, a biography of Goya. Now there was an artist who knew something about suffering.

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.

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.