You may not know it, but it's a year today that Hurricane Katrina began to batter the Gulf Coast. I mean, the media has done such a good job downplaying it and everything, it's almost like they're trying to erase history. Yeah, downplaying.

On Sunday, curious to see how our notoriously shy media would skirt the issue of the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I assumed, were I lucky enough to find a story, aliens from another country watching the coverage would come away with the following impressions:

• Americans, especially their President, hate black people, even though black people are American as white people
• Hurricane Katrina hit only New Orleans
• Mayor Ray Nagin is an effective, albeit controversial, civic genius

And so forth. And I was not disappointed.

Obviously, the media is not downplaying Katrina. In an hour of channel surfing, I saw the more-interesting-than-I-would-have-thought 60 Minutes piece on New Orleans, whereby one expert stated that the future of New Orleans could be seen in the papers only a few months after Katrina: in the society pages, the debutante balls were in full swing, but this year they were all lily white. Yes, only a few months after thousands upon thousands of poor people were eradicated from the city by the cold efficiency of Mother Nature and the predictable bumbling of government, teenage girls wearing white dresses made it known that they were now Fair Game. Nice, and to the credit of the man who observed this, an interesting observation. 60 Minutes probably did the most interesting piece thus far, but...

• On C-SPAN, there were debates in New Orleans.
• On C-SPAN 2, there was a roundtable about a picture book about New Orleans
• On MSNBC, there was a cheaply done 'remember when' about New Orleans
• On CNN, more New Orleans
• On Fox, well, there was the Ramsey murderer
• One assumes that Franklin Mint commercials will soon be popping up, on one side of a coin the silhouette of an empty housing project, the other side a broken levy.

But today, this major anniversary, it's all Katrina all the time. Joe Scarborough, whose adolescent MSNBC version of The O'Reilly Factor is as unwatchable as, well, The O'Reilly Factor, obviously had the foresight to remember the same thing that many of us did: Katrina didn't just hit New Orleans. Sure, Anderson Cooper was deemed worthy to write a book based on his on-the-ground experience there (not to mention gaining MSM street cred by being a white man showing moral outrage at the race divide in this country), and Shepherd Smith did some of the best reporting the media had to offer, it is Scarborough who might actually pull a coup. Ol Joe went to Biloxi last year, and while New Orleans was swamped, Biloxi-MS was destroyed. So Joe's doing the classic TV News Thing and going back One Year Later to see what has changed. I'm guessing just enough to make a person feel good, but not enough to make a person feel great.

What is the MSM to do, one wonders? It's bad enough that Katrina doth come but once a year - and only two weeks before the fifth anniversary of 9/11, no less - but then, what every sane person not even following the case already knew - that Karr was not the killer of JonBenet Ramsey - was announced and all hell has broken loose. Anyone who has watched Mork & Mindy reruns has obviously gotten close enough to Boulder-CO to know who runs the asylum up there, and that a simpleton like Karr could fleeced a DA who theoretically went to law school is absurd.

But wait, this is about Katrina. This is about New Orleans. This is about rich white teenagers in their parents' basement giving each other handjobs while their parents clink champagne flutes upstairs, celebrating the mass exodus of the poor darkies, laughing, one imagines, at their good fortunes; and, to wax Newtonian since all action has an equal and opposite, they must also be laughing at Houston, who took the bulk of their tired, weak and the poor and is now suffering the consequences of swamped schools and sky-rocketing crime.

If you don't get the sarcasm, allow me to spell it out: this has nothing to do with race, at least for me. It does, however, have everything to do with class, and when I say class, I mean the English kind, not the I'm Not Skanky I'm Classy kind. New Orleans was a poor, poor city. It just got rid of a massive number of its poor people, swept like dandelions throughout the country, likely never to return to the Big Easy. I keep hearing people say that the city's poor were it's soul, and not being a native of the city I couldn't argue the point one way or the other. I would say that on my soul - er, sole - trip to New Orleans, the only thing I enjoyed more than the spicy food and copious titties was presumably poor teeangers who made money by tapdancing to drunk, money-friendly white people like me: I didn't give them money because I was guilty, I gave them money because I was entertained. New Orleans could be an interesting experiment, though: what happens when a city's massive poor population is evacuated on a one-way ticket, their homes ruined, their lives devastated, and all that are left are people who could afford to get out in the first place? What does the city look like five years later?

Is New Orleans destined to become some kind of ante-Aryan mixture of middle-class and affluent whites and blacks? Instead of purity of race, could it be on the road to purity of affluence? The question is rhetorical, because no city ever sheds its poor, for so long as there are politicians who rely on votes, and so long as votes to a degree rely on what politicians are willing to give of other people's money, there will always be the poor. Lack of money doesn't make people poor, government makes people poor. Always has, always will.

 Luckily, though, we have a media that Will Not Let Us Forget, even though none of us has forgotten. We will be pounded over the head as to how guilty we should feel about the plight of Katrina refugees, even though we do feel guilty, at least guilty in the sense that most of us have done nothing to help them, nor do we plan to. But we are guilty. Of what, I have no idea.