There was a house in New Orleans.

Hurricane season is upon us again. So is the season for taking stock of ourselves and measuring the progress we have made. Although last year's season spared us, this season makes no promise to be so kind. Perhaps it will bring a repetition of the cataclysmic storms of two years ago. That was when, for the first time, many of us saw faces from New Orleans full of anger and despair.

We might say we did not see the best face of America that week in 2005. We felt ashamed, and rightly so. We should be ashamed of the way we as a nation failed the people of New Orleans. We failed them by ignoring the condition of the levees. We failed them by despoiling the Louisiana countryside, which should have provided some protection from flooding. We failed them by waiting too long when we should have evacuated them to safety. We failed them by sending away their National Guard units and equipment, which should have been there to assist in rescue operations. We have continued to fail them in our disappointing efforts to rebuild their shattered homes and their lives.

However, let us not be ashamed of that eccentric city's people themselves. We must not be so arrogant or ungrateful as to judge them for the degraded ways in which some of them may live. The drunkenness and debauchery of New Orleans might well be our most precious national resource. In a way, the legendary depravity of that unique city has, in the eyes of many people all over the world, redeemed us for all of our country's other sins.

If the people of this world bear our country any love at all, it is above all else because of what Americans have created and given to human civilization. The world does not love us for our fast food. The world does not love us for our blue jeans. The world does not love us for our military support of anti-Communist governments. The world certainly does not love us for the idea of democracy; we deserve no credit for that. Indeed, our efforts to impose our form of government on other nations, off our shores and around the globe, have won us more enemies than any other cause.

Our country's greatest gift to civilization is the music of democracy, America's art form. Jazz music, along with all its popular derivatives, has expressed the pain and the rage, the hopes and the joys of the world's common people more eloquently than anything that ever came from the imperial courts of Europe. All the glorious stomping, swinging, boogie-ing, be-bopping, rocking, rolling, hip-hopping music which people all over the world love had its genesis in the streets and brothels of New Orleans. For that, we owe New Orleans and all its fools and sinners an incalculable debt. A United States with no New Orleans would be a United States few of the world's people would appreciate or admire.