JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

Let's dissect a quote and from that dissection expose -- make that re-expose -- a remarkably insulated, insensitive and inept American president.

Here is the statement, spoken impromptu to reporters last week by King George II, also known as George W. Bush, as he toured Mississippi's Gulf Coast: "It (Hurricane Katrina) spared nobody. United States Senator Trent Lott had a fantastic house overlooking the bay. I know because I sat in it with he and his wife. And now it's completely obliterated. There's nothing."

First, to get pet peeves out of the way: This man holding an eminent office once occupied by powerful and moving orators such as Lincoln and FDR and JFK simply cannot seem to avail himself of his native language. He did not sit with "he and his wife." He sat with "him and his wife." To say something is completely obliterated is to suggest it could have been partly so. But if something is partly obliterated, it's not obliterated. It's still there, just damaged, perhaps heavily.

Second, it must be that old college cheerleaders hold a special bond. Bush has been fretting about Lott's lost antebellum mansion for a solid year now, having first voiced his privileged empathy this time last year while poor people's dead bodies floated in New Orleans and Brownie was doing his heck of a job.

Bush was a cheerleader at a prep school. Lott was one at Ole Miss. Cheerleading seems to prepare one well for sideline exhortations while others actually go to war.

Now, to the real outrage of King George's latest vacuous remark, assuming he hasn't uttered another between this writing and your reading, a distinct possibility: It is difficult to imagine anything more beyond belief than the utter insensitivity of this president a year ago. He peeked down at New Orleans from a little airplane window on an arrogant fly-over. He lamented the threatened extinction of the city not for the death and destruction and suffering, but for his drunken party days on Bourbon Street.

Yet now he reveals something even more beyond belief. It's that he remains clueless a year later. It's that he's equal parts tone-deaf, meaning politically and socio-economically, and that the conditions are chronic.

His readiest frame of reference remains Trent Lott's bay mansion. On his wholly choreographed Gulf Coast tour, he veers off script once -- and uses it to pine for Lott's loss. While New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, inhabited largely by low-middle class black people, sits empty and unimproved, he invokes the horror of Southern gentility's lost grandeur.

He remains his mother's son. Remember that she said those people in Houston's Astrodome were doing fine in their uneasy and all-too-public quarters because, after all, they were underprivileged to start with.

That attitude apparently applies to the Lower 9th Ward, which, by the way, was flooded by Hurricane Betsy in 1965, prompting the then-president, Lyndon Johnson, actually to go there immediately and talk to people left homeless.

Here, effectively, is the Bush administration's seeming policy for the 9th Ward: Those people didn't have much anyway, so there wasn't much actually lost. Since they didn't have much, they couldn't possibly be in significantly direr straits wherever they ended up. So, let's disregard their predicament for the moment and hope they get by wherever they are. A low-middle class neighborhood is hard to rebuild from scratch, anyway. It takes time for new things to get run-down from limited resources.

Meantime, let's rise in praise of our own vigilance. Let's praise the human spirit. Let's casually mention that perhaps we should have done better, as if it mattered to belabor the obvious.

And, for goodness sakes, let's get Trent's big old porch rebuilt so that he and King George II can have a place to practice their cheers. Maybe then the president could find something else, and someone else, to worry about.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.