"With images of American soldiers torturing their captives fresh in our minds, those sanitized relays from smart missiles and satellites no longer hold the video game allure they once did."

"The dead in the city of New Orleans were those unable to leave, primarily those without the financial or physical resources to evacuate in advance of the hurricane."

"Many of the beliefs that once seemed most deeply etched in our national psyche — ideologies of freedom and privacy, for example — may be the very things that must be asserted most vigorously in the decades to come."

"Pilots, he asserted, just 'saw things differently' and had an 'easier time' during the war, a veiled reference to the devastation left behind in the wake of planes like his, a consequence his aerial perspective made easier to disavow."

"Blue Velvet's' evocative explorations of the cityscapes of New Orleans both pre- and post-Katrina help us to understand that the seeds of the devastation wrought by Katrina were sown years before the storm touched ground."