At least no one is saying 'It was just like a movie'

Quirky Salon -- they sent a novelist to cover the mess in New Orleans, or maybe the guy just decided to go and they agreed to run his stuff. In any case:

Trash is strewn everywhere. There are black bags, pillows, boxes, twisted chairs, water bottles, soiled and torn clothing. Shopping carts are turned upside down and stacked on top of each other. Garbage cans lie in the bushes. Nothing in the Gulf Coast seems to symbolize the tragedy more than the excess of garbage and human waste.

WTF? The guy needs a symbol of the tragedy? He's there -- he's in the tragedy. It's all around him. But he finds a "symbol of the tragedy."

As if to emphasize this reality-once-removed aspect of the story, his next sequence features Geraldo Rivera -- a guy who actually seemed like he was going to redeem himself from decades of shameless pandering when he set unctuous right-winger Sean Hannity straight on the air last week -- staging a "rescue" for the Fox cameras.

Geraldo Rivera arrives in a Fox News truck. An elderly woman with blond hair grips his elbow. She's wearing thick dark glasses and a pink shirt. He carries her small white dog in his arms. He's wearing thigh-high waders unzipped to below his knees. We shake hands. "Her relative called one of our stations," Geraldo tells me, explaining how that call went to another station, and then another, and finally to him.

The woman had been stranded in her home for six days. Geraldo picked up the woman and her dog and brought them here. The woman looks frail on his arm, though not as bad perhaps as a lady collapsed on a chair nearby, unable to move. Or a woman in a wheelchair being lifted from the truck, carrying her prosthetic leg on her lap.

"That's the second time he brought her here," one of the doctors tells me, nodding toward Geraldo.

"What?"

"They did two takes. Geraldo made that poor woman walk from the Fox News van to the heliport twice. Both times carrying her dog."

Now that's a symbol of the tragedy.