The angry black men and women were dispersed to shelters all over the South, far from Anderson Cooper and the TV cameras. America had five straight days of watching angry black people (and the anchors who wept for them), and it was more than anybody could bear. We got them off our screens and out of our homes; we sent in the Guard and packed them off to Texas and Georgia and Oklahoma and Arkansas and places even farther away. Once they were no longer on TV shouting at us, we were free to begin forgetting them, to rationalize for ourselves how thin is the line between civilization as we imagine it to be and civilization as it is practiced in the streets of Mogadishu and New Orleans.

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Should New Orleans be rebuilt? CNN.com readers respond:

New Orleans has always had a European feel to it. Why not enhance this by making it like Venice, Italy? Leave the areas that didn't flood as they are and make the rest like Venice, with canals for roads and houses and properties on concrete "islands."

-- Charmaine, Hattiesburg, Miss.

Let the "bowl" fill in naturally with water and build homes around this new lake. Name the lake appropriately and remake New Orleans from the bottom up.

-- Sherry, Milan, Mich.

Flatten the slums, build staff quarters, give the French Quarter and the surrounding areas to Disney or Harrah's and turn it into a play park for grown-ups.

-- Phil, Houston, Texas

A fire truck full of firemen rolls down Bourbon Street, grinning and waving at the catcalls and wolf whistles they're getting from the gay crowd drinking beers on the sidewalk in front of the Bourbon Pub. The curfew has been extended to midnight starting tonight, so people can go out to dinner. One by one, the restaurants are opening.

Over on St. Louis Street, Gennifer Flowers' most recent ex-husband, Finis Shelnutt, is out on the sidewalk in front of his club, across the street from Antoine's, the most famous old-line restaurant in town. (George W. Bush eats there.) Finis is doling out red beans and rice and cold beer to all who come by, as he has been doing since a couple of days after the storm. His red beans and rice is fiery but excellent, and he refuses to accept a nickel for it.

As the evening wears on, he adds more shakes from his giant Tabasco bottle. By 9 o'clock the dish is too hot to eat, but people are eating it anyway, sweating and cursing and laughing at each other.

My friend Stephanie says the rebirth of the French Quarter began when Shelnutt went to the police around the corner and announced, with all due respect to them and their curfew, that he intended to put a table with a white tablecloth out on his sidewalk. They didn't try to stop him. Now there are five tables filled with people stopping by to eat and drink for free, courtesy of Shelnutt. He has found himself in the good graces of the owners of Antoine's because he helped save the restaurant's priceless wine collection when the back wall of the building collapsed in the storm. Shelnutt has been informed he won't be paying for dinner at Antoine's.

There's a party in the air. Today New Orleans' tap water has been declared potable, fit to shower and brush your teeth in at least, if still perhaps a bit bleachy. Since water is the essential ingredient of ice, and ice is necessary for making cocktails, the joint begins to jump a bit. Over at Bacco, Ralph Brennan's place in the W Hotel, I stand in line with some big-time developers, waiting to eat T-bones off Styrofoam plates with plastic forks and knives. At the bar, city employees anxiously check their Blackberries to see if they are among the newly laid-off; Mayor Nagin just announced that 3,000 city workers, half the workforce, will lose their jobs because the city is broke. How any city can hope to recover from such a calamity with only half its civic employees is an issue he did not address.

There's lots of talk about how the Brennan restaurant family managed to keep all their 400-odd workers employed at full salary throughout the crisis, thanks to Ella Brennan's managerial smarts and good business-interruption insurance. There's some muttering about another more famous, and wealthy, restaurateur who reportedly laid off a lot of people, and hasn't been all that visible since the storm. Perhaps the criticism is unfair, or perhaps it deserves to be kicked up a notch.

Everybody's proud of chef Paul Prudhomme, inventor of the high-end Cajun restaurant, who set up a kitchen at his suburban warehouse and has fed thousands of Guardsmen, police, firefighters and volunteers, free of charge. By late Friday night, Bourbon Street is rocking -- not just with Guardsmen and power-company workers. Actual locals are crawling out of the wreckage, coming out into the night to celebrate the return of their fellow human beings.

In 72 hours the ghost town has taken on the air of a boomtown. Lots of cars on the street, and no place to park. A taxi cruises by, the first I've seen. Drunken people weave down the sidewalk, struggling against the force of gravity. Either the vomity smell has gotten better or I've grown used to it.

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The next day Stephanie and I are driving through Bywater, checking the houses of her friends who are still out of town, so she can call and tell them their places are still OK. I am reading the spray-painted tags left by the rescue crews in their search-and-rescue missions. We pass a door the inhabitant has tagged himself -- with a big pink X and the inscription "9/6. 2 CATS. 1 DRAG QUEEN."

Reconstruction is in the air. It's a word that comes easily to a lot of people now -- without irony. On United Radio, small businessmen are shouting into the microphones, decrying the carpetbaggers who have come down here with their huge no-bid contracts, these guys from Montana or New Jersey or wherever, getting paid $22 an hour when you've got plenty of local guys out of work who would gladly do the job for half the price! You can almost hear the whine of the lumber mill as Scarlett heads out alone in her buggy to take a drive through Shantytown.

We round a corner in the Bywater and suddenly it is all in and on us, around us, wrapping us in hideous arms: a stink so disgusting, so meaty and rank and foul that it can only have come from something that died not very recently.

"Some kind of animal," Stephanie says.

"You hope it's an animal," I say.

We get the car windows up too late. The smell stays in our noses longer than you might think.

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I e-mail my friend Sara, who is coming back tomorrow to her partially flooded house for the first time in five long, hot, electricity-free September weeks.

"It is both better and worse than you think," I warn. "The main thing they say is, if you had a lot of sort of meat-oriented food or fresh food in the fridge, don't open it. Just take it on out to the curb with some tape around it to keep it from coming open. You will see a whole lotta fridges on the corners. Someone is going around marking them all with the words "Voodoo" or "Voodoo 5 Here Today." Perhaps it is an anti-maggot curse. Can't wait to see you."

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