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That's not an inspiring scene to contemplate, especially now, 40 years after the Voting Rights Act.

Yeah, they're still down here, you can't start congratulating yourself, but I think the younger generations are going to be OK. I think they're a lot less marinated in bad racial attitudes, at least I believe that to be true, although I wouldn't look away and think that the problem's been solved. I mean, prejudice is universal, prejudice and bigotry are human traits and it's unfortunate that the South has been stereotyped as the only place where these attitudes have been prevalent. It's not true, as anyone who's done much traveling can tell you.

Let's talk about New Orleans. After the disaster that's hit the city, what do you think will happen, particularly in view of the nearly mythological place New Orleans has in Southern culture?

In fact I'm writing about that now. Walker Percy called New Orleans "the Paris of the South." It was the place where you went to get away from all the small-town repression and expectations and just let your hair down in a place with a whole different set of assumptions. He said it was "in the South but not of the South, like Mont St-Michel at high tide."

I think New Orleans has very little to do with the South in a lot of ways, but it's a wonderful place to go for R&R. It was a great place to go for things that didn't flourish elsewhere, like tolerance, the arts, diversity, great food. That was my special city, I lived there for a year and have been back many times and it's a terrible personal loss for me, in addition to what a disaster the whole thing has been. If it's lost, or is never the way it was again, it would be a terrible psychological loss for the country, never mind the economic loss.

How do you feel about the overall arc of your career? You've had so many varied positions, are you satisfied with how things turned out?

Well, I don't wish I had done anything else. I've enjoyed doing what I wanted to do, I've been willing to take chances and it's worked out well for me. But the problem I'm having now is that I wanted to give up indignation and fury at a certain point in my life. I wanted to retire from writing about politics and I wanted to write more about books and music and religion and art but I've started to feel now that there just aren't enough clear voices. I'd love to just be traveling, seeing some of the great museums in Europe I've never seen, but I feel that the politicians these days are making me work beyond my retirement age (laughs) because there are so few hands to throw the sandbags on the levee. So as long as I'm still being published and people still want to read what I have to say, I feel I have this sense of responsibility as long as there's any hope at all.