Reflections of a stormy petrel

I am listening to Joan Baez singing Johnny Cash's magnificent anthem to America, "City of New Orleans". It is one of her best performances and one of the greatest pieces of popular music ever composed. It is not even about the tormented city, just about a train named after it, and yet for some reason it is affecting me more about the tragedy of Katrina than anything I have seen or heard. Perhaps because Johnny Cash himself was a product - the greatest product, perhaps - of the rural south, perhaps because the song has something consciously valedictory about the landscape it describes, but I have tears in my eyes. God keep America; she is, in the end, a part of all of us, and all that we have to complain of her is dwarved by what we owe her.