If sports mean anything to you, be sure to watch the Agassi/Blake match tonight at the U.S. Open. Blake is playing the best tennis of his life after facing down a career-ending injury and Agassi is racing against the sunset–this is his last best chance to win a major.

A brief word about Agassi: There may not be a more compelling figure in modern sports. He’s a fundamentally tragic figure who has found his way to a happy ending. Agassi emerged on the tour as a bright light, someone who was expected to win many majors. He got the big endorsement deals with Nike and Prince, seemed on the brink of success, and then suffered a series of devastating losses in Grand Slam tournaments. He then became something of a nut. He shaved his body hair, dated Barbra Streisand, worked out with shady “strength” coaches, and became a parody of the goofy, spoiled, underachieving professional athlete. He watched from the sidelines as a host of lesser Americans (Jim Courier, Michael Chang) won majors. And then there was Pete Sampras.

Sampras was an unheralded teenager when he blew the heavily-favored Agassi off the court in the 1990 U.S. Open final. (The score was 6-4, 6-3, 6-2, but it wasn’t that close.) Shaken by the loss, Agassi then watched as Sampras became the most dominant player of his generation and headed off on a chase of Rod Laver legend. Agassi dropped out of the top 10, into the 100s, and looked washed up.

Two years later, something amazing happened. On the grass at Wimbledon, the surface least friendly to his game, Agassi found himself in the finals against a young, hard-serving Goran Ivanisevic. He dropped the first set in a tied break, but came back to win in five sets. He was reborn.

Since then, Agassi has gone on to win 7 more majors and is one of only a handful of men (I believe four or five) to have won all four of the Grand Slam tournaments–something even Sampras failed to do. Along the way he dropped the dangling earrings and the denim shorts, became a born-again Christian, got married, had children, and now, at 35, is still contending for titles after Chang, Courier, and Sampras are long since retired.

When the final reckoning on his career takes place, I’d argue that you could put Agassi in among the five best to ever play the game (Laver, Sampras, Borg, McEnroe). But taken as a tale of promise, failure, perseverance, and grace, you’ll find no better story in all of sports.

Update, 11:56 p.m.: At 5-3 in the third set, up two sets and a break, James Blake suddenly took on the pallor of Jana Novatna. If Blake loses, let’s hope he gets beat and doesn’t collapse.

Update, 1:15 a.m.: If you missed this classic you only have yourself to blame. Simply unbelievable. More thoughts on the greatness of Andre Agassi tomorrow.

The 2005 Transatlantic Trends poll has just been released and the results are, well, interesting. The poll, assembled by such diverse partners as the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Compagnia di San Paolo, Fundaçào Luso-Americana, and Fundación BBVA, consists of a widespread sampling of respondents from the United States and nine European nations as well as Turkey (on select questions). Some of the key findings:

Over the last year, have relations between Europe and the United States improved, worsened, or stayed the same? Roughly 50 percent of all the respondents, including in this country, say things are the same (which isn’t that good).

Bush’s disapproval ratings in Europe are still staggeringly high, at about 72 percent. (His approval ratings in this country aren’t exactly great either.) The one exception being the Poles, who give the president a mere 36 percent disapproval rating. We should all grill some kielbasa tonight in their honor.

On the thermometer scale of “Nation’s feelings toward the U.S.” the warmest readings, at a mild 57 degrees, come from the U.K. and Italy. The only countries giving us readings below 50 degrees are Spain (a cool 42 degrees) and Turkey (a frigid 28 degrees!).

Despite the recent rejections of the E.U. constitution in France and the Netherlands, all of the European countries polled give favorable ratings to the E.U. (between 57 and 74 percent).

Perhaps most interesting is this question: Should the European Union have a single permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council?

Fully 60 percent of Europeans say yes! This means they would also be willing to give up French and British seats. Sixty-four percent of Germans also agree, clearly contradicting Chancellor Schröder’s intent of procuring a separate seat for Germany. Even France is willing to surrender (pardon the expression) its seat in favor of a pan-European one, at an astounding 62 percent. Only 37 percent of Brits favor this plan, however.

When it comes to “democracy promotion,” it seems the Europeans are more in favor of it (74 percent) than the Americans (51 percent). Even more bizarre is the Europeans’ affinity to the Republican position (76 percent) as opposed to the Democrats (43 percent). But when you break it down further, the Europeans are largely in favor of promoting democracy by peaceful means as monitoring elections (83 percent) rather than military force (32 percent), whereas Republicans favor military force by 57 percent (but also support monitoring elections by large margins). Strangely, only 64 percent of Democrats support monitoring elections–that’s right, even less than the Europeans.

Eighty percent of Europeans think a more powerful E.U. should serve to cooperate and not compete with the United States.

Patrick Ruffini has this astute observation about the difference between the Democratic reaction to 9/11 and Katrina:

Balz doesn’t examine the profound change in the Democratic Party that comes closest to explaining the sharply disparate reactions to the two disasters. Four years ago, Daily Kos was barely a glimmer in our eye, Joe Lieberman was a frontrunner for the 2004 nomination, Howard Dean was still considered a “moderate”, the DLC was still ascendant, the words “liberal” and “lefty” were almost never spoken in polite conversation, The New Republic represented the mainsteam of Democratic thinking inside the Beltway and you wouldn’t think twice about calling David Corn and The Nation “far-left.” As I’ve documented, the party’s vitriolic reaction to Katrina was shaped on the blogs. Had those blogs been around on 9/11, we would have seen the same response, with immediate cries of “Bush knew.”

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin is mad as hell and he isn’t going to take it anymore. In an interview on radio station WWL (linked by CNN), Nagin is at his wit’s end and understandably so. His city is submerged under water, oil, and raw sewage. His people are starving, dying, and rioting. But it also seems that the mayor has had one too many hurricanes–and I’m not talking about Katrina. Or perhaps he is just tired of the beat down. Who is to blame? Nagin isn’t sure, but it’s either the governor or President Bush.

Noam Scheiber: We’ll all be working for him some day.

Over to you, Brendon.

Nicole Gelinas has a sobering essay about the future of New Orleans that should be read by everyone. The general theme is:

Sure, the feds must provide cash and resources for relief and recovery—but it’s up to New Orleans, not the feds, to dig deep within itself to rebuild its economic and social infrastructure before the tourists ever will flock back to pump cash into the city’s economy. It will take a miracle. New Orleans has experienced a steady brain drain and fiscal drain for decades, as affluent corporations and individuals have fled, leaving behind a large population of people dependent on the government. Socially, New Orleans is one of America’s last helpless cities—just at the moment when it must do all it can to help itself survive.

Gelinas’s central point is that the disaster of Katrina is merely causing the city’s deeper sociological problems to manifest:

No American city has ever gone through what New Orleans must go through: the complete (if temporary) flight of its most affluent and capable citizens, followed by social breakdown among those left behind, after which must come the total reconstruction of economic and physical infrastructure by a devastated populace. . . .

Thousands of opportunistic vultures have looted stores all over the city, and shot in the head one police officer who tried to stop them. The New Orleans Times-Picayune has posted photos on its website of other police officers joining in the widespread theft from unattended stores. Looters have picked clean Wal-Mart’s gun department downtown. This anarchy is regrettably not all that surprising. Disaster does not make a weak peacetime civil and social infrastructure strong. Unfortunately, New Orleans must now ask for deserved billions in recovery money even as Americans see images of a city that loots itself on its worst day. . . .

How will New Orleans’ economy recover from Katrina? Apart from some pass-through oil infrastructure, the city’s economy is utterly dependent on tourism. After the city’s mainstay oil industry decamped to Texas nearly a generation ago, New Orleans didn’t do the difficult work of cutting crime, educating illiterate citizens, and attracting new industries to the city. New Orleans became merely a convention and tourism economy, selling itself to visitors to survive, and over time it has only increased its economic dependence on outsiders. The fateful error of that strategy will become clearer in the next few months.

Gelinas also argues that New Orleans is a sad city. I’d have to agree.

Permit a personal anecdote: In the fall of 1996, having just finished college, I spent several months driving around the country playing pick-up basketball. (It’s a long story and no, you don’t want the details.) I played on playgrounds in every one of the lower 48 states. I played in some of the “worst” neighborhoods in America–from Coney Island to Cabrini Green to South Central Los Angeles and, on the whole, my experiences were incredibly positive.

Most of the time I was a distinct minority: a middle-class, college-educated white kid playing in neighborhoods that were frequently poor and nearly all-black. At the risk of sounding patronizing, I would honestly say that the friendliest, most hospitable people I met during those months were almost always in the “worst” neighborhoods.

There were only a thimbleful of exceptions, one of which was New Orleans. I spent a day or two playing at parks in the south end of town and the racial hostility and sense of lawlessness was palpable. Driving through the streets I got ugly looks from nearly everyone I passed. It was one of the only times during my trip that I felt not entirely safe. At one point, a nice fellow from the neighborhood with whom I had been playing, was packing it in for the night; he suggested that I go to another park about a half-mile away since it was next to a police station and he thought I’d be safer there. From my limited experience I couldn’t tell you what all of the components were to the hostility I saw, but a partial list would surely include racial segregation and social inequality on a scale that should embarrass any American.

I bring this up not to claim any deep insight into what is happening in New Orleans, but merely to underscore Gelinas’s point about the terrible difficulty in rebuilding not just the city’s infrastructure but its society. If you’ve only been to New Orleans for Mardi Gras or on an expense account, you have not seen the real city. The real city, as Gelinas points out, suffers from such decay, mismanagement, and inequity that it will be a wonder if it can right itself.

I confess to watching Katrina from a pub on Monday afternoon and being not exactly delighted by the spectacle, but filled with a pretty large sense of wonder and awe. I assumed, like many others, I think, that we would see a great deal of property damage and some small-scale human suffering, but nothing more. After all, that early in the morning the cable news nets had announced that Katrina had veered off to the east and New Orleans was going to be spared the cataclysm that had been feared on Sunday. Remember the phrase they used: “The best worst-case scenario.”

Five days later we have this terrifying quote: “The conditions are steadily declining,” said Maj. Ed Bush. “The systems have done all they can do. We don’t know how much longer we can hold on. The game now is to squeeze everything we can out of the Superdome and then get out.”

Ross Douthat has a useful summary of what I expect most people (including myself) are just coming to wonder: This is the United States of America, not a Michael Bay movie. How can this be happening?

(Douthat also has this intriguing thought about Katrina as the anti-9/11.)

On many levels–from the leadership of our government, to the behavior of looters, to the shocking response of some portions of the American left–the destruction of New Orleans has revealed some troubling traits of our national character. It’s sobering to realize that what we saw on September 12, 2001, when American society was the picture of strength, dignity, compassion, and valor, at every level, might have been an aberation, and not the norm.