European mental map of U.S.A.

In all kindness,
and I mean this in a good way,
it's how their socialist selves perforce perceive things
in order to make sense of the concrete world
when it comes crashing through their mental constructs.
Bless their hearts.

The mental map differs from an actual map but it's used to process something like Hurricane Katrina and the colossal failure of what is understood universally as a federal government's primary function, the tender over-care for the well-being of all its citizens no matter how complacent, uncooperative, or hostile those good and fine citizens be. [Understand, this is the Federal government and is in no wise the responsibility of State or City government, or in the case of Louisiana, Parish rather than District government. No coordination between levels of government is to be expected or even desired. Success or failure lies squarely with the federal government. Those other levels are not discussed, they're irrelevant, poorly understood, and tend to complicate.]

The yellow area up there ↑ is the mostly unexplored and undeveloped barren central region consisting mostly of vast areas of wispy buffalo grass or desert, identical to Australia's Outback except with Grand Canon instead of Uluṟu. 

To be fair, Europeans know perfectly well there's a row of southern states between Texas and the Atlantic. Everyone knows that row begins with Louisiana and ends in Florida, and Florida looks like a penis. Ha ha ha ha ha .

Los Angeles and New York are the cities where all the people who count live but New Orleans, the Crescent City, is of special interest. Perfectly situated safely high atop a hill and occupying the whole of the Gulf Coast and encompassing the entire Mississippi Delta, it's surrounded by the waters of lake Pontchartrain, (named after Count Pontchar, who took up an interest in steam engines early on when the Spanish Mountaineers settled the place and named it after a town in Spain), the Gulf of Mexico and, of course, the Mississippi river which fans out after passing through the base of the great New Orleans mountain and spreading out as it flattens toward the great and tumultuous Gulf of Mexico, and which all together form natural and imposing protective barriers around the vast city on the hill. It's the ideal place for the U.S. government to round up all its minorities and herd them into one area, forcing them to live there through the century and a half following slavery, coerced against their individual wills, so they could be better monitored and altogether more thoroughly seen after.

There's also Chicago and a few other towns around the perimeter but that's about it. A more complex mental map is conjured in the European mind when needed that vaguely includes Washington (below New York), a few cities around penile Florida, because they've briefly thought of one day visiting, San Francisco and possibly Seattle (above Los Angeles), and Texas, because it's big as a country and next to New Orleans, and because, of course, it is whence the loathed Bush.