My New World

First of all, let me say how much I despise the word blog -- it is a lazy bastardization from a society now founded almost exclusively upon sound-bite material, everything becoming a monosyllabic shadow of itself all too quickly. So while the site name may indicate differently, this is a web log, and I will be dealing with real words and sentences and punctuation (though I am a bit loose on that last item, since years of letter-writing have produced an inordinate reliance upon dashes at the expense of periods and capital letters -- sorry).

Second, I am an American refugee fled from the new Venice, New Orleans -- I am lucky enough to have family close by and not only have a place to stay, but my own room with a TV and a place to set up my computer. I left at three the day before Katrina came ashore and you’ve never seen so many cars going one way on a highway at three o’clock in the morning. By the time I got to Lafayette, I’d been up for more than twenty-four hours, but I was here and it took less than three hours instead of the ten and twelve hours I’ve heard from others who left after the sun came up -- and still, they were among the lucky ones, because no matter how long it took, they got out and are now safe, however uncomfortable they may be at the moment. The unlucky ones are still there living in a disaster zone turned war zone -- seemingly no one prepared for this event, which while tragic, was nonetheless predicted over and over as an eventual possibility by the experts in the field.

So now, here it is, the inevitable catastrophe come to pass and what do you know, no one knows what the hell to do about it -- instead of having vehicles at the ready, boats or amphibious craft or something to get in and get those left behind, we’re all scrambling to find trucks that’ll run in hip-deep water and boats that’ll travel over the debris. We’ve been caught with our pants down after ten years of computer models telling us this is exactly what would happen if New Orleans had a direct hit by a major hurricane -- of course, the funny thing is that this wasn’t even a direct hit and the big catastrophe didn’t happen until Katrina was well past. A direct hit would have been even worse, which is probably hard to imagine at this point, but just imagine having all water and no houses whatsoever poking out the top and you’ll get an idea of what they’ve told us to fear.

With this information in hand, those of us who could get out did so, leaving those without the means to leave or without the sense to leave behind -- now we watch them on the news, all the worse elements of the city running amok among the continuing tragedy for the entire world to see. It’s not enough that we’re the Murder Capital of the country, but now we’re an uncivilized No Man’s Land, a lawless Third World hole bereft of all of the charm that made New Orleans a destination for tourists worldwide. Now those same tourists are being robbed for being tourists, stores looted, people terrorized -- looting a grocery store for food to survive being one thing, but what’s going on now is simple chaos. For a city known to be the best at crowd control (as anyone who has been to Mardi Gras should readily realize), these are the worst pictures that could come out of the city at this time and the perpetrators should be shown no mercy. I don’t think anyone could call the looters an aberration endemic to New Orleans, though -- it is the problem of the poor inner city that affects all of the country at the worst of times, and for my city, this is without a doubt the worst of times.


Switching gears from sad to pissed, I thank George W. Bush for these lovely shots of my beloved city of New Orleans -- it’s because of you, George, that the city is under water, because you’re the one that couldn’t be bothered with approving the funds for our Wetlands Restoration projects. Our Congressmen have begged and pleaded, but we’re just Texas’ sad little neighbor, good for a few laughs in our casinos and for titillating strolls down Bourbon Street, but that’s a whole mess of money to be giving us for a bit of resodding work. So now, see the fruit of your labors of inaction -- hell, it’s not so bad, you think, could have been much worse, you reckon -- if Abdul would have crashed a plane into One Shell Square, now that would have been a stain on your pretty starched collar. This? Well, shucks, this is just an old fashioned Act of God, your close pal, and what can anyone do about that but stand back and appreciate the spectacle. Hell, New Orleans has probably been a fairly big blot on your Christian conservative hand-wringing designs for the country anyway, a huge smudge on your vanilla-coated Family Values plan to turn America into a bunch of black-coat wearing Puritans again, though we’d all be wearing cowboy hats with this time.

Now one of those dens of evil is taken care of (look out Vegas, there may be a nuclear accident heading your way), the Big Easy washed clean in biblical proportions, with a little presidential foot-dragging thrown in to help -- no worries now, though, because God has taken care of it, washing away the thin veneer of civilization to expose the festering jungle that lay at the heart of our city of sin. Now you’re in your comfort zone and can handle things the way you know best: SEND IN THE TROOPS! Martial Law in New Orleans, now that has a sweet ring to it -- more fun than taking a month-long vacation during the second coming of Vietnam, more invigorating than riding bikes with Lance while faceless American soldiers die on the side of nameless Iraqi roads -- nothing like the Wrath of God to energize those right wing prayer lines, that’s fer sure.

So thanks George -- I’m sure you’ll do all you can to fix it now that things have gone so terribly wrong, but if you would have practiced that ounce of prevention, maybe New Orleans wouldn’t be a watery wasteland right now.