I. I'm feeling astonishingly sick and angry at the destruction of New Orleans. I'd been to the oldest city in the US twice, and delighted in its bizarreness.
Of course, as my friend Hugh, who lived there for ten years, said, if you're born poor in New Orleans, you'll die poor in New Orleans. Of course the tapdancing kids were slaves. Of course the cops started at $17,000/yr and moonlighted as armed security guards. Of course every building smelled of mildew, every surface was greasy, and the Summer air was to crawl through. Of course it was gradually being gobbled by a well-organized, fecund invasive termite. Of course Bourbon Street was the haunt of gross white people who had vulgarized mardi gras to death ten years ago. Of course the one night I slept outside of the Quarter was in a scary residence motel with drug dealers in the courtyard and filthy sheets. Of course the Old Absinthe House had its 300 year old interior renovated. Of course someone burned down Peristyle because they didn't pay someone off.
But ah, the French/cajun/African American history, the OJ/beignet/cafe au lait, the mufaletta, the trolleys, the unmodern streets, the lushness, the anarchy, the closeness to swamps, the statue of Ignatius Reilly. Truly it was the exotic fringe, and I wanted to visit again and again.
II. Then of course there's the question of what will happen to the refugees, who are in numbers twice those of the Afghans who fled the Taliban and drought in 2000--01. Undoubtedly, as always, the rich will get some compensation, the middle classes will be screwed, and the poor will be utterly screwed. Undoubtedly the insurers won't be able to pay off, and compensation will be disbursed to whoever is loudest: namely, the rich. The middle classes will never get adequate compensation for their material losses, and many non-material losses will be uncompensatable -- where will the professors at UNO and Tulane get jobs? The poor of New Orleans were grindingly poor and isolated, and I'm unable to figure out how they will survive now that the social networks that kept them afloat have been smashed (and given that their housing is unlikely to be rebuilt). (Not to mention the unknown destruction of the Bayou people, with an entire parish under water.)
III. It would be a mistake, I think, to think about Katrina as we thought about the tsunami. The tsunami was bizarre, unpredictable, and beyond the power of even the Army Corps of Engineers to defend against.
By contrast, there are a number of reasons why the destruction of the Big Easy was not a natural disaster:
* Storms and hurricanes are inevitable in the Atlantic/Gulf/Caribbean. But thanks to global warming, they've been increasing in frequency and severity.
* Massive interference with water drainage in southern Louisiana increased NO's vulnerability enormously.
* Had the levees been in adequate condition, they might well have held up. But they hadn't been adequately maintained, thanks to the odious Republican party.
* The aftermath has been worsened by unknown amounts due to lack of manpower and organization. Of course the manpower is off in Iraq and the organization doesn't exist in an administration unconcerned with human well-being.
So there are short term and long term factors for which humans can be blamed for this disgusting horror -- those to blame being the usual crop of villains. -- Benj
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