Katrina & The Flood – Four Years On

Fleur de Lis in Manhattan

Since leaving New Orleans for Ohio (and San Jose, Boston, Vermont, Chicago and Colorado) five months ago, I’ve met a lot of people.

There are those who exclaim “Oh, New Orleans, wow, that must have been exciting!” and ones who ask with genuine concern, “Were you there when …?”

In these rolling spice-starved foothills of the Appalachians, there are those who ask D if he can make them gumbo and jambalaya.  “Sure I’ll help you install that, if you promise to put extra hot sauce in the jambalaya!”  Of course, darlin’, just bring yourself and the family!

There are those who spent a drunken, heavily-beaded three days ogling boobies in the Quarter a decade ago and know “what New Orleans is all about.”  Conspiratorial wink and everything.  To which they get a disgusted look from me. [Like Harry Shearer, who spoke at last week’s Rising Tide conference said, I’m delighted to be anywhere, any time I’m in New Orleans.  But, Bourbon Street at night is not one of those places.  In all my years in NOLA, I can safely say that I walked the entirety of the tourist portion of that street all of three times, mostly avoiding it by taking Royal, Dauphine, Burgundy and a series of cross streets, my favorite being Toulouse for one obvious reason.]

There are the Mennonite few who step away from me when I let them know that some of “those gays and trannies in that end of the Quarter” are my friends.  There are the Mennonite many who traveled down to New Orleans and Slidell in late 2005 and early 2006 to bring supplies, gut houses and help us clean up.  Thank you.

Surprisingly, there has been only one who has vehemently remarked that the wretched hive of scum and villainy should never have been rebuilt and ought to be sunk into the swamp whence it came.  Dude, people live there much like people live all over America at the mercy of geology, weather and government capriciousness.  Yes, we left for family and work, and I’ve been seriously frustrated with the place on more than one occasion, but many still live there strengthening their ties to a place they call home.  Not your tourist destination and subsequent object of ire.  Their home.  Chill.  Mind your own glass house.  A hundred retorts come to mind, but I’ve found there is no reasoning with such crushing self-assurance and anger.  Other problems lurk in there.

The most irritating and endearing creature up here, though, is Mr. or Ms. Let Me Tell You What Happened During Katrina.  “The government response was pathetic, shameful.  You see, the river levee fell into St. Barnhard Parish and then they bombed it following which Bush zipped in on a jet ski and said, ‘You’ve done a great job, Mr. Brown!‘  And those poor people in the Superdome for weeks.  That disaster would never have happened if it weren’t for global warming.”  These are the moments that flummox.  After four years, such blessed interest, passion and rage for what happened in New Orleans in 2005, but the facts are all wrong as is the audacity to inform D and me, who actually lived there at the time and went through the whole wretched thing.

So, I do only that which can be done on days like today.  Inform you.  Again.

All of New Orleans is not below sea level and Hurricane Katrina did not come to New Orleans. Were either of this true, my house in the Lower Garden District would have flooded or been sheared off its foundations to land somewhere in Mississippi.

… A population map of New Orleans in 1878 indicates that almost none of today“s flooded zones was inhabited back then and that the city really didn’t expand until swamp reclamation in the early- to mid-twentieth century.  Therefore, the city wasn’t built below sea level, it was expanded below sea level.

Again, Hurricane Katrina did not touch New Orleans and skated to the east of us laying waste to Bay St. Louis, Waveland, Biloxi/Gulfport in Mississippi, Mobile, Alabama, and Slidell, Louisiana in all her Category 3 glory.

Last but by no means least:

“The city’s vaunted levee system, mandated by Congress to provide no more than Category 3 hurricane protection, was untested.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which was in charge of all New Orleans levees, had seen its local budget slashed repeatedly by the Bush administration – by some $80 million in 2005 alone.”

Yes, the city started with smugglers and prostitutes and wouldn’t be what it is without its driving forces of disorder and dysfunction. Yes, an amazing level of corruption, grandstanding, lies and sheer apathy on the part of the federal, state and local governments and the people of Louisiana caused a deadly flood in place of just another hurricane that went east. But, these are not what we ought to shake our heads and weep over.

The real tragedy is that no one who can do something about it really cares even now, after the worst possible happened. We all know why New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are important to this nation’s interests, what threatens it, what can be done about it and that absolutely no steps will be taken to protect it.  I hope I’m wrong and know that this presidency is still young and beleaguered by the recession and predecessorial mess, but Come On. Where are you, President Obama? This is your chance to keep that campaign promise. This is your chance to shine and help a great, cultural, colorful and unique part of America.

Look at it as practice.  Manhattan’s next.

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“Like Venice, New Orleans has been burdened with an accumulated and shared touristic vocabulary that everyone uses to describe its character, and which, for various reasons, remains the sole content of its foreseeable future.

“… As the Venetian floods quickly exceeded their actual significance to achieve a charged, symbolic meaning, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is likely to alter the symbolic, and consequently physical and social, structure of the city. Tourism in New Orleans, though not so global a force as it is in Venice, led to a certain sort of vision that was blind to whatever did not accord with the spectacle. A doomed New Orleans has no history to answer for, and can be remade into any whimsical vision that visitors have of it. When we visit such a place, we can pretend that it has no past other than the one we see pleasantly deteriorating with exotic, carefully manicured negligence. With such a New Orleans, we needn’t engage in any handwringing over racism, poverty, or any injustice at all, except the sort that finds accord with our own nostalgia. If a city’s fate is already determined by “water-gods,” well, that’s no injustice after all”certainly nothing we could help. In a doomed place where only the inevitable takes place, nothing can be reformed except purely mythic problems, in colossal, “pharaonic” ways. To the resolution of particular issues, we prefer catastrophic visions. We like to have objects of reform that are too grand to fix but lovely to contemplate and pity, even if it’s the particulars that will add up to the very catastrophe we spent so long dreaming of.

“It was such thinking that rendered New Orleans’ poorer, mostly black residents invisible, beyond contemplation, before the hurricane. Now the districts where many of them lived have been destroyed, and are not likely to be rebuilt. The former residents have become refugees, stateless citizens, within their own country.”

— Nikil Saval in Invisible Cities