THE headline last Friday on the front page of the New York Times, America’s most influential newspaper, said it all: “Despair and Lawlessness Grip New Orleans as Thousands Remain Stranded in Squalor.”
The spectacle of 15,000 helpless victims, most of them black and poor who did not have the means to flee the city, and were left to huddle in the Convention Center fending for themselves — desperate, hungry, dehydrated, sick and dying — as looters and other marauders roamed downtown streets, was indeed gut-wrenching. Asked by reporters how many people have perished so far, the mayor replied, “thousands,” and left it at that. The bodies, you see, are still being counted.
New Orleans, of course, is not a Third World city situated in a “failed state” with a criminally negligent government and an unsophisticated infrastructure ill-equipped to deal with a natural disaster like a massive hurricane. But that was the image evoked.
President Bush, shirt open and sleeves rolled, finally arrived for a brief stop in “N’awlins” on Friday. Hey, you’re the country’s leader, so you gotta make an appearance. “You know, I’m going to fly out of here in a minute,” he said, “but I want you to know that I’m not going to forget what I’ve seen.” Earlier, he had told Diane Sawyer, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”
He didn’t? If he truly didn’t, it’s because he, or his advisors, never bothered to read countless reports about how those levees were at risk of busting under pressure from a heavy-duty hurricane. And the anarchy in the city, along with the shattered lives of tens of thousands of its inhabitants, well, maybe someone should have reminded him that the impact of all that could have been avoided, or diminished, had not one third of the National Guard, and half its equipment, been tied up in Iraq.
There are many, many questions Americans need to have answered once this tragedy is over — once the nation had taken care of hundreds of thousands of homeless people living currently in shelters in several surrounding states.
For now, however, we mourn the death — what other word will do here? — of a great American city, still lying under water, that, even were it to be totally rebuilt, will never be the same again.
Throughout human history, the greatest disaster that could befall man was the death of a city. “A city is the outward sum of man’s nobility, for in it his condition is most thoroughly humanized,” wrote the literary critic George Steiner. “When a city is destroyed, man is compelled to wander the earth or dwell in the open fields in partial return to the manner of a beast.”
That is the central theme of Homer’s poetic narratives in the Iliad — the dread fact that the splendid city of Troy died a fiery death by the edge of the sea. (Where the Iliad spoke of the ancient terrors of city gates broken and towers burned, the Odyssey spoke of the aftermath, the epic of a displaced people, of survivors wandering the face of the earth as pirates, beggars and thieves.)
The failed city of Knossis perished circa 1400 B.C., but legendary recollections of its downfall reappeared in the Greek imagination for centuries thereafter. The conquest of Jerusalem, and the massacre of virtually its entire population that ensued, at the hands of the Crusaders in July 1099, still resounds, to this day, in the historical archetype of Arabs.
And New Orleans was indeed a fabled city. (Yes, folks, we have to get used to the past tense when we recollect the Big Easy on the Gulf Coast.) An iconic city, with no other like it in the United States. Everyone was welcome in New Orleans — the crew-cuts and the long-haired, Jazz freaks and tattooed bikers, party animals and stoned hippies. And New Orleanians never tired of displaying that Old South hospitality: “Y’all come back now, d’hear!”
Does it break the heart of all of us who loved the city — my first visit was in 1976, after a lecture I gave at Tulane University down there — to read about its submerged Bourbon Street, its demolished balconies and wrought iron in the French Quarter, its twisted street cars? Sure it does, very much so. How could we watch Marlon Brando again hollering, “Stella, Stella,” in the black and white “A Street Car Named Desire,” (1951) without ourselves hollering back, “Oh, the horror, the horror”?
Will I again get a chance to fly down to New Orleans every year, with thousands of others from around the country, for the Jazz Fest? And will someone tell us, please, in the name of mercy, if there ever will be a Mardi Gras again down there?
What other city in this great US of A has people living in it with names like, say, Marcel Boudreaux and an airport called Louis Armstrong International. A city so culturally diverse and linguistically polyglot that when the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe arrived there in 1819 he found “a more various gabble of tongues than was ever heard at Babel” and a society of such astonishing diversity as to be “wholly new even to one who has traveled much in Europe and America.”
Yes, New Orleans was everybody’s favorite city, whose sprightly soul spoke to, about and from all creative misfits — artists painting their canvases right there at the corner of Bourbon and Canal, struggling writers sitting under oak trees downtown undaunted by rejection slips, accountants from the boondocks wearing necklaces of colored beads who partied till they dropped, serious Jazz fanatics doing the jazz club crawl at four o’clock in the morning, energized by the music and the ethos of the city, a city whose character is all about communion — talking, arguing, sipping, eating and, above all, laughing.
For New Orleans is New Orleans 24/7. New Orleans, a 17th-century French settlement, is unique.
For sure, to say that you’re from Manhattan is to say you’re a cocky, know-it-all intellectual who reads the New York Review of Books and goes to Edward Albee’s plays on Broadway, and to say you’re from San Francisco is to say you’re a laid-back and cool, though a touch flaky, Californian. But to say you’re from New Orleans is to say you’re from a city that everyone loves, a city that draws raves, magically from the hip and the hick — a city like no other in the United States.
Now the floods have claimed it. The question is this: Will everyone’s favorite place in this country ever come back?
If you’ve been reading this column for a long while, you will know that this columnist’s hopes run eternal. After all, San Francisco, everyone’s second favorite city, was gutted to the ground in 1906 and came back — and in the late 1960s became, at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, the scene of the most remarkable cultural uprisings in modern American history, an uprising that changed the shape of our musical sensibility, our social values, our semantic fashions of expression, and our political view of the world.
New Orleans itself, to be sure, was battered before, including a devastating fire in the late 1700s, a yellow fever epidemic in the mid-1800s and terrible floods caused by Hurricane Betsy in 1965. And the city was rebuilt. It will be again.
Meanwhile, those people who stayed behind despite the warnings that Hurricane Katrina was on its way, did so because they are the poor of the poor. They had no cars, no credit cards, nowhere to go. They have languished in the Superdome because government officials twiddled their thumbs and took their sweet time mounting a truly effective relief effort.
As the New York Times editorialized last Saturday: “Congress and the president had better get the message: An extraordinary time is upon the nation. The annihilation in New Orleans is an irrefutable sign that the national tax cut is over.”
