This week, New Orleans had its Mardi Gras.
Whoopee....
Here in Waco, I ate a tasty Shrove Tuesday pancake and was glad to have it, frankly.
I shuddered thinking about those Mardi Gras floats roll down New Orleans streets where only six months ago, over a thousand dead bodies bobbed up and down.
I cringed at FOX News’ coverage of carnival marchers and revelers drunkenly strutting down New Orleans avenues and boulevards where only six months ago, looters rampaged and even police smashed their way into a Cadillac dealership and took off with what they could get going.
More than 300 New Orleanians are reportedly still missing and unaccounted for in Katrina’s aftermath.
And over half a million — 250,000 or so now — were forcibly relocated in the biggest Diaspora in modern American history.
Should the show have gone on?
It’s called, “The greatest free show on earth.”
But that’s a lie. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras is far from free.
Mardi Gras costs lots of money. The City of New Orleans knows this.
Back in December, the Mayor’s Office publicly declared Mardi Gras was in jeopardy: “We do not have the money to pay for essential services” like police (the ones who didn’t drive off in the stolen Cadillacs), firemen, and sanitation workers.
To get money for these “essential services,” the City retained the Los Angeles media firm, MediaBuys LLC., as its agent to procure “corporate sponsors” who’d supposedly pay $2 million for the privilege of “saving” Mardi Gras.
Who paid MediaBuys?
The contract’s terms were supposedly secret.
Carnival’s now come and gone, so you’d surely think that MediaBuys nabbed a couple of deep pocket corporations and saved the day, right?
Well, you’d be wrong.
Plenty of corporations announced they were interested in donating money and services to help the injured, displaced, and disrupted rebuild their homes and lives. But finance a marauding revelry of floats and marching bands, bars, “gaming,” and all the “hells are breaking” looseness that happens when thousands of disparate people congregate in one spot, strategically strip off their clothes, and drink copious amounts of alcohol while hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses are still wet and ruined, over a thousand graves are still fresh, and hundreds are unaccounted for?
Even corporate American paused. Corporate America took a breath. And then corporate America said, “No.
No money.
No money.
No money.
Let them eat tasty Shrove Tuesday pancakes and sober up.
Glad Trash Bags, owned by Clorox, donated 100,000 trash bags and an “undisclosed sum.”
Enough to take the edge off Mardi Gras’ cost?
Not likely.
Some New Orleanians and those who insisted the world’s supposedly greatest “free” show roll on argued that tourism, the City’s lifeblood after the oil industry fled the state for Texas, makes money and needs to go forward.
But how can tourism of any kind be sustained when New Orleans’ money’s so tight the airport can allegedly barely turn all its runway lights on?
After MediaBuys failed to find a sponsor, the City reportedly allocated $2.7 million to cover Carnival’s expenses.
Accountants have lots of creative ways of looking at things, but this $2.7 million is almost certainly money New Orleans doesn’t have. And along with its brains, New Orleans is losing its heart.
On my last trip home, the man who served me a cheeseburger wore a black T-shirt with a New Orleans police logo on the front. On the back, it largely proclaimed: “I looted New Orleans in Katrina, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
A policeman who moonlights at the restaurant gave it to him.
I blanched.
Every one of my family members lost their houses in Katrina’s post-flood.
And my brother’s house was looted, neighbors claim, by police who tied their speed boat to his balcony — half a block from the floodwall’s “ground zero,” broke in, and took off with jewelry, silverware, and money.
A childhood friend was shot in the stomach and arrested for the “crime” of securing his own home — in admitted violation of the mayor’s curfew — against the police who were looting it.
“What would New Orleans be without Mardi Gras?” people asked when the news cameras rolled their way as they stood, hands outstretched for catching the beads, doubloons, and ticky-tacky largess of our bread and circuses tradition.
It’s a good question that people must ask. But change just one letter, and ask this: “What could New Orleans be without Mardi Gras?”
What could New Orleans be with a smaller, more traditional and discreet celebration of the beginning of Lent?
What could New Orleans be if it raised $2 million for starting, say, a civil aviation training program such as that available in other states’ public schools and colleges, rather than steering students into low-wage fry cook and bottle washing jobs?
What could New Orleans be if it raised $2.7 million — a good start — to rebuild the blocks and blocks of utter ruination, instead of urging the poor to sell off their flooded homes to real estate developers seeking to gouge them?
What could New Orleans be if it raised $2.7 million to fund early reading and math programs for schoolchildren?
It could be a much better place than it is today.
And just think — it would only cost us one Mardi Gras!
That is a show that should go on.
