On June 15, 1980, my late wife and I flew from San Antonio to New Orleans on our honeymoon. We found a city of hospitality, good feeling, and great food. We stayed in an antebellum guest filled with history and the ghosts of the past. All in all, New Orleans was the perfect place for a wedding trip.
Five years later, we celebrated our fifth anniversary with a trip to the Jazz and Heritage Festival. In the early Nineties, we took our two boys to the Crescent City. They loved the alleys, the parades, the voodoo shops, and the zoo and aquarium. One declared flatly that he wanted to attend Tulane (he didn’t). And, my wife and I went there again for our 20th anniversary.
So, New Orleans means something to me. It is -- or was -- a great American city with a truly unique ambience and personality borne of Catholic mysticism, Creole manners and cuisine, and African-American culture. There is -- or was -- no place like it. The manmade tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is now coupled with a second tragedy: Incredibly, Americans seem to have forgotten New Orleans. Among the MSM, only Bob Herbert reports on it with any persistence. Otherwise “Katrina” and “FEMA” take their place in the long checklist of Bush Administration incompetence that led to the Republican downfall last November. Otherwise, people seem to identify the New Orleans Saints football resurgence with a city that has somehow overcome all odds to recover.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Shortly after Katrina, I received emails about communities that experienced blizzards the brought down electricity for a day or two, and yet were able to get back to normal without complaining about FEMA or expecting the government to do anything. These accounts reflected a complete inability to grasp what had happened to New Orleans. Let me try: Just as a midwestern ice storm was a pinprick compared with 9/11, 9/11 was a pinprick compared to Katrina. We are talking about destruction on a scale with the Great Chicago Fire, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the terror bombings of Dresden and Coventry. No municipality or state -- not even California -- has the resources to recover from something like Katrina on its own.
MIchael Tisserand writes in The Nation that “For New Orleans, the most dangerous outcome of the midterms would be if voters receive the message that Katrina was a terrible thing, a Republican blunder, but now it’s over.” He points out that Nancy Pelosi’s “New Direction for America” makes no mention of post-Katrina needs that include
- reviving the city’s mental health infrastructure.
- clamping down on disaster profiteering by auditing the distribution of Federal money
- amending regulations that have resulted in “inhumane living conditions” in shelters
- reversing the destruction of wetlands
All true. But we also need leadership. Can anyone doubt that Lyndon Johnson would have sunk his teeth into this? Since President Bush won’t step forward (aside from the occasional photo op), it’s up to the Democrats to make this a national cause. Success in New Orleans could cause a sea change in public attitudes toward government. Discouragingly, they show few signs of significant action, perhaps seeing the problem as insurmountable and fraught with political risk. The people of New Orleans deserve better. All of us do, because it’s our city, too.