Madness

It was maybe 10 years ago that Eric and I took a trip to New Orleans... it was a great time and a beautiful city, and we learned that the best way to heat up pecan pie is on a hot griddle with a ladle of melted butter on top. I've been thinking about that trip a lot lately, trying to reconcile the city I visited with the general civil collapse that has come out of the recent natural disaster.

One of the appeals of New Orleans has always been its edginess — the liquor served to go at all hours, the bawdiness of Mardi Gras. We stayed in a cheap hotel, and on arrival we were given a map, on which the concierge promptly drew big X's to identify those adjoining neighborhoods we were not to enter. (These neighborhoods did not seem worse than what I've seen in Chicago, mind you, and we had received similar kinds of instruction upon entering the U of C years earlier.) There is the finery of the Garden District, of course, but I think most people don't think of that when they think of New Orleans. Instead it's Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and funky Blues bars and people exposing themselves in exchange for plastic beads.

What I've been reading and hearing all makes me feel terribly sad. Looters going first for liquor, cigarettes, and guns; people shooting at rescue helicopters; dead bodies lying out in the open; rape and murder in the midst of tragedy. Isn't a terrible situation supposed to bring out the best in people? I guess the answer is no; sometimes it brings out the worst.

So I suppose you may have heard that a recent highway bill allocated $231 million dollars to build a bridge in Alaska to an uninhabited island containing an airport. What I've just learned from Maureen Dowd is that at the same time the Army Corps of Engineers was allocated only $40 million to repair New Orleans' levees, when it had asked for $105. The head of FEMA is a man of dubious credentials (though he does know horses!), the president and most of his staff was on vacation, and frankly even I, who had been expecting nothing but slow-simmering disaster from this administration, even I am surprised at how badly it's been bungled.

Well, for a fascinating blog read, I recommend http://mgno.com/, especially the entries from a few days ago, when the military was just arriving. It reads like a cross between The Road Warrior and PC World Magazine. Now, apparently, the chaos is dying down.

Labels: journal, personal

posted by Tony at 10:59 PM