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November 26, 2005

Back to Old New Orleans

Yes Virginia, people still believe all kinds of lies about poor black people. One of them is that their success needs to be institutionally programmed but that's another rant for another time. Today we are simply revisiting more of the mythology surrounding the ordinary catastrophe of a hurricane. One of the myths which is associated with people in general is that, given an extraordinary situation, people panic. People don't panic, they play to their strengths.

One of Cobb's Rues is that people don't have weaknesses, they just overplay their strengths. Given a crisis, legislators legislate, terrorists terrorize, pedants lecture, whiners whine, liar lie, conspiracy theorists connect more unconnected dots. The only thing that changes is the volume. Few people jump out of their routines and do something completely different and they tend to be young anyway. So the question one should have asked in light of the stories of sniping in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is how many sniper incidents do we usually have in New Orleans?

The Captain's Quarters gives us food for thought:

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times reports that another myth of the Katrina hurrican and its aftermath has been exposed. The infamous "snipers on the bridge" incident that supposedly kept relief contractors from rescuing helpless victims turns out to have been a media-fueled urban legend, according to witnesses. The "five or six" snipers taken out by the police department turns out to be two, and one of those was a mentally-handicapped man whose only venture out of his house in years apparently came out of desperation for food:

Is that stunning? Are you shocked? Don't be.

Growing up amongst good hearted people who desparately seek to improve the lives of the less fortunate of us, it came as no surprise when Pops told me that he had no idea whatsoever about the condition of trade and traffic on the Mississippi River. And why should he, or anyone so liberally-minded care about commerce? It's all about what we can do for the poor, isn't it? So questions of economics are outside the realm of thought and recourse when it comes to assessing America's response to the Katrina crisis for him. His mind naturally goes towards the ethical angle. Why can't we do this? When we don't, we are morally suspect and this moral suspicion casts a shadow over those who do recover. It is the victim of the moral lapse that his politics identifies as well as the moral rationale. Fixing the Mississippi River trade before building low cost housing is a moral failing of business according to this logic. Why? Because black people don't work at the docks?

The poor don't work. That's the point. The socially indigent can't figure it out, and nobody (or not enough for liberal tastes) is there to help them. And yet somehow a balance is achieved. It takes a crisis to change the terms of that balance, and in this case it took a hurricane.

Now people who have left New Orleans are finding new lives elsewhere. They have discovered that schools work elsewhere, that people are friendlier elsewhere, that jobs are more plentiful elsewhere. The symbol that New Orleans was a black city is now in jeopardy because so many blackfolks were just barely hanging on there economically. They had lives in New Orleans but it wasn't their own life, it was the life that New Orleans would have them live. The control belonged to the city and the culture and the paths that the town had laid down for them rather than the paths they would themselves design. Now their accents and their cooking and their dress mark them as alien rather than homefolk in their new homes. Wherever they are now, many are not quite home. And so they will return, some with the fire of conviction that New Orleans can be better than it was. I suspect most with a complicated sense of homesickness.

I sit and wonder these months away with updates from my aunt, what it takes to move for those who don't. I move. I can live just about anywhere and I've been a whole lot of places in these United States, but I am the rare exception. What would it take for those in the Bottom of the 9th Ward to gather up the gumption to move to high ground in Metarie? I'm sure class and racial barriers make it harder to move from one part of New Orleans to another than it is to move across the country. But schools and jobs and churches don't move. Emergency services and hospitals and dentists and mechanics don't move. If you want and need these things, you have to go to where they are. Nobody outsources pizza delivery, and if Dominoes doesn't deliver to your neighborhood, maybe , just maybe you are living in a bad neighborhood. Nobody's neighborhood has natural gas nowadays in New Orleans. People can't cook at home and wait for the Red Cross mobile to deliver beans and biscuits. But after a while, the people won't be coming around to help any longer. And neighborhoods will be what they be. Or will the 9th ward just be a 'hood, where nobody is neighborly? Or will it become a ghost town? It depends upon who moves back and why.

New Orleans was not full of snipers. Now the city of 470,000 is down to about 70,000. It's not full at all. Dillard University may not recover. The students are getting over elsewhere. There are a bunch of newbies in the previously black-run kitchens all over town and the food's no good. The cooks are elsewhere. Who will remain gone and who will return will mark the new balance of New Orleans? I think maybe it will go back to the old. I imagine that will depend upon whether people saw life in New Orleans as their strength.

Posted by mbowen at November 26, 2005 12:36 PM

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Comments

Posted by: UncleSmrgol at November 26, 2005 07:53 PM

Posted by: Chap at November 27, 2005 11:25 AM