'I'm just glad I saw it'
New Orleans was the city of jazz, Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, the place where the US Bible Belt came unbuckled. Former New York Times editor Howell Raines laments the destruction of the Big Easy, and asks: why did President Bush do so little in response?
Thursday September 1, 2005
The Guardian
Unlike thousands of American families, my kin and I received at least one precious splash of good news from New Orleans. My daughter-in-law Eva Hughes Raines loaded her three-year-old daughter Sasha and the family pets into an SUV and fled town a full day ahead of the evacuation order. My son Jeffrey and his mates in Galactic, one of the city's better known funk bands, were performing in Seattle, watching from afar as Katrina inundated their homes in the US's most distinctive city. Soon the little family will arrive here in the Pocono mountains in Pennsylvania where we will wait, for weeks or months, to see if their antique neighbourhood of distinctive "shotgun houses" can be made habitable again.
In the personal realm, there is no relief like the relief arising from the safety of loved ones. In the civic realm, there is no communal grief quite like that kind so well known to Londoners and New Yorkers from past disasters, the sorrow of watching as a beloved city is hammered by an unstoppable malice. Millions around the world now know about the inundation of the famous "bowl" formed by the city's levees. What may need a little explaining is why New Orleans has been for generations of Americans a golden bowl of memories, both sacred and profane.
In colonial times, it was the one American city where Afro-Caribbean and Creole culture enjoyed at least a measure of tolerance under a succession of masters - Spanish, French, British and American. In 1814, it was the site of the United States' most complete victory over the Redcoats, a victory all the sweeter because it was crafted by the raw Celtic cunning of our most quintessentially American president, Andrew Jackson, and the Gallic conniving of his pirate ally, Jean Lafitte. Even the handful of Americans who died at the battle of New Orleans did so in Mardi Gras style, dancing atop the barricades before the last of the British snipers had skulked away.
For millions of Americans who grew up in strait-laced towns, the Big Easy has always been the city to dance, the one Southern place where the Bible Belt came unbuckled. A hundred years ago, the Storyville section was America's best place for the world's oldest profession and the birthplace of America's best contribution to world music, jazz. Like millions of other young people in the preacher-haunted Southland, I bought my first legal drink in the French Quarter. We went for the booze, and in that world of cobbled streets and hidden gardens, some of us glimpsed the glory and costs of pursuing art or individualism.
This was the place where Thomas Williams of St Louis became "Tennessee", and where that much-ridiculed postal clerk from Oxford, Mississippi made himself into William Faulkner, novelist. This was the place where you could come to find or lose yourself. Across the river in Algiers, William Burroughs shot his wife, and Kerouac and Cassady ate Benzedrine like gumdrops. In the backroom of the Maple Leaf Bar on upper Magazine Street, my classmate Everette Maddox, a poet so precocious he had published in the New Yorker before he left the University of Alabama, succeeded after two decades of steady effort in drinking himself to death. Oh, wondrous city of music that floats from the horn and poems drowned in drink! Oh, cheesy clip-clop metropolis of phony coach-and-fours hauling the drunken Dodge salesmen of Centralia, Illinois, of shaky-handed failed watercolourists hanging unloved pictures on the wrought-iron fence at Jackson Square, of gaunt-eyed superannuated transvestite hookers, of Baptist girls suddenly inspired to show their tits on Chartres Street in return for a string of beads flung by a drunken college boy on the balcony of his daddy's $1,500 suite at the Soniat House - must we lose even these dubious glories of the only American city that's never been psychoanalysed?
I hope not. I am 62. If New Orleans is to be pumped out, its soffits re-replastered, its live oaks replanted before I'm gone, I'll be happily surprised. I'm just glad I saw it, and I'm glad my babies got out alive. For now, we wait and ponder this question. If it's gone or permanently altered, what memorial would be fitting? Surely it would not be some monument of stone, but perhaps a political memorial suitable to the city of Huey P Long and his fictional iteration Willie Stark, or a spiritual remembrance befitting the City That Care Forgot.
In both categories, the sacrifices of New Orleans need a kind of national reckoning that would enable our people to see the president who forgot to care for what he is. Every great disaster - the Blitz, 9/11, the tsunami - has a political dimension. The performance of George Bush during this past week has been outrageous. Almost as unbelievable as Katrina itself is the fact that the leader of the free world has been outshone by the elected leaders of a region renowned for governmental ineptitude. Louisiana's anguished governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, climbed into a helicopter at the first possible moment to survey what may become the worst weather-related disaster in American history. She might even have been able to stop the looting in New Orleans if the 141st Field Artillery of the Louisiana Army National Guard had not been in Iraq for the past 11 months. They are among thousands of Southern guardsmen who could have been federalised by the stroke of a pen had they not been deployed in a phony war. Even Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a tiresome blowhard as chairman of the Republican National Committee, has shone a throat-catching public sorrow and sleepless diligence that puts Bush to shame.
This president, who flew away on Monday to fundraisers in the west while the hurricane blew away entire towns in coastal Mississippi, is very much his father's son when it comes to the kinds of emergencies that used to call forth immediate White House action before its Bushite captivity. When he was president, his father did not visit Miami after Hurricane Andrew, nor for that matter, did he mind being photographed tooling his golf cart around Kennebunkport while American troops died in the first Iraq war. Now the younger Bush seems determined to show his successors how to holiday through an apocalypse. Consider the visible federal leadership presence in Louisiana on the day that the levee broke, a full day after the hurricane first hit. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the US government department charged with disaster preparation and response, issued the usual promises. Bush, for his part, urged people not to stay where they were, even if their evacuation residence might be the roofless, toilet-clogged Superdome.
Meanwhile, in Baton Rouge, an army colonel seemed to be the most senior federal official at a televised news conference called to announce a Corps of Engineers plan to drop sand bags into the raceway of the broken levee. The proposed drop did not take place because the shortage of helicopters was such that the aircraft had to be diverted to rescue work. Twenty-four hours later, on Wednesday, as Bush met by intercom with his emergency team and considered a return to Washington, as Pentagon and Homeland Security promised relief by the weekend, intensive care patients were dying at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. They had languished for two full days because the overworked coast guard helicopter crews available in New Orleans did not have time to reach them. As for the Superdome refugees, it finally fell to the governor of Texas to announce that they could come to Houston's Astrodome. What other American president, one wonders, would fail to house these people in the decent barracks available at the closed and active military bases scattered throughout the South? The plain fact is that Jimmy Carter did a better job of housing the Mariel refugees from Cuba than Bush has done with the citizens of New Orleans.
The populism of Huey Long was financially corrupt, but when it came to the welfare of people, it was caring. The church-going cultural populism of George Bush has given the United States an administration that worries about the house of Saud and the welfare of oil companies while the poor drown in their attics and their sons and daughters die on foreign deserts.
© Howell Raines. The writer is the former editor of the New York Times and author of a memoir, The One That Got Away, to be published by Scribners in May 2006.
Link Here
Thursday September 1, 2005
The Guardian
Unlike thousands of American families, my kin and I received at least one precious splash of good news from New Orleans. My daughter-in-law Eva Hughes Raines loaded her three-year-old daughter Sasha and the family pets into an SUV and fled town a full day ahead of the evacuation order. My son Jeffrey and his mates in Galactic, one of the city's better known funk bands, were performing in Seattle, watching from afar as Katrina inundated their homes in the US's most distinctive city. Soon the little family will arrive here in the Pocono mountains in Pennsylvania where we will wait, for weeks or months, to see if their antique neighbourhood of distinctive "shotgun houses" can be made habitable again.
In the personal realm, there is no relief like the relief arising from the safety of loved ones. In the civic realm, there is no communal grief quite like that kind so well known to Londoners and New Yorkers from past disasters, the sorrow of watching as a beloved city is hammered by an unstoppable malice. Millions around the world now know about the inundation of the famous "bowl" formed by the city's levees. What may need a little explaining is why New Orleans has been for generations of Americans a golden bowl of memories, both sacred and profane.
In colonial times, it was the one American city where Afro-Caribbean and Creole culture enjoyed at least a measure of tolerance under a succession of masters - Spanish, French, British and American. In 1814, it was the site of the United States' most complete victory over the Redcoats, a victory all the sweeter because it was crafted by the raw Celtic cunning of our most quintessentially American president, Andrew Jackson, and the Gallic conniving of his pirate ally, Jean Lafitte. Even the handful of Americans who died at the battle of New Orleans did so in Mardi Gras style, dancing atop the barricades before the last of the British snipers had skulked away.
For millions of Americans who grew up in strait-laced towns, the Big Easy has always been the city to dance, the one Southern place where the Bible Belt came unbuckled. A hundred years ago, the Storyville section was America's best place for the world's oldest profession and the birthplace of America's best contribution to world music, jazz. Like millions of other young people in the preacher-haunted Southland, I bought my first legal drink in the French Quarter. We went for the booze, and in that world of cobbled streets and hidden gardens, some of us glimpsed the glory and costs of pursuing art or individualism.
This was the place where Thomas Williams of St Louis became "Tennessee", and where that much-ridiculed postal clerk from Oxford, Mississippi made himself into William Faulkner, novelist. This was the place where you could come to find or lose yourself. Across the river in Algiers, William Burroughs shot his wife, and Kerouac and Cassady ate Benzedrine like gumdrops. In the backroom of the Maple Leaf Bar on upper Magazine Street, my classmate Everette Maddox, a poet so precocious he had published in the New Yorker before he left the University of Alabama, succeeded after two decades of steady effort in drinking himself to death. Oh, wondrous city of music that floats from the horn and poems drowned in drink! Oh, cheesy clip-clop metropolis of phony coach-and-fours hauling the drunken Dodge salesmen of Centralia, Illinois, of shaky-handed failed watercolourists hanging unloved pictures on the wrought-iron fence at Jackson Square, of gaunt-eyed superannuated transvestite hookers, of Baptist girls suddenly inspired to show their tits on Chartres Street in return for a string of beads flung by a drunken college boy on the balcony of his daddy's $1,500 suite at the Soniat House - must we lose even these dubious glories of the only American city that's never been psychoanalysed?
I hope not. I am 62. If New Orleans is to be pumped out, its soffits re-replastered, its live oaks replanted before I'm gone, I'll be happily surprised. I'm just glad I saw it, and I'm glad my babies got out alive. For now, we wait and ponder this question. If it's gone or permanently altered, what memorial would be fitting? Surely it would not be some monument of stone, but perhaps a political memorial suitable to the city of Huey P Long and his fictional iteration Willie Stark, or a spiritual remembrance befitting the City That Care Forgot.
In both categories, the sacrifices of New Orleans need a kind of national reckoning that would enable our people to see the president who forgot to care for what he is. Every great disaster - the Blitz, 9/11, the tsunami - has a political dimension. The performance of George Bush during this past week has been outrageous. Almost as unbelievable as Katrina itself is the fact that the leader of the free world has been outshone by the elected leaders of a region renowned for governmental ineptitude. Louisiana's anguished governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, climbed into a helicopter at the first possible moment to survey what may become the worst weather-related disaster in American history. She might even have been able to stop the looting in New Orleans if the 141st Field Artillery of the Louisiana Army National Guard had not been in Iraq for the past 11 months. They are among thousands of Southern guardsmen who could have been federalised by the stroke of a pen had they not been deployed in a phony war. Even Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a tiresome blowhard as chairman of the Republican National Committee, has shone a throat-catching public sorrow and sleepless diligence that puts Bush to shame.
This president, who flew away on Monday to fundraisers in the west while the hurricane blew away entire towns in coastal Mississippi, is very much his father's son when it comes to the kinds of emergencies that used to call forth immediate White House action before its Bushite captivity. When he was president, his father did not visit Miami after Hurricane Andrew, nor for that matter, did he mind being photographed tooling his golf cart around Kennebunkport while American troops died in the first Iraq war. Now the younger Bush seems determined to show his successors how to holiday through an apocalypse. Consider the visible federal leadership presence in Louisiana on the day that the levee broke, a full day after the hurricane first hit. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the US government department charged with disaster preparation and response, issued the usual promises. Bush, for his part, urged people not to stay where they were, even if their evacuation residence might be the roofless, toilet-clogged Superdome.
Meanwhile, in Baton Rouge, an army colonel seemed to be the most senior federal official at a televised news conference called to announce a Corps of Engineers plan to drop sand bags into the raceway of the broken levee. The proposed drop did not take place because the shortage of helicopters was such that the aircraft had to be diverted to rescue work. Twenty-four hours later, on Wednesday, as Bush met by intercom with his emergency team and considered a return to Washington, as Pentagon and Homeland Security promised relief by the weekend, intensive care patients were dying at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. They had languished for two full days because the overworked coast guard helicopter crews available in New Orleans did not have time to reach them. As for the Superdome refugees, it finally fell to the governor of Texas to announce that they could come to Houston's Astrodome. What other American president, one wonders, would fail to house these people in the decent barracks available at the closed and active military bases scattered throughout the South? The plain fact is that Jimmy Carter did a better job of housing the Mariel refugees from Cuba than Bush has done with the citizens of New Orleans.
The populism of Huey Long was financially corrupt, but when it came to the welfare of people, it was caring. The church-going cultural populism of George Bush has given the United States an administration that worries about the house of Saud and the welfare of oil companies while the poor drown in their attics and their sons and daughters die on foreign deserts.
© Howell Raines. The writer is the former editor of the New York Times and author of a memoir, The One That Got Away, to be published by Scribners in May 2006.
Link Here
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 8:35 AM
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