KATRINA VI

Ok. Let’s start right off with some of my current jokes…

What’s the difference between Ray Nagin and George W. Bush? One has a constituency in dire need of rescue from a terrible situation. The other is the Mayor of New Orleans.

Toto. I don’t think we’re in New Orleans any more.

Hurricane. Hurri-saw. Hurri-conquered.

I’ve had it up to here with all this flooding.

The name of the State of Louisiana is being changed to the State of Emergency.

I’ve heard references to my town as “New Rouge.”

People who think the situation has nothing to do with race are, on the whole, white.
People in America who are genuinely surprised by what happened racially are, on the whole, white.

OR as John Steward said:
The people who complain about people playing the “blame game” are to blame.

This from a t-shirt: Hey George Why don’t you wait in the convention center

I had a long conversation with Alaina Dunn, who I wrote about before. She’s doing better. Her family is scattered all over the place. This very large and tight New Orleans family is now scattered over about 7 different states. She is particularly concerned about a cousin. “He’s black, gay and living in a Baptist church in Little Rock… It’s not working out.” Alaina herself is putting up about 7 people… 4 of them are on oxygen. One thing we talked about a lot, and it is a HUGE conversation around here, is the fate of the culture of New Orleans. For many people in America, Mardi Gras and the Jazz of the French Quarter was a tourist attraction. For the denizens of the city they were much more and deeper. The fact that Mardi Gras might not happen in New Orleans this year is really high on the unthinkable list for the NO diaspora. I myself, even after being down here only a couple of years, cannot imagine something NOT happening. Despite the subterranean well of meaning that it had in the community, Mardi Gras has a big visible side to it as well, but many of the aspects of NO culture were less flamboyant. More delicate. More nuanced.

The culture of a city like NO is like a compost pile. It takes a lot of junk and rot and crap to build up the critical mass necessary to get the heat and richness of NO. The music and art and weirdness and food and vibe that seeped out of those streets were organic in the deepest sense possible. And there is much talk that trying to get it back together is like trying to un-fry an egg. It ain’t gonna happen. Oh there will be some sort of Disney version of NO, with Jazz and Mardi Gras and Jambalaya. The politicians will be able to brag about how they re-built it, and they will claim that it is better than ever, and they will even claim that the spirit of NO is back. People all across America will feel good about it. But it won’t be that thing that was keeping these people with little else, culturally alive. Hey I saw Lion King. I know about the circle of life. But something really beautiful has died here and as we continue to deal with the ongoing problems, we need to grieve.
The Blues, and all of Jazz come out of pain and deprivation. It is not an accident that there was a lot of Blues in NO. There was a lot of pain and deprivation. The culture that emerges in a place like the American south is a culture that provides survival. Spiritual sustenance. For the tourists it was entertainment. For many of the artists it was literally ALL THEY HAD. Sure there were artists who had dough, but there were enough hungry ones biting at their heels to make the scene in NO as authentic as it was. The “scene” was one of an extravagance of spirit in an impoverished milieu. To pretend that the people who were making that spirit and that milieu possible were all living middle-class lives, is just plain blind. And to think that people whose very reason for going on living came out of being a part of that milieu were refusing to leave because they were stupid or blind is just dumb. Many of the people who are out in the hinterlands now had NEVER been outside of New Orleans in their lives.

Alaina told me about her cousin who, after rescuing fifteen people in his flooded neighborhood stood in chest-high water watching and waving wildly at rescue choppers going back and forth over them with no indication that they were seeing them. Apparently he said that just as he was thinking “What do I have to do to get these guy’s attention? Shoot at them?” the firing started and the choppers all went away.
I showed her the cover of the new Onion with the headline “God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again”. She summed up a lot of the feelings amoungst the dispossessed with a quaint colloquialism: “Fuck mother nature. I want my city back.”

Looking at what’s going on in this country, I have a recurring and really troubling thought. It goes back to the period of time after 9-11 when it became clear that the country was going back to sleep. That we were all going to just hook ourselves back up to the Matrix and go on with the hypnotic money fueled choreography of America. That even a clarion wake-up call like what that day was couldn’t cause our culture to think anything more sophisticated than “let’s declare war on terrorism” and “we need to go shopping to get the economy back up to speed” was and continues to be really upsetting. I remember saying to quite a few people that what’s really scary now is that if we ARE going to wake up, it’s going to take something much worse… like the loss of a major city. Now with something very close to if not actually the loss of a major city we’re already starting to slip back into the haze of catch phrases and spin. The problems of New Orleans are the problems of the entire country. Scrape the surface off of any community in this nation and this is the color of the blood you’ll see.

On a note closer to home for me; after some frustrating time dealing with the cowardly, selfish, artistically blind way my department has been reacting to this crisis, I have massaged the politics and managed to get Big Love back on the calendar. I am doing it with a minimal budget which excites me and some of my colleagues, who are as concerned as I am that we are teaching a group of theatre majors that if you don’t have the funding you should stop doing the art. I mean if that were true…
Because it is a form of life, the most elemental job of art is to keep going despite the circumstances. The job of civilization is to create and sustain healthy conditions for life (inclusive of art) to flourish.
…I have abundant evidence to argue that what we have here in America is not a civilization. It is the idea of a civilization that has been hi-jacked by a bunch of terrorists who are fanatics in the religion of capitalism. They are using the mighty democratic tool that was forged to help us all make a better world and used it to generate profits for the few, and keep the rest either asleep, or running in circles, chasing carrots on sticks.

Ever since Katrina, the gym here at LSU has been one of the places that visiting EMT (emergency medical technitians) have been using to camp out. There’s something really interesting about racquet-ball courts with rows of inflatable mattresses and little reading lamps. I go in in the morning to do my workout and I’m rubbing shoulders with the groups that are getting their gear together to go out, or the groups that are coming back in. They’re on a sort of 24 hour rotation, so there’s always people sleeping, coming and going. We civs are cordoned off from the main areas where they live, but the locker-rooms are shared and an important part of their lives. Even naked you can tell who the EMTs are because no one else carries waterproof cell phones into the showers.

Speaking of showers. Remember a few posts back and I mentioned that the father of the girl across the street said that after three days cutting his way out of Sllidel he was happiest about taking a shower. It’s strange. He came by the house the other day. His daughter who now lives in my house wasn’t around, but I told him he was welcome to hang out. He got into the shower and took a two hour shower. I’ve mentioned this to a couple of people and some people have told me that I’m not the only one to notice this. Apparently many of the displaced seem to find comfort in long showers…