VIVA NEW ORLEANS

September 27, 2005

Sick in bed today, I am pigging out on CNN. I know I should turn it off, but I don’t seem to be able to. It has been a day of information for me. I haven’t been able to do much else but lay in bed, check my email, type on the computer. It has also been a day of frustration and hope. Today I got an email from a friend who is back in the Quarter- and full of spitfire about rebuilding the city the way it needs to be rebuilt. He says that he has toured the neighborhood and believes, despite what they are saying on TV, that many of the houses can still be salvaged- if the repairs are done fast before too much mold sets in. This friend has been a mover and a shaker in other arenas in the past, so I believe he will become a major player in getting the wheels turning with this as well. Yet he is working against time, and he knows it. Not just because of the mold, but also because of public policy. The government seems damned determined to bulldoze almost the entire city. And put up what? More Wal-Marts? Trailer parks? Track homes? I understand why my friend is in such a frenzy to save these homes in places such as in mid-city, the Treme’, the Ninth Ward. These are neighborhoods within which has grown the seeds of a culture and a history I am just beginning to understand. Music and art builds community in New Orleans, not stores and housing tracks. That’s what makes it unique, so different from so many other places, where suburbia has already strangled the vital energy of the place In New Orleans, streets are famous for bars whose walls shake and shimmy themselves with the music that is played within them. Artists paint the day to day pain of their own existence in bright oranges, royal blues, majestic greens-then dance in the second-line, celebrating a life just past or a new one just beginning.

The government, the negative collective unconsiousness, the powers that be- they all have the agenda of wiping the uniqueness from the face of New Orleans after the hurricane. Could that have been the plan all along? Were the the levees intentionally jeopardized? Mr. R comes to mind, the eighty-five year old retired mechanic and engineer with the thick Cajun accent who almost rented Jeremy and I a house in Youngsville. He was a levee worker in New Orleans during the time of Betsy.

“Can I tell ya what I know?” he asked. We nodded while our ears strained to understand his Cajun-French accent. “Listen here, I don’t think it is much of a coincidence that the levees broke in the same exact spot during Betsy. And it is a might unusual for them to break at that point at any rate. Its not the weakest point, ya know? I suppose ya all can make up yer own minds as to what a I’m talking about?”

A planned flooding of the East side of New Orleans, St Bernard Parish, the lower ninth ward. Why? St. Bernard has always been the sacrificial lamb, this is common knowledge to long-time residents there. The Ninth Ward- too much culture, too much black independence, too much music, too much dancing, too much restless beauty and venomous art steaming from the double shot-guns and run-down two-story houses. On the East side, perhaps just too much of everything. Too much of race, too much poverty, too much that the powers-that-be says it has to go.

Yet everyone who knows anything about New Orleans knows that there is absolutely nothing that can detroy her spirit completely. It runs just too far deep into the loomy soil, into the very water itself. Its in the land, its in the swamps, its in the river most of all, the arterial vein that runs right through the city. What makes my blood boil though is the pattern of human suffering she seems to wear as a permanent cloak around her shoulders. Its like a role she and her people play here in America- over and over again, taking the fall, spilling the blood, feeling the weight of compound years of oppression. When will it end?

Now it appears as if the next phase to this newest chapter is upon us. The denials, the disclaimers, the masking of the concrete events of history. In effect, the brain-washing of the people. 1984 is really not that far off, it would seem. Now there is talk of what happened in the Convention Center, the Super Dome. Fox news (owned by the Bushes in part) is running stories claiming that nothing really happened there at all. It was all just a made up story, people exaggerating the truth (you know, those folks in New Orleans, they like to tell stories). Sure, there were a few rapes, but no murders, no craziness, none of that despite the lack of authorities, three days without water, the blistering heat. So the erasing of history has begun. Like other genocides of the past- like the atrocities of slavery, like the genocide of the American Indians. Our mainstream media and our government is so very skilled in the art of sweeping things under the rug when it is convenient to do so- and the American people are so skilled at letting the rug go unshaken. Yet tell me, why would the woman I met at the Shreveport Social Security office lie to me? What did she have to gain by telling me and the others waiting to get food stamps the story of her friend, who at that very moment was sitting at her house, scared to death, replaying images over and over in her mind. The images were of two teenage girls sitting outside the Convention Center doors. A man came up to them and slashed their throats, then left them for dead as the woman stood there helpless, looking on in horror. “I don’t think she is ever going to be the same,” her friend says. Why would this woman lie?

One story among thousands. There are so many others. I have heard them, many others have too. And I say that these stories must be told. They must live on so that people can know and remember the truth of what went down at these two spots in the very center of New Orleans. Two dents have been made in the wheel of history, two grey smudges, two warbles in the record. And who-knows-how many souls who will search and search for redemption, explanation, a way home. A hundred more ghosts that will haunt the city, creaking doors and brushing through magnolia trees in the dead of night.

There must be a way to beat this case of collective short term and long term memory loss that America suffers. There must be a way to preserve the lessons of history, even recent history, so that the pattern of oppression and suffering can be broken. For New Orleans. Indeed, for the country as a whole.