Quick disclaimer: I realize there is still a lot of rescuing, grieving, and hard work to do in the Gulf coast. I respect the city of New Orleans, and its people. This post is just me thinking out loud about a bigger issue, possibly prompted mainly by my “corruption” in English Lit grad school.

I just read this article in the Washington Post — A Sad Truth: Cities Aren’t Forever — and wondered about a few things.

Only in July, I heard a wonderful story on NPR about the 100 year old restaurant Galatoire’s, where various folks were interviewed about its history and its long-time clientele. The verbal posture and language, the way these people spoke of the area and its sultry, complex eccentricities, reminded me of something, but I wasn’t sure what.

Finally I realized what it reminded me of: the way expatriates talk about the near-third-world places where they’ve set up shop with their little typewriters over the last hundred years or so. Hemingway in Mexico or Spain, or William Burroughs in Tangier (and Mexico too, for that matter). Other examples that I can’t think of at the moment … but it made me wonder other stuff …

Was the “New Orleans” so many of us romanticize actually a sort of last-bastion of this kind of existence? That is, relatively well-off intellectual white folks sipping coffee (or bourbon or whatever) in old-world surroundings, steeped in “dark” mystery? It makes me think of Post-Colonial Lit Theory: essentially the worldview and literature sprouting from a people who occupy another, weaker or poorer (or at least colonized) country or people.

I’m oversimplifying, and maybe even misappropriating, but New Orleans has always seemed the sort of place where people could be writers and artists and languidly soak up the atmosphere of the place, and then use it as grist for their typewritten mills, without actually having to be one of the poor and downtrodden folk who make up the majority of the mysterious “dark” (yeah that word is, in an academic sense, “problematized,” because of the racial connection, but here I’ll only acknowledge it; to get into it much would be a huge tangent) vibe surrounding them.

Even one of my favorite James Bond movies, “To Live and Let Die,” takes place partly in New Orleans and in the Caribbean, and makes great use of the “voodoo” spookiness and, let’s face it, sultry sexuality through a Hollywood lens. Same for the infamous “Angel Heart” film, with chicken blood and everything.

What I’m getting at is this: when I read the article I linked above, I wondered if the romantic New Orleans that so many of us want to fight to preserve is really just a sort of weird Disney World version of the city that’s built on the backs of the hundreds of thousands of poor people surrounding it? Evidently what most outsiders (and the relatively well-off in NO) like to think of as New Orleans is really just a small part of the city, a crescent slice of Orleans Parish.

From the article:

That tourist crescent is relatively intact. (Only two of the 1,500 animals at the Audubon Zoo died.) But it is only perhaps 10 percent of the city. … The rest to the north of the river … is under as much as 25 feet of water. For the last 90 years, this vast bulk of the city has required mammoth pumps to clear the streets every time it rains. This is where you’d find … areas of soul-destroying poverty, part of the shredding fabric of a city that had a poverty rate of 23 percent. …

Plus there’s the rest of the city, which doesn’t fare much better (many of the other parishes). Does this explain in part the huge failure of preparation and evacuation? (although to be fair, hundreds of thousands of even the very poor *were* rescued and evacuated) I mean, though, is part of the reason that many of the levees never were quite up to par was that those parts of the city were systemically written off in the collective imagination of the culture?

If I were still in academia, I’d jump on this concept: of New Orleans as a last holdout of post-colonial romanticism.

This isn’t to say that all the people in the city don’t deserve to have their homes back. It’s not to condone the situation in any way. It just makes me wonder if we need to question some assumptions.

When I first started hearing the rhetoric right after 9/11/2001, that we were in a “war on terror,” I really didn’t want to be difficult. I mean, it was a horrible thing, people were passionate and grieving, and yeah I wanted revenge, or justice, or something.

But when I heard that, I thought, “I hope that’s just a rhetorical flourish, and not an actual policy … because how the heck can you fight ‘terror’?”

Now, four years later, I wonder why more people (the press especially) didn’t challenge the administration on this? But, like all of us, they undoubtedly wanted to believe in our leaders, that they would lead us properly and wisely, in spite of all the signals to the contrary.

Even a war on “terrorism” or for that matter “Radical Extremist Islam” is absurd. You cannot fight ideas and win. Ever. Not as a war. All you can do is provide better ideas, which have never in human history taken hold of people’s imaginations and cultures with any permanency at the point of a weapon.

The quotation below is from an article [Taking Stock of the Forever War – New York Times] linked by JJG recently. He points out how the article shows just how “open-source” and nodal the terrorist networks are. They’re the brutal pioneers of social network technologies. (Of course, from the perspective of the ancient native cultures of the Americas, European explorers could easily be seen as ‘brutal pioneers’ of nautical technologies, but I digress…)

I liked this bit especially because of the metaphor at the end … I’m a sucker for visceral metaphors:

Call it viral Al Qaeda, carried by strongly motivated next-generation followers who download from the Internet’s virtual training camp a perfectly adequate trade-craft in terror. Nearly two years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a confidential memorandum, posed the central question about the war on terror: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” The answer is clearly no. “We have taken a ball of quicksilver,” says the counterinsurgency specialist John Arquilla, “and hit it with a hammer.”

Yeah, we kill off or capture leaders in the organization, but because it’s not a strictly top-down/hierarchical organism, new leadership sprouts up very quickly. Every bit we prune sprouts two more bits. In the face of this kind of nimble, ant-hill-like phenomenon, the US feels like a lumbering elephant being tormented and devoured by insects.

Think of all the Science Fiction and War genre movies and stories where the plucky Americans win because they think on their feet, while the totalitarian enemy topples because of failure at its top. We still cast ourselves in this role, not realizing that we’ve become the new (in relative terms) stiff-limbed abomination, the super-monster trying to devour the world. This is how we look in the eyes of many. We want to think of ourselves still as those plucky underdogs, but we’re not the underdog, not by a long shot. And we’re no longer so nimble.

Also, last night, I watched Weapons of Mass Deception, a documentary about how the thought police and incestuous corporate media interests sold us on the war. Unlike Michael Moore’s sniveling, quack-fest “Fahrenheit” movie (lots of good potential there, but his immaturity and simplistic conspiracy-think crippled it for any truly thoughtful observer), this one actually documents what it says, and backs it up over and over again.

The truly creepy thing about what is going on isn’t that it’s the result of some Illuminati crowd of puppetmasters smoking cigars and drinking cognac in a secret room in the basement of the Pentagon. It’s that the whole system is so huge and complex and self-interested, that the entirety of it all dooms us to certain outcomes, unless we hack the system. It also makes clear how important things like regulated media really are — how what seems like a harmless, capitalistic/democratic move (let the media companies do what they want! don’t hinder commerce!) can change the entire character of how “truth” is created and propogated in a society.

At any rate, I think I’ve officially hit the point where I no longer can trust my country’s leaders to be safe and sane. I know I was naive to even think that to begin with — not that it was a totally conscious choice, more of a feeling leftover from childhood about any parental or authoritative figures, perhaps? I really wanted to believe that at least more than half of what was going on was being handled with some competence. But the more I learn about how the Iraq conflict came to pass, how personal pockets and careers have been bloated on other people’s misery, how deep the lies and self-deceptions and insidious ideologies really go, the more I … well, I’m not sure. I suppose the more I want to just go to sleep and hope it goes away?