The Mississippi Gulf Coast, inland from the beach itself, is heavily forested. Thick stands of pine and white oak, dogwood and mayhaw and river birch line the highways going west to New Orleans. This is Brett Favre country. The quarterback grew up in Kiln and still lives down here, just a few miles from the Gulfport/Biloxi airport.
deep down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans
way back up in the woods among the evergreens...
The region teems with wildlife: deer, opossum, raccoon, wild turkey, squirrel, duck, dove, all have habitat and hunting seasons here. The calls of mockingbirds and cardinals still echo through the evergreens, but the piney woods are dying.
In southern Mississippi the trees that snapped in two or simply fell over all fell west. As the great storm moved across this land from south to north on August 29, 2005, the first winds came up from the east, gradually intensifying to a shrieking 140 mph. The rain came in hard, in sheets and buckets, falling almost sideways. Where the eye passed over, the wind and rain virtually ceased for a time, as the sky glowed eerie shades of yellow and pale green, while east and west of the eye the winds shifted to the south and north respectively.
As Katrina moved further north, the last winds here were out of the west. The storm was so strong that all the trees that were going to fall did so early on. 3-foot diameter pines, 100 feet or more tall and many dozens of years old, bent over and snapped cleanly in two, sometimes near the base of the trunk, sometimes higher up. These trees were more than old enough to have survived Camille, which ravaged this same coastal plain in 1969. Like the great Yellowstone fires of 1988, it is damage that will be visible for many generations to come.
Quite a few trees have had large sections of bark, several square feet each, stripped away from the trunk. Some folks tell tales of trees being wrenched around by the tornados that Katrina spawned, twisted like someone wringing out a dishtowel. A few trees appear to have been completely denuded of bark, but this may be an effect of salt water intrusion. As far inland as Interstate 10, several miles from the beaches, Katrina pushed in enough Gulf water to kill a large number of the old trees it didn't knock down. The long-term loss of habitat will affect the ecosystem here in ways we can only guess at.
Flying in to Gulfport, we briefly circled out over the water, so as to land south to north. For maybe 50 yards beyond the beach into the sea there are new underwater dunes, formed by the material pushed up toward the shore by the surging tide, and by what washed down from the land after the storm moved out.
The road signs tell a tale of woe for tourism here. Several new signs announce "US 90 bridge at Bay St Louis washed out" to travelers considering a familiar route to the white sand beaches. State parks that were washed out to sea have had their exit signs covered with black plastic sheets.
In old New Orleans, that venerable, subtropical anachronism sandwiched between 25-mile-wide Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the mighty Mississippi to the south, with vast wetlands east and west, the Carnival parades ran exclusively through the relatively undamaged Uptown and Central Business districts this year. Lakeview and Mid City, where several Krewes, like Endymion, used to parade, are filled with enough abandoned homes and businesses that Carnival organizers feared for the safety of parade-goers in those areas. The city, like most its size, has always had its share of crime, but in the aftermath of Katrina, violent crime, like the suicide rate, has jumped way up in New Orleans.
Over the final Carnival weekend we enjoyed seven (or was it eight?) parades: Iris, Tucks, Endymion, Okeanos, Thoth, Mid City, Bacchus. We screamed for throws Uptown on Saturday, near Napoleon and St. Charles, and Downtown on Sunday, in front of the tall Marriott hotel on Canal Street. The NOPD did a terrific job, as always, of keeping the peace, in the midst of what is by design chaos and near-hysteria. We witnessed no real incidents, beyond a couple of misguided souls who jumped barricades on Canal and were politely but firmly (under threat of being locked up for a few hours) ushered back into the crowd by the nearest presiding constable.
we talk real funny down here
we drink too much and we laugh too loud
Yes we do... maybe that's what Carnival down here is all about: inviting the world to come join in being New Orleanians for a little while.
if you go down to the river
bet you gonna find some people who live
you don't have to worry 'cause you have no money
people on the river are happy to give
The whole world can drink too much and laugh too loud, even go a little crazy... the nutty symbolism of the town's aristocrats, black and white and everything in between, riding through the streets on garishly decorated flatbed trailers in equally garish costumes and masks, throwing a couple million dollars worth of cheap plastic trinkets to adoring throngs who simply cannot get enough of it – it's hard for even the soberest church deacon to resist the appeal of this extraordinary madness once exposed to it.
There's no other place like New Orleans.
Sunday night, long after Bacchus had rolled on by and the last rider had thrown their last handful of beads, we found ourselves at the Cafe du Monde, sipping hot cafe au lait after midnight. On Monday – Lundi Gras – the city takes a bit of a breather, and so did we. Trooped off to experience breakfast at Brennan's, a French Quarter tradition (this is where Bananas Foster was born, and where every flavor of liqueur you've never heard of keeps a comfortable home), and then we shop-hopped for a couple of hours. If all you saw was the Quarter and Uptown, you could believe that nothing has changed down there. There are still bizarre street performers everywhere, and tacky sidewalk artists in Jackson Square (some more tacky than others), and the t-shirt shops are still overflowing with the most profane t-shirt slogans imaginable – but there's a new theme to the profanity, involving the government and its response to the devastation over the last eighteen months. Those slogans never used to be this topical.
Make levees, not war
The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club was throwing a party on the levee, across Decatur from Jackson Square. We floated through on our way to the Aquarium... it had the feeling of Jazz Fest, with music tents and food vendors. I thought I heard someone wailing at the Gospel Tent, tasted Crawfish Monica, City Park jambalaya and Miller Genuine Draft... we made our way back to the car, and then we drove to the Lower Ninth Ward.
Between the Quarter and the Lower 9 lies a little bit of the Eighth Ward and the Bywater neighborhood, itself a part of the Ninth Ward. Here we saw many structures with the now-familiar search and rescue team spray-painted tags, and brownish-yellow waterlines on the walls. There does not seem to be a high level of abandonment. We saw lots of people, lots of activity.
The residents of New Orleans once numbered near half a million. Those who grew up there, in particular, identify strongly with their neighborhood, and those neighborhoods are many: Carrollton, Freret, the Garden District, Treme, the Irish Channel, Mid City, Gentilly, Lakeview, Lakefront, Milneberg, Touro, West End, Uptown, Audubon... there are dozens more.
The French Quarter – the Vieux Carre – is the original city of New Orleans. It hugs a bend in the river and is comparatively high ground. Thus it was spared the catastrophic flooding that was visited upon less fortunate districts.
In the Central Business District, a part of the old Third Ward, there are high-rise buildings that have essentially been abandoned to the elements. On floor after floor you can see the blown out or boarded up windows from the street. Many businesses – tenants, owners - have relocated, out of the city, out of the state even, never to return.
Still, life goes on in the CBD, and in the Quarter, and Uptown, where rumor has it the wealthiest homeowners hired private security agencies to keep them safe in the weeks and months after Katrina slashed her way through the Northern Gulf. Uptown, like the Quarter, is mostly high ground, and while there was some scattered flooding there, it was mild compared with other parts of town.
The city of New Orleans was divided into seven wards when it was incorporated in 1805. Over the next few decades the city was subdivided, redistricted, and then reunited in 1852, when the ward boundaries as they exist today were set. Most of the old ward designations have fallen out of common usage, but the Ninth Ward, especially the Lower Ninth, is still known by that name.
Life does not go on in the Lower Ninth Ward.
President Coolidge come down in a railroad train
with a little fat man with a notepad in his hand
President say "little fat man, isn't it a shame
what the river has done to this poor cracker's land?"
The Industrial Canal system trisects eastern New Orleans and links the big lake and the river with Lake Borgne and the Gulf of Mexico, south and west of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The fork of the system called the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal separates Bywater from the Lower Ninth, and on that day in August '05, as its eye passed a few miles east of there, Katrina's powerful counter-clockwise rotation produced northerly winds of such strength that the levee on the canal's downriver side was demolished, by a surge of water and a barge that had broken free from its moorings. A wall of water and the barge itself tore through the Lower Ninth, scraping most homes off their foundations and completely submerging the few that were left standing.
they're tryin' to wash us away
they're tryin' to wash us away
The Common Ground relief organization, a non-profit group working in the Lower Ninth today, estimates that 1600 people died there in those terrible few days.
When you drive up to the drawbridge over the canal, heading east on North Claiborne, you cannot possibly have prepared yourself for what you are about to see – the wasteland laid out before you. The ironwork that once framed the front door is all that's left here. A BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary statue) and the front steps are all that's left over there. Here there's nothing but a naked concrete slab, cracked beyond repair and sweating in the sun. This brick house has no windows but has large sections of someone's wooden fence on the roof. The weeds have taken over whole blocks. The barge must have missed that two-story house over there, with the big chunks of siding missing.
The Lower Ninth was surely one of New Orleans' poorest neighborhoods, especially if you discount the Projects, but it was a real neighborhood with its own identity just the same. It was a place that generation after generation of the same families called home. If the homes there were far more modest than those in Lakeview, for example, they nonetheless had the humanity of those residents, those citizens, invested in them. They housed and guarded and nourished the heartache and suffering, the hopes and dreams and laughter, the victories and defeats of thousands of human beings. All washed away.
The Common Ground site was not hard to find. They've painted it with lots of bright blue, and there are virtually no other intact structures for blocks all around. It strikes you as an oasis, or a lonely outpost in some wilderness...
I went to the Lower Ninth to see for myself, and to take pictures for a new photo essay, a follow-up to one I had done back in August of last year. I went to Common Ground, in my too-nice clothes, out of guilt. Purely out of guilt. I gave the first person I encountered there a small cash donation. She gave me a look that said "can't you do more, Mr. Too Nice Clothes?" I had a hard time making eye contact.
I medicate my guilt with the thought that the money we spent partying in New Orleans during the waning days of the Carnival season made a small contribution toward reviving the NOLA economy – but of course that's not why we went. We went to pass a good time with friends and family, in the best place we know of for doing such things.
I didn't write this to convince anyone to go to the Ninth Ward and volunteer with Common Ground, or even to send them money. I hope you'll contribute to the rebirth of New Orleans in some way, dear reader, but that is not my main objective here. I've got bigger fish to fry.
I want you to change the government that allowed this to happen.
Lakeview had the feeling of a ghost town to it – not a Wild West ghost town, but one that smells of oyster shells. Only a few of the homes near the breach in the 17th Street Canal, which runs south from Lake Pontchartrain between West End and Bucktown and separates Orleans from Jefferson Parish, were completely washed away, but the floodwaters were high enough and around long enough to drive out most of the people. A few have mustered the financial resources to return and restore or rebuild. Just a few. Block after block of silent, empty homes stand waiting for someone or something to save them.
One summer on the Gulf Coast ought to be enough to convince anyone of the debilitating effects of heat and humidity, on people, on domesticated animals, and on abandoned buildings.
There are a handful of FEMA trailers in Lakeview, but virtually none in the Lower Ninth. Displacement is a huge part of the problem. Thousands upon thousands of New Orleanians left the city before, during, and after the hurricane. Many, perhaps most of them have not yet returned. It must have been easy in those early days to give up on New Orleans, and some surely did, deciding not even to attempt a return. For the ones who want to come back, how can they do it? Flood insurance money, capped at $250,000, won't begin to cover the cost of rebuilding a great many homes in the more expensive areas like Lakeview. How many can afford to quit their new locations to return home to New Orleans, where they'll have no income or even a place to sleep for an undetermined period of time?
If this government were serious about using the billions of allocated taxpayer dollars to rebuild New Orleans, as opposed to doling out no-bid, no-work contracts to their corporate pals, they'd have rounded up as many of those citizens they scattered to the four winds as were willing to return, set them up in temporary housing near their damaged or demolished homes, and put them to work rebuilding. For those incapable of doing the work themselves, they'd have hired local construction crews to do it. If they couldn't find enough local crews, they could have offered out of state crews incentives to relocate – permanently – and help rebuild.
If they were serious about rebuilding, they wouldn't require homeowners to start rebuilding on their own and then apply for reimbursement before seeing any of that money. If they were serious, would the Lower Ninth or Lakeview or Mid City still look like they did a week or a month or a year after Katrina hit?
And if they were serious about protecting New Orleans from future storms, wouldn't they have provided the funding necessary to do that, instead of the $3 billion they've actually provided, an amount sufficient only for the Corps of Engineers to restore the levee system to the category 3 protection level where it was supposed to have been already?
We must change this government, and I don't mean simply turning Republicans out of office. Nor am I concerned only with the Katrina response, but it has been such a perfect microcosm of the greed, incompetence, venality and neglect that typifies the federal government today that it is the best evidence of the need for change.
Karl Rove gave a speech to the New York Conservative Party on June 22, 2005, wherein he made various comparisons between liberals and conservatives, among them:
"Conservatives measure the effectiveness of government programs by results;
liberals measure the effectiveness of government programs by inputs."
One wonders whether Rove would actually have applied the "conservative standard" to, say, the occupation of Iraq in the summer of '05, or nearly two years later for that matter. Rove was put in charge by the White House of the rebuilding of New Orleans. How would he grade the effectiveness of that government program, a year and a half after it began, or was supposed to begin?
@@@@@
Some call the '94 Congressional election the beginning of the Neoconservative movement. Although it was that election that saw the Republican party take control of the House, I say the movement began in earnest with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980. The Democrats still controlled the House, but an awful lot of them were now quite conservative, and it showed. The Reagan administration's agenda was virtually rubber-stamped by that Congress, the only notable exception being that they didn't cut taxes quite as much as the Stockman/Laffer cabal wanted.
"Liberal" was turned into a dirty word back then... after two and a half decades or so of the Neocon movement, and four years of total Republican domination of the federal government, how are they doing? What results can we use to judge their effectiveness?
That the Iraq adventure has been an abject failure could not be more obvious. Even the Afghan war – the one that was overwhelmingly endorsed both at home and abroad – has turned sour, with the Taliban daily taking back more and more power. So this administration, which never cared much for domestic affairs, has tried to refocus attention on the economy – but there are no successes there for the vast majority of the people. The numbers paint a picture of a highly fragmented, stratified socio-economic status quo. Real wages have been stagnant at best for most people. Unemployment is only as low as it is because millions have dropped out of the labor force. Health care costs continue to soar and with that tens of millions go without health insurance. Energy costs fluctuate wildly but are mostly through the roof. The middle class is increasingly undermined by globalization, a phenomenon wholeheartedly embraced and encouraged by this government. Only the very highest income group, the top one-half of one percent or so, show any appreciable income growth over the last few years, and in fact, their income has grown dramatically. The pay of top executives has risen to record levels, as has the ratio of their pay to that of the rank and file worker – just as the income gap between rich and poor continues to widen and the number of Americans living below the poverty level continues to rise.
The government tells us that the economy is strong, that the GDP continues to grow at a healthy pace, but all of the above point to one conclusion: that the economic expansion in the latter years of the Bush presidency is heavily skewed in favor of those who are already quite wealthy.
The Bush administration continues to undermine the very liberties our armed forces are said to be protecting on the other side of the world. They've given the finger to the centuries-old precedent of habeas corpus. They've invaded our privacy in clear violation of the Constitution and with impunity, and claimed virtually unlimited power for the president on account of his undeclared "war." They've suppressed freedom of speech and assembly, and openly accused those who stand in their way of treason. They've even handed the reins of power to lobbyists and other agents of their favorite large corporations, allowing them to write policy and legislation itself. Make no mistake, it's not all corporations that are given such privilege. The airlines and automakers clearly do not rate nearly as high as oil companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and defense contractors.
A government of, by and for the rich and powerful few... but some trees are still standing. As hard as they've tried to corrupt and pervert the electoral system, we've still got the vote. We've still got the power to speak out.
Two years ago, at a publicly funded rally for his campaign to privatize Social Security, George Bush's staff had three Denver citizens forcibly ejected from the venue for the sole reason that they had arrived in a car with a "No More Blood for Oil" bumper sticker on it. They broke no law. They had not disrupted the event or created a disturbance of any kind. They provided no probable cause to believe they might be breaking the law, and in fact it was not the law but the Bush stormtroopers who removed them from a place where they had every right to be.
The Washington Post reported on March 1, last week:
In his first visit to the Gulf Coast in six months, President Bush said Thursday that he heard "loud and clear" the growing complaints in the region that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina has become ensnared in red tape.
But in a trip designed to highlight the progress made in the 18 months since the hurricane devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi coast, the president insisted that "people's lives are improving and there is hope."
The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, California, reported on February 23, three days after Mardi Gras:
Nothing prepared Rob McMurray for the devastation he found in New Orleans when the First Congregational Church of Riverside sent a team of 14 volunteers to the hurricane-ravaged city last month.
"It's absolutely shocking," McMurray said. "You can drive for miles and miles and see empty houses, stores and businesses that haven't been touched."
The task of rebuilding more than 275,000 homes destroyed by hurricanes Katrina and Rita is falling heavily on the shoulders of faith-based and other nonprofit groups, especially in the poorest neighborhoods of New Orleans, Louisiana and Mississippi, where volunteers are providing much of the physical labor, disaster-recovery officials say.
The Associated Press reports today that a FEMA trailer park in Hammond, Louisiana, was closed over the weekend and its residents evicted on 48-hours notice because of health and safety concerns.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency abruptly closed down the mobile home park...because of ongoing problems with raw sewage and periodic power outages.
By late Sunday, 48 of the 58 households had places to go to, with many of those households moving on to other FEMA sites, the agency said. The 10 remaining were still in search of housing, [FEMA spokesman Manuel] Broussard said.
Monday morning, Broussard said that Catholic Charities, a Catholic social work outreach program, had offered to temporarily house the 10 remaining households.
Residents said they questioned the genuineness of the sudden concern for their health because the stink of sewage has been a nuisance for about a year.
Stop this, please. Help us stop this. Learn all you can about the government and the candidates and vote as if your next trip to the polls could be your last. Search your conscience and put into place a government that helps its people when they truly need it.
Rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Rebuild this country.