Death of an American City

Here's the 11/11/05 editorial in the NYT. I am pasting it here because it needs to be read as part of this blog and not just a link.


Editorial
Death of an American City

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.
We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.
There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.
At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.
The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.
The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.
Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?
Losing a major American city.
"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.
Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.
The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.
Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.
If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.
Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

My Street

When I first saw this picture published on my neighbor's blog Katrina: A Midcity Blog, I really didn't want to go back. Although the shotgun double where I live is not in this picture, the absolute devastation of this image taken in mid-September made the storm more real for me than any of the surreal news footage because it was/is just a typical New Orleans street, one that I walked down on my way to the local coffee shop to prepare for classes or meet a new colleague. Now with the spectacular waters receded, the modest homes on this street were left wounded, raw and bare, for all of us to see.

Writing, Manuscripts, and Katrina: New Orleans Writers discuss their Loss

The Wall Street Journal did a story today on New Orleans' writers including UNO English Dept.'s very own Niyi Osundare and Kris Lackey! Words Can't Describe What Some Writers In New Orleans Lost. Their many stories of losing manuscripts of prose and poetry are quite devastating. Even more profound is Niyi's story of barely escaping the floodwaters with his wife and ending up in a shelter in Alabama. Fortunately, he is now a visiting writer at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire this semester, but what an experience!

BTW, this article is a great example of a feature article with its compelling lead-in, interviews with a variety of writers from NO, and exciting details and character profiles as well as its very focused angle on how writers have suffered tremendously from Katrina.

More Return of Cultural Stuff

It looks like the Prytania Theatre is now open for those of you in the area who may want to see Wallace and Grommet's Curse of the Were Rabbit.

Website and Audio Memorial

To Kick Off the Memorial Component of our class blog, I'm going to provide a few links that may be useful for article ideas, but are also powerful testimonies from people about the storm.

The first is a website entitled Alive in Truth which is "an all-volunteer, grassroots effort to record oral and written history about the lives of displaced New Orleanians, in their own words.
The project is founded and coordinated by New Orleans native Abe Louise Young, a nationally-awarded poet." It seems like this website is collecting stories primarily from those evacuees who were in the Superdome, Convention Center, or rescued from their homes, but they are open to all testimonies and encourage people to submit their own stories and/or collect oral histories and post them on the website.

Secondly, This American Life, an audio narrative program on NPR, hosted by Ira Shor, did two fantastic shows on Katrina. Episode 296 is called After the Flood and Episode 297 is named This is Not My Beautiful House. They are both well worth listening to in their entirety as they offer a variety of testimonials from people affected by Katrina. You can buy and/or download them for a fee or listen for free with RealPlayer or ITunes.

A Little Bit about Me (and Katrina): Doreen Piano

When Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 27, 2005, I'd just finished my first week of teaching at the University of New Orleans. I'd moved to New Orleans in early August to begin a position at UNO as an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English Dept.

Weeks after the hurricane hit, I had two images in my head, one was of the chair of my dept. telling faculty members at a meeting the Thursday before the storm that the semester had gotten off to a much better start than last fall when during the first week of school everyone had evacuated for Ivan, and the second was again an academic moment during my job interview when the committee members, upon being asked why they liked where they worked, made several typical comments about the student population, the classes they taught, and their colleagues, and the chair after listening to them, gave me a smile and said, And it is New Orleans! to which everyone including me nodded our heads vigorously.

Despite knowing what a screwed up southern city it was both through my own half dozen visits to the city and my friends' accounts who lived there, I had eagerly looked forward to the move. When I finally arrived in the t-shirt stickiness of early August, I was not disappointed. I rented half of a double shotgun in MidCity. Even in the hot summer evenings, I made it a ritual to walk around the bayou and take in the oasis of natural beauty while the sun was setting. My neighbors were friendly, the local coffeeshop harbored a variety of people who had seemed to make it their second home, even something about the bizarre logic of driving in a city where you couldn't make a left turn at an intersection appealed to me.

Although I had almost considered evacuating 'vertically' with friends who had lived there most of their lives, I, like most folks that I knew, including my friends who shelved their incity evacuation plans, sped away by car, my cat Jaffa Cakes riding shotgun as we departed the city with a few suitcases, a box of research and teaching materials, and a favorite leather jacket I took "just in case." After realizing that this evacuation was going to be longer than a three night hotel stay, I slowly made my way to Tucson AZ where I had lived in the 1980s and where I had a friend who housed me and my cat and our things. I've been here now for almost two months and will return to NO in mid November to resume my new life.

Welcome to Writing the Hurricane: A Class Blog

In fall of 2005, New Orleans was vaulted into the limelight of national and international news due to Hurricane Katrina. Within days, every aspect of New Orleans culture had been picked apart and analyzed by social commentators, news journalists, professional writers, artists, and authors. From this intense scrutiny of our city emerged numerous human interest stories due to the natural disaster that will remain forever etched in our collective minds. Furthermore, New Orleans itself acted as a reflection of the many social ills and environmental hazards that have beset many American cities while retaining its own indelible culture that sets itself apart from the rest of the nation. As someone I know who lived in New Orleans for years and moved away from the city recently said, "When I left New Orleans, I crossed the border back into the U.S."

For many of us affected by the storm, our own particular view/image/experience of Hurricane Katrina may or may not have been part of the national story which emerged or it may have only been the tip of the iceberg or it may have been misrepresented or not really understood. It is for this reason that I began teaching a non-fiction writing class called Writing Hurricane Katrina: Natural Disaster and the North American Psyche when the University of New Orleans restarted its fall semester in October 2005.