F&L on the Radio

UPDATE: Because time ran out today (those chatty Rollergirls!), I'll be on next Saturday, somewhere between 8 and 10. I know, I know - I'm going to have to set my alarm, too.

Because I know you are all dying to hear the dulcet tones of my voice...

Schroeder over at People Get Ready got in touch with me the other day about putting my post "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" on the radio. In his other life, he djs for WTUL (that'd be Tulane's radio station) and does "Community Gumbo" for them, and he liked that post and wanted to broadcast it.

Somebody wanting me to read something I wrote? No problem, anywhere, anytime. I'm easy like that.

It should be on sometime between 9-10 am this Saturday the 29th, at WTUL, 91.5 on your radio dial. He may even play a Smuteye song, though I don't guarantee it, nor do I guarantee you'll enjoy it if he does.

"But Dale," you say, "I don't live in New Orleans, and I will simply die if I don't hear you."

Not to worry Gentle Reader, for there is a simulcast. Just go to WTUL's website, listen in and don't be left out.

"But Dale," some others protest, "I live on the West Coast and, while I love you more than life itself, that's 7-8 on Saturday morning our time, and I'm only up that early if I've been partying all night."

Never fear, for Schroeder plans on putting the recording on the Community Gumbo blog called, appropriately enough, "Community Gumbo."

So check it out. I'll probably even listen myself, but mostly for the stuff about the Big Easy Rollergirls that's on the show too.

GMAC Mortgage Comapany is Stupid and Annoying

Lately we’ve been struggling with the mortgage company. We got stuck with GMAC after the mortgage company we made the deal with immediately sold, within a month, our mortgage to them. Okay, fine, not unusual. Our first mortgage payment, by the way, was due September 1st, 2005. Yeah, three days after. Obviously that didn’t happen, and we were told that payments didn’t have to be made for three months, which only meant that in January we owed them everything we hadn’t paid all at once. I’m not sure exactly how that was supposed to be helpful.

After much wrangling, everything got re-negotiated and we had a new payment plan, slightly higher than the old payment plan. We sent payments off to them and then they called us saying we had to re-negotiate again or go into default. Apparently, they rejected one of the payments because they said they didn’t realize it was part of the same payment.

Okay, fine, so we re-negotiate again. Now the payments have really jumped, much higher than our original payment plan in order to get everything we owe them from the last half a year paid off within a year.

Meanwhile, every time I call I have to go through the same routine, changing the address because for some reason they never know the new address, despite the fact that I have told them again and again not to send anything to the house address because there is no mail delivery there. The phone conversations always started the same way, “We mailed you the blah-blah-blah weeks ago.” Then I explain I never got it, ask where they sent it, and give them the new address again.

So we send off our re-re-re-negotiated payment. The money disappears from my account just as it should. A few days later I get a phone call saying we were going into default unless we made the payment. I call and explain how we sent the payments. She asks for the address. Then she asks if anyone is living in the house.

“No, it was wrecked by the hurricane.”

“Well I have no way of knowing that.”

Really? No way? GMAC keeps its employees on a news blackout? The fact that I’ve changed the address a million times didn’t clue you in? Or how about this – how about that the company you work for is holding onto my insurance money?

Now, I understand that GMAC is an unbelievably large corporation, but I still think such a large corporation with billions of dollars and thousands of employees would be able to make some kind of notation on our account indicative of the hurricane damage, not to mention that they’re holding our insurance money.

After I count slowly to ten, I find out they have a record of my portion, by not Dr. A.’s, and I have to make a payment immediately or we will go into default the next day. I mention that this has happened before, and we’re making payments, and could she explain why they won’t take our money. She tells me the payments have to arrive “at the same time.”

“Okay, what does that mean?”

“At the same time, they have to arrive at the same time.”

“We scheduled them for the same day.”

“No, at the same time.”

The conversation pauses here while I bang my head against the wall a few times.

“Okay, so two electronic payments from different accounts on the same day doesn’t count?”

“No.”

“Okay, so what does count?”

“They have to arrive at the same time.”

I then spend five minutes running through every possibility I can think of, electronic payments, checks, same day arrival, to finally get down to what “at the same time” means – one electronic payment, or one envelope. Apparently, two checks in one envelope is okay, but two checks in two different envelopes is too confusing for GMAC to match them to one account. This would have been useful information for them to pass along to us, say, six months ago.

I point out that one envelope will be difficult given that Dr. A. and I are two different people, with two different checking accounts, living in two different places. She understands, but is adamant – one electronic payment, or one envelope.

Fine, I make a payment over the phone and call Dr. A. Dr. A. checks her account and, sure enough, they took her payment as well. In fact, she over-paid a little to get us closer to the time when we go back to regular payments, so they not only got more than enough money up front and on time, but then asked us for more money which I gave them. Naturally, we call back the next day to get this straightened out.

We ask the woman on the other end of the line (Dr. A. having arranged a three-way call) what happened to our money, and she proceeds to tell us a lot of stuff we know, like we’re in a re-payment plan, none of which answers the question, and finishes with “You received an insurance payment, so you’re capable of paying off what you owe.”

Now, how is it that she knows this, but other people don’t know we got wrecked by a hurricane?

“No,” I say, “actually we don’t have an insurance payment because you’re holding onto that money while we rebuild.”

At this point, she hung up.

To be fair, we could have just been cut off somehow, but that timing sure is something, isn’t it?

So we call back again, get bounced around a little bit, and finally talk to someone who tells us we owe them a little less money next month.

What?

After much questioning, we find out that first, they did indeed get all the payments including the extra one I made, and are in fact capable of matching payments that don’t arrive “at the same time” to one account, and furthermore, already made the recalculations to reduce our payments over the rest of the year by the amount we over-paid this month. Which is awfully sweet of them if you ignore the idea that we arranged the payments that we did because we could afford that each month and not the extra they squeezed out of me.

Plus, since they reported the non-payment to credit companies already, they’ll send us letters saying it was a misunderstanding and not our fault that we can show to people for the next year when they refuse us credit because our credit rating is screwed because GMAC Mortgage Company is stupid and annoying.

I feel this is somewhat akin to getting knocked in the head with a cast iron skillet and bequeathed with a Band-Aid.

It’s enough to make me wish I could just take the house back to the store and return it because it’s broken, but houses don’t come with 30-day guarantees. Not to worry, though, because I won’t give them the satisfaction. There is no hoop they can devise that I can not figure out a way to jump through it, not to mention that I get to bitch about them here, and there’s nothing they can do about that.

The Unbearable Heaviness of a Dollar Bill

Okay, so I’m a little behind the news curve on this one, but unfortunately I think we’re going to be stuck with U.S. Rep. “Dollar” Bill Jefferson in the news for some time. Actually, that fact is something I want to write about.

I won’t go into all the details of the bribery scandal here. If you don’t know them, search, uh, anywhere. Actually, Dangerblond gave a pretty good run-down on the whole sordid family and friends way back when, which I think was called “Fuckheads from Fuckland.” The latest juicy bit concerns ousted Council Member and Jefferson protégé Renee Gill-Pratt using an SUV donated to help the city as her personal vehicle. Jefferson arranged to have the vehicles put under her control. A couple of days before she lost her election, she donated the one she had been using to a non-profit, which hired her immediately as soon as she left office, and - ta-da! – she has the SUV again. She, by the way, attributes this lucky coincidence to the largesse of God. Oh, and speaking of Pratt, can I somehow cite her for still having a campaign sign littering the St. Charles neutral ground a block from my apartment? Is there some sort of citizen’s campaign violation fine I can impose as a good New Orleanian? Or how about just plain littering?

Okay, back to Dollar Bill. I do have to say I almost wish the $90,000 had been in his New Orleans freezer instead of his D.C. one, because I have sweet visions of him facing five weeks worth of refrigerator rot and trying to decide if getting the money out would be worth it. $90,000 under pounds and pounds of veggies, chicken, beef, shrimp and oysters all melting together in a small space for over a month in constant 90+ temperatures – what to do, what to do? By the way, if you’re ever faced with this question, the answer is “forget it.” Not only would it be unspeakably disgusting getting it out, but nobody would accept the money because of the stanky stankitty stank. Of course, that never would’ve happened because Dollar Bill has no problem with commandeering military vehicles, including a helicopter, to get a briefcase out of his New Orleans house (the last $10,000?) in the first chaotic days after the flood, vehicles which should have been rescuing people off roofs or at least helping restore order (And isn’t that illegal somehow? Since when do members of Congress have military authority?). Not to mention that said helicopter blew bricks off his house and rained them down on my friend’s car, thereby wrecking one of the few vehicles in New Orleans still unflooded and serviceable.

I was glad to see Dollar Bill removed from his position on the Ways and Means Committee. He argued that he needed to stay because the people of New Orleans need him on the committee these days. Would it help us recover to have influential people on important committees? You bet, but somehow I don’t think people whose own party is trying to oust them really have all that much influence. Another argument he made was that nobody else had ever been removed from a committee before being indicted, to which I was like “Whaaaa?”

Now, I’m all for innocent until proven guilty, but if someone is being investigated for stealing chickens, you don’t leave them in charge of the henhouse. Dollar Bill used his position in Congress and on the W&M Committee to bring in at least one bribe – the way I figure it, he’s suspended. Besides which, they found the marked money in his freezer before Katrina even struck – if he wasn’t in Congress, does anybody believe he wouldn’t have been indicted by now? Charges of racism surrounded Dollar Bill’s removal as well, to which the only real answer is to see what happens next time. Now that the precedent has been set to remove members from positions of power if they are being investigated for abuses of those positions, let’s see them stick to it.

Hooray, by the way, to the Democrats for doing it, even if they did it just to help them in the upcoming elections by way of contrasting themselves to the Republican’s “culture of corruption.” Since Congress usually does the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, I’ll take doing the right thing for the wrong reason any day.

Which brings us to this point – why am I not surprised the only time Republicans come to the defense of one of their Democratic colleagues is the time when it is completely and totally wrong to? House Republicans got all up in arms over the search of Dollar Bill’s office, finally having second thoughts about His Moronic Majesty George II’s abuse of executive power.

Could somebody explain to me why warrantless wiretaps of any old average American are hunky-doory while the warranted search of a Congress member’s office is an offense to truth, justice, mom, apple pie, Superman, and the Constitution?

Unless, that is, members of Congress get to play by different rules from the rest of us, even though I thought we were all created equal and nobody is above the law. And, to misquote a favorite talking point, if the members of Congress have done nothing wrong, then they have nothing to hide.

And as for those Democrats who also bitched and moaned about the search of Dollar Bill’s office (Pelosi, I’m talking to you) – shame on you, too. Again, just like removing him from the committee, part of the uproar was because it had never been done before, as if doing something stupid for hundreds of years is reason to keep doing something stupid.

Anyway, they're all wrong, at least for now. A judge ruled that the search of Dollar Bill’s office does not violate the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution. (A Reagan appointee, by the way, before anyone starts in on “activist judges.”) Now, I’m no Constitutional scholar, but I read that clause and it’s pretty clear to me that it’s about protecting members of Congress from harassment over legislation and has nothing to do with criminal investigations, as Dollar Bill and his lawyer claim. In fact, to make that claim would, in the words of Judge Hogan, “have the effect of converting every congressional office into a taxpayer-subsidized sanctuary for crime.”

Dollar Bill is, of course, appealing the decision, which brings me back to my first point, that we’re going to be hearing about this for quite a while. The first appeal goes to a three-judge panel of U.S. District Court, and then the Supreme Court, and you can imagine how long that will take. Until then, the material seized in the search remains sealed, which means the grand jury doesn’t get to see it, which means they have to wait to indict Dollar Bill. What that means is I’m stuck with a worthless representative for the months (years?) it takes for this to work through the court process. Then, finally, there will be an indictment or not, and Dollar Bill will get his day in court. That’s an awfully long time for New Orleans to be stuck with him.

So, William Jefferson, let me appeal to you directly. If you really want to help the people of New Orleans as you keep claiming, don’t appeal. If you’re indicted, then you can give us your “honorable explanation.” If you’re indeed innocent, you can have your old job and position back and we can get on with the process of recovery. If you’re guilty, we can get you out of the way and get someone in who will help us.

Until then, you’re dead weight, an anchor, and we don’t need anything dragging us further under the water.

Shameless Self-Promotion (Mostly, Anyway)

A very short piece – and I mean really short, as in only a page long - of mine will appear in Louisiana in Words, a book coming out from Pelican Publishing in the spring.

Not too long ago Pelican put out a submission call for the book, looking for writers to describe the real Louisiana, minute by minute. The book will collect them together, giving people a snapshot of a day in the life of Louisiana. They specifically asked for some stuff not set in New Orleans and not about the hurricanes, and believe it or not I managed to come up with something, and I recently heard mine got accepted. I have to say I’m quite excited and proud to be in the book, not just to be included but also because of the company I’ll be keeping.

Also accepted was Kelly Wilson, my friend and office-mate from Loyola, as well as John Biguenet, also from Loyola and author of the books The Torturer’s Apprentice and Oyster. There are some other heavy hitters in there, too, like Andrei Codrescu, as well as other friends of mine from New Orleans, Charles Cannon, Joe Longo and Sarah Inman, but the one I’m actually most excited about is Linda Rigamer. See, I gave the call for submissions to my Intro. to Creative Writing class as an assignment and encouraged them to submit; Linda did, and she got accepted, and that’s just really cool. If you want to see the full list of authors, go here.

The book should be out in the spring sometime, at which point I will remind everyone about it again, here and in emails and phone calls and possibly by running around for Mardi Gras wearing nothing but my page like a fig leaf. Here’s hoping the book isn’t pocket-sized.

Nine Months, One Week, and Four Days Later ...

… I got my insurance money. I mentioned in the last post that my blue roof is among the many in New Orleans that are, officially, gone. The roof was the first thing to get fixed because fixing anything else only to get it leaked on really sort of defeats the point.

For all this time, the first question most everyone asked me whenever we spoke was, “How’s the house?” Still, I’ve been putting off writing about it because first, there wasn’t much to say, and second, it’s boring, mostly a tale of bureaucracy and regulations, minutiae and percentages, inspections and waiting on hold, oh, so much waiting on hold. In short, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, more often than not signifying nothing. Still, things are finally happening, so here goes.

First, history:

The Good Dr. Arwen and I bought the place together – it’s a shotgun double which, for the non-New Orleanians, is a traditional style house here with two front doors that both open to a long row of rooms one after the other, with no real hallways. They say the name derives from the idea that you could shoot a shotgun through the whole house, front to back, if you wanted.

We bought it “as is” from people who weren’t finished renovating it on July 29th, and spent the next month finishing renovations. In fact, we worked right up until evacuation – Gavin and I grouted my new bathroom floor on Saturday, then evacuated Sunday, and Katrina hit Monday, August 29th. Actually, the house survived the hurricane pretty much intact, losing only a handful of shingles from the roof, which resulted in the leaks that were the first things to be fixed. The failure of levees – thank you government and Army Corps of Engineers – wrecked it, though.

The three feet of water that sat in the house for about three weeks pretty much destroyed everything inside. If you doubt that, take a yardstick around your house with one end on the floor and imagine everything within its length soaking in water for almost a month. Then imagine mold growing up the walls and over everything else straight to the ceiling. Pretty much does it, doesn’t it? Plus, since I was just moving in, everything was packed up in boxes on the floor. If you haven’t read “Operation Bass Save” from way, way back in October, it’s got a quick description of the results of that particular misfortune.

So the first thing I had to do was shovel all the moldy, stinking trash out. Wearing big rubber boots, a respirator, and gloves, I tossed to the curb, oh, almost every book I had ever read, along with hundreds I hadn’t gotten to yet, and somewhere in the gluey, slimy, largely unreadable mess, my copies of the journals that had published my short stories. Since I’m a writer and English professor, I did that first because I knew, for me, that would be most upsetting – the books themselves are of course replaceable for the most part, but all the scribbled notes in the margins were not, nor were the signatures and dedications from all the writers I met, nor were the first editions and antiques, like the complete Poe in ten volumes published in the late 1800s. They made a pile about ten feet long, a couple wide, and three or four feet high.

On top of that went photos and posters, the hand-made “7 Deadly Sins” sign my friends and I carried around for the Greatest Mardi Gras Ever, all my notebooks and papers from college, not to mention costumes and toys and videos and kitchenware and beer-brewing equipment and all the other little knick-knacks that clutter up our homes because they remind us of who we are. That took a long, lonely week in early October (happy birthday to me!). At the end of every day, I would go back to the old apartment and shower, even though we weren’t supposed to bathe in tap water those days, but I couldn’t live with the sweat, stink, and muck on my skin.

Meanwhile, my neighbors, who had actually lived in their houses, threw out even more.

It’s an odd thing to have your whole life rotting on the curb for all the neighbors to see, waiting to be picked up by the garbage collectors. I felt totally exposed. My friend John said to me one day, “I saw your Tank Girl down the street,” and I wanted to cringe because it’s a comic book and it’s embarrassing to still be reading comics at my age, especially one called “Tank Girl” and this despite the fact that I knew John would hardly hold it against me, in fact had read them himself. But what of everyone else? The piles sat there for quite a while, weeks in fact, plenty of time for anyone who cared to learn about my reading habits, or to note the Star Wars toys that came out of the house of a single thirty-something non-parent. It’s also plenty of time for you to remember that “adult novelty” tucked away deep in a box and think, “Oh gee, I hope that’s on the bottom somewhere.”

I did rescue three bottles of wine that had spent those five or six weeks in the house. One I drank the night I rescued it, with a hearty “fuck you” to all that had happened and all that had caused it. I saved the other two, the first of which I plan on drinking my first night back in the house, the second on the anniversary of Katrina, though the way things are going that order will probably be switched. Either way, both will be drunk with some sorrow but with more defiance and determination, and don’t worry, if they’ve turned to vinegar, I’ll have back-ups.

After that came the gutting. I got help from my dad, as well as my friends Gavin, John, and Karl. As soon as we pulled the drywall down, we discovered the mold covered the plaster underneath, since the previous owners had put drywall up on top of the original plaster and lath. If you don’t know, lath are narrow thin boards nailed horizontally on the studs all the way up a wall, with maybe a half-inch of space between them. Cover that with plaster and ta-da! Wall. At least that’s how they did it around here in the days before drywall. Preservationists insist the plaster should be cleaned of mold because it’s part of the history of the house and whatnot, but I was too busy getting that moldy shit out of what was left of my house to listen.

And what a nasty, dirty job it is – first of all, the plaster crumbles into small chunks and powder which gets up your nose and into your eyes and ears no matter what kind of mask and goggles you wear. They help, but the stuff is insidious. So you break the plaster with a hammer or crowbar (I called mine “Big Max”) and it flies off in all directions, and then you pull the lath down with Big Max or your bare hands. You would be surprised at how much of a house you can pull down with only your hands. I just imagined that rather than plaster and lath, I was pulling Brown’s vapid stare and Bush’s smug smile off their bloody, shrieking skulls and the rest was easy. Pretty good therapy, actually.

After getting all the walls down, then I just had to spray the whole place down with bleach, which makes all the dried mold puff out in clouds of powder. Even with the respirator, this doesn’t feel exactly healthy. All of that – the trash, the gutting, the bleaching – was done before October was out, and then all I had to do was wait for the insurance money to come so I could start rebuilding.

Did I mention that I finally got the insurance a couple of weeks ago?

For the seven months in between, the house sat – gutted, bleached, ready – waiting. So when you all asked me what was going on with the house and for months I said “Nothing,” it wasn’t that I was being rude, or didn’t want to talk about it, or didn’t want to bore you with the details, it was because literally nothing was happening.

During that time, I spent an awful lot of time talking on the phone, working my way through endless bureaucracies, inching toward that ever-elusive, apparently mythical goal – rebuilding money.

For those with a tolerance for financial minutiae, here’s how it works: the insurance adjustor comes out (this happened in October) and works up an estimate of damage. This then needs to be okayed by a gazillion cubicle-dwellers in a gazillion offices around the country if not the world. All of these people need to weigh in with their opinion, even though they’ve never been anywhere near N.O. and haven’t taken one look at my house, as far as I know. Once they all decide that the adjustor knows what he’s talking about (or haggle out the differences), the insurance company actually cuts a check. In our case, two of them – homeowners’ and flood. Homeowners’ covered the minor roof damage, flood everything else. Luckily, homeowners’ didn’t try to blame everything on flood (a common problem around here that leads to court cases and even more delays). Both checks arrived sometime in May.

Here’s where it gets fun. The flood insurance comes in two parts – contents and structure. We easily maxed out the contents coverage, so when they tell you most people go with $25,000 – don’t listen. It won’t even begin to cover everything, and we didn’t even live there. Then, the structure check was made out to us AND the mortgage company. Apparently, we’re not to be trusted, though how it could possibly be to our advantage to run off with an insurance check that doesn’t cover what we owe in mortgage in an age when running from your debts is practically impossible, that eludes me.

So the money to repair our house passed briefly through our hands, only there as long as it took us to sign it, and then off it went to work it’s way through the mortgage company bureaucracy. That only took several phone calls (“Yes, I swear we’re fixing the house. No, we’re not living there – there’s no power, no water, no nothing. No, I didn’t receive that – please don’t send anything to the house because there is no mail service there.”), as well as many signed documents, all of which had to be signed by both me (here in N.O.) and Dr. Arwen (3 hours away where her job has gone since New Orleans’ version of a psychiatric hospital is an emergency room set up in the old Lord and Taylor’s). One of those documents had to be notarized, requiring we were both present at the same time. Lastly, they wanted a signed, detailed estimate from the contractor. After all that, the mortgage company consented to send us a third of the money.

Yep, just a third. We get the second third after the mortgage company has sent out an inspector who confirms that half the work has been done, and the final third when an inspector determines that 90% is done. Interesting how we’re supposed to get 90% of the work done with only 60% of the money.

Again, that check stuck around just long enough to get signed and then off it went to the contractor. Gavin took maybe a week and a half to get to my place, which is remarkably fast considering the amount of work in this town, but then if I hadn’t been a good friend with a contractor, I probably wouldn’t have considered buying a house in the first place.

In the last few days, the roof has been fixed, a floor torn up and redone, a couple of closets torn down and another two put up, and the egregious errors of other renovators fixed (they took out a load-bearing wall, which John discovered while walking in the attic and almost falling through). Gavin said it could take as long as six months before I can live in it, an estimate not based on the amount of time the actual work takes, but rather on waiting – for an electrician, for inspections, for getting appliances delivered, and for money. We’re hoping for better.

All that said, and it was rather a lot – anyone still with me? – I do a little jig every time I think about how the work has finally begun, even if it was 9 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days later.

I try to go by everyday and see if anything needs doing. I’m probably more in the way than anything else, but when we started renovating back pre-K, it was Gavin and John and Karl and me – I ran wire, I knocked down a wall, I laid tile – and that’s the way it’s going to finish (with a little help from some more friends). So far, this house has claimed my blood, my sweat, and my tears, and probably will get a few more things before it’s done, but when I’m home that first night and I uncork that bottle of wine, well, nothing will be sweeter, and everyone’s invited.

In Which Our Narrator Discovers the Recuperative Benefits of Travel

I went on vacation, got out of town and visited Brooke and saw some other friends. (Here comes the annoying shout-out to people you don’t know – hi Sarah, Brandon, Laura, Benjamin, Jennifer & Jennifer’s funny drunk friend!) I meant to blog from there, but not surprisingly that didn’t happen. I should have put up a post like newspapers run, explaining their columnist is on vacation and will return and here’s a greatest hit from a couple of years ago. Though I suppose to deserve that, I would need a regular schedule like newspaper columnists …

At any rate, this was the first time I had left New Orleans since December. Everyone I mentioned this to agreed that six months is a REALLY long time to spend in this town without a break, and they’re probably right. One tends to forget what it’s like to be somewhere where everything works and the streets aren’t constantly lined with trash. Places where firefighters don’t have trouble putting out fires because the water lines are all broken and leaking or where restaurants and bars don’t have hand-written signs on their doors proclaiming their “temporary hours,” and it’s important to remind ourselves of stuff like that because if we do forget, then we don’t mind. We accept that things are just that way now, and we don’t stay angry, and we don’t turn that anger into resolve, and we don’t demand change. (Our ability as a species to adapt to just about anything is a double-edged sword.) The long march to a repaired New Orleans, that “bigger and better” one we kept hearing about several months ago, is a very long one, years long in fact, and we have to fight exhaustion and depression every step of the way.

So here are a couple of the things I got excited about while visiting Jersey and New York – no blue roofs! Flying in to Newark, the only blue visible was the light, translucent blue of swimming pools. Someday, I thought, New Orleans will look like that again from the air. Also – working public transportation! Not that New Orleans ever had great public transportation to begin with, but I really miss the St. Charles streetcar. Also, taking the train from Jersey to NYC got me really hopeful of the plans to expand the streetcar lines and add some lightrail commuter lines to Baton Rouge and the Gulf Coast. Just being where those things actually exist and work was a good reminder along the lines of, “Um, hey, we could do that, too.”

Here’s a funny thing about people that live Out There – they’re not obsessed with New Orleans. I know, I know, totally crazy but true. Don’t get me wrong, they do care; they’re just not obsessed with it to the exclusion of all else. People would ask how things are here, and I would launch into what surely would be an absolutely fascinating lecture of several hours full of telling detail and perceptive observations and strident recommendations, and then people would tune out after a couple of sentences. It was shocking and a little upsetting (why isn’t everyone totally centered on MY problems?!?), but it turns out they have their own problems. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to ask a cab driver if he or she thought we should rebuild New Orleans, but I really wanted to.)

Brooke took me to this musical, “Spring Awakening,” which I’m not giving too much away about by saying it was all about sexual repression, teen suicide, and death from illegal abortion. It was based on a play written in 1891 that was banned for seventy years. Not only was it very well done and extremely well-performed, but it was a good reminder that all sorts of old problems and fights are still here, that many things haven’t changed significantly, an idea they underlined by punctuating period scenes with songs with contemporary lyrics and music. (Some of the recent legislation passed by the Louisiana legislature also reminded me of the same old fights, but more on that later.)

I’ve been pretty tunnel-visioned lately, and it was good to shake that off a bit. A broadening of horizons, if you will.

In a kind of opposite directioned connection, there’s a production of “Waiting for Godot” up in New York that takes place on a roof surrounded by floodwater, where the implication is that the Godot the characters are waiting for is FEMA. If anybody’s seen it, I’d like to hear about it, because I like the idea of connecting the disaster in New Orleans with something beyond the disaster itself.

Here’s one last observation from my trip Out There: as we flew into New Orleans, I watched out the window as we soared over Lake Pontchartrain and came in over the suburbs. The last couple of times I did this, New Orleans was Blue Roof City, but this time, they were actually few and far between. I was so surprised I kept staring, looking around, trying to find all those blue roofs I had seen in December, but they just weren’t there. (Including my own, by the way, but again more on that later.)

From the ground here, while in the middle of it, I just couldn’t see much progress. In fact, I came back to a city where five teenagers were gunned down several blocks from my apartment last Saturday and the National Guard has returned, which looks and feels more backwards than forwards. That expanse of repaired roofs was the best evidence of progress I have seen in six months, and if I hadn’t gotten anything else out of the trip, that alone would have been worth it.

"The corps is responsible"

That's from Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, on the failure of New Olreans' hurricane protection system. For the full quote, see this Times-Pic article from last Friday that I'm linking to because I suspect the rest of the country didn't get the story.

In short, the article relates the results of an eight-month Army Corps of Engineers-sponsored study of New Orleans' hurricane protection system that concludes that the blame for the catastrophic failures lies with the United States' inherently flawed flood control planning.

Links

Added some more. Most of them are New Orleans related to some degree, though not all. I considered slapping up every New Orleans related thing I could find, but quickly realized that, first of all, that's really tedious, and more importantly, other people have done it for me. So instead, it's just stuff that I've enjoyed and/or felt was important lately. Hopefully, there will be more in the days to come, so you too can spend your entire life reading everything on the web, every last page.

Nothing Works, and My Apartment is Slowly Killing Me

My car has been in and out of the shop so many times in the past two weeks I can't even remember what I originally took it in for, and it still has a nail in one of the tires (the fifth or sixth since my return) and has developed a mysterious clunking noise it didn't have before. Everytime it goes in, it comes back worse.

Meanwhile, my computer is crashing in slow motion. I took it in for help and the guy told me he could recommend a few good places to buy a new one. It can't even handle routine maintenance anymore - any defrag attempts always end in seizure. I waste so much time everyday waiting for it to catch up with my typing, and don't even ask about trying to read everybody's blogs. Every day feels like Russian roulette - will today be the day of the Black Screen of Death?

Then this evening I stuffed my clothes in the only washer the apartment building has, fed it my quarters, poured in the detergent, closed the lid and got ... nada. No amount of turning switches, checking plugs, or switching fuses achieved anything. When I tried to call someone for advice or at least an ear to vent in, I got a "we can't place this call" recording and flipped.

I think I can at least partially blame my perhaps inproportionate fury on PTSD - that recording took me right back to the days immediately after when phones were useless, so naturally I flipped out. I did what I usually do when I'm angry and lacking anything or anyone to righteously take it out on - pace up and down the apartment muttering angrily about why the religious right are evil and unAmerican. A few minutes of that usually works the anger out of my system.

Also for the past couple of weeks, I haven't been able to shake this annoying phlegmy cough, which I finally figured must be allergies even though I have never had allergies before. I started paying attention to when and where it was at its worst so I would know what to avoid if possible, and discovered that it's worst at night and first thing in the morning. It always gets better when I go outside. The conclusion: I'm allergic to my apartment.

This isn't nearly as far-fetched a notion as it sounds. My apartment is in this old mansion that has been chopped up into oddly shaped little units, and it is slowly but surely disintegrating around us. The landlord takes exactly zero care of it, so I've always been plagued with leaks and other annoyances. One time I found a mushroom growing out of a crack in my wall. This was even before the storm, and I'm sure it has only gotten worse. No doubt there's some sort of horrid mold growing in the walls, giving me and my cat mutant black lung or something. My flooded-but-gutted house is probably healthier to live in, and it doesn't come with loud downstairs neighbors trying to drive me crazy, like in "The Tell-Tale Heart" except I didn't kill anyone, not yet at least.

Hmmm ... apparently I wasn't entirely done venting.

But hey - maybe this is a sign that I'm returning to something akin to normal. Even as I write all this, I can't help but realize how trivial it all is, but perhaps that's a good thing. Getting all worked up over this stuff is actually a nice change of pace. Maybe I've really turned a corner here - it's okay to hate the neighbors and the landlord and the mechanic again. Ah, sweet, sweet normalcy!

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

And so it begins … hurricane season, that is. Not that hurricanes haven’t been known to happen outside the borders of the official season, but nonetheless today’s date – June 1st - has been tying my stomach in knots for months. Now it’s here and you know what – I don’t feel any better.

It’s all we talk about around here. Conversations used to all start with “how’d you make out?” and now they all start with “you staying or going?”

A lot of us have already left – students have decided now’s a good summer to do that whole off-campus program/European vacation thing. Families are heading off to visit relatives in places inland, preferably ones that have just finished thawing out from blizzards and the like. Those of us still here walk around all jittery and suspicious, like kicked dogs.

Because we’re scared. We’ve seen what happens when the Big One hits, or rather, when the Not Actually that Big but Big Enough near-misses, and as they keep telling us It Could Happen Again. So, yeah, we’re a bit spooked.

Maybe because the city hasn’t made enough progress, maybe because they’ve been telling us to expect four or five evacuations this year, maybe because last week one of the new levees “slumped.” At least, that’s the word the media seemed to have agreed on using to describe how a large section of levee just dropped several feet. I guess “slumped” sounds better than “collapsed” or “broke” or “fell the fuck down.” Slumped has a kind of casualness to it, as if the levee was just feeling a little lazy and decided to kick back on the couch and crack open a beer for a bit.

Maybe because those new levees are being built by the same people that built the last ones, the same people that told us the old levees would hold.

My father the other day told me the new levees were being built higher. I opined that kinda didn’t matter since the levees weren’t over-topped, they breached. I think he got my point.

So why am I staying?

Last Saturday, some friends and I met up at the Mid-City Bayou Boogaloo. Billed as the “first annual,” it took place on the Bayou St. John that winds through my neighborhood – or, to be more specific, the neighborhood my gutted house stands in. Picture a canal surrounded by green space curving through little shotgun houses, schools, restaurants, a couple of bike shops, a funeral home, an old factory turned into apartments, and one ugly gas station/convenience store and you have the general idea. Now imagine a bathtub ring on everything and you have it exactly.

The Boogaloo featured all the standard N.O. fest treats – food, art, drink, music. Nearby restaurants, many still closed, set up booths and provided Mexican, pasta, Middle Eastern, and good ol’ N’Awlins cookin’. The Mid-City Art Market – a venue for locals to show their stuff and make a buck – moved from its usual City Park locale for the occasion and a wine shop sold a quite nice rose for $9 a bottle (and if you don’t know about the rose revolution, get yourself to a decent wine store; it’s not that sickly sweet stuff you’re expecting). We sat by the still water sipping wine and watching the fish jump while listening to the music, a fabulous eclectic mess that I’ve come to expect in N.O. and know I can’t get anywhere else – jazz, blues, folk, rock, funk, reggae, Caribbean, Brazilian, and the uncategorizable Mardi Gras Indians. One friend wore a Big Easy Rollergirls t-shirt (“We skate come hell and high water”), and I briefly considered knocking him down and stealing it, but he assured me there were more where his came from.

Keep in mind, this is a neighborhood that remains mostly empty, a neighborhood with little going on besides planning meetings, where nine months after there still isn’t enough of the hopeful drone of power tools. Where that same day, as my friends and I enjoyed the Boogaloo, firefighters found a body, not a new one – a Katrina body, in what was left of a bathroom, in a bathtub.

So why am I staying?

The next day, I threw a party in the gutted remains of my house – the Festage in the Wreckage, very definitely not billed as the “first annual” but rather “first and hopefully only.” I never expected to have to rent a portable toilet for a party at my house, but such are the times. I filled my bathtub, currently resting comfortably in my bedroom, with ice and beer and water and invited people over in the afternoon while the light lasted. A bunch of friends and some strangers came over, stories were exchanged, gossip relayed, bad jokes told, and all the beer got drunk. One friend spun fire out on the street, which I recommend for any good party. We fired up a generator and made everyone listen to our band Smuteye for a half hour, ‘cause it was my party and I was gonna play if I wanted.

Afterwards, I spent an hour or so closing the place up as the light died and I had to lock the windows by flashlight, and then I walked half a block to Finn McCool’s (“Rebuilding Mid-City 1 Pint at a Time”), open since St. Patty’s Day, all bright lights and cold beer. Inside, I found my friend Miss Amanda and her guy, deep in conversation with a couple of women I didn’t know. I grabbed a beer and introductions went around; soon we were all chatting like old friends. I asked one of the women how they knew Miss Amanda and she smiled and said, “We just met five minutes ago.”

So why am I staying?

I keep hearing about people who don’t think New Orleans should be rebuilt, that we simply got what we deserve for living here, though I have yet to talk to any of these people myself. Perhaps because the people who don’t think we should rebuild are people who have never talked to a New Orleanian, I don’t know. Perhaps the Chris Matthews of the world assume they exist without bothering to find them because the news isn’t any fun unless you argue about something. Perhaps the President and I live in our own exclusive bubbles. I don’t know why I haven’t talked to anyone who doesn’t think New Orleans should rebuild and more to the point, I don’t care. I don’t care why I haven’t talked to them and I don’t care what they think. Personally, I don’t think we should be in Iraq, and yet there we are. Theoretically, a democracy is run by the majority, not the nut-jobs on the fringes. Theoretically.

Way back when, we needed a city at the mouth of the Mississippi to serve as the port to move goods and people in and out of the heart of the country, so we built one. We built one on the highest ground we could find at the bottom end of one of the world’s biggest rivers, on land that wouldn’t even exist if the river hadn’t carried silt here over thousands of years. At the time, New Orleans faced plagues, wars, hostile natives, river floods, ever-changing colonial allegiances, a fire that burned down the entire French Quarter, and even the occasional hurricane, but we endured because the country needed us, and it still does.

85-90% of this city got out. Of those that didn’t, the vast majority were either unable to or, like many of my friends, taking care of those who couldn’t leave. Many of them made their way to the Superdome where help was supposed to be on the way; they were following the plan. The Army Corps of Engineers had told them that the levees would hold. Their government officials (local, state, federal, all of ‘em) told them help would come.

When your house floods for the first time since 1923 when it was built, when you have to chop your way through your ceiling with an axe, when your entire life just washed out into the sea and you’re sitting on your roof with the rats, snakes, and alligators also looking for high ground, there just ain’t much to do besides wait for help.

Nevertheless, most of us didn’t just wait for help. We got out, we got friends and family out, we helped those who couldn’t get out. We loaded bed-ridden patients onto helicopters, we rowed canoes from rooftop to rooftop, we trucked in clothes, food, whatever we could get our hands on. We re-opened schools, we gutted houses and rebuilt them, and while fighting with insurance companies we used our own money to hire local contractors so they could use that money to fix their own places while fighting with their insurance companies. We’re still doing all those things, and we’re telling stories, and playing music, and yes, sometimes we help by throwing a party. Most of us didn’t wait around for the feds to help then, and we aren’t waiting around for them now.

I’m actually still waiting on the insurance and mortgage companies, on the wonderfully efficient magic hand of the free market.

So why am I staying?

What else am I supposed to do? Insurance is supposed to give me enough money to fix my house, not pay it off. If I don’t fix it, the money goes to the mortgage company, and I owe $70,000 on a hunk of junk I have no money to fix and couldn’t sell for $30,000. Maybe other people can walk away from that, but I can’t. Us new professors don’t exactly rake in the big bucks, and this house is pretty much all I have.

Well, that and I have a job I love. Sure, Loyola and I have our differences, but I’ve taught at seven universities so far and Loyola is easily my favorite. I have friends here; not as many as I used to, but still plenty, and new ones come along all the time. I have a band, a loud, obnoxious, rude, silly punk band that people seem to actually enjoy, much to our surprise. I have writers around me that are smart, encouraging, and talented. I have the Bayou Boogaloo and the Festage in the Wreckage.

And finally, I have a city of suffering people, and the U.S. is supposed to be the kind of place that doesn’t turn its back on suffering people, whether halfway around the world or in its own backyard. But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps those that think we shouldn’t rebuild, those that think we got what we deserve are right, and the U.S. isn’t that kind of place anymore.

But I’m still that kind of person.

So why am I staying?

Who wouldn’t?

Driving Chris Matthews

I was going to bitch about Chris Matthew's ignorance and uselessness as moderator of the nationally televised mayoral debate, but Mark over at Wet Bank Guide did it for me.

Just for fun, everybody ask their next cab driver if they think New Orleans should be rebuilt - send me the results and I'll put 'em up.

Ending FEMA

Money quote of the week:

In reference to FEMA plans to put cameras into disaster zones for live feeds back to headquarters -

"If CNN and Fox can do this, we should be able to do it." - David Paulison, acting FEMA director.

Really? Ya think?

Though I love that qualifying "should" - as in "but perhaps not"? - so heartening.

Anyway, after much study and many hearings, after deeply examining and analyzing all the things that went wrong with FEMA's response to Katrina and its aftermath, some members of the Senate have come up with their fix - doing away with FEMA altogether and replacing it. Considering how much hell I've given FEMA on this blog, you might be surprised to learn that I think this is a really bad idea.

The dismantling of a government agency and replacement of it with another (intended to do the exact same job) is an incredibly time-consuming and costly process. Considering on one hand our record-breaking deficits and continuing tax cuts, not to mention spendy little things like wars, we simply can't afford it. More importantly, hurricane season is two weeks away (and if you don't think that has me all kinds of paranoid and jumpy in a PTSD-way, you haven't been paying attention). Not that I think anyone is suggesting we do it now, but if they really wanted to replace FEMA, they should have done it sooner. Like it or not, FEMA has to get us through this next season, and after that, the inherent resistance to change all bureaucracies have will take over and it will never happen.

But furthermore, let's be realistic here - replacing FEMA with the Super Agency to Deal With Really Bad Things or whatever it would be called is going to add up to firing a bunch of career government people, along with all the bureaucracy and money that involves, only to turn around and re-hire most of them, just issuing them different stationary. If you think I'm just being cynical, remember what the Department of Homeland Security's first big announcement was after spending millions of dollars and months on reorganizing: "Here's our logo!" Followed shortly by the vague and useless terror color code alert and recommendations to stock up on duct tape. X-raying airplane baggage and screening shipping containers? Not so much - that would be hard, you can almost hear them whine.

Also, keep in mind who would head up this fabulous new disaster agency - yet another Bush appointee, and we all know how wonderfully those have worked out in the past.

Simply put, replacing FEMA with something else is just standard bureaucracy "let's rename it and shuffle the organization chart to fix the problem" crap. Sure, it beats the Bush administration's usual "Problem? What problem?" approach, reluctantly replaced with the "Pointing out problems is supporting terrorism" fall back position when problems can no longer be denied, but it doesn't actually fix the problem.

Under the Clinton administration, FEMA went from an ineffectual and expensive boondoggle rife with cronyism where big campaign donors were to sent to suck from the public trough to a model of government efficiency, effectiveness, and reform. It doesn't surprise me that FEMA returned to its bad old ways under George II, but it doesn't have to be that way.

The lesson here - renaming FEMA isn't going to fix it. To do that, we have to elect a smart, competent President that appoints experienced, capable professionals to head up essential agencies rather than viewing them as highly paid positions to reward campaign contributors. Alternately, we could elect Senators that take their review and consent powers seriously rather than rubber-stamping anyone their boss nominates.

Otherwise, all we get is Michael Brown by another name.

Rats! Only Four Days of Yard Signs, Pre-recorded Phone Calls, Flyers, TV Ads, Debates, and Campaign Calls Disguised as Polls Left

The Most Important Election Ever plays out on Saturday, and you know I just have to weigh in on it. Other New Orleans blogs try to avoid politics because they, quite sensibly, don't want to alienate people of certain political persuasions which could interfere with getting our fair city's post-apocalyptic story out. We here at Flood and Loathing, on the other hand, just can't seem to help ourselves.

But before trying to make a call on the Mayoral choice, let me first say that way back before candidates were even declaring themselves, I knew who I was voting for. See, I wanted the candidate who was going to be honest, the candidate who was going to call the tough choices we all know we still have to face. I wanted the one who was going to come out and tell us what parts of town were coming back and which weren't; I wanted the candidate who would articulate a vision of our city's future without pandering to everybody, without promising the impossible, without trying to convince us that New Orleans would be back just like it was before the flood. I believed that in the brutal Post-K reality we live in, at least one candidate would dispense with the bullshit and hit us with the truth straight, and the one who did that was my guy. Silly me. Of course nobody was going to do that - it would be political suicide. After months and months of this, now I think I'll just vote for the guy whose campaign staff gives me the fewest annoying phone calls.

Since my man Manny didn't make the run-off (though I'm proud my vote netted him triple digits), we have instead the contest of the follicly-challenged, the bald C. Ray Nagin and the not-quite-bald Mitch Landrieu. Not that's there's anything wrong with having less than a luxurious mane of head hair; at least, we here at Flood and Loathing hope not as we're not really ones to talk. In fact, three people so far have pointed out to your humble servant (that's me) that I bear a striking resemblance to potential-Mayor Mitch, no doubt because of our boyishly good looks and not our nearly-but-not-quite-nonexistent hair. I'm hoping to parlay this resemblance into getting accepted into the Landrieu family as a long-lost relative, or at least into a lucrative side career as a Mitch body-double (writing for F&L doesn't come with a real hefty salary). Perhaps - dare I dream? - even a "Dave"-like situation where I actually get to be Mayor someday.

Assuming I don't cast my vote on who I resemble more, I have to figure out other criteria on which to base my participation in the democratic process. Unfortunately, the difference between the candidates on the issues is pretty tiny. Both maintain all neighborhoods should be rebuilt though admit the city doesn't have the money to provide services - fire, police, etc. - to everywhere. Neither acknowledge that what gets rebuilt really isn't going to be up to the mayor. Both agree the city must aggressively pursue taking over houses the owners don't rebuild. Both agree the mayor should have more say and control over public schools.

In order to draw a difference between the two, Nagin is doing his best to portray Landrieu's political dynasty as a negative - the "politics of the past" - since Mitch's father Moon was mayor. Also, he's touting his experience as mayor and the fact that he's been building relationships with the feds and the POTUS.

In response, Landrieu points out how little progress said relationships have gotten us and how little help we've actually received from the POTUS. He's also playing up his ability to get things done, to work out agreements between people from different sides of the aisle. His support seems the most biracial, while Nagin's might be more bipartisan, probably because Nagin is a bit more conservative (though we're talking relative terms here) and he did switch from Republican to Democrat while the Landrieus are a Louisiana family of the old and very influential Democratic persuasion. That switch of Nagin's, though, does have a whiff of political expediency, since no Republican is going to get elected mayor in this town, no matter how many floods come through and how many residents are displaced.

And there is the basic gut reaction of "Nagin had his chance and blew it; let's get someone new." That's tempered a bit by my thinking that anyone would have been in over their head Post-K (a perhaps too-apt metaphor), but it's still there.

In the end, however, I think the really important quality in the city's next mayor is going to be his ability to squeeze money and services from the feds and the state. That, put bluntly, is what New Orleans needs more than anything these days. Given that Landrieu's sister is a Senator and he serves as Lieutenant Governor under Blanco (who isn't up for election until 2007), he has the advantage in that department. It's rather sad that the primary responsibility of our mayor is now begging for cash, but that's the reality. At least, for once, a candidate's ability to run a campaign actually equates to the job they're running for. So I guess we here at Flood and Loathing are throwing all of our considerable political might behind Mitch.

At least for the next four days until he actually gets elected and starts doing stuff that pisses me off.

The endorsements are more ubiquitous than nutria around here these days, though nobody wants to try and call the election yet; probably because all the usual indicators like polls and such are all wonked up what with everyone scattered hither and yon. About the only thing everybody will predict is that this one is going to be a nail-biter. More important than endorsing any particular candidate is encouraging the vote, so we here at Flood and Loathing urge every New Orleanian, whether returned home or not, to get out there, vote early, and vote often. Sure, democracy is a crappy form of government that doesn't actually work, but it's better than any other option.

The Center, Still Holding

The last couple of weeks have been pretty much dedicated to Jazz Fest. While the Fest itself only occurs on two weekends, those who have been or live here know that it really extends throughout the week leading up to it and the week in between. All the music venues are packed with talent, often splitting into a full early show, a standard time, and the late night show that doesn't even begin until two or three and ends sometime after sun-up. I think it was especially good getting out and seeing shows around town this year because a lot of displaced local musicians who weren't on the Fest line-up made it back to play shows around town. I, for one, was glad Lynn Drury showed up, though I only managed to get to one of the several performances she had. It's a long but glorious haul, and it's no wonder that I've been feeling a little under the weather the past couple of days.

The weather, by the way, was fanstastic the entire time - cool, by New Orleans standards, which means warm to everyone else, as in not unbearably hot. Even when it poured rain on the last day, nobody really minded. We took our shrimp po-boys and huddled under one of the little picnic tables by the food booths. Besides, the mud makes the hippies happy. After eating in relative comfort, we made a dash for the Gospel Tent and Pilsner Urquell.

Yes, along with the crawfish Monica, the crawfish bread, the shrimp etouffee, and the soft-shell crab po-boys (to name a few), I can get my beloved Czech beer (on draft, even!) at Jazz Fest, but it's only in one spot. Otherwise, it's Lite and Foster's in cans. And no, I'm not telling you where it is - the line is bad enough already.

The shows around town aren't the only extension of Jazz Fest, though, because it draws so many tourists, and that always means friends visiting from out of town, and this year that meant a few Tours of Destruction. I'm glad all the tourists come and spend their money on our hotels, restaurants, bars, and taxis, but unless they get away from the Quarter and the Sliver by the River, they come away thinking everything's normal. The Fairgrounds (where Jazz Fest is held) and its surrounding neighborhood did get flooded, so Fest attendees got a glimpse of what it's like, but it's nothing compared to the truly devastated parts of town.

Not until people get out and see The Suck (Lakeview, the Lower Ninth, East) for themselves do they realize just how bad it is. So I take them. Sometimes I show them my house and 'hood first, as a kind of warm-up, or I might finish with that, as a way to soften the blow at the end. People only truly grasp it when they see whole bent and crooked houses crushing over-turned trucks beneath them, and block after block of nothing but rubble where an entire neighborhood used to be, and a line of concrete stairs that used to go up to front porches leading to empty space, and a muddy, broken doll trapped thirty feet up in the branches of a grey and leafless oak. It's important, even necessary, that people see and understand it because, as I've tried to point out again and again, New Orleans can't rebuild itself on its own. It's going to take all of us - every American - to do it, and whether we manage it or not (and that's still a question) will prove, or disprove, our worth as a country and a people.

That's the context that we go to Jazz Fest with. While we're grooving to the music, to Coolbone, Keb' Mo', Eddie Bo, John Boutte, Dumpstaphunk, and Allen Toussaint (with a little Elvis Costello thrown in for good measure), or welcoming back Cowboy Mouth, World Leader Pretend, Galactic and Ani DiFranco, or catching people we might not see anywhere else, like Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, we're doing it all with The Suck in the back of our minds. Whether the people on-stage acknowledge it or try to give us a break from it, it's always there.

And we're all there, too. That's another thing about Jazz Fest; even if I don't arrange to meet people, I run into everyone I know anyway. I guess that's what happens when you cram an entire city into a horse racetrack. Even so, strange and magical coincidences happen. A few of us were searching for the spot some more intrepid friends had staked out for Bruce Springsteen, a seeming impossibility in a crowd of thousands and thousands, an expanse of people so vast and so packed we had to wind our way through them like one of those hedge mazes.

We weren't worried, though, because we had the usual Jazz Fest kind of directions, "Close to the sound stage. There's a pole with a bunch of panties hanging on it. We're back and to the right of it."

When we finally found the spot, we discovered a different set of friends, unknown to the first, had staked out the spot right next to them. And then I glanced around and saw my neighbor not twenty feet away. Then followed much toasting and drinking while waiting for the music to start. Oh, and lots of raucous cheering when the plane trailing the "Impeach Bush" sign flew overhead.

I have never been much of a Springsteen fan, perhaps because I first became aware of him with "Born in the U.S.A." which got co-opted by knee-jerk nationalists before I actually listenened to the lyrics and realized how smart and even liberal they are. Nonetheless, I couldn't really pass up the chance to see him at the Fest, and he was amazingly good.

First off, the music was folky and all new to me, and he has that ability to make it feel intimate despite the huge crowd. The songs and his voice are so raw and real, you can't help but get caught up in it. He played one or two songs with a great zydeco sound, which I loved - bring on the accordions!

The show was fun, and true, and moving, and then he played this quiet song My City of Ruins and everyone's hands went in the air. He sang about destruction and despair and then faith and hope and exorted us all to "Rise up!" I looked around. The people in front of me extended so far I could barely see the stage, and there was no making out the edge of the crowd in any other direction. An immense number of people, endless, and each and every one of them, hands in the air, taking in the music and the message, and I was in the middle of them, of Jazz Fest, of New Orleans. The center of the country, even the world, the universe, everything good and right and true, had moved to that very place, and all the doubt and fear went away; in that moment I knew, truly knew, for the first time in eight long, bloody, exhausting, hellish, damned months, that New Orleans, that everything, would be okay.

I leaned over to my friend and said, "If he makes me cry, I will never forgive him."

So I drained the last couple of drops of whisky from my flask and blamed the tears on that.

It's the Levees, Stupid

I have been meaning to post about a few important announcements for about a month now, but stuff kept happening. Anyway, now that classes are over and all that's left is the grading, I figure I'll put off actual work that I'm paid for and do this instead. Clearly I have fully embraced the Big Easy's general rejection of that Prostestant work ethic thing.

So, first, in a story that got under-reported in the national news, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that the 17th Street Canal levee breach was due to design problems.

Shortly after that, they also announced that rebuilding the levees properly would cost billions of dollars more than they originally estimated.

And then, finally, some seven months after the flood, FEMA announced the rebuilding rules for New Orleans, saying the flood maps wouldn't be significantly changed assuming the levees are built according to the new, improved plan.

In other words, my house (oh yeah, and everyone else's, too) got flooded because the federal government built craptastic levees, but I don't have to raise my house assuming the federal government approves the money so it can build levees it assures me won't be craptastic.

Oh, I'm just brimming over with happiness, gratitude, and confidence!

But do you see where New Orleans stands? It's ALL about the levees, and the levees aren't in our control. How the levees are rebuilt determines whether or not rebuilding is possible, and that's all up to the federal government. We just went through this big mayoral election during which one of the big questions was who and where gets to rebuild, but nobody was pointing out that the mayor no longer has any say in such decisions. The feds have made the decision, and they have decided to write off huge swaths of the city.

I'll try to give you the short version of why. The new FEMA rules also announced that houses in certain hard-hit areas should be raised, because apparently they're assuming there will be flooding even with the levees. Raising a house will cost (depending on its size) at minimum $50-60 thousand. FEMA has promised grants of $30,000 to raise houses, though I don't know anyone who has gotten one yet, but that still leaves a sizable chunk of cash that insurance DOES NOT cover. And I'm sure the poor black residents of the Lower Ninth Ward have that money hidden under their mattress. Oh, wait. Even if they did, it got washed out to sea.

Put another way, if I had to raise my house (still a possibility, for arcane reasons I'm not going into here), I simply couldn't do it. I guess I would have to hand over the insurance money to the mortgage company and still owe a bunch more money on a house I couldn't live in or rebuild. That's what these rules do for people.

In a different kind of example, the Corps isn't getting all the money they requested. Bush didn't request it all from Congress; he and his people decided not to pursue the money necessary to rebuild the levees in lower Plaquemines. Now, granted, lower Plaquemines is mostly rural, a lot of shrimpers and the like - think Forrest Gump and Lt. Dan - and represents a tiny portion of New Orleans' population. At the same time, the $2.2 billion the Senate just approved (and Bush is threatening to veto) doesn't include levees for Plaquemines. Meanwhile, that bill includes another $90 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. No levees, no Plaquemines.

So despite all the promises that New Orleans would be rebuilt "bigger and better," it's clear that the feds actually are erasing large parts of a great American city from the map.

Election, Shmlection

As unbelievable as it is, my man Manny did not make the run-off. In fact, he only got 100 votes, which is a suspiciously round number - I mean, really, did they actually count the votes or just make a reasonable guess? He did get one more vote than James Arey, though, proving for all time that pot and prostitutes are indeed cooler than classical music any day. Or, at least, that New Orleanians prefer aficionados of the former as mayor compared to aficionados of the latter. He did finish 10th out of 22, which ain't bad, and I think lays a solid foundation for next time.

Let's see, what else? Wilson, despite getting national attention and invites to all the debates between the "magnificent seven" finished eighth behind Butler, proving that if you want to get elected mayor in New Orleans, it's better to be just plain bat-shit crazy rather than a right-wing reactionary nut-job. The I Quit ticket pulled off one straight-out win, and got in the run-off in two more, which is promising. There's a whole bunch of city council run-off action and some guys named, like, Landrieu and Nagin or something made the mayoral run-off, whoever they are. I guess the one guy is related to some famous people, and the second sounds vaguely familiar but I can't quite remember why. Anyway, they made the run-off and Manny didn't, so power to the people and all that.

The good news is the election itself went off about as well as could be expected. No major problems with polling places and machines and whatnot. I strolled in, showed my card and ID, walked into the booth and was out of there. Total elapsed time at polling station? Less than five minutes. The number of people voting was only a little less than usual. The African-American vote was slightly smaller than usual (30-something percent of eligible voting as opposed to just over 40% last time), which is probably due to the fact that so many African-American New Orleanians are still out of town, and perhaps planning on staying out. It does seem, however, that on the whole the measures taken - contacting everyone displaced about absentee ballots, polling places set up around the state, early voting, etc. - were enough to get the vote of most everyone who wanted to vote. It doesn't hurt that most of the votes weren't particularly close. So it seems the vote will stand and we won't go through long, protracted court battles and recounts. Take that, Florida! We kick your participatory government butt any day!

After voting, I was all full of the democratic spirit, so headed down to the French Quarter for some Festing. For those not in the know, the French Quarter Fest is this big free music festival we throw every year, and I was glad to see so many people voting for New Orleans with their appearances - the place was packed. I met up with the famous Dr. A. who brought a family of friends with her, so Dr. A. and I pushed a stroller around the Quarter for a while, and everyone thought we were this happy, pierced, tattooed, bohemian couple with child, which was quite amusing. After that, we went to a free crawfish boil/birthday party at the R Bar, where I ate all the crawfish in Louisiana. Every last one. Then it was on to Handsome Willy's to watch election returns and partake in more democratic spirits, and let me tell you, democracy can give you a mean headache if you over-indulge.

Anyway, I'm just glad that that's over with - no more signs, no more pre-recorded robo-calls, no more anguishing over platforms and positions. I have had enough of that for quite some time.

Oh, wait. Run-offs. Nooo! NOOOOO!!!!!!!

The P&P Ticket

Election day is tomorrow, kids, heralded by everyone as the most important in New Orleans history. So as the eyes of the nation, nay, the world, focus once again on the Big Squeegee, I give you, right in the nick of time, because you know you gotta know, the Official Flood and Loathing Election Endorsements! (Plus a few anti-endorsements thrown in for kicks and grins.)

First off, let’s talk assessors. New Orleans has to be the only place that elects the people that determine the value of houses for tax purposes. That’s right, the guys who say an abode is worth half a mil or perhaps just several thousand or so need to go out and get campaign contributions from the very folks that own said houses. Not to worry, though, I’m sure there’s absolutely, positively no temptation whatsoever for just a little bit of fudging on the house values of those contributors. And we have not just one of these assessors, but seven. Chicago and New York City get by with one, but we need seven. There’s a bill in the Legislature right now to consolidate the assessors, though the last time it was tried shortly after Katrina, it was killed in committee by representatives Jeff Arnold and Alex Heaton, who – I shit you not – just happen to have close relatives that are assessors.

By the way, at the moment I could tell you exactly what 80% of the houses in New Orleans are worth without even looking at ‘em. Like my flooded and gutted skeleton, they’re worth jack squat.

Which brings us to the “I Quit” ticket, seven people who have pledged that, if elected, they will immediately quit and use their salaries to hire a professional assessor. Only in New Orleans would you get seven people running for office on the simple platform of quitting the job they’re running for, AND where that’s clearly the best choice. For that reason, Flood and Loathing endorses the whole “IQ” ticket: Maria Elliot, Jackie Farnsworth Shreves, Errol George, Chase Jones, Ron Mazier, Nancy Marshall, and Charlie Bosworth.

Consolidation is the all the buzz in New Orleans these days, so there is also a bill consolidating our criminal and civil courts, which currently are separate. We have both a criminal sheriff and a civil sheriff, and a court clerk for both, all of which need to be elected. Now, for three of these offices – both sheriffs and the civil court clerk – Flood and Loathing has no endorsements. Since we haven’t heard much about them, as in no scandals, apparently things are going fairly well with them. These people haven’t made the news, and that’s a good thing. We do need to point out, though, that one candidate for criminal sheriff, Frank Gerald DeSalvo, made the news because, as part of his campaign, he has accused the incumbent, Martin Gusman, of covering up the deaths of a couple of deputies. This made the news mostly because DeSalvo has absolutely no evidence for this. Here at Flood and Loathing, we believe that making wild accusations of heinous crimes for personal gain is NOT something we want in a sheriff, so for that reason, DeSalvo earns an anti-endorsement. Don’t vote for him.

The criminal court clerk, however, did make the news. The two essential responsibilities of the criminal court clerk are to take care of trial evidence and oversee elections (no, I don’t see the connection, either). Kimberly Williamson Butler first made the news when she bungled the last election, failing to get voting machines to polling sites. She then made the news again when she asked for help with cleaning up the evidence after the flood, got it, then complained the mayor was trying to usurp her job, disobeyed court orders, went into hiding, and was finally arrested. Happily, after she got out of jail, she announced she wasn’t running for re-election. She did, however, announce she is running for mayor. No, I’m not making that up. She made the news again when a photo of her in a nice, spruced-up looking French Quarter on her campaign website turned out to have not been taken in the French Quarter, but rather the New Orleans themed area of Disneyland. No, I’m not making that up. Needless to say, KWB is NOT Flood and Loathing’s pick for mayor. After going through the 11 candidates vying to replace her, Flood and Loathing picked two – Paul Massa because he’s the Green Party candidate, and Nick Varrechio because he’s focused on and experienced in running elections. The others we eliminated for reasons like being a Republican or having “suing the city” as part of their platform.

Next, we come to the city council, five district council members and two “at-large” members. To start off, the current council has been feuding with the mayor over all kinds of stuff like where to put trailers, which has led to our current situation of very few people having a trailer and a moratorium on any new ones. The council members blame the mayor, the mayor blames the council. Flood and Loathing has decided to act like an elementary school teacher – we don’t care who started it, everybody’s getting detention. Therefore, we’re against every incumbent council member. They’ve all earned a time-out.

The luxurious offices of Flood and Loathing (both apartment and house) are located in District B, so that’s the only one we have an endorsement for (cut us some slack – there are a lot of candidates to shift through). Of the six candidates, we eliminated Renee Gill Pratt because she’s the incumbent, and while we admire the spirit behind Quentin Brown’s hand-written “No More Bullshit” campaign signs, they don’t exactly inspire confidence in his ability to get the job done. Stacy Head seems impressive, and also appears to be the front runner, but Michael Duplantier gets our nod – he’s a retired lawyer, he’s volunteered and worked for lots of organizations we like, and in the recent televised debate he seemed to be the one who most understood just what a council member can and can’t do.

Similarly, for the at-large candidates, we were able to eliminate some of the eleven candidates because they don’t seem to understand what a council member does. For instance, while we agree that the minimum wage should be raised, if you’re running for city council on that platform, you’re running for the wrong job. We were also able to eliminate two more, Oliver Thomas and Jackie Clarkson, because they’re incumbents who have been obstacles to getting New Orleanians, particularly working class New Orleanians, back. A couple more went because they’re Republicans and stand for things Republicans stand for, which left us with five candidates for the two spots: Arnie Fielkow, Carlos Hornbrok, David Lapin, Leonard Lucas, and Roger Wilson. We like Fielkow because he got fired for telling Tom Benson, the Saints’ owner, that the Saints needed to commit to returning to New Orleans. He and Lapin both seem to have a lot of support, and Wilson was in the movie “Porky’s,” but beyond that, we here at Flood and Loathing are throwing up our hands and saying “pick two of these guys.”

Which brings us to the headliner, the mayoral race. Now, as with most of these elections, we no doubt have a run-off coming, so Flood and Loathing will have a sequel endorsement when we get there, but these here are our picks for now. In all likelihood, the run-off will be between Mitch Landrieu and C. Ray Nagin, but we will deal with that later. There are a lot of candidates we’re clearly NOT for, like Butler or Peggy Wilson, who years ago led the fight against integrating Mardi Gras parades. Apparently, the city had no business telling parade krewes that if they wanted the cops to block off public streets for them and clean up their mess, then they couldn’t exclude African-Americans. And she continues that kind of divisive rhetoric as part of her campaign, so hopefully the public will plant its collective foot firmly in her reactionary, right wing, Republican, racist ass.

There are also some candidates we like but aren’t officially endorsing, like Virginia Boulet and James Arey, who not only plays classical music on our NPR station, but is focusing his campaign on pushing the arts in New Orleans. That almost got him the Flood and Loathing nod, but not quite.

But who gets the Official Flood and Loathing mayoral endorsement? Isn’t the suspense killing you?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a troubled man for troubled times, a man’s man, ladies’ man, man about town, and my man for mayor:

Manny “Chevrolet” Bruno!

Why him, you ask? Because he wants to legalize pot and prostitution and we here at the Flood and Loathing offices are all for it. Actually, when we were considering a run for mayor ourselves, that was going to be our platform, so it seems only right that we throw our considerable weight behind the candidate who stole our thunder.

You think I’m kidding about this, but I’m actually not; I do really think we should legalize both, regulate them mightily, tax the bejeesus out of them, and rake in the dough. I have been to Amsterdam, I have seen the promised land, and, from what I’m told, I apparently had a really good time.

New Orleans should legalize pot in the same way as Amsterdam. I suggest zoning it into the French Quarter and the Marigny, and only making it legal to be sold and smoked in hash bars, just like in Amsterdam.

I can hear the protests now – how will we keep it out of the hands of kids? I ask you, who’s more likely to card someone, the owner of a licensed hash bar or the sixteen-year-old dealer on the corner? But won’t it make the Quarter more dangerous, even more unfriendly to families and tourists? Compare a bunch of drunks to a bunch of stoners – the drunks are loud and belligerent and screaming for women to flash for beads, but the stoners, if they can be motivated to move at all, will only do so because they have the munchies. When you’re high, you don’t puke and piss on the street. I think a stoned Quarter would actually be a nicer place than a drunk Quarter.

As for prostitution, we have riverboat gambling, so how about riverboat brothels? It would still be illegal on land so we won’t have streetwalkers or even women in windows like Amsterdam, but instead patrons would just board a riverboat and set sail for a quick trip down the Mississippi. There would be required medical check-ups and no more pimps and lots of tax dollars. Everybody wins.

So there you go, because he has the cojones to run on the P&P ticket, and because I can’t resist the opportunity to back someone who is actually advocating some of the crazy liberal schemes I believe in, Flood and Loathing urges everyone to get out on Saturday and vote for Manny “Chevrolet” Bruno.

God, Loyola, and Getting Let Go

If you happened to have read Sophmom's comments to the last post then you already know that Loyola announced it's big re-organization plan on Monday. You can read the plan here and read about student and faculty reaction here.

The (selfish) good news - the English department still exists, and I still have a job. The plan doesn't call for letting all adjunct faculty go, which I half expected it would. The bad news is that part of the reason I still have a job is that the English department lost professors who didn't come back after the flood and is losing more this summer. People are retiring and/or getting the hell out of this city, and I can't blame them. The worse news is that other departments, programs, and majors got the ax, including education, communications, and computer science, as well as City College, which is our adult education night class program.

Leading up to this, students had asked me about what was going on or what I would be teaching in the fall. I'd tell them I honestly didn't know the answer to either question, and didn't even know if I would be at Loyola come fall. Since Monday, many of my students have gone out of their way to ask if I would still be around in the fall, and I'm glad I could tell them I will (though I still won't entirely believe it until I have that signed contract in hand). I even got a relieved hug, which almost made me cry. Teaching college is a job like no other (at least no other I've ever had, and I've had more than my fair share) and I am only too aware of what a profound effect my college professors had on me. I can't imagine what it must be like for the tenured and tenure-track professors who have been at Loyola for years and years and intended to spend the rest of their careers there only to lose that because our government is too inept to build adequate levees and maintain wetlands. That the one has led to the other is just too cruel and absurd, and if I believed in God, I would have to conclude that He, She, or It has a seriously sick sense of humor. (I know, I know, an atheist teaching at a Jesuit university, that's absurd in and of itself, but that's part of what makes Loyola so cool.)

So not a good day for Loyola. Even though I still have a job, I left the "Black Monday" I had written into the 10th on the big wall calendar in our office. I don't know if this will be good for the university or not - maybe I'm too close to be objective, and it's hard to know if their plan will work in the long run. Change always sucks to a certain extent and I'm not against it in principle, but it's hard for me to see these changes as anything but harmful and even unnecessary. First off, enrollment isn't down that much - the new class next year is around 700 instead of 850 or so. Significant, but not deadly. Also, if we're trying to position ourselves as a national liberal arts institution, how does cutting programs contribute to that? Finally, what's so awful about running at a deficit for a year or two? The government has been doing it for much, much longer and corporations do it all the time. Why can't we? And if it's that bad, why not dip into the endowment? They say it's "the future of the university," but what kind of future are we planning when we cut programs and fire tenured faculty?

So as far as this goes, today I'm all questions, no answers, a state that seems to be pretty perpetual these days.

This Semester Has Kicked My Butt

Only three weeks left and I can't wait until it's over. I was walking across campus the other day and ran into another teacher who asked, "Are your students getting as lazy as mine?" And indeed they are, but the truth is, so are we. I, in fact, am writing this during class while I have all my students working on their web pages. Apparently, I have done all the teaching I'm going to do this semester.

I have four writing classes this semester, which really isn't that big a deal because I almost always have four writing classes even though everyone agrees four writing classes is probably two too many. Plus, two of them are classes new to me, so I have all new preps added to the two classes I have done before. For those non-teachers out there, trust me, four classes and three preps is a lot of work. Not to mention the grading, the grading, the grading, the endless endless grading ...

All of this while struggling with a multitude of bureaucracies including, but not limited to, two separate insurance companies, two mortgage companies, FEMA, the electric company, the water company, the USPS, as well as a multitude of city and state departments of this, that, and the other, all of which want stacks of paperwork signed in tripiclate and stamped and dated and verified and endorsed and notarized. My life has been reduced to a constant struggle against red tape in an immense bureacracy I can't even begin to understand. I am K.

Meanwhile, the almost-not-metaphorical Sword of Damocles at Loyola is preparing to descend. The scuttlebutt around here is that in the next two or three weeks the great "re-organization" plan shall be announced, and the next round of lay-offs shall begin. Word is, they plan on dumping entire programs, and nobody seems to know just what will happen with non-tenure track faculty like me. So in the next couple of weeks I could be told I'm out of a job. Again. It's really hard to motivate myself to grade and teach and all that stuff when I've spent the entire semester at least half-convinced I'm about to be let go.

All of which is a really long way of saying I'm sorry I haven't been updating this blog as much as I would like. I'm way behind on adding links and pictures, not to mention responding to comments, which I really appreciate, or acknowledging all those out there who apparently read this (yes, I have a counter and yes, I'm pretty surprised at the numbers - hi everyone! And thanks!) and there is a whole host of things I've been meaning to write about.

Sigh.

So, yeah, this semester has kicked my butt, and as much as I have actually loved my classes, I'm so done, though really, it's not the classes that have kicked my butt, it's all the other stuff. Unfortunately, classes actually have a end point, while it seems that the rebuilding bureacracy just stretches on endlessly into the future, never to end, so I'm in this weird position of looking forward to end of something good so I can concentrate on dealing with the crap.

Sigh.

But enough self-pity - at least I'll have more time to blog.

The First Mardi Gras Post-K

Here was the plan for Mardi Gras: wear costumes, wander around the Quarter, see everyone I know, and party all day. I'm proud to say I accomplished every aspect of the plan.

Anyway, I have to say this was one of my best Carnivals ever. I already wrote about the parades, which only got better despite the fact that many of the krewes lost their floats in the flood. On Mardi Gras itself, we headed down to the Quarter in the morning and arrived in time to march with the St. Ann's walking parade, which was the usual collection of funny, sexy, and satirical costumes, everyone half-dancing, half-marching down the street to the horn blasts and drum thwacks of the brass band. Many costumes made fun of the government and the Thing (hurricanes, floods, apocalypse, etc.), though we chose not to focus on that ourselves. Besides, I did a Katrina Kostume for Halloween. Plus, I wanted to wear a silly hat, because what's the point of Mardi Gras unless you get to wear a silly hat?

Brooke had a costume emergency in that her boot was attempting to cripple her, but that was solved with a $15 pair of sandals and an extrememly large vodka tonic.

Once that was taken care of, we returned to careening around the Quarter aimlessly, which, if you've never been to Mardi Gras, is essentially like attending the biggest costume party ever that lasts all day, and I really did run into just about everyone I know since we all hit the Quarter and tend to congregrate at some point near Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop. I swear I have friends I only see during Mardi Gras. There's never really any telling who you will end up hanging out with as people come and go, everyone on these crazy, looping trajectories intersecting each other, then splitting, only to come together again later - you run into someone you know dressed in a fairy costume who knows someone throwing an apartment party in the Quarter where a complete stranger convinces a handful of people that you absolutely have to bar hop down Decatur which leads you to Frenchmen where you meet up with a colleague dressed as a superhero and then ... well, you get the idea.

I know this is a strange word to apply to Mardi Gras, but it was really nice this year. Very casual and stressless (even considering the near-disaster of the boot) and a good time. Everybody was happy, and while it was definitely crowded, it was never overwhelming. Later, the city announced that arrests were way down, even taking the smaller crowd into account, so it wasn't just me. So, yay, New Orleans! Even when knocked on our ass, we can still throw one hell of a party, and if people don't think that's enough of a reason to love, cherish, and rebuild this place, well, they have no joy and no soul. Unfortunately, I think that's exactly the reason why so many people don't think New Orleans should be rebuilt.

Sure, Hastert and others like him continue to say it's because it's dangerous - we're below sea-level, after all, but that's true of most port cities located on big rivers, and it's not like other places don't have similar dangers. Yet, I don't remember there ever even being a question about rebuilding Charleston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, etc. And while our damage is much more extensive than those places, since when has the difficulty of a task been a reason not to do it?

But if it's too much for Hastert, we'll do it without the wimp.

We do have a not-undeserved reputation for corruption, but name me one place that doesn't? If corruption were a reason to abandon a place, then given the millions of dollars the feds have wasted on useless trailers, overly expensive blue roofs, and no-bid Halliburton contracts, D.C. should be razed. Or perhaps just those neighborhoods housing the federal government, since they clearly would be best returned to green space.

But I don't think the "don't rebuild" argument is about any of the stated reasons of danger, difficulty, or corruption. I think it's actually about the unstated reason that we're a city that knows how to have a good time. We refuse to get with the American work ethic program, apologize for our hedonistic ways and come to Jesus and a life of self-denial and hard work.

Over in England, the Puritans banned the performances of plays, bringing to an end one of, if not the, greatest play cultures of Western civilization and ensuring that Shakespeare lived out his latter days and died in a place where none of his work could be seen. The British quite sensibly kicked them out, but unfortunately, they sent them here, and most of the country has been trying to throw off those self-imposed shackles ever since. Most of it.

New Orleans is the only American city I've lived in where people actually seem to work to live, rather than live to work, where we not only don't feel guilty about shutting the city down for a week to throw a big party, but celebrate it. We even have the audacity to brag about it.

We're the charming, ne'er-do-well brother that most people shake their heads over but are really a bit jealous of, but who really angers some others, like Hastert and Bush. After all, he had to give up booze, cocaine, and going AWOL, so New Orleans should, too. If we don't, we'll just see about that help we need. It's a little more subtle than the idea that God punished New Orleans for our sinful ways with Katrina, Rita, and the floods, but it boils down to the same attitude.

I'm tired of defending New Orleans with other reasons why we should be rebuilt, the oil and gas, the seafood, all the grain that goes out and coffee that comes in - the hell with it. Why should New Orleans be rebuilt? Because we throw the best party this country will ever see. Without us, you're England without Shakespeare, no joy and no soul.