Numenius is right. Or I share his sense that, thanks to a host of evils political and historical, New Orleans was particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack, particularly unable to withstand such an attack.
It's as if someone turned a firehose on a fragile, elegant old woman who hasn't smelled too good for the last forty years (Faulkner's Miss Emily?) but no one would dare say so to her face because she is such a cultural icon. I have never been to New Orleans but have always wanted to go, and I confess that my first reaction was entirely selfish: "Oh damn, now it's gone, I'll never see it the way it was, I'll never find Storyville like I wanted to, I'll never see Bourbon Street or the French Quarter as they were." I have been through a natural disaster or five, so I know from experience that whatever survives is never, ever the same.
Everyone I know who's passed through New Orleans as a tourist says the same thing--"It's fabulous! SO much fun!" whereas everyone I've ever known who's lived there has told me some version of "Yeah, it's got character, but there's fuckin' bugs everywhere, and it's hot and wet and rotting and smells bad, it's like the Third World down there once you get into it, really nasty, I could hardly wait to leave." New Orleans natives have described their home town to me the same way: a culture with no infrastructure to speak of, days numbered, running on fumes like Miss Pittypat and Miss Havisham: scratch the fragile baroque surface and find rot, like Versailles. They told me that New Orleans was an exoskeleton of Mardi Gras and music and gumbo and oyster po'boys and Jax beer and laissez les bontemps roulez! with nothing much inside. No safety net: you're on your own with the booze and the food and the women and the music because it all burned out long ago but left its husk behind.
So that's why, this time when the Universe turned on the firehose, the Big Easy and most of the Gulf Coast were gone with the wind. And the water.
Leaving only the poor and Fats Domino and Harry Connick Jr. behind. Ask yourself WWLAD?: What Would Louis Armstrong Do? and what would we do for him? HUH?
This isn't all I care about, about this. It's just all I can stand to think about.
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