Pass the Whiskey, Please

Ugh. I really wasn't expecting the confirmation of John Roberts as C.J. to leave me feeling so profoundly bummed out. As I watched images of his swearing in pop-up on my computer screen yesterday, waves of nausea overtook me. Be afraid!! Be very, very afraid!! Is it just me, or are these surreal and terrifying times that we are living in? Right now, I only wish that I had some wise, old (and I mean OLD) friend or grandparent in my life- someone who had lived through some seriously heavy s--t - to assure me that society is self-correcting, and that some day soon the pendulum will start to swing in the other direction. SIGH.

On a happy note, last night we played some nice loud music with cousin El in our new living room ('bout time we broke it in). As my wise hubby likes to say, times like these are the reason why God invented rock and roll. The throat's a little scratchy this AM, but it feels good.

As Shakey says, we gotta keep on rockin' in the free world. (We are still free, aren't we?)

Let's Hear it for Harry

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, there is a lot to be thinking about. Heaviness abounds surrounding our nation's Supreme Court, though it's hard to pay attention when Mother Nature is cooking up another Category 4 hurricane off the Gulf Coast.

Still, my heart lept when I saw just now that Harry Reid, that maverick from Nevada, has announced he will be voting to oppose the confirmation of John Roberts as the next Chief Justice. Harry is the kind of politician who actually makes me believe in politics. As far as I am concerned, he has made all the right moves since he became the top-ranking Democrat. I can't even believe I was sad for a minute when Daschle got bounced.

The Brownie Man

Some of the profound grief and sadness following Katrina's devastation has begun to lift. We have received word that Jazz Fest '06 is a go. We are SO there. (We should really all be planning trips to The Big Easy, to help jump-start the local economy.)

But the in the mean time, my mind continues to fill with images of characters with whom I crossed paths while living in the Crescent City. So I had to take a minute and pay hommage to "The Brownie Man." The Brownie Man, as he called himself, used to call the PJ's Coffee on Maple Street (where I worked) on a regular basis and inquire after our brownie supply.

"How miny caw-nuhs you got? How miny inz you got,?" he would want to know. (He had a decided preference for the corners and the ends from the brownie pan, which we would set aside for him upon his request.)

The Brownie Man played his trumpet outside of Cafe duMonde in the French Quarter, and for all I know, he lived off of the dollars and change which tourists tossed into his open trumpet case. I can only hope that The Brownie Man is safe and well, and out of harm's way. Who knows? Maybe he hit it big sometime back in the late '90's and is living in high style on Chicago's Gold Coast? Better yet, maybe I will see him back at his post on Decatur Street when I make my next trip back.

The Eloquence of Anne Rice

I am still relying on others to express a lot of the things I have been thinking and feeling about the devastation of New Orleans. Mostly because I have yet to figure out a way to capture in words what the city means to me in my heart. One of these days I will comb through my journals and writings from my time living there, and my subsequent return visits, and try to use some of my own words - however inadequate they may be.

In the mean time, Anne Rice has said so much so beautifully in today's New York Times. I always thought of her as a writer of campy vampire novels, but here she shows us a depth of insight and sensitivity that caught me quite off guard.

September 4, 2005
Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?
By ANNE RICELa Jolla, Calif.

WHAT do people really know about New Orleans?

Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land?

The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together their work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners, skilled laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves lived on their own in the city, too, making a living at various jobs, and sending home a few dollars to their owners in the country at the end of the month.
This is not to diminish the horror of the slave market in the middle of the famous St. Louis Hotel, or the injustice of the slave labor on plantations from one end of the state to the other. It is merely to say that it was never all "have or have not" in this strange and beautiful city.
Later in the 19th century, as the Irish immigrants poured in by the thousands, filling the holds of ships that had emptied their cargoes of cotton in Liverpool, and as the German and Italian immigrants soon followed, a vital and complex culture emerged. Huge churches went up to serve the great faith of the city's European-born Catholics; convents and schools and orphanages were built for the newly arrived and the struggling; the city expanded in all directions with new neighborhoods of large, graceful houses, or areas of more humble cottages, even the smallest of which, with their floor-length shutters and deep-pitched roofs, possessed an undeniable Caribbean charm.

Through this all, black culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact, New Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to this day.

The influence of blacks on the music of the city and the nation is too immense and too well known to be described. It was black musicians coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the city "the Big Easy" because it was a place where they could always find a job. But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.

Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy.

Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries; they didn't want to leave families whose rounds of weddings, births and funerals had become the fabric of their lives. They didn't want to leave a city where tolerance had always been able to outweigh prejudice, where patience had always been able to outweigh rage. They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs.

And so New Orleans prospered, slowly, unevenly, but surely - home to Protestants and Catholics, including the Irish parading through the old neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day as they hand out cabbages and potatoes and onions to the eager crowds; including the Italians, with their lavish St. Joseph's altars spread out with cakes and cookies in homes and restaurants and churches every March; including the uptown traditionalists who seek to preserve the peace and beauty of the Garden District; including the Germans with their clubs and traditions; including the black population playing an ever increasing role in the city's civic affairs.
Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn't do. Nature has done what the labor riots of the 1920's couldn't do. Nature had done what "modern life" with its relentless pursuit of efficiency couldn't do. It has done what racism couldn't do, and what segregation couldn't do either. Nature has laid the city waste - with a scope that brings to mind the end of Pompeii.

I share this history for a reason - and to answer questions that have arisen these last few days. Almost as soon as the cameras began panning over the rooftops, and the helicopters began chopping free those trapped in their attics, a chorus of voices rose. "Why didn't they leave?" people asked both on and off camera. "Why did they stay there when they knew a storm was coming?" One reporter even asked me, "Why do people live in such a place?"

Then as conditions became unbearable, the looters took to the streets. Windows were smashed, jewelry snatched, stores broken open, water and food and televisions carried out by fierce and uninhibited crowds.

Now the voices grew even louder. How could these thieves loot and pillage in a time of such crisis? How could people shoot one another? Because the faces of those drowning and the faces of those looting were largely black faces, race came into the picture. What kind of people are these, the people of New Orleans, who stay in a city about to be flooded, and then turn on one another?

Well, here's an answer. Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do - they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn.

What's more, thousands more who could have left stayed behind to help others. They went out in the helicopters and pulled the survivors off rooftops; they went through the flooded streets in their boats trying to gather those they could find. Meanwhile, city officials tried desperately to alleviate the worsening conditions in the Superdome, while makeshift shelters and hotels and hospitals struggled.

And where was everyone else during all this? Oh, help is coming, New Orleans was told. We are a rich country. Congress is acting. Someone will come to stop the looting and care for the refugees.

And it's true: eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid? Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life for so long? That's my question.

I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance.
They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.

Anne Rice is the author of the forthcoming novel "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections

Watch Your Mouth, Please, Dennis

Better choose your words a little more carefully from here on out, Dennis. There are an awful lot of people who feel pretty #*@!-ing strongly about New Orleans and will not stand to see her abandoned. She survived for 300 years, didn't she? She will be rebuilt, no matter how long it takes, and she will be stronger than ever.

We Can't Look Away

The horror keeps mounting. We all are seeing it unfold. One thing we cannot escape is the reality that most of the victims of this disaster are the people who had the least to begin with. This really is a tragic comment on the condition of our society and the intractability of racism.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES TODAY:

September 2, 2005
From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy
By DAVID GONZALEZ
The scenes of floating corpses, scavengers fighting for food and desperate throngs seeking any way out of New Orleans have been tragic enough. But for many African-American leaders, there is a growing outrage that many of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy were people who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society.
The victims, they note, were largely black and poor, those who toiled in the background of the tourist havens, living in tumbledown neighborhoods that were long known to be vulnerable to disaster if the levees failed. Without so much as a car or bus fare to escape ahead of time, they found themselves left behind by a failure to plan for their rescue should the dreaded day ever arrive.
"If you know that terror is approaching in terms of hurricanes, and you've already seen the damage they've done in Florida and elsewhere, what in God's name were you thinking?" said the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. "I think a lot of it has to do with race and class. The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people."
In the days since neighborhoods and towns along the Gulf Coast were wiped out by the winds and water, there has been a growing sense that race and class are the unspoken markers of who got out and who got stuck. Just as in developing countries where the failures of rural development policies become glaringly clear at times of natural disasters like floods or drought, many national leaders said, some of the United States' poorest cities have been left vulnerable by federal policies.
"No one would have checked on a lot of the black people in these parishes while the sun shined," said Mayor Milton D. Tutwiler of Winstonville, Miss. "So am I surprised that no one has come to help us now? No."
The subject is roiling black-oriented Web sites and message boards, and many black officials say it is a prime subject of conversation around the country. Some African-Americans have described the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina as "our tsunami," while noting that there has yet to be a response equal to that which followed the Asian tragedy.
Roosevelt F. Dorn, the mayor of Inglewood, Calif., and the president of the National Association of Black Mayors, said relief and rescue officials needed to act faster.
"I have a list of black mayors in Mississippi and Alabama who are crying out for help," Mr. Dorn said. "Their cities are gone and they are in despair. And no one has answered their cries."
The Rev. Jesse Jackson said cities had been dismissed by the Bush administration because Mr. Bush received few urban votes.
"Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response," Mr. Jackson said, after meeting with Louisiana officials yesterday. "I'm not saying that myself, but what's self-evident is that you have many poor people without a way out."
In New Orleans, the disaster's impact underscores the intersection of race and class in a city where fully two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter of the city lives in poverty. In the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, which was inundated by the floodwaters, more than 98 percent of the residents are black and more than a third live in poverty.
Spencer R. Crew, president and chief executive officer of the national Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, said the aftermath of the hurricane would force people to confront inequality.
"Most cities have a hidden or not always talked about poor population, black and white, and most of the time we look past them," Dr. Crew said. "This is a moment in time when we can't look past them. Their plight is coming to the forefront now. They were the ones less able to hop in a car and less able to drive off."
That disparity has been criticized as a "disgrace" by Charles B. Rangel, the senior Democratic congressman from New York City, who said it was made all the worse by the failure of government officials to have planned.
"I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence, Mr. Rangel said, adding that the danger to the levees was clear.
"I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich," he said.
Outside Brooklyn Law School yesterday, a man selling recordings of famous African-Americans was upset at the failure to have prepared for the worst. The man, who said his name was Muhammad Ali, drew a damning conclusion about the failure to protect New Orleans.
"Blacks ain't worth it," he said. "New Orleans is a hopeless case."
Among the messages and essays circulating in cyberspace that lament the lost lives and missed opportunities is one by Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx.
"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?" Mr. Naison wrote. "If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions."
That sentiment was shared by members of other minority groups who understand the bizarre equality of poverty.
"We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-handed, as somehow random," said Martín Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts and poet of a decidedly leftist political bent who is Puerto Rican. "Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It's dangerous to be poor. It's dangerous to be black. It's dangerous to be Latino."
This Sunday there will be prayers. In pews from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast, the faithful will come together and pray for those who lived and those who died. They will seek to understand something that has yet to be fully comprehended.
Some may talk of a divine hand behind all of this. But others have already noted the absence of a human one.
"Everything is God's will," said Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. "But there's a certain amount of common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare for certain things."
That means, Mr. Steele said, not waiting until the eve of crisis.
"Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor," he said. "So it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It's as simple as that."
Contributing reporting from New York for this article were Andy Newman, William Yardley, Jonathan P. Hicks, Patrick D. Healy, Diane Cardwell, Anemona Hartocollis, Ronald Smothers, Jeff Leeds, Manny Fernandez and Colin Moynihan. Also contributing were Michael Cooper in Albany, Gretchen Ruethling in Chicago, Brenda Goodman in Atlanta and Carolyn Marshall in San Francisco.

A Little Humanity, Please

This editorial appeared in the Times today. I am posting it here in full because I think it captures so much of what has been missing from W's response to this catastrophe. And because linking to the Times site has become particularly difficult for non-subscribers. Check out their thoughts:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end

We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.
Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.
While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?
It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America "will be a stronger place" for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal.