CONSTANT SIEGE

And it starts again (never really stopped)

“3 years later and these refugees STILL haven’t found jobs? Let’s stop rebuilding the public housing in areas below sea-level and maybe then we won’t have to pay for people’s transportation to evacuate. Most people don’t need government-provided buses to escape a storm. If you can’t afford to pay for your own evacuation, you shouldn’t be allowed to live in a storm-prone area. There’s a lot of great wide-open land available in New Mexico and Arizona that doesn’t get hit by hurricanes, perhaps we could build a giant colony for all of those sucking on the udder of the public dole could go live in.” -SuperAcidJax, receiving 235 thumbs up, vs 128 thumbs down (on the Houston Chronicle website) for this little nugget of humanity.

“You live in the Quarter. The shotgun you live in dates back to pre-Victorian time. The bar down the street from you dates even further back, to when the French actually had the Quarter, and its popular mythology is that it was owned by the pirate Jean Lafitte, who fought with the Americans against the British in the Battle of New Orleans, on the Chalmette battlefield, just a few miles away.

You head out to do your laundry, which you do in a laundromat on Rampart that was formerly J&M studios, where Fats Domino recorded what is arguably the first rock and roll song ever recorded, The Fat Man, in which he references standing on the corner of Rampart and Canal, just a few blocks away. Across the street is Congo Square, where slaves used to gather on Sundays, and sing, and was the place jazz was born. Next to it is the site of Storyville, the former red light district, in whose brothels jazz came of age, and where both Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton learned their craft. Next to that is Basin Street. That’s where the Zulu parade goes every Mardi Gras, which once had Louis Armstrong as their king.

That’s three blocks of New Orleans. And it’s the most cursory look at it. I haven’t even detailed the St. Louis Cemetery nearby, which contains the bodies of many of the city’s founders, as well as that of voodoo queen Marie Laveau, and Easy Rider’s LSD freakout scene was shot there. That’s one more block. And we’re just circling the Quarter now. We haven’t headed along the Irish channel, or to the Garden District, or up towards the Lake, where there’s the spectacular City Park.

You gonna move that?

No. You build a wall around it and protect it, because it’s America, and you don’t let an American city fall because you couldn’t make it enough of a priority to divert a fraction of the money you’re spending on a useless war abroad to shore up the levees enough — in three years! — to make sure it would survive another hurricane. Because it wasn’t Katrina that flooded New Orleans last time. It was the levees. If the levees are sound, the city is sound.

It all depends on what we care about. And, for the last eight years, we haven’t cared enough about one of America’s most unique cities enough to protect it. The fact that the levees may not be strong enough to survive Gustav is an outrage, as in any talk of just giving up the city. Why would you throw away something that precious?” -Max Sparber (via)