Nothing Can Prepare You
All the dramatic rhetoric, righteous anger, extravagant allegory, profligate tears, and urgent broadcasts of need have not been wasted. If some well-intentioned money has been squandered in a vortex of government and charity bureaucracy, all the love, prayer, intention, direct action, and indignation could not be better spent than on saving this amazing spiritual and cultural homeland.
Seeing this city offers the working definition of urban decimation and burns a hole in the heart.
On a driving tour of the devastation, desolation, and desperation, we saw: a patchwork of blue tarps decorating rooftops (Andrei Codrescu called the blue tarp the “new flag of New Orleans”); putrid piles of rotting refuse from houses recently gutted in a city that locals assure me is much cleaner than it was a few months ago; destroyed houses, many with the intimate remains of people’s lives—from personal photos to children’s toys—still littering the floors and walls; squatters’ tent cities taking up space near what was once a public golf course; the ubiquitous clusters of white FEMA trailers, both in parks and in front of still uninhabitable homes; the ominous brown lines marking how high on the houses the floodwaters rose; and just as distressing as the water lines, the startling spraypainted messages, often adjacent to the insignia of resignation, an “X” left by search and rescue teams, noting when a house was searched and whether any bodies were found.
In a brief survey of this revered and rebellious residence of
Like a trump card from the Tarot decks of Voodoo Alley and
Certainly, writers and critics with a larger audience than me have recently visited
Nothing cancels Mardi Gras, as one billboard selling booze reminded us. And I’m grateful that the sensual and defiant gravity of the holiday hooked me to get down south.
Nothing cancels Mardi Gras, yes. But that’s not all. Nothing can prepare you for