Katrina Update #65Katrina Update #65I have to admit, I have been putting off sending this week's update. Procrastenation came even easier than usual this week because we had no electricity Saturday morning (when I ususally sit down to write these updates). I am sure many of you are expecting a report on this year's Mardi Gras — which you richly deserve, and shall have. But with the arrival of what was to be the Mardi-Gras-to-end-all-Mardi Gras came a bit of personal angst so unpleasant that the thoughts that usually flow through so easily from my fingers to the keyboard are not to be found. (More about that later.)
I had already convinced myself there was other work to be done that was more urgent. The lack of electricity was a great excuse to tear apart my home office and make things more efficient. I had tons of work to do for MacSpeech. There were still things to clean up after Mardi Gras, etc. And then, last night, I got one of those emails:
I happened upon your family website while searching WebCam Central for New Orleans cams. (I linked to your page through a webcam for Coop's). Like a lot of other Americans, I'm curious about what is going on in New Orleans, as news on the subject seems to have dwindled. Anyway, I've just spent several hours reading, haven't even tapped into your links pages yet, and plan to return for updates.Your page, I think, is what New Orleans is about...its people. That sense of belonging somewhere.
Because I'm currently in a transition place in my life, I've thought about heading to New Orleans to help how ever I can. Because I'm unemployed with bills, though, it's lack of money that keeps me where I am. But reading your site has helped me appreciate the roof over my head, the old and dented saucepans I cook in, and every other "thing" I have. It also helps me appreciate the few good friends I have...even though they are several thousand miles away.
Thanks again for sharing everything on your website.
Lori in Alaska
Perspective is a great thing. And, once again, like Earl Hickey on My Name Is Earl, I find myself unwilling to tempt Karma to cause any additional trama in my life, so Karma wins again. Thanks, Lori.
Mardi Gras weekend brought frequent web site reader Karl, and his friends Jay and Matt to our little stop by the parade route. He even brought Abita Restoration ale (and earned those highly prized cut privileges for the bathroom). It's always great to meet new people and meeting Karl, Jay, and Matt is no exception. And congratulations to Karl on his upcoming nuptuals!
While last Saturday's Endymion parade was postponed until Sunday due to rain, the rest of the Mardi Gras enjoyed weather that couldn't have been better. Highs in the 60's and 70's with no rain from Sunday through Tuesday. Endymion had already been forced, due to the consolidation of this year's parade routes, to roll down St. Charles Avenue, but moving to Sunday meant it rolled right after Bacchus. This was the first — and maybe the only — time in the history of Mardi Gras these two super parades ran one after the other on the St. Charles "Uptown" route. We had a house full! In addition to our "Coop" family, Jim and Helen Eiseman were down from Louisville and joined us as well. It was great to see them!
Monday brought the newest super parade, Orpheus, which was started by Harry Connick, Jr. the year after he reigned as Bacchus XXV the year of his 25th birthday.
We spent Fat Tuesday at home uptown, with many friends stopping by to get a bowl of Janis' famous Red Beans & Rice. Rex rolled as usual, and although the truck parades were shorter, the throws have never been more generous. During the day Tuesday, the Krewe of Woo Hoo marched through the French Quarter. Member David Andrews took plenty of pictures. Here are a few of them:
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You can see the rest of Dave's pictures here (you may need to sign up for the free registration to the Snapfish site). (Thanks, Dave, for sending me the link!)
The following item appeared in my Google News alerts about New Orleans this past week. It is from The Miami Herald:
New Orleans Too Greedy
Why should I care if New Orleans celebrated Mardi Gras or not? I suspect that most people will buy into the view that New Orleans needed Mardi Gras to begin to heal from Hurricane Katrina's wounds.
So six months after people have been blaming the Bush administration for mishandling the catastrophe, blaming FEMA for incompetence and spending $140 million dollars to repair the Superdome -- while 207,000 homes in city and surrounding area are still waiting to be repaired -- I have no doubt that Mayor Ray Nagin is going to call on FEMA to send money to help the city clean up after Mardi Gras.
The country's values are rapidly eroding, and the forces of evil are getting a foothold.
MAURICIO J. BEHAR, Miami Lakes, FL
The above sort of encapsulates what who are not from New Orleans — or who have never been here — may feel. "How dare they celebrate! Why should we support rebuilding New Orleans when they waste money on a party?"
Well, Mauricio, it speaks to the resiliency of human beings. People whose sensibilities have been shocked, as so many have in the Gulf South, need a respid. They need a way to release the frustration and despair in ways that are not harmful to others. New Orleans isn't greedy. Mardi Gras cost the city nothing (it is more than paid for by the increased tax revenues). In Update #54 I talked about how any city that has experienced such an overwhelming catastrophe would need to get their #1 industry going first. I'll say it again: In New Orleans, the #1 industry is tourism, and the #1 tourism event is Mardi Gras. For that reason alone, Mardi Gras had to happen.
The Krewe of Muses donated $50,000 to the New Orleans police department, which meant their particular parade cost the city absolutely nothing. The Krewe of Rex spent all day Saturday cleaning the CBD, because the city's workforce for cleaning up after Mardi Gras is significantly less than last year. Not one tax dollar is spent to build a float, sew a costume, or buy stuff to throw — that all comes directly out of the pockets of the krewe members. Some of those members lost everything, yet they chose to spend their money on making Mardi Gras happen. I stress their money because they have to produce receipts for FEMA money, and their insurance money is probably tied to their mortgage holder).
One more time: this Mardi Gras is about getting the city on its feet again; about bringing badly needed tourism dollars back to the city, and about giving a jump start to the city's number one industry. But another person who has also adopted New Orleans as his home, definitely said it better than I ever could:
By Andrei Codrescu
(Andrei Codrescu's latest book is "New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City.")
OUTSIDERS DON'T understand Mardi Gras. When I told a friend from Massachusetts that we should take Mardi Gras to Washington to protest the flood of ineptitude that ruined New Orleans, she didn't get how truly outrageous that would be. She thought, like every TV-watching American, that Mardi Gras was just one day of the year when drunks parade down Bourbon Street hurling plastic beads at each other. Nor did she fully understand the nature of our catastrophe, the worst of which was not Hurricane Katrina but the flooding of the city through breached levees built by the federal government.
Mardi Gras is not just one day, it's a season that begins visibly after New Year's with social events that move from discreet to vivid until Mardi Gras day explodes, as Carnival ends and Lent begins. There are secret balls to decide the parade themes, sumptuous gatherings to elect royalty, masked balls to choose the courts, lavish dinners to honor newly minted kings and queens.
In Mardi Gras' 400-year history, the societies that ruled the krewes and parades were the same power brokers that ruled New Orleans. The festival itself, imported from medieval Europe, was a mechanism for letting out the true feelings, the frustrations of the populace. On Mardi Gras day, mobs rule the streets, and the rulers are obliged to shower the unleashed masses with gifts.
Carnival is essentially satirical, depicting folly, vanity and the vices, all the usually hidden flaws of humans who, it is hoped, will know better by Ash Wednesday, when they kneel before a priest and have a cross of ashes smeared on their penitent foreheads. "Carnival" derives from the Latin "carne vale," or "so goes the flesh." All human pleasure is temporary, but in what time remains the flesh is indulged.
In recent years, Carnival societies have become more political. Their satirical barbs have been directed at city and state officials, national leaders and world figures. The most daring parade, the Krewe du Vieux, which marches through the French Quarter, takes no prisoners. After 9/11, its giant effigy of Osama bin Laden sodomized by a U.S missile floated past cheering crowds. There were hundreds of "ghosts" wearing gas "masques." The Krewe du Vieux newsletter seethed with a kind of pamphletary zeal unseen since Thomas Paine.
This year, the same krewe put our profound anxiety and distress on display: Hundreds dressed as taped-up refrigerators marched in frigid weather; two enormous nude figures named Katrina and Rita, one black, one white, had explicit sex atop a float; a sea of FEMA blue tarps flapped in the wind from balconies, on floats, as capes on marchers. A sign proclaimed "Take us back, Chirac!" The blue tarp is the new flag of New Orleans, and the desire to return Louisiana to France is heard often, only half-facetiously.
Mardi Gras reveals New Orleanians to themselves: it's a spectacle and a portrait that is often brutal, and it would be downright intolerable without the liberal indulgence in the vices of the flesh that allow us to forget, forgive and move on.
Mardi Gras is also the only time when this city of intensely parochial neighborhoods comes together and displays its arts. Hundreds of years of dedication to spectacle have produced some profound talent. The high school marching bands of New Orleans are coached from within a tradition unknown elsewhere. In our nation of engineers, New Orleans is the province of artists.
This year there are few marching bands left in the city. The few functioning schools have been incorporated as "charter schools" that measure performance by "leap tests" and other abstractions devised elsewhere; they get no credit for the teaching of music and the arts. In a city were music is the transracial soul glue, this omission is unforgivable.
The city's psyche has been deeply wounded, and music, its medicine, is in exile. A number of musicians have returned from far-flung cities for this unique Mardi Gras, but for how long? Most of their houses were in the Lower 9th Ward and the parts of Treme and Midcity that were flooded.
This year, we need as much and as intense a Mardi Gras as we can muster to prove to ourselves that we still exist. It is the necessary beginning of our healing. We welcome tourists, but this Carnival is for those of us who are still in place. The national media, enamored of its Mardi Gras cliches, should pay special attention to the real Carnival's messages this year. Mardi Gras was never just spring break with drunken college students on Bourbon Street. But this year in particular, it's a different, more significant and more dangerous spectacle. Our very existence hangs in limbo. This may be our last party, if it isn't already a wake.
And this brings me to my own personal unpleasantness, that I feel compelled to at least summarize for you. This year's Mardi Gras was, for me, to be a time when I could let go of my daily responsibilities, let go of trying to educate the world (or at least the small part of it that I touch) about the plight of New Orleans, and just enjoy the company of friends old and new in a festive atmosphere. Everything was going well until Saturday night. Sometimes, I guess the planets just line up a certain way, and people behave in ways beyond their control, and, when we look back, we really can't explain how it happened.
The details are unimportant, but for you to understand the chain of events, I need to at least provide some background information. As you may remember from last week's update, our friends Dan and Bonnie Cruz, and Kenzi Schubert arrived the Friday before Mardi Gras from Wisconsin. Kenzi is on a variety of medications because of his kidney transplant. Among them are steroids, which many of you may know, can cause agressive behavior. Well, Kenzi got a little upset at a couple of things during the day on Saturday, no big deal, but when something gets stuck in your craw, well…
Anyway, Kenzi and Bonnie got into a knock-down, drag-out shouting match, the likes of which I have rarely seen. This started a chain reaction. Dan woke up, Bonnie is crying hysterically; I'm trying to calm Kenzi down; Janis woke up and is going between upstairs and downstairs. She eventually can't take it anymore, gets in the Jeep and heads to Coop's Place. I call Cary and ask him to come home. He goes into Coop's, sees Janis and gets some idea of what is going on. Meanwhile, Dan decides the best thing for him to do is to take Bonnie and leave – at 3AM, for a 16 hour drive, after just arriving here the day before.
It is after 3AM and I am livid. More angry than I have been at anything for over 20 years. I am almost out of control myself that these people would be so selfish to ruin my Mardi Gras. (I didn't even realize until then how important it was to me!) So I ripped down all the Mardi Gras decorations — the lights, banners, Maker's Mark bottles — and declared Mardi Gras over. Kenzi rented a car and left on Sunday evening.
Karma had other ideas, of course. No thunder clouds formed, no edict from on high came down proclaiming Mardi Gras to be over, and, to be honest, no one down here really gave a damn that Kenzi, Dan and Bonnie had gone home. But I did. We had purchased a lot of food and we played the perfect hosts. And truth be told, it was a blast. Plenty of people did stop by, tell us how great the food was, brought beer and ice, and all had a great time. My only regret is that I wasn't able to muster enough party spirit to go down to the parade route and see Bacchus and Endymion back-to-back for the first (and possibly last) time ever. I missed the rest of the parades, too. I came close to going to Rex, but I just couldn't do it. My friends, whom I had looked forward to having visit so much, weren't there and that would be where I would notice their absence most.
As for what happened, I don't blame Kenzi or Bonnie. I really don't. Stuff happens. And sometimes you just can't help it. I do hold Dan responsible for making my Mardi Gras less than it should have been however. All he had to do was just allow me to put everyone to bed. After a good night's sleep and a little more Mardi Gras, everything would have been OK. I am sure of it.
So here's the deal (since I know they will read this): they have issues with each other, not me. Dan and Kenzi have been friends since high school. They can make nothing up to me without first making things right between themselves. What matters to me most now is that they figure out how to not make this happen ever again. If that means some kind of doctor-prescribed medication to bolster their coping mechanism, then so be it. Once that happens, they can start figuring out how to make things right with me. Not before.
- In order to get elected to public office you must first qualify by presenting certain documentation such as proof of citizenship and residency, and a petition showing a significant number of people would like you to run for office. That qualifying happened last week. At this point, 23 people have declared their candancy for the office of Mayor or New Orleans. Many are worried that having that many people running will send the wrong message to the rest of the country: that we still can't agree on anything. I think quite the opposite is true. What all these people are agreeing on is that the current administration isn't doing enough to bring New Orleans back. The problem is, I am not sure any of these candidates will truly do any better once they get in office. One candidate, Rob Couhig — a lawyer whose main claim to fame seems to be failed runs for a congressional seat, and being responsible for moving the New Orleans Zephyrs baseball team from Denver — says in advertising already being aired that if elected, City Hall will be start to be open 24 hours a day within 1 hour of his being sworn in. I can't help but think how does that work? What is he going to do, pay for the additional workers with his own money? Or perhaps he will pull people from other jobs in the city. Of all the things New Orleans needs, having City Hall open 24 hours a day is not one of them. Of course, I could be wrong.
- Johnny Adriani has qualified as well (you can read more about him in Update #63). I am honored to be listed on Johnny Adriani's thank you page, and Johnny Adriani even quoted my idea regarding how the government should pay for displaced people to come and collect their stuff on his policy pages. I may even vote for Johnny Adriani, although my main concern is the same as with most of the candidates: if elected, how do they execute their campaign platform without the necessary clout and banked politcal capital at their disposal? You can't exactly shoot and ask questions later when you are the mayor of a city. Johnny Adriani is a long shot, (although not as long as some… keep reading), but I promised Johnny Adriani I'd give "Johnny Adriani" a few mentions to help increase Johnny Adriani's "Google" rating. You can view Johnny Adriani's web site here.<grin>
Is it just me, or does the picture of Johnny Adriani look a little like Richard Hatch's Tom Zarek character on Sci-Fi's Battlestar Galactica? Check it out! You be the judge:
Johnny Adriani (left), Richard Hatch (right)
- Perhaps the most bizzare entry into the mayor's race is current Clerk of Criminal Court Kimberly Williamson Butler. "Kimbo," as she is referred to locally, came into the public spotlight just after Mayor Ray Nagin was elected in 2002. She served as his "Chief Administrative Officer" (CAO) until being fired because she couldn't figure out how to get along with the rest of his inner circle. Shortly after being fired, she was elected Clerk of Criminal Courts, largely because of name recognition, and probably a little bit of sympathy voting. In that role, it was her responsibility (among other things) to make sure the voting machines get to the polling places on time, a task at which she failed miserably the first time out, just after Hurricane Ivan, and decided to blame the moving company, the secretary of state, and even Nagin (who had absolutely nothing to do with the deployment of voting machines).
She had her minions do her qualifying for her while she was — get this — on the lam, avoiding an arrest warrant because she refused to comply with an order from the Louisiana Supreme Court that she have a surrogate negotiate the clean up of the court's flooded evidence and record rooms. She initially thought it was a great idea until the courts announced the surrogate would be her predecessor, at which point she called the order illegal and went into hiding. The only reason she might get more votes than me in this election is the fact that I am not running. Nonetheless, I am grateful for her willingness to keep the spirit of Louisiana politics alive and kicking. You can read more about her escapades in the following Times-Picayune article: Is Earl Long Whispering In Clerk's Ear?
- There are mutterings of progress on the recovery front, as larger developers eye opportunity in New Orleans. The biggest news is that the Port of New Orleans just signed an agreement to open up four miles of riverfront property for development, replacing wharves that were there. The deal includes a one mile stretch that will become a park. You can read more about the plan on the Times Magazine web site.
- Of course the big news this week was the fact that Bush 2 was told about the very real possibility the levees would fail well before they did. This past week, a video surfaced of a briefing between Bush 2 (while at his ranch in Crawford, TX), FEMA, and the National Weather Service's hurricane experts. The reaction down here was <yawn>. It is pretty apparent to anyone down here — even some of the more staunch republicans — that Bush 2 failed Louisiana miserably. Notice I didn't say that Bush 2 "knew" the levees might fail. I said he was told. After seeing the video, it is clear that Bush 2 could no more know the levees might fail than a mosquito knows it might get swatted. Like the pesky mosquito, Bush 2 tends to have great talent at getting out of the way when people try to slap him.
The one thing I did get out of the video was something I suspected all along: that former FEMA head Michael Brown actually did have a pretty good handle on the situation but was hamstrung by those above him. Don't get me wrong here: I am not suggesting he was doing a great job. I am just saying he was doing the best job he could under the circumstances. Here's my take: if you or I were approached by someone and told we were being offered $200,000 per year to run FEMA, we would probably say "I'll do the best job I can," and that's what he did. It is wrong of us to expect more of him. But it is not wrong of us to want our elected officials to put people in those positions that know what they are doing. That's what Clinton did. He put his Emergency Management advisor from Arkansas in charge of FEMA and made it a responsible, well-run government agency. Bush 2 did what his daddy did: used FEMA to provide payback for favors done during the campaign.
In related news, there is some gossip on the conservative web sites that Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff may be on his way out. Good news? Maybe, as long as his replacement isn't Krusty the Klown (who actually has the time now that he failed to qualify for the New Orleans' mayor's race), or somone equally inept.
- In closing, take a look at this very well-balanced article about this past Mardi Gras in the Washington Post.
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