Katrina, 4 Years Later

It has been four years since Hurricane Katrina, and I find myself grasping for words. Many good things have happened since the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast — and many not so good. If you were to go back to New Orleans now, you could travel quite a bit around town and never see a trace of the storm. Businesses and restaurants are open everywhere, schools are up and running, hospital emergency rooms bursting as usual. You have to go to the eastern part of town, to the area I used to live and practice in, to see the scars.

Where I used to live, St. Bernard Parish, about a quarter of the population is back. My old house was razed two years ago, and a year after that, we sold the bare slab to a neighbor.

The sad legacy of Katrina is that the poor of New Orleans, the inhabitants of the eastern side of the city, are the ones who have not been able to return. For New Orleans this a particularly grievous injury; I do not know of a city in America that has so consistently drawn from the creativity of its poorest citizens. Jazz, the jazz funeral, Mardi Gras Indians, much of the city’s unique cuisine, its folk art, even its manner of speaking come from the poor folk. It is an irony that New Orleans always sought to expand its middle and upper class, but it was the people who had nothing who gave the city the most.

(An example: in New Orleans, blue collar natives are sometimes called "Y'ats," a diminutive of a greeting originally used in the Lower Ninth ward and in St. Bernard. When two middle or lower class New Orleanians meet, one will say "Where y'at?" -- that is, "where are you at?" -- which means "how are you doing?" Though many people still greet each other this way, the orginal Y'ats now live in other cities.)

A year after the storm, I read New Orleans, Mon Amour, a book of essays by Andre Codrescu, a New Orleans immigrant who wrote movingly about the city in a series of audio essays on NPR in Katrina’s aftermath. In the book, Coudreseu said of these essays:

I wrote several radio reports and poetic essays after the Katrina apocalypse….They are not meant to signal the end of the city itself … but they are eulogies nonetheless, for something that was and will not be ever again, no matter how many commissions meet and how far the price of real estate soars. You can rebuild a house, but you can’t restore a soul.

When I first read those words I was unable to get my mind around them. It didn’t seem possible that the old city was truly gone. But it turned out to be true. Much of the city is back the way it was, but hidden parts of it, both physically and spiritually, are ruined and hidden from sight. As the city recovers it is reinventing itself, but it is not the place that it was. I am not sure I can explain the difference. I can only suggest that you read Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children by John Chase, a book written long before the storm, and then Condrescu’s elegaic Mon Amour and try to taste the subtle change in spirit.

New Orleans has always been a city buried in its past, so much so it was often hard to tell if time was moving forward. This was exasperating and endearing in equal portions. Now, the city has to look forward. Recovery demands that. As the people who live there turn their eyes towards the sun for the first time, they are creating a new city but at the same time are letting part of the old disappear.

The Islanos community of St. Bernard, the murky neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth, large swaths of stately dilapidated Mid City, the remnants of the Creoles of Color culture are all gone. And that’s that.

It will be all right. It has been all right, sort of. What saddens me, though, it that New Orleans always was, beneath the surface, an atypical American city. What is likely to happen is that the lost parts of the city will return as replicas of America elsewhere. Our country seems to be gradually homogenizing, and it is a tragedy that a little sliver of difference has become slightly more like the rest, all because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers can’t build a decent levee.

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It seems that BO's deceit does not limit itself to the heathcare debate. He has now changed his tune on the rebuilding of the New Orleans levees from what he promised on the campaign trail. Here is what he said on the campaign.....

Obama's Plan to Restore New Orleans
New York Times | August 25, 2007

By Jeff Zeleny

Washington -- On the cusp of the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Senator Barack Obama will present a plan on Sunday aimed at hastening the rebuilding of New Orleans and restructuring how the federal government responds to future catastrophes in America.

The Gulf Coast restoration, Mr. Obama said, has been weighed down by red tape that has kept billions of dollars from reaching Louisiana communities. As president, he said, he would streamline the bureaucracy, strengthen law enforcement to curb a rise in crime and immediately close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet in order to restore wetlands to protect against storms.

Mr. Obama also said that he would seek to lessen the influence of politics in the Federal Emergency Management Agency by giving its director a fixed term, similar to the structure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FEMA director would serve a six-year term, under Mr. Obama's plan, and report directly to the president.

Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, and several presidential hopefuls are scheduled to arrive in Louisiana this week to highlight how New Orleans has — and has not — recovered from Hurricane Katrina. Democrats have sought to use the city as an example of what they believe was among the Bush administration's greatest domestic failures

If elected, Mr. Obama said he would establish a Drug Enforcement Agency office in New Orleans that would be dedicated to stopping drug gangs across the region. He also would create a "COPS for Katrina” program, which would allow communities affected by the storm to hire more police officers and prosecutors to fight crime.

The city's recovery has been crippled by a shortage of doctors and the closures of hospitals and medical centers. Mr. Obama said he would create a program to forgive medical school loans in exchange for doctors agreeing to practice in New Orleans.

In his plan, Mr. Obama will call for creating a National Catastrophe Insurance Reserve, which would be paid for by private insurers contributing a portion of the premiums they collect from policy holders. Working with the industry before a disaster, he said, would create a "backstop” to protect homeowners and business owners against catastrophic loss.

Mr. Obama will also propose overhauling the levee and pumping system in New Orleans by 2011 to protect the city against a 100-year storm. To restore wetlands, marshes and barrier islands to help protect the city from a future storm, he pledges to close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, an old navigation channel that many scientists say destroyed wetlands and contributed to a funnel effect that increased damage from the storm.

Here is what he is DOING now....

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/08/28/shearer.new.orleans/index.html

Since the Obama administration took office, the Corps has: announced that one part of the new "system" will be built using a "technically not superior" solution, because of funding problems; and, DEFYING A CONGRESSIONAL MANDATE, delivered a report supposed to offer a post-2011 plan for so-called Category 5 storm protection 20 months late and lacking a specific plan, offering only a menu of possible options. It's almost as if the Corps is inviting someone else to do the job.

President Obama, who has mainly limited his comments about New Orleans to feel-good boilerplate, did pledge to make good on President Bush's promise on that eerie, floodlit night in a deserted Jackson Square in 2005, to rebuild New Orleans better and stronger. But he has yet to actively intervene to make sure New Orleans gets state-of-the-art flood protection and robust and timely coastal wetland reconstruction. Like President Bush, President Obama so far seems to be acting as if just saying it makes it so.

Is this the kind of "Change you can believe in"?