“So, New Orleans is in a state of anarchy right now,” he said, in between bites of his BLT. “People are rioting, looting, stealing flat-screens and shit.”
“No kidding?” I responded, more interested in the
anarchy rather than New Orleans. I imagined babbling tourists in tawdry Mickey Mouse shirts fleeing while rioters torched Cinderella’s Castle. Police in riot gear were retreating, dropping their Plexiglas shields after failing to
hold the line, as bandanna-masked hooligans tossed flaming Molotovs into shattered storefronts.
It was my second year of college upstate, and I was absorbed in my own nocturnal world. The janitor, interrupting my fantasy of urban violence unto hapless Disney mascot, crept out of her little closet, her yellow bucket-on-wheels signaling that the cafeteria was due to close in about 15 minutes.
“Eh. What happened in Florida?” I asked innocently.
“Wha—what?” His eyes then shrunk to slivers as he smirked, gloating at a chance to one-up me. “You’ve got to wake up and smell the coffee. New Orleans isn’t in Florida. Well, it is, but… you know, the hurricane? It just hit New Orleans. In Louisiana.” As if on cue, the wet splash of the mop punctuated his statement.
I knew nothing of Katrina then, and even less of New Orleans. I had no television in my dorm room, and I got the most important news from Darren, the smug asshole in front of me. In my mind’s filing bin, I placed “Look into Hurricane Katrina” and “Research New Orleans” onto the “DO LATER” stack, where it would be forgotten for years to come. I guess now’s a good a time as any.
New Orleans, it would seem, is unique in that it was—well, it was unique in a lot of ways. After the switching of hands and shuffling of feet, New Orleans was passed back and forth between the French and the Spaniards, before it was ultimately sold to the United States. It was from this that determined the basis the city’s spirit—the changing controlled allowed for a more diverse population (French, Spanish, Creole, white, black, slaves and freemen alike) and different attitudes. Indeed, blood was diluted with the mixing of the races, and more notably, as Peirce F. Lewis puts it, “blacks have worked besides whites”; this was progressive at a time when the rest of the nation was still prodding at race relations like cavemen with fire.
History would not be as kind to New Orleans after this. When the blacks, who were arguably the most progressive in comparison to populations in other cities, tried to push for too many rights, tragedy beset them from then on. Though once a paradigm for race relations, New Orleans would become the beaker in which segregation is the catalyst, and less-than-humane compounds would be synthesized. Race relations, tolerable at best, went down a rocky path, and each bump along the way contributed to bruises in our nation’s history (such as
Plessey v. Ferguson,
Brown v. Board of Ed., white flight, housing projects, etcetera).
That etched out the foundation for New Orleans’s culture. Currently, New Orleans has the upper-class old money with blood that is “Bourbon-blue”; the tourists, who provide $5 billion to the city’s revenue; the shipping and oil industries, and the black underclass, which is romanticized for their music and dancing.
The geography, then, was manipulated to suit all four tiers. “Land” was dredged up from swamps for the two industries, and levees and pumps were built to drain parts of the Pontchartrain Lake so that suburbs could be built for refugees of white flight. The
Brown v. Board ruling ended segregation in schools but had the unintended consequence of alienating blue-collared whites and concentrating blacks within specific parishes and public housing project. The culling of blacks into these enclaves also lessens their chances of upward social mobility, and concentrates their masses into a pot of poverty and crime. In this way, New Orleans is just like the rest of America.
It was because of that, then, that led to the incredible oversight in the face of Katrina. According to Douglas Brinkley, New Orleans was a sinking bowl surrounded by levees that were rendered ineffective by the constant dredging of the oil companies. Money that was necessary towards the defense against the ire of Mother Nature was instead focused on the city’s failing public school system. With an elevation that is on average of six feet underwater, New Orleans is just one disaster away from being a soup bowl filled with “HAZMAT gumbo.”
That’s not to say the city isn't a stranger to disasters. New Orleans has a legacy of 300 years of flooding ever since it was founded by a Frenchman named Sieur de Bienville in 1718 to use as shipping port. Though he knew of the slumbering leviathans that are the Mississippi River and the Pontchartrain Lake, Bienville kept New Orleans where it was, for the sake of commerce. Since then, levee failures, floods, and hurricanes have wreaked havoc on the city and taken its toll on the residents. And while the physical aspects of and surrounding New Orleans is inevitably ineffective against Katrina, so too will be the people running the city. It’s safe to say that the top heads of New Orleans—- one Mayor Nagin and a Superintendent Compass—- dropped the ball when it came to the evacuation of the city in light of Katrina, which had just devastated Florida days before. They chose to side with the second tier—- tourists-— by delaying a mandatory evacuation to see if the storm would miss them. It didn't, and as a result, the fourth tier-— the underclass—- took the brunt of the hit.
But that’s for another time.
(Take that, Darren. You smug sonuvabitch.)
(As seen here, the levees of the West Bank are no match for a category 3 storm, such as Katrina)
(Note the 10' and 13' walls that shelter the city from Lake Pontchartrain.)
