In our little boat (which I have now christened
Calypso II
) we travel underneath the Crescent City Connection, a so-called pick-up point for stranded souls. Except nobody seems to be picking up anybody else. Instead, people are camped out on top of the bridge that spans the Mississippi River, with no water or food, praying for salvation. Dead bodies lay covered on the road shoulder. Angry looters shoot at helicopters as they pass overhead. Suddenly a man calls out, “We going to stay here, or we going to walk out of this hell?”
“Today is the day we walk!” somebody else answers.
“We is all walking to Gretna!” announces another.
The crowd begins to move en mass, but soldiers with guns meet them at the far end of the bridge. “Nobody leaves Orleans Parish!” the refugees are told at gunpoint.
Apparently in America we can no longer traverse American soil at will. Indeed, who are these soldiers, and what reason might they have for stopping the lawful movement of free people?
Most locations within the city have no power, but here we are able to hear the voice of Mayor C. Ray Nagin on a small battery-powered radio held aloft by a man whose head is sticking out of a hole in his roof.
“The first levee breach was at Florida Avenue,” the mayor explains. “Shortly thereafter, the levees at 17
th
Avenue and London Avenue broke as well, sending water pouring into St. Bernard’s Parish and the 9
th
Ward. People ask me what I need. I need reinforcements. I need troops. I need five hundred buses. They talk about bringing in school buses from other cities and towns in Louisiana. This is bullshit! Pardon my French. What needs to happen is for every single Greyhound bus in the entire country to get their ass movin' to
The Big Easy
!”
At the Louis Armstrong International Airport, we disembark (knowing full well that our boat will probably be gone when we return) to find utter chaos. Entering the terminal, we encounter police—a task force called the ‘Ice Unit’—operating a weapons collection depository. “Leave your guns and knives here,” they tell us. “No questions asked.”
“I ain’t got no gun,” the woman in front of us tells the officer.
“Are you carrying any illegal drugs?” she asks her.
“You serious, bitch?” she retorts.
We clear the initial security barrier and make our way through a throng of as many as eight thousand people—each one trying to get out of the city. We step over countless listless bodies lying upon rumpled blankets, or upon the dirty tile floor. Hope seems to be lost; only resignation remains. Outside, military transport planes arrive to further displace the already displaced, and hundreds file up the steps and onto the planes, all their worldly possessions in their arms, not having a clue where they will be taken.
Upstairs, we find the medical triage area, where thousands of sick and injured are tended to with the most remedial care imaginable. Some have been waiting here for days, sleeping on the floor amidst piles of garbage and overflowing dumpsters, hoping for air transportation out of the disaster zone, while more arrive by the hour. A distraught woman tells us that her elderly mother has been transported to Utah, while her four-year-old boy was evacuated to San Antonio. She did not know if she would ever see either of them again. “Why do they separate families?” she asks helplessly. “Why did they take my mama to North Dakota and my little boy to San Antonio? How am I going get them back? How!!!”
In fact, more than one million people have been scattered like dandelion seeds in the wind over forty-nine of the fifty states in the American Union. They are called ‘refugees’. Imagine that! Bayou Creature drops his head at the reference. Meanwhile, George W. Bush is speaking from Jackson Square: “There’s no way to imagine America without New Orleans,” he proclaims. Singer Harry Belafonte responds, “New Orleans is seventy per cent African American, and the roots run deep. Families have lived here for generations. Without Black culture, New Orleans is just a bad version of Disneyland. No Blacks, no culture.” In an NBC studio in New York, Kanye West is instructed to just ‘read the teleprompter’, but Kanye has other ideas. “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people!” he says out of turn while Mike Meyers looks on. Meyers is rendered speechless. Knowing he is live on camera, he tries to answer. He babbles like a baby. Finally, he can only say, “It is what it is…”
And in Congo Square (the very location where American jazz was born: the one and only place where American slaves were allowed to play African drums and rhythms) the Hot 8 Jazz Band (with Charlie ‘Bayou Creature’ Collins on the big bass drum) plays a funeral dirge to a dead dog hanging out of an open window. “How do I make you understand nothin'?” he asks. He begins to weep for his vanished city, his despoiled home.
On our way to St. Vincent de Paul Cemetery, we round the curve of the Mississippi River that is called, ‘The Big Easy’. Willie ‘Wordsworth’ Greene recites a poem he has recently written: “New Orleans: Paris of the Deep South: No More”.
Finally, we talk with Mayor C. Ray Nagin himself: “Sure there was violence. Sure there was looting. Some of the looters was takin' stuff for survival: water, food, clothing, medicine; others were carryin' off TVs and air conditioners and iPods and whatever else they could grab. The ones looting for survival, you can excuse that. The others will be brought to justice: if not by the police and the courts, then by the Almighty. And it’s important that everybody out there in America knows that the reason the National Guard finally—finally!—arrived was not to help the people evacuate the city, but rather to protect businesses against looters and violence.
“And it’s also important for everybody out there in America to know the truth about New Orleans before Katrina struck, and before the levees broke and the city flooded. It’s important for them to know that New Orleans has one of the worst education systems in the entire country, that New Orleans schools have a sixty per cent dropout rate, that nine out of every sixteen schools are themselves classified as ‘failures’, that the superintendent and the principals have had to invite the FBI into the schools for security, that the poverty rate in Orleans Parish is double that of any other American city. Why? One reason only: New Orleans is seventy per cent African American. And the Federal Government don’t care about us—not even enough to save our sorry asses during the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history.
“So now I’m probably fucked for good. My political career is probably over. Maybe I’ll even turn up dead under mysterious circumstances. But somebody’s got to say it; somebody’s got to tell it like it is. Kanye West said it the other day on NBC, ‘George Bush doesn’t care about Black people’, and Mike Meyers backed him up: ‘It is what it is!’ And I, C. Ray Nagin, am sayin' it again, for all to hear: ‘If you’re Black, your government don’ t give a fuck about you. America had better wake up, too. Because we ain’t no third class trash down here;
we are
you
! So watch your backs. And live a righteous life. And that’s what C. Ray Nagin has to say about it.”
Back in our Florida Hotel, I cannot seem to stop crying. Well, the truth is that my emulation can’t actually cry unless I make it cry, but overwhelming sadness is what I, Amy Birkenstock, feel when I think about what happened in New Orleans, so tears for my emulation are appropriate. Actually, in PL time, it is several years after the fact, but the
City That Care Forgot
REP is perpetual. The builders made it that way, I suspect, so that people would never forget what happened once the media moved on to other stories. So it is always there for people to experience firsthand: what actually happened, and what
can
happen. As painful as it was, I’m glad I went.
As sad as I feel, my sadness is cast upon the backdrop of my anger, and my shame. All the pain and the suffering that the people of New Orleans experienced—everything I witnessed and everything I did not—was wholly avoidable. Hurricane Betsy, which struck New Orleans in 1965, was a warning of Katrina, but those who should have listened then, and acted to prevent future disaster, did far less than should have been done. The levees were not built to specifications, and in fact they were never finished at all. By all accounts, disaster relief was slow and ineffectual, even nonexistent in places, and those who were charged with the responsibility for such relief were caught not only unaware and unprepared, but disposed to neglect and carelessness. To this day, neither St. Bernard’s Parish nor the 9
th
Ward has been rebuilt; to the contrary, much of the debris has not even been removed. Months after the disaster dead bodies were still being found. Identification was painfully slow, prolonging both the final disposition of the deceased and the grief of survivors. Many who were airlifted out of the city never returned. Indeed, what was left to draw them back? Some took up residence in Texas, or New York City, or Utah. Seeds scattered to the four winds. In all probability, New Orleans will never reclaim its lost character. Which is a tragedy not just for those who lost loved ones, or those who lost homes, but for all Americans, because New Orleans was truly one of the country’s most unique cities.
I am angry beyond belief. And I am frightened. Because I have seen firsthand, or perhaps virtually, what can happen when, without warning, the tides of destruction rise. Whether or not Katrina’s power was related to global warming remains in debate—at least for those to whom debate is still relevant. As far as I am concerned—and I’m certainly not alone in my opinion—the debate should have ceased long ago, and active participation in reclaiming our natural habitat should have been undertaken without delay. But reclamation has not begun, and the debate rages on and on and on, initiated and perpetuated by those who have the most to gain and the most to lose financially—a debate that will endure till the bitter end, I suspect.
Just ask Igloo Iceman what it means to lose your habitat. Or ask Dr. Adler if he thinks the human race has a future on this planet. Ask him if he knows how to re-create a baby seal. Or ask Captain Jacques Cousteau if he thinks the coral reefs can be reclaimed before the oceans of the world have become lifeless aquatic desserts. Ask Al Gore if he thinks that Katrina was a once-in-a-lifetime aberration. And lastly, ask President Bush what the fuck he was thinking as he played air guitar and joked about the perpetual war in Iraq (which, when all is said and done, is really about maintaining the oil culture that is wholly responsible for our dubious future life on this unlikely oasis in space).
I can’t help but wonder whether someday the tide might rise in my hometown of Seattle. Or whether it will submerge the city of Copenhagen, where Sonja (Crystal) lives. I wonder if the desert that Cassandra (Kizmet) calls home might someday become the floor of the ocean, thereby rendering the ancient Hopi settlement of old Oraibi as some future civilization’s mythical version of Atlantis. I guess it all depends on whom you choose to believe. Or at least the argument was once open for debate. No longer, I suspect. Not after what I witnessed in The Big Easy (or The City That Care Forgot).
ADDENDUM 1: It is the PL summer of 2010, and I have just learned that an oil-drilling platform owed by British Petroleum and located fifty miles off the coast of Louisiana has exploded and sunk. Twelve people have been killed in the explosion and countless more injured. Oil is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of thousands of barrels per day. Apparently, nobody knows how to stop it.
Even more alarming, though, are the long-range complications of this so-called accident. Certain scientists are saying (not on the official record) that five or six miles down at the drill site—the level at which magma (liquid rock) exists—the batholith (a large emplacement of igneous intrusive (also called plutonic) rock that forms from cooled magma deep in the earth’s crust) will eventually come under so much pressure that it will literally have to discharge, or burp, releasing lethal levels of hydrogen-sulfide and benzene. Already, scientists are detecting multiple vents creating giant underwater plumes of oil gushing into the sea, and the spilled oil will eventually cover not only the Gulf of Mexico but move out along an ocean current route known as the Atlantic Conveyor, which normally brings warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to European seas and keeps Europe from freezing over into another Ice Age. Certainly, this is all potentially devastating, but the most dramatic concern being voiced through these underground scientific channels is even more unthinkable: it is the possibility that at some point pressures will begin to equalize, and when that happens then seawater will enter the oil reservoir chamber, and as the water reaches down to the level of the magma, it will superheat and cause a gigantic methane-hydrate steam explosion on the ocean floor, which is likely to produce a Tsunami some eighty to two hundred feet high, moving at four hundred to six hundred miles per hour and reaching as far as one hundred miles inland. Which, of course, would devastate the entire Gulf Coast region from Brownsville, Texas to Pensacola, Florida; and, in fact, since nowhere in Florida is more than fifty feet above sea level, such a wave, in all probability, would engulf the entire state, moving from west coast to east coast.
Whoosh…
ADDENDUM 2: TEXAS CITY, TEXAS—Two weeks before the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the BP refinery in the coastal town of Texas City, Texas spewed tens of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the skies.
Anonymous Tip line: If you work for BP or a contractor on a rig in the Gulf, or anywhere else, we’d like to hear from you. Tell us about your work conditions, your management, and your observations of what is happening. We will not publish your identity.