Won't Wash Us Away

Randy Newman's classic tune, "Louisiana 1927," is a song which, following Katrina's slam dunk of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, became a sort of theme song for the disaster and the Bush administration's magnificently incompetent response. It begins with the stellar line, "What has happened down here is the wind have changed." That may be the clearest statement of the overall realization that we, as a nation, have come to in the four weeks since Katrina slammed my home town and washed our national sleepwalk over the levees and off into the Gulf of Mexico.

I was one of the ones that Sunday evening who, like another of the lines in Newman's song, "got away alright." That night (four weeks ago as I write this, but a seeming eternity inside my head) I sat in the driver's seat of an old beat up Ford van, a sort of fortunate gift from my absentee landlord that allowed me (and my landlord's little dog) to flee the hurricane and make it to the relative safety of my former sweetheart's house in Hattiesburg. Despite our less than stunning end to a 17 year relationship, Marsha welcomed me into her home and even befriended my disheveled companion. Together we spent Monday watching trees fall for eight hours. When it was all over, there was no power, but the little bit of news I could pick up on the radio proclaimed that "New Orleans dodged a bullet." I went to bed that night, thankful for the relative safety I had found and with the glad feeling that after putting in some heavy lifting to help my Mississippi benefactors dig out from under the pile of pine wood that surrounded the house I would be back on the road home, a little tired, a little sweaty, but mostly no worse for wear.

That was before the flood. Before the retaining wall two blocks from my friend's house gave way and buried the house she has lived in for the last seven years under a sea of water. Before "da lower nint" turned into an extension of the Mississippi River and took houses, cars, pets and people with it. Before the police in Gretna turned on their cousins from the Crescent City and sent them across the bridge back to face devastation, disease, and maybe even death. Before the mayor of New Orleans got on the radio and said what we all wanted to say when he told the president and his associates to "get off your asses!" Before Barbara Bush stood in the Houston Astrodome and proclaimed that, "this is actually working out pretty well for these folks." Before the ubiquitous Crescent City greeting, "Where Y'at?" morphed from a question about one's relative health and demeanor and into a serious question about a displaced friend's whereabouts, safety, health and personal circumstances.

That was before I was told that I better get a tetanus shot before I go back home.

Most significantly, it was before Bush swaggered out from behind Andrew Jackson's statue and into the glare of the TV lights to "take responsibility" for "the problems" and to promise 200 billion dollars of money that is not his to give, to bring the city back.

Which of course begs the question… Back to what?

A week after George's moment in the lights of New Orleans (which were turned off again almost immediately after this latest in the long series of staged moments that characterize Bush's ever so theatrical presidency) I returned to my former home in ostensibly liberal Northern California and was greeted by people who were actually discussing the value of plowing the city under and starting over with a sort of instant Disneyland version of The Big Easy; a city that might be just a little higher, a little cleaner, and populated by a whole lot fewer poor people.

In the aforementioned song, Randy Newman repeatedly offers the line, "They're tryin' to wash us away," as an explanation of the inaction, ineptitude, and devastation that resulted in and with the flood of 1927. It is a sentiment that serves as the perfect metaphor for the present circumstances and the present state of the political mind. What was different about the week following Katrina was the simple fact that for 7 days the national self-image, normally defined by the carefully scrubbed images of happy people in sitcoms and talk shows was sent into a state of toxic shock. As if some evil interloper had collectively poisoned all the drinking water, our televisions, newspapers and computers spilled over like the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and flooded our homes with the deep, frightening hallucinations of people living and dying without all the things that we like to believe our nation stands for. Without water, food, medicine, safety, help, attention, hope, or love.

It is these images, and not their underlying reality, that seems to now be the target of "relief efforts." After ignoring the problem for nearly a week, the Bush administration finally figured out that they better do some damage control, so the military finally made it in, people were finally pulled out and the streets were made safe, dry, and clean with astonishing rapidity. Within days we were treated to the official announcement that New Orleans was "… now among the safest cities in the nation." Of course, the only people left were soldiers with M16s, but why quibble with such impressive crime statistics? Katrina had succeeded in accomplishing something that countless administrations had been unable to achieve, she had cleaned up crime in New Orleans. If the city was now a toxic wasteland unfit for human habitation, well, tough problems demand tough solutions.

It is this mindset that seems to characterize all the efforts at some sort of cultural clarity in America today. The broad differences and exciting quirks that make our national culture as unique as it is seem to be the prime target of efforts to turn us into some sort of Calvinistic, money producing, oil consuming, cultural machine. From this point of view, it's not for nothing that the people who suffered the most were simply the people who didn't own cars. In the New America it's important to have a car, to have a job and to have a solid handle on the cultural expectations of the primary demographic.

The problem is, as Randy sings, "the wind have changed." The nightmare of Katrina has finally demonstrated to the country that the little boy emperor really has no clothes and we aren't going to cheer the parade. New Orleans (like San Francisco, that other precariously positioned coastal city), does not easily fit into the mold. As a people, New Orleanians will not fit into the mold. In general, we are a damned stubborn and rather ribald bunch of folks. We're mostly like that old joke about how you can "dress him up but ya can't take him out." We are inevitably going to pop out of our monkey suits, laugh too loudly, drink too much and spill things on our dinner jackets. We're very likely to dress up in stupid costumes, throw worthless beads (but only at clearly specified times), play loud music and celebrate when we should be working. We know how to party, and we aren't really good at being puritanical, judgmental and intolerant. You can come to our richly cultured city and spend your entire vacation drinking on Bourbon Street and return home thinking that you experienced New Orleans, while we have gone on being the lively, vibrant, mixed up human gumbo this little delta town has always been and you will have missed all the best parties. We won't judge you for that. In New Orleans people are mostly allowed to be who (and what) they are. As things come back together, you're welcome to come and join the party (for there will most definitely be a party), and you can pull out a cleaning rag and put a new shine on our city. We might even like it. But it's best to understand that we will always be who we are and we are highly unlikely to fit the mold that others have set for us. The rest of the country might want to take note.

You can clean us up, but you won't wash us away.