Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006 - (Page 65)

tival. The concert was held on the banks of the Mississippi River in weather that turned crisp after darkness fell. Earlier, as the setting sun silhouetted tankers and container ships gliding down the river toward the Gulf, we had been entranced by Worms Union, a local punk drum ensemble, one of whose members wore the most commonly seen T-shirt at the festival. It featured, just above a musket, a skull emblazoned with a fleur-de-lis; circling the skull and gun was a simple message: “Defend New Orleans.” If there’s anything left for me to say after my 15 columns and videos this past month about my hometown, it’s to echo that plea: Defend New Orleans. The city is in jeopardy. At dinner last night, a knowledgeable historian and friend, who has been trying to get a fix on the actual population of New Orleans today, told me that the estimate he keeps hearing is 150,000 people during the day and only 50,000 at night. That means, if those numbers are accurate, the city has a resident population only one-tenth its size before Hurricane Katrina hit two months ago. Many have compared the tragedy here to the events of 9/11, but as terrible as that day was for America and the families that lost loved ones, it resulted in the closing of a neighborhood in New York and a building in Washington. My son, then a student at Columbia University, was back in class a few days later. The collapse of defective levees here, on the other hand, led to the forced evacuation of an entire city. Our universities will not open again until January. Basic governmental services are still being restored two months later. Much of the population is homeless and either jobless or without salaries. What happened in New Orleans is a catastrophe of so large a scale, it is difficult to comprehend the extent of the upheaval. As has now been widely documented, all this suffering was engendered by the incompetence of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. As an engineer on an LSU team researching the collapse of the city’s levees concluded, the levee design the corps chose to use “could never work.” But having lost our houses, cars, jobs, and possessions to a needless flood for which a government agency bears responsibility, we now face an administration ideologically opposed to the use of government to serve the public good. The grandiose promises of reconstruction aid made by President Bush before St. Louis Cathedral in a dramatically lit nighttime speech to the nation turn out to have been nothing more than lies by a weakened politician. It is now expected that what aid we get will be funds redirected from existing poverty programs, and unlike any other federal disaster aid in history, we will be made to pay it all back. LCV John Biguenet is a native of New Orleans, where his family has lived since the 18th century. His most recent books include Oyster, a novel. He is currently the Robert Hunter Distinguished Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. This series of observations originally appeared in Times Select. Excerpted with permission. David Rae Morris is a New Orleans-based free lance photographer. His photographs have been published in such diverse publications as TIME, Newsweek, and USA Today. In 1999 he collaborated with his father, the noted author Willie Morris, on the book My Mississippi. His website is www.davidraemorris.com. Winter 2005-06/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 65 Nov. 1, 2005 Defend New Orleans Saturday night, Marsha and I attended a Nine Inch Nails tribute concert for relief and emergency workers as part of the Voodoo Music Experience, an annual New Orleans fes- http://www.davidraemorris.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005 Contents Letters Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Louisiana State Museum After Katrina: “It’s time somebody woke us us up.” Missing New Orleans On Perilous Ground The Buildings of Louisiana (Architectural History by Karen Kingsley) Historic New Orleans Collection Louisiana Association of Museums Back to New Orleans Diary of a Displaced Person Jazz Notes (Music History by Bruce Raeburn) Cradle of the Stars The Terrible and the Brave Bookstand (Book Review by Thomas Uskali) Sound Advice (Music Review by Ben Sandmel) Forum (Commentary by James Lee Burke)

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.