New Orleans is alive

New Orleans is still New Orleans, and I can't express how happy I am to be back. I had red beans for lunch yesterday and a shrimp poboy at Domilise's today. People are riding their bikes up and down the street and hanging out on the corner. WWOZ and WTUL are on the air. Rue de la Course is open.

But if you'd talked to me Sunday night I would have said that it's much, much, much worse than it looks on television. The scale of destruction is inexpressible. Driving west on I-10 from Mobile it gets more and more post-apocalyptic. Steel billboards bent over like willow trees. Abandoned cars by the side of the road. Blue tarps on every roof that's still there. The twin span is now the single span. You creep over it, one lane in each direction, and contemplate its collapsed twin beside you. New Orleans East is abandoned. There are still upturned boats on the median, cars in the canal, brick buildings collapsed, big box stores smashed in by their fallen signs. Driving on the elevated highway over the 9th Ward, 7th Ward, it's dark and abandoned. Claiborne Avenue is torn apart. Tulane Avenue and North Carrollton are worse. Even in comparatively lightly hit uptown, there's destruction everywhere. On St. Charles, street lights have fallen over and there's no streetcar. There's a blue tarp on the roof of my old building. Most of the stop lights are not working. There's piles of debris everywhere. A lot of people are living in campers in their yard.

But the parts of town that are occupied are busy. A lot of stores and restaurants are open, though they close early and selection is spotty in the stores. Magazine Street is jumping. The Quarter is quiet, but it's almost kind of nice to have it to ourselves without 9 million tourists all over the place. I've seen a lot of familiar faces of people I don't really but used to see all the time.

My house is untouched, except that the tree in the back yard is uprooted and is leaning oh so lightly on the roof of the house behind me. The peach tree in the front has been cut down. And like everyone, there are cryptic symbols spray-painted on the front of my house. But I have been spared the experience of having to deal with wet moldy stuff, wet moldy house. Except my mail is wet and moldy and old. No sign of any new mail for months and months. And no land-line phone.

The rumor that there aren't any black people left in New Orleans is not at all true. But if you enjoy getting hit on relentlessly by Mexican guys, this is now the place to be.

The best analogy I can make is that New Orleans is like someone who just got the living crap beat out of it in an accident or a fight. It's been horribly, gravely injured. It's going to be a long, long road to recovery and it's never going to be the same again. But there's no reason to think that the injuries it's sustained so far are going to kill it. But there's no way it can survive another blow.

People, we need Category 5 levees and a major reengineering of the river and wetlands restoration. It's true that from a practical standpoint maybe there shouldn't be a town here at all, but there is a town here and it's a town like no other, and in any case it's wrong, it's deeply immoral, to say you're going to save it and then do nothing or far too little.

It's true that the local and state governments are largely corrupt or incompetent, but even in the best case this is not the job for a state government. Only the federal government has the money and the power to fix this right. So please, please let's do this.

There's idle rumor about drafting Bill Clinton into running for mayor. He was here talking about how the city can be saved. He mentioned this was the first town he ever saw with buildings over two stories tall. Wags say it's the first place he ever got a blow job. But New Orleans needs someone like that, who has vision and national and international power.

Make levees not war!