The lower nine

Today I took a ride into the Lower Ninth Ward and Chalmette. There were other people out gawking. The big barge that crashed through the levee has become a bit of a tourist attraction. I didn't photograph the barge, and the pictures I took don't really give a sense of how bad it really is. For one thing, you want to take pictures of things that are recognizable, rather than piles of unidentifiable rubble, which is what half the area has been reduced to. And the other thing is you don't get a sense of how vast this waste is. It's like a bomb dropped. People don't want their homes bull-dozed--it's become a big issue. There are No Bulldozing signs up all over the place. I deeply sympathize with the people who have lost their home and their neighborhood, and all they have. But when your house has been lifted off its foundation and deposited on top of a car, when the walls and the roof have collapsed, I don't think you can do anything but knock it down and haul it away. I don't think you're dealing with reality if you think such a house can or should be saved. And I think I'm coming to the unpopular opinion that the neighorhood should not be rebuilt.

In Chalmette, a the parking lot of an abandoned Wal-Mart is now a FEMA trailer park and another strip-mall lot is now a new dump.

The first four steps of the Katrina 12-Step program:

1. We admitted that we were powerless over Katrina, that our lives had become unmanageable

2. Came to believe that government and insurance companies could restore us to sanity

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the Fashion God Michael Brown as we understood him

4. Made a searching and pointless inventory of our possessions.

For the rest of the steps and the "projected path" of this year's parade, I direct you to http://www.kreweduvieux.org/MdM2006.pdf


P.S. The psychopath emailed me today, as I feared and suspected he would. Of course I am not going to reply. He is free to assume that I changed my email address.