Touchy subjects

It's Saturday night and I'm home alone. The town feels empty and hollow.

I took Hank for his late-night walk. We walked by a bar, and a guy standing outside told me Hank was a cool-looking dog. (He is a good-looking boy. I'd post more pictures of him, but he gets all wiggly for the camera.) But a couple of hoodrats saw Hank coming and scrambled across the street.

People in the ghetto are generally afraid of dogs. Sometimes I feel bad about it, when little kids run screeching from Hank when he just wants to get petted and play with them. But when the kids turn into 17-year-old gangbangers I'm glad he keeps them away.

There are plenty of people who would call me a racist for referring to hoodrats and gangbangers. I admit that I am stereotyping black teenage boys loitering on the corner, wearing extra extra large white t-shirts and big jeans falling down off their asses (surely one of the dumbest, most non-user friendly fashions ever, yet it has lingered for years now) doing their best to intimidate everyone on the street. And yeah, I do get some satisfaction when my dog makes them back up. Unfortunately, though he's a hardy and resilient boy, he can't deflect bullets.

I'm still a good liberal, but I'm tired of the apologetic white liberal thing where if you dare to notice anything bad about the black community around you, you have to explain it away by invoking historical racism. Yes, there is a problem that has its roots in the fact that white New Orleans never gave a shit about, say, funding decent public schools where someone might learn to read or gain other marketable skills, that it turned its gaze away from the poverty and squalor festering the next block over. Etcetera, etcetera, and all true.

But when the overwhelming majority of the murders in the city are done by black teenage boys spraying bullets at other black teenage boys, and taking out a few bystanders besides, and when those boys are actually proud of New Orleans being Murder Capital USA... well, I'm not going to apologize for noticing that and getting a bad attitude about the kids hanging out on my corner.

What spurred this rant? Well, this afternoon I saw the kid who snatched my purse about a year and a half ago. I'm not sure if I ever wrote about this, but a boy about 13 years old or so grabbed my purse when I was walking down the street in my own neighborhood. I ran after him screaming, which he didn't expect. And since he was a fat little fuck and I was in good shape from being a bicycle commuter, I caught up with him and he dropped the purse. There were a bunch of people sitting out on their stoops watching this, and no one did anything to help me. Then this lady told me I better get out of this neighborhood, and I stood there in the street and screamed at them that this is my goddamn neighborhood. This was just around the corner from my old apartment, which I'd lived in for five years by that time. It was the day after Valentines Day.

And then later today I had the unpleasant experience of watching this video on YouTube, taped in the Magnolia projects. I'm sorry, you're going to have to cut and paste, and then you're going to have to turn the volume down and I'm warning you you won't be able to watch it for more than a few minutes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QGon3B0FJc

New Orleans was always a precarious balance of beauty and ugliness, love and hate, grace and despair. Since the storm, it seems to me that the balance has shifted in favor of the ugliness. I'm starting to think that I should move away, even if I can't generate that much enthusiasm for anyplace else.

Right after the National Guard returned, there was a dip in the murder rate, but for the last few weeks there has been at least two murders a day almost every day.

It's not just the crime. It's the fact that no one seems to be in charge. It doesn't seem like anyone has a plan, at least not anyone with the power to implement it. Actually, one of the mayor's advisors is working on getting some big box stores in Orleans Parish. Great.

One of the few good things has been the turnover on the city council. But it's not enough.

It's been almost a year, and it's actually shocking how little progress there has been in cleaning up and rebuilding. I mean, they've started to tow away the flooded cars. Supposedly the levees are being rebuilt. When you drive through Lakeview, there might be one or two houses on each block that is being renovated, where people are living a trailer out front or actually in the house.

The music still exists, but it seems subdued. Kermit Ruffins opend a new club on Frenchmen Street, which is cool. The Dragons Den reopened last week.

Magazine Street is still busy, lots of hip people spending money. Where they come from I don't know. Rents are approaching New York and San Francisco levels, but I don't know where anyone gets the money to pay it.

What's left? Pretty houses, corner bars, shrimp poboys, good radio, dramatic afternoon thunderstorms. I'm not sure if that's enough.