New Orleans, Two Years Later
Still.
A.
Fucking.
Mess.
That's a shame.
It should be a scandal.
posted by The Minstrel Boy at 9:29 AM
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Still.
A.
Fucking.
Mess.
That's a shame.
It should be a scandal.
About Me
- Name: The Minstrel Boy
- Location: Palm Springs, California
Currently Reading: Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon (still slogging through) Just started "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" by Mosin Hamid. email steviecl1 at aol dot com
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6 Comments:
It would be a scandal if the Republicans were in control of Congress and the president was a Democrat.......
- oddjob (who recognizes that ultimately NOLA may not be salvageable, but still regards the level of incompetence in this whole fiasco as impeachable in and of itself)
I took my massage chair and went down to give what comfort I could to the folks who were housed at our convention center. It was a sobering site to see that large space filled with cots and airbeds so close together that you could not walk between them and realize that the people there had only what they were wearing. I agree that the situation remains unacceptable on any level. Many people stayed here or wherever they evaced to and will never go beck to NOLA. I have met several who went back and still don't have much. We must all dream a better dream for them.
Any nation would place a major port at the mouth of its largest river. But our failure to provide proper protection for these Americans, in the form of levees that don't undermine and collapse long before reaching design capacity, caused most citizens of New Orleans to lose almost everything. They're there because our nation needs New Orleans there, otherwise the city would have long ago shriveled away and everybody moved on much like Rhyolite (a famous Nevada ghost town that had over 10,000 citizens at its peak and was in the running to be the capital of Nevada, now it is just a ruin). America needs them, but apparently America is not willing to protect them as they provide vitally needed port services for our nation. That is not only a tragedy, but a national disgrace.
Some Louisianians that I know say that the entire Gulf Coast should secede and start charging the rest of the nation for the services that the Coast provides -- every bit of goods going through the ports should get tariffed, every drop of oil coming in through their marshes should get tariffed, they should force the rest of the nation to pay what they owe for the services the Coast provides and then they'll rebuild the Coast themselves. That is, of course, just a pipe dream. No nation could allow another nation to have a strategic chokehold on the mouth of its mightiest river -- just ask President Thomas Jefferson, who was mighty peeved at the French having such a chokehold to the point that he was willing to compromise his principles and commit to buying Louisiana despite his uncertainty that it was strictly legal to do so. Any attempt by the Gulf Coast to secede would be treated harshly and with immediate dispatch of armed troops to restore federal rule. Although, thinking about it, if Dear Leader keeps us in Iraq much longer said troops will be armed with sticks and stones... hmm...
- Badtux the Geostrategic Penguin
The WaPo ran an excellent commentary on 8/26--"Reckless Abandonment," i which the author concludes,
"The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine."
GWB's "Reckless abandonment" was a form of stateside terrorism from above.
Badtux, from a long-term viewpoint it's more complicated and also worse than that. While the levees are there because the people living along the Mississippi were tired of the flooding, the levees also prevent the river from maintaining the swamp. Thanks to the levees TONS - MANY, MANY TONS of river silt that would normally annually replenish and maintain the ground level above sea level now are carried out to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
With the levees such as they are along the Mississippi there is in the long term - literally - NO hope for New Orleans.
The river MUST be allowed to flood if NOLA is to survive.
At the rate things are going before the end of this century the big city along the Gulf itself will be Slidell, and the big port city will be Baton Rouge.
- oddjob
new orleans 05
it was said this morning
to tether the dead
so bloated corpses
can't float away
human balloons
filled with sorrows.
this is a poem that i wrote and donated along with some other poets, to a group that was collecting donations for the flood victims.
our president should be ashamed.
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