Over the holidays, a friend and I hosted a reunion party at the Modern Language Association convention for our colleagues, all tenured senior faculty at the University of New Orleans and all looking for jobs, any jobs, elsewhere. All the job-seekers reported interviewers concentrating on why someone would want to give up his/her tenured job and go elsewhere. The reason seems to us to be screamingly obvious. Why would anyone need to ask?
I think the whole issue of New Orleans is a touchy
one. The city keeps saying that everything is OK and
open for business, which is true as far as the Quarter
goes, but people then think the rest of the city is OK too.
And they don’t have a clue as to how thoroughly
the infrastructure has been destroyed and what it
means to live in a city without an infrastructure.
Also they seem to think that we, the displaced New Orleanians, should spend the rest of our lives* without reliable utilities and other amenities of modern civilization enjoyed universally throughout the developed nations, being heroic pioneers rebuilding the city, while the rest of the country blithely experiences business as usual.
I think the situation also arouses both guilt and
fear. There was a recent column in the NYTimes about
the cosmetic “maintenance” required by middleaged
women, and the point was made that without eight hours
a week of attention to appearance, a middle class,
middle aged woman would look like a bag lady:
“These days, I find I spend a fair amount of time thinking about who I am going to be as I get older. The big picture is kind of scary. Saving for my
children’s college! Saving for retirement! Sometimes,
when I forget to take my preventive migraine meds
(low-dose Elavil; I highly recommend it), I wake up at
3 in the morning, convinced that I am going to become
a bag lady.
Other friends, I know, share the same fear. The terror
of falling off the rails, of failing utterly, of being
unable to care for yourself, not to mention your
family is, I suspect, relatively widespread. It’s
certainly present for [Nora] Ephron.
‘I am only about eight hours a week away from looking
exactly like that woman,’ she wrote of her maintenance
regime, contemplating the sight of a local homeless
woman, ‘with frizzled flyaway gray hair I would
probably have if I stopped dyeing mine; with a
potbelly I would definitely develop if I ate just half
of what I think about eating every day; with the dirty
nails and chapped lips and mustache and bushy eyebrows
that would be my destiny if I ever spent two weeks on
a desert island.’ I believe her concern is not just
skin-deep. I think she’s afraid of losing control and
of becoming a throw-away person.
Our society is full of throwaway people of various sorts; all those people we don’t deem worthy of decent health care or education or housing or political
representation. When you hear stories about
middle-class people who fall into bankruptcy because
of, say, medical bills or the costs of caring for an
elderly relative or, often enough, divorce, you
realize that, unless you’re very, very wealthy or
very, very lucky, you are really only one or two bad
strokes of luck away from falling off the rails
yourself. I feel this quite acutely. Which is why, I think, many of us – even women like Ephron, who on the surface of things has no right to
such worries as she strides past the homeless on her
way to her biweekly blow-dry – have our own inner bag
ladies. They surface in the dead of night, when the
dog barks and there’s no Ambien.
The bag lady threatens. She’s a menace. And we need
whatever armor money can buy.”
—-Judith Warner
That’s it. We’re middleclass people who got thrown
off the rails (well, pushed off by the Army Corps of
Engineers) and have overnight become homeless,
throwaway bag people. It is sooo much less
threatening to construe this mess solely in terms of
poor black people in the Lower Ninth, who, in Barbara
Bush’s estimation, didn’t have anything to lose
anyway, than to think of the comfortably middleclass
who overnight lost everything and are still homeless
after 17 months. If it happened to US, it could
happen to THEM, and why would THEY want to be reminded
of their vulnerability? And they have watched the
federal government which was the source of our problem
simply throw us away. There must be something very
wrong with us since we don’t have our lives back on
track after 17 months….
So here we are, a very affluent colleague permanently crippled and forced into early retirement (or so I gather) because of lack of health care after
Katrina,** almost all of us without a permanent address
(and now the government is even taking away the miserable FEMA trailers), without political representation because we
are scattered all over the country–the Louisiana
delegation doesn’t give a damn about us in the
diaspora and certainly our interests do not matter to
the politicos in whose districts we have landed
(except of course for the mayor of Houston who is
blaming all of his city’s problems on Katrina people).
We can’t take care of ourselves, although the country
thinks we should be able to, because we are being
asked to repair an entire metropolitan area by our
individual unsupported and uncoordinated efforts, thwarted at every turn by bureaucratic red tape and profit-bloated insurance companies. And
who in the rest of the country wants to think about
all that? So they have convinced themselves there is
no problem, and if there is, they don’t want to be
forced to acknowledge it. And tenured faculty out
beating the bushes desperately looking for any job rub
their noses in it. So they pretend that they can’t
imagine why we wouldn’t want to stay in New Orleans.
I was at synagogue the other day, and I was introduced
to some woman who wondered why I was here temporarily
and looking for a place to live. Why didn’t I go back
to New Orleans? I would think it’s obvious–it costs a fortune
to live there in third-world conditions with little medical
care and armed villains roaming the streets
unrestrained by a non-existent court system,
unprotected from normal afternoon rains, never mind
another hurricane. How could a retiree not in best of
health–or even a healthy person in mid-career–contemplate going back for even a single moment? But it clearly isn’t obvious…..
*For example, every single water and sewage pipe in the city is broken. The estimate is that it will take at least 25 years to tear up every street, replace every pipe, and repave every street. And that’s if sufficient funds are available and work gets started at once. Meantime I am told that on rainy days, geysers of raw sewage erupt from manholes in certain neighborhoods. Electrical service, never entirely reliable, has become very iffy, and there is flood water in the natural gas pipes, interrupting the flow of gas and leaving people without heat and hot water–and our fabled restaurants without functioning burners and ovens.
**As I understand it, my colleague and her husband did not evacuate before the storm, and in the chaos afterward, she broke her ankle and was unable to get timely medical attention. She had to flee with her untreated injury. Since then she has had several surgeries, but her ankle has not healed properly.