Stupid Questions
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.Â
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]Â 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…..
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*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.
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**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. Â
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January 10th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Let me respond to Clarkmeister in the right thread….
Clarkmeister wrote:
“I am admittedly ignorant of all the variables at play, but I suspect there’s a legitimate discussion to be had (as a society) regarding the ROI (both tangible and otherwise) of attempting to truly restore New Orleans.
I suspect it’s marginal even with quality coordination and leadership, which is obviously an impossibility. At a minimum, it’s a 20-40 year plan based on what I saw in June and what I’ve heard anecdotally.
It makes me wonder what is the status of restoration at the larger cities impacted by The Tsunami. Of course, I’m far too lazy to actually look anything up.”
The problem is, of course, that there has been no such discussion. Ray Nagin has refused to confront the political issues which would arise from such a discussion and has opted for a completely free market approach–everyone is free to make an individual decision about what should be rebuilt where and how. And Governor Blanco and the Bush administration have been equally unwilling and uninterested in fostering/forcing such a discussion. The racial politics of New Orleans are so touchy and so inflammatory that it would take a very brave and selfless politician (is there such a creature?) to touch it with a 10-foot pole.
There have been planning groups upon planning groups organized by neighborhood (and some neighborhoods have done better jobs and some not-so-better). However, the neighborhood plans have all called for things like more grassy strips with more park benches (apparently they have forgotten about the park bench problems in the Quarter….). By their very nature of being neighborhood-oriented, none of them has confronted the more fundamental issues you raise, Clarkie.
Given the example of the Dutch response to the great flood of 1953, it is obviously possible to restore and protect New Orleans if there is the national political will to do it. But not everything that can be done should be done–and that is the question no one wants to confront.
I don’t know much about the tsunami recovery either, but I have seen a few articles decrying the slow pace of recovery and questioning the use of donated funds. It would be instructive to compare the recovery of the tsunami areas with the recovery of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Mississippi was hit with a huge storm surge (analogous to the tsunami wave), and like the tsunami areas, the Gulf Coast experienced complete destruction along the shore (the first block or two back from the beach), but minimal destruction inland. While the national perception is that Republican Mississippi is doing a swell job of recovering, while the hapless Democrats in New Orleans are just sitting around whining, the fact is that the Mississippi waterfront has not been rebuilt, people are still in temporary housing, the insurance companies are still refusing to pay claims (State Farm just agreed to pay up this week), and things are still far from normal. I seriously doubt that the tsunami areas have done much better. Whether in the tsunami area or in Louisiana-Mississippi, funds donated/appropriated for disaster recovery have a lot of sticky fingers to go through before they get to where they are actually needed, and not much flows through unstuck, so to speak.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Hi
I would just like to let you know how the New Orleans looked to non-Americans, this is not an anti-American posting but simply an observance from abroad.
basically we couldn’t believe it, in Europe we get flooded and teh occasional disaster hits and being First World countries we expect and get fast and efficient help. See for example the train Bombings in London (Not on the same scale I know).
When the Tsunami hit we donated an amazing amount that broke all records because it was less well off countries that needed our help, we felt protective, maybe even guilty for being safe in a first world country where help is always at hand.
Where were the collections for New Orleans, there were none WHY? because it is America you have the power you have the technology to rebuild you don’t need help. That is what we thought, you are capable of mobilising thousands of troops to war, going to the moon. You are capable of greatness in so many ways. Yet when your own people needed you you weren’t there.
That is how it looked from outside and it is still talked about over here as a shameful episode of which we can’t believe your Prsident hasn’t been impeached. Clinton just got a **** job and he almost gets impeached. This one ignores the plight of a whole city and breaks all promises of help and he gets re-elected.
I have one last question- does the word liberal mean something different in America - over here it means someone who is open minded and thinks about the good of others as well as himself and yet watching American media it seems to have been changed to mean something similar to the way Communism was viewed.
Thanks for this blog entry it was eye opening and anything tat makes people think should be written.
Peter L
January 14th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Hi Peter–
The American people basically repudiated Mr. Bush in the recent midterm elections, but because we don’t have a parliamentary system, we are nonetheless stuck with him for two more years. He is free to ignore the fact that he has been repudiated, and basically that is what he has been doing. He cannot be impeached because essentially being a stupid jerk is not an impeachable offense and because the Democratic majority in the Senate is razor thin.
Why are New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still such a mess? There are a bunch of reasons. First of all, Europeans have difficulty with the size and scope of the US. The area devastated is, I have read, about the size of the island of Great Britain (this would include the Rita mess in SW Louisiana and E Texas which the press seems to have forgotten). How well would the UK do with destruction on that scale? It’s a very big undertaking. Remember that western Europe was rebuilt fairly quickly after WWII in part because the US made the Marshall Plan a priority.
In this case too it is a matter of political will and priorities, and rebuilding New Orleans is not a priority. From the first instant George Bush made clear that his only concern was the Columbia pipeline and the oil refineries. As long as Port Fauchon and the refineries are functioning, Bush is happy. And those facilities were reopened lickety-split.
As you note, the US has great resources, but how are those resources being used? I heard yesterday that our military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing $1-2 billion a week. A few weeks of war funding would go a long way to putting things right in Louisiana and Mississippi. Each US state has its own militia, which collectively make up the National Guard. The National Guard of Louisiana, like all the others, is under the jurisdiction of the state governor and is intended to respond to disasters, natural and man-made, to local problems of civil unrest, and similar situations. Where was the Louisiana National Guard in the desperate days after the storm? In Iraq where it took heavy casualties. It should have been in Louisiana ready to respond immediately to the emergency.
Hydraulic engineering does not receive the emphasis in the US that it does elsewhere, most particularly in the Netherlands where the very existence of the country depends on the excellence of its hydraulic engineers. The Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for the design and construction of the flood control and water management structures which (ostensibly) protect New Orleans and the rest of the Mississippi River flood plain, and by their own admission they did a very poor job. The Army Corps is immune by law from suit, and so they cannot be held legally accountable for the massive damage resulting from their errors and omissions. Since Katrina, the Dutch have offered to share their superior hydraulic technology, but I do not know whether or not their offer has been accepted. I do know that the Corps’s hasty repairs to the levees and floodwalls are already clearly inadequate.
And, quite frankly, many people throughout the US do not think that New Orleans should be rebuilt, at least not with federal tax money. The danger of living below sea level has been, I think, exaggerated in the media. I have spent a lot of time in the Netherlands, and I see my Dutch friends living their lives happily and securely in areas much lower than New Orleans is.
And then there is the issue of race. The same people who have long resented welfare benefits paid to poor black people do not care to see them resettled in New Orleans at taxpayer expense. Further the power structure in New Orleans –that includes the white upper middle and upper classes and the affluent creoles of color–does not want to see the repatriation of large numbers of poor “American” blacks either. This accounts in part for the behavior of Ray Nagin since Katrina, including his campaign strategies in the recent election. Whatever he does, he will alienate either the white business elite and creoles of color who were responsible for electing him mayor in the first place or the poor American blacks in the diaspora who elected him the second time around after he lost the support of white New Orleans. And so he has chosen to do absolutely nothing and let the free market operate in determining what will and won’t be rebuilt when and where. And the governor, Mrs. Bunker, uh, Blanco, is simply in over her head. Upstate Louisiana has always considered New Orleans to be Sodom and Gomorrah, and the legislators from outside Orleans Parish have always been hostile to anything they perceive to be in New Orleans’s interest–and that hostility has not changed since Katrina. So the will to rebuild New Orleans simply isn’t there on any governmental level.
BTW, Peter, a lot of money and in-kind donations have been contributed by individuals, charitable organizations and foreign governments. Where these donations have gone, I have no clue. Certainly no one I know has seen any of it. It should also be noted that substantial federal appropriations to state and local governments have been announced, but little or no money has actually appeared. Much of the money appropriated to FEMA has simply been wasted, either in overly generous contracts to politically connected contractors who are more or less incompetent or in unwise schemes like the notoriously unsuitable and unusable trailers. Katrina victims have been blamed for waste and fraud, but this is ridiculous. The frauds were largely perpetrated by people who were not affected by Katrina and therefore had no claim whatsoever or by various government employees and their contractor friends.
And then there are the insurance companies who have refused to pay hurricane claims in any case in which there was water damage, even if the water damage occurred after the wind damage. Up until last week the courts sided with the insurance companies, but last week one of the insurors lost and was ordered to pay punitive damages. If that turns out to mean that the unpaid insurance claims will now be paid, obviously more money will be available to rebuild, particularly in Mississippi. However, in New Orleans there is the question of rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure. Even with more insurance money and the Road Home government money if that ever really materializes, would people be wise to rebuild in the face of grossly inadequate floodwalls, levees, and pumps? Only the federal government can address that issue–and at the moment it doesn’t want to.
Even if a ton of money had immediately been made available and even if everyone had gotten to work busily and efficiently immediately after the waters receded, a year and a half is not enough time to do what needs to be done. After all, the Dutch, whose very existence depends on flood control and who have no greater priority, have spent the last 50 years (since the great flood of 1953) working on their enhanced flood control system.
I too was confused by the different senses of the word “liberal” in American and European political contexts. Basically in the US the left is liberal and the right is conservative. Americans are essentially centrists, and so from a European point of view I would imagine liberals would be center left and conservatives center right.
From the time of the Reagan administration onward, Republican propagandists have gone to great effort to make ‘liberal’ a dirty word. It has becone a code word for people who advocate the interests of African-Americans (the real term for which liberal is a code word is too nasty for me to write), for people who want to murder pre-born infants (as if there were such people), for people who are promoting a “homosexual agenda” (as if there were such an agenda beyond basic human and civil rights), in short for people who are the devil’s spawn and who are opposed to “family values” (which are what the conservatives claim they, and only they, support).
During and since the Reagan administration, the Republican party has managed to get working and middle class Americans to vote against their own economic interests by harping on issues like abortion and gay marriage which are really none of government’s business in the first place. Reagan broke the American labor movement when he broke the air traffic controllers’ strike–and the relocation of American industrial jobs finished off labor’s political clout. Now American organized labor is pretty well confined to low-paying service workers and goverment employees. (I myself am a retired member of the American Federation of Teaachers–but then I grew up in one of the very few American cities to have Socialist administrations.) Distracting the American working class with “religious” issues has enabled the Republicans to slash taxes for rich corporations and individuals, which has in turn led to obscene wealth and incredible arrogance at the top of the economic scale and, on the other hand, a badly squeezed middle class and a working class which can barely afford the basics of life. This past midterm election, it looks like the middle and working classes have finally begun to notice how badly they have been snookered. One can only hope….
January 29th, 2007 at 12:07 am
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