ARTICLE
By JIM BECKERMAN ('77)
STAFF WRITER
[submitted by a classmate]
It's sad, said author Jack Finney, to see a town you love die. "Much worse
than seeing a friend die, because there are always other friends to turn to."
Surely there will never be
another New Orleans to turn to.
If it dies, something
unique and precious will be gone from America forever.
As someone who fell in love with the city in the 1980s, and made a point of
going several times a year thereafter, I can't help feeling a shock that
goes beyond empathy for the thousands of potential victims, regret for the
billions in property damage, and awareness that what happened to New Orleans
is only part of a larger, regional tragedy.
What I feel is emptiness.
A great city has suddenly been
ripped off the map of the United States. And a city unlike any other.
Even the city's death-throes,
horrifying as they are, have that
fantastic quality New Orleans is famous for: alligators and water moccasins
roaming suburban Metairie, lawless mobs attacking buses full of nursing home
patients, coffins floating down the street. This is stuff Anne Rice couldn't
make up.
Even if New Orleans recovers
eventually from the horror of Monday's hurricane, it can probably never
be what it was.
What was it?
You can name all the obvious
things: jazz and jambalaya, houses with ornate iron balustrades, Mardi
Gras beads and frilly umbrellas, chicory coffee and beignets with powdered
sugar, old-guard families in the Garden District and black transvestites
in the French Quarter, rhythm and blues and rap, streetcars -- not named
Desire -- and streets with names like Bourbon, Burgundy, Iberville, Terpsichore,
and Melpomene.
But there's something deeper. New Orleans was a little slice of non-America
in America.
Not, of course, in the sense of patriotism. But in the sense of
culture, values, attitudes to life.
Because of the Spanish and French who first settled there, and the African-Americans
who were given (comparatively) more freedom than anywhere else in the U.S., an
alternate version of e pluribus unum took root in that submerged city.
This, too, is America: not
America as it developed through most of the continent, but America as
it might have developed. As - in some ways - it would have been better
off developing.
It's a city that valued hospitality
over efficiency, good times over
making a buck. It's a cosmopolitan city that welcomed the eccentric, the freakish,
the fantastic: a town where people lived below sea level and the dead are buried
above ground, a town of jazz funerals and drive-in Daiquiri stands, a town
where the two biggest religions -- in order -- are Catholicism and Voodoo. It
was a city where nobody rushed. People tended to be gabby. Casual conversations
would start across restaurant tables and in supermarket lines. And those conversations
almost never began, like those up North, "so what do you do?" Partly out of
politeness - it was assumed, unless otherwise indicated, that you might be
unemployed, or working three jobs - but also because people down there tend
not to define you by your career. It was a multicultural city. With
plenty of racial problems of course - its crime-ridden projects are notorious,
its poverty widespread and horrible, and the "n" word was heard on the lips
of cab drivers, store clerks and school kids. But it's also a city that truly
celebrated its African-American heritage, the only major city that named its
airport (Louis Armstrong International) after a black notable, a city where
white folks and black folks could be found in friendly conversation on any
street corner.
It's a city that knew how to
get funky. Mardi Gras may have devolved into the world's biggest frat
party, but the radical idea that life is something to be enjoyed - rather
than a routine of breakfast-eating, TV-watching and paycheck-cashing
to be slogged through on the way to the cemetery -- has yet to take root
in most of the U.S. It's a city that marched to its own drummer.
Which may explain why, along with the sympathy the Katrina disaster has
evoked in most Americans, there has also been an undertone of exasperation. "If
the people of New Orleans and other low lying areas insist on living
in harm's way, they ought to accept responsibility for what happens to
them and their property," said an editorialist for the Waterbury (CT)
Republican. "Before the government commits to reclaiming New Orleans
and its marshy environs, it should think long and hard about whether
the investment of time and money would be worth it."
Much more sensible, presumably, to raze the whole thing and erect a
Wal-Mart.
In a United States that is becoming, year by year, more uniform, where you
see the same Olive Garden restaurant in every city, and hear the same music
on every radio station, a pocket of uniqueness like New Orleans is all the
more precious. It needs to be cherished, not abandoned.
E-mail: beckerman@northjersey.com |
