Wet Bank Guide

"Why am I here? Coming back after the flood was a leap of faith. I thought New Orleans had a fighting chance. I thought maybe it could even improve. I wanted to be a part of that ...

"Why am I here?

"An object at rest tends to stay at rest. I still have my job. We still own a house. Starting over is hard. Leaving would entail all kinds of hassles, not least of which is admitting I was wrong. So… there’s a certain inertia that keeps us here."

-- Bart Everson on b.rox wondering why he's here

In the dark of the year with the Saint's frenzy behind us, with the parade all passed an nothing left behind of the brightness and joy, nothing but the litter and the distant wail of sirens we are like residents along the parade route wondering: why, why do we live chose to live here?

It is not simply inertia thats holds us here, Bart. New Orleans captures us in the way planets capture moons: an irressitable force that will grab hold of any body that wanders past, all vectors and velocities altered and so many captured--some burnt to a cinder and others irreversibly drawn into orbit--by a primordial force.

I don't know what it is. The essence of New Orleans is as indistinct and essential as the philosopher's stone: something understood by the adept but impossible to produce. If we were somehow to capture it in a jar it would cease to be, or at least the genuine thingness of this place that brings or keeps us here would not be there. It would be only a Disney golum, a hollow and lifeless shell of the thing we would try to capture.

For hundreds of years America was a patchwork of places as disjointed as the Holy Roman Empire, a true assembly of states both physical and of mind, held together only by our seperateness from our forefathers' homelands. Some people were comfortable with their native state and could remain there, while others set out West in search of something different, and could be fairly certain of finding something that was not what they left behind.

Part of the ugly legacy of the 20th century is the loss of the individuality of place, the homoginezation through mass media and mass marketing of most of an entire continent into a single suburb designed in Long Island, and a single shopping boulevard perfected in California. As children we were indoctrinated in this sameness by television and came to accept the gradual replacement of the local diner and five-and-dime and department store by the national chains. We bought the same clothes and cars and became increasingly indistinguishable except perhaps by accent or license plate.

A few places and their people resisted this, either by isolation or choice. New Orleans resisted better than most (even as our stores vanished we held our restaurants) because of some unique customs that set us apart, like Carnival, and because of a certain cultural and economic isolation. Our days as the queen of the south long behind us, we escaped the fate of Atlanta and Dallas. Even our povery in some sense preserved us. People without cars need their neighborhood stores and restaurants to survive, and no corporation rushed in to exploit that tenuous market. As a result we remained at least in an essential way ourselves.

The flood nearly washed that away, may still succeed in washing it away forever, and it is something that is worth save. I can't tell you why to stay, only why I came back, and it was to be part of that critical threshold of return we need to save what remains of this place and its way of life.

As I was travelling on business this past week and stepped out into the nine degree morning on Long Island, N.Y., the frigid air transported me back to think about North Dakota. In that broad and empty place are vast native reservations that have struggled as we have for generations with poverty and its symptoms, with the threatened collapse of their identity. These people have struggled against the despair of poverty and the homogenization of American culture and the lure of distant, prosperous cities for generations.

With Carnival almost upon us, we need to look to the example of the native peoples, to one of the ways in which they cope and try to overcome their challenges and preserve their essential selves: they make elaborate costumes and they dance. They are the model (from turn of the last century wild west shows) that our own Mardi Gras Indians fashioned themselves from in their own search for their lost culture.

For the pow-wow dancers, these rituals are closely tied to religion and language, to the elements of their culture most threated and which they must preseve to retain their identiy as a poeple. They prepare their costumes and dance not because it will magically transform the alcoholism and unemployment anymore than their father's ghost dances would stop bullets. They do it because they recognize they have to start by recovering their sense of themselves.

If you want to remember why you're here, why we're all here, then lay aside for a day or a week all of the challenges. Make your costume and dance. Preserve that which is essential, without which this is just another East St. Louis on a hell bound train. Remind yourself what attracted you here in the first place, and refresh yourself in the celebration of it. Remember that what we are trying to preserve is unique and important, so that when the parade is passed you are not left with just a littered street and a pounding hangover but with a renewed sense of who we are and why we are here, of why we are struggling so that it might survive.

Katrina NOLA New Orleans Hurricane Katrina Think New Orleans Louisiana FEMA levees flooding Corps of Engineers We Are Not OK wetlands news rebirth Debrisville Federal Flood 8-29 Rising Tide Remember Native American pow wow Mardi Gras Indians

// posted by Mark Folse @ 5:38 AM