Wet Bank Guide

I have taken some grief in these columns for my earlier suggestion that an economy which did not, for example, provide every city resident a car made a profound contribution to the City's ability preserve a level of neighborhood economic activity and culture increasingly disappearing from our Neighbor to the North. I was accused of celebrating poverty.

One of the earliest posts in this space was on the very subject, titled A People Apart. I wrote:

In spite of the crushing poverty, New Orleans is not some Disney production. The joy of life is real. It is how everyone copes: the poor with their poverty, the middle class with the heat and humidity and mosquitoes, the rich with the rest of us. We love life, whatever it deals us. You can hear it in the music, taste it in the food, imbibe it as we do with a European gusto in your daily drinks. The spirit of this place is as strong as the coffee, as thick as the humidity, as hot as the spiciest food.

In that piece and one as recent as last week I found a parallel between poverty and the preservation of culture in New Orleans and on the native American reservations of the upper Midwest, not far from the city I spent a cold decade living in. Marginalized by a culture (if we can call America that) and an economy that had no use for a people or its ways, the reservations had one positive side: far from the cares of those who run the U.S., remnants of the old culture survived as it would not elsewhere.

That is not an excuse for what is allowed to transpire, either on The Rez or in The Bricks. Still, what was preserved by isolation and poverty should still be preserved. The question before us is how do we do that here in New Orleans, how do we recover from the greatest disaster in American history and preserve who and what we are?

Duany is dead on when he suggests that the conventional answers to that question are as dangerous as the failed attempt at social infrastructure that produced the housing projects.

"[The New Orleans way of life] which has been so misunderstood in the national scrutiny following the hurricane, is the Caribbean way. It is a lifestyle choice, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with it. In fact, it is the envy of some of us who work all our lives to attain the condition of leisure only after retirement. It is this way of living that will disappear. Even with the federal funds for housing, there is little chance that new or renovated houses will be owned without debt. It is too expensive to build now. The higher standards of the new International Building Code are superb but also very expensive. There must be an alternative or there will be very few “paid-off” houses. Everyone will have a mortgage that will need to be sustained by hard work—and this will undermine the culture of New Orleans.

This is a radical and dangerous assertion by North American standards, but entirely true. It is not, however, our greatest problem. As I pointed out as far back as September of 2005, we are both a Caribbean city and a Latin one. It is the latter that troubles us, our unflattering association with the Americas to the south.

This thought returned to me Mardi Gras morning, when some very thoughtful and intelligent people whose tongues were loosened by cocktails at breakfast, suggested that what we increasingly needed as a Strong Man to lead us out of our current predicament. Where, I added , is our Huey Long when we need him? In the cold light of Ash Wednesday I found myself revisiting this conversation and thinking if the plague of crime had finally lead us to the ultimate Latin American response?

That people might propose such a solution should shock no one when we are plagued by so many of the same problems as our cousins to the south. Our city is plagued by a government of oligarchs, from the White House down to Perdido Street. The money America thinks they sent to help us was mostly diverted into the pockets of the oligarchy that currently controls the White House in vast no-bid contracts that merely trickled a bit of the money down to us.

What did reach us was filtered in the same way through Baton Rouge, which contracted out our aid to incompetent and dishonest contractors from elsewhere who are spending money hand over fist on themselves without directing any to us. What does reach the city goes into the hands of Perdido Street, where new and expensive contracts for city services are let in secret.

This is not the way government is run in much of the Caribbean, where the English and French with their vast experience of colonial empire left behind a functioning if not always efficient government by bureaucracy. Ours is the system of corruption founded instead by the Spanish throughout the other Americas, one our current President seems to have discovered and become enamored of as the Bush family moved from New England to colonize Texas and Florida, one which we in southern Louisiana have been perfecting for centuries.

The idea that anyone might endorse this is what I think rankled Maitri in her own response to what da po blog and I wrote about Duany's piece. I don't think anyone who has read Wet Bank Guide for the last year-and-a-half would think that I celebrate or endorse that sort of corrupt ineptitude. More than half of what is written here in driven directly by scorn for it. We deserve better.

The two issues are really separate. Duany is right that the best of intentions among the legion of planners who have descended to help could destroy us as easily as the corruption at every level of government over us. We are being saved from the first so far only by the ineptitude of our own government and that of our neighbors to the north.

In the end it is best that the city regrow organically, without the heavy hand that made such a mess of concrete blocks out of the reconstruction of post-World War II Europe. To succeed at that level we will have find a way to put in place an administration that can succeed against the crime problem and fix the streets, that can somehow manage to dole out what little remains unlooted of the mythical $110 billion to attract and keep the critical mass of citizens that will make us viable.

The challenge is enormous. Here in New Orleans we are divided by racial and sectional tensions as profound as those that tear at Iraq, and building a working civic infrastructure for the city will be almost as large a challenge as the think-tank utopians in Washington found in the in Bagdhad. The current crime wave is both a symptom of our dysfunction, and exacerbates it, inflaming those same racial and sectional divisions because virtually all of the violence is rooted in one community.

I do not believe that it is beyond us. The 200,000 who have come home have shown a willingness to throw over the past, as evidenced by the overturning of the old assessor system or the tossing out by neighborhoods most fully returned of their old city officials. The real trick of it will be both to put in place some sort of local administration that would in fact by the envy of the Caribbean and the rest of our kindred Americas--even if it falls short of the expectations of the America to the north--without succumbing to the demands that we model our economy and society on the utopian fantasies of Republican think tanks and the dystopian model portrayed in American advertising.

A way must be found to end the crime wave and fix the streets, to fully restore basic first world services such as water and electricity at rates that won't bankrupt us all. The city is only worth saving if we can remain a people apart, poorer perhaps than the industrious thralls to our north but infinitely happier. If we can only save ourselves on the model of Atlanta or Dallas, I have to hope that it succeeds only so I can sell my own fabulously mortgaged house for enough to afford something to my taste further South.

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// posted by Mark Folse @ 7:30 AM