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Friday, September 2, 2005
New Orleans Has Always Been Unique
By Jim Belshaw
Of the Journal
JIM BELSHAW COLUMN: In this very newspaper on Thursday there appeared a list of the many fine agencies collecting money and other items to relieve the terrible suffering in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. One of them was PNM Resources, trying to raise $150,000 for American Red Cross. It will match up to $75,000 in contributions.
Sounded good to me. I could mail in the check (payable to American Red Cross) at Hurricane Relief Effort, PNM Resources, Alvarado Square, Albuquerque 87158-1225.
Or I could go to Alvarado Square and drop it off. My office is about three blocks away. Philanthropy made easy.
My check won't raise any eyebrows, but I liked the idea of it: a simple, clear thing in a morass of headlines screaming "Anarchy!" and such. (Remember "Escape from New York"? I expect to turn on TV news one night and see Kurt Russell with an eye patch waving an M-16 on the Superdome roof.)
On the walk to Alvarado Square, I found myself thinking again about the plain fact of dryness, the sidewalks and streets we take for granted every day. I wondered what someone in New Orleans might give for a dry street and an easy ride out of town.
As usual, the sublime and the ridiculous made appearances:
CNN: "Across the nation, people ... are offering up their homes as temporary shelters."
Cox News: "Hundreds of storm refugees are being evicted from Tallahassee hotels to accommodate fans coming for the Miami-Florida State football game Monday."
New Orleans always reminded me of Southeast Asian cities, sensual places where there's no escaping the sensuality and why would you want to anyway?
The heat and humidity and smells, whole sense of these places permeate you until you just give yourself up to it and soon you're looking at life differently from the way you did before you got there.
The first time I went to New Orleans, I wasn't even out of the airport before I started thinking— So this is why Tennessee Williams' characters do what they do.
The blame game has already begun. The Fox News commentariat found the guilty: The people who live there. Their offense: living there. (Next up: Irresponsible Midwesterners and their blizzards.)
I talked to a meteorologist at UNM, David Gutzler, a professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences. I was looking for a sense of scale.
"The cloud shield?" he said of Katrina. "That hurricane was on the order of the size of this state— New Mexico."
He said forecasters did a brilliant job. Warning systems worked.
But the headlines still say "Anarchy!"
"We like to think we have things under control," he said. "We think, my goodness, how much time and money and effort have been sunk into warning systems, and they worked. Everything worked. People knew this was coming and still were overwhelmed. That's very humbling."
A friend of a friend who has lived in New Orleans for 15 years wrote an essay on her relationship with the city.
It ended: "I really loved and hated New Orleans. People are lying or they are tourists if they say that they loved it. Great art and music came from the depths of its poverty. The corruption was colossal and evil ... When you worked there you had to have a special touch to get things done because people thought about things differently ... You had to stop and watch and suspend judgment to learn the lessons the city had to offer ... The thing that New Orleans had that I have never found anywhere else was a sense of community and a wry sense of humanity and insight into oppression, racism, irreverence and belief in what is truly valuable in life."
She wrote the essay in the past tense.
Write to Jim Belshaw at The Albuquerque Journal, P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103; telephone— 823-3930; e-mail— jbelshaw@abqjournal.com.