New Orleans writers struggle to pen rebirth story

Tonight and tomorrow night BBC Four TV will be showing Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. Earlier I posted about a spate of excellent books that came out over the year and a bit since Katrina. One that I didn't know about then but later discovered was by one of my great favourite authors from New Orleans, Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans Mon Amour (actually a collection of stories, poems and essays spanning the last 20 years, from and about NOLA.) I bought the book for my daughter, another doomed lover of the Big Easy, and I have heard that she liked it a lot. And now I found this story, one of many concerning how the various communities of New Orleans, the musicians, the artists, the political activists, have been struggling creatively but often painfully, to rebuild in the wake of the great deluge.

Big business sees a chance for ethnic and class cleansing

Gary Younge, writing in the Guardian comment section, covers the resurgence of Jim Crow in a more subtle guise, as mostly poor and black Katrina evacuees struggle to vote. New Orleans mayoral elections this year see big businesses ex-friend Nagin as the only black major candidate against two white men who are better friends of big business than he proved to be. The mostly white neighbourhoods are far more resettled, and looking to expand their gentrification into the wastelands left behind. Evacuees in Houston, facing constant harrassment in a daily struggle just to live, now have to find a way to vote postal with no mailing address, or travel hundreds of miles just to exercise their right to vote.

America's ghost town

A review of a hip hop video by Louisiana artist Juvenile is a forum for a searching look at embattled black New Orleans. Things are not really improving there, people, despite the fiery grass-roots spirit of a lot of black and white musicians and workers of all kinds. Valiant community effort will only get you so far against obstacles like these. From City Pages.

Bittersweet, like the coffee

And like Blanche Dubois, depending on the kindness of strangers. It's New Orleans first post-Katrina Mardi Gras.

Sink or Swim

August Nimtz, a New Orleans native who is now a history professor at the University of Minnesota and a leading American Marxist scholar, has this brief but pithy interview with the City Pages' Jim Walsh.

Gore airlifts stranded patients, while elsewhere . . .

Here's a story that you may not have heard at the time. Ex-VP Al Gore paid to airlift the patients of a hospital in New Orleans to Tennessee when they were stranded in life-threatening circumstances. (Gore has apparently been a little shy about the story, no doubt due to his unfair and atrocious treatment by the press in the past.)
In an interesting if chilling parallel, I was watching the new Andrew Marr show Sunday AM this morning and in the ritual reading of the newspaper headlines, one of the national tabloids had a front page story alleging that hospital staff in New Orleans engaged in mercy killing of stranded and terminally ill patients. I could not find a link for this on the internet (I'm sure it must be out there*) but I did find a lot of other stuff, including this powerful accusation of ethnic cleansing in New Orleans. Here's a quote:

Buffalo-based columnist Michael I. Niman notes Sept. 8 how the feds effectively shut down citizen self-help rescue efforts such as [New Orleans resident Charmaine] Neville's:
The Â?too dangerous to rescueÂ? myth was also employed by FEMA as rationale for ordering rescue teams to stand down early in the crisis. Louisianans are a tough lot, and many private boat owners from areas surrounding New Orleans immediately entered the city as flooding began, creating an ad hoc rescue flotilla. Many survivors tell of strangers in small fishing boats plucking them out of second story windows or off of roofs, depositing them high and dry on highway overpasses. The Federal government put a stop to such heroism, while failing to replace the independent effort with one of their own. (Online at MediaStudy.com)
There appears to have been an overt policy of racial and class discrimination in the rescue effort. ThMilwaukeeee Journal-Sentinel Sept. 2 reports the ordeal of Kelli Nelson, an African-American Wisconsin native working as a nurse at Charity Hospital, New Orleans' largest public hospital and trauma center. She and other personnel and patients were finally airlifted out to San Antonio on the 2nd, after she stood on the roof with a big sign reading "Save the babies, please get us out of here." The city's big private hospitals like Tulane were evacuated days earlier. Trapped in the city, Kelli did manage to get out some chilling text messages to her friends and family.
"She says the situation has gotten worse," the friends relayed that Kelli had messaged them. "The evacuation was aborted... [T]hey had taken babies and mothers down to a boat to go to Tulane's helicopter pad and they were refused access to the pad... what a horror story.
"Does that mean indigent people have no rights...?

* Update: It was The Sunday Mail. I ended up buying the paper and reading it "offline". The pundits on the show pooh-poohed the possibility of accuracy of this story, but I have to say it had, for me, a ring of verisimilitude.

New Orleans left to the dead and dying

A shocking story comes to a conclusion of sorts. Only read this if you have the stomach for the unpleasant truth.

Thousands feared drowned in New Orleans

And then there is this:

President Bush flew over New Orleans and parts of Mississippi's hurricane-blasted coastline in Air Force One. Turning to his aides, he said: "It's totally wiped out. ... It's devastating, it's got to be doubly devastating on the ground."

Although ex-President Clinton is too much of a gentleman to criticise Bush, this has got to be said. If Clinton were president, absolutely nothing would have prevented him from landing in New Orleans and doing his famous touching, feeling, comforting thing. I am just saying. The difference between the two men is searingly obvious.
I am in mourning for New Orleans, a city I loved, and Mississippi, a state where half of my family resides. On a personal level it is hard to get information. I know more or less where everyone is, but they are cut off by phone and power outages, so I do not know how much loss they have suffered. All we can do is wait and pray. And send money to the Red Cross or your choice of charity if you can.

Update: here is a whole bunch of news photos from LA and MS.