by Joseph M. Monks.
Wednesday
September 1
11:31 p.m.
Let me start off by saying that I was fortunate enough to visit New Orleans when I still had my sight, on a long Halloween weekend on assignment for Leg Sex Magazine. I spent it with friends, in a friendly city, doing touristy things like visiting the above-ground graveyards, expending about 20 rolls of film, eating fried dough and trying coffee after coffee in every cafe we walked past. (I do not drink coffee, but when in Rome...). I ate more pralines than I thought humanly possible. I visited out of the way, nook-and-cranny shops that sold nothing but zydeco, or voodoo
paraphrenalia, or cooking items related to crawdads. I had considered, last year, sending my parents to the French Quarter for a few days as an anniversary present. This year, we sent them to St. Augustine. I regret the decision, because in all honesty, New Orleans as we knew it, is dead. And the only solution see, is to take what *is* left standing once the flood waters recede , and
level it.
New Orleans began to burn in spots today, and I think that is perhaps the best fate for it. I loved New Orleans, and I hate to see it fall, but like it or not, New Orleans cannot be saved. Sure, it would be nice to try and salvage the French Quarter, to keep some of the Bourbon Street
mystique, to save the Superdome and the waterfront.
But that is useless and short-sighted. This isn't just about flood damage and houses knocked down, as it was in Florida when Hurricane Andrew wrought havoc and wiped out the city of Homestead and some of Miami proper. This isn't like last year's triple-hammer of 'canes that turned the Gulf Coast of Florida into a wasteland and erased Punta Gorda from the map. Those
towns and cities *can* rebuild, or could rebuild, because there was something left. What will be left in New Orleans will be contaminated. Not just by waste water and sewage, but with the rot of countless dead--both old and new. Bodies floating in the streets may be victims of Katrina, or they may be the long dead wrested from what was supposed to have been their final resting places. No longer. The ground will be poisoned with toxic chemicals used in the battered refineries and ports, in the waste and residue from the chemical plants. There is talk that the only solution is to pump the toxic bilge out the way New Orleans has always pumped water out of the city, by funneling it into the Gulf of Mexico. But that won't solve the problem, it will only drain away one layer of it.
While the Gulf will eventually be able to cleanse itself--nature has a way of doing it, though it takes time, in this case likely a decade or longer--the ground beneath the fallen buildings and ruined streets and decimated neighborhoods is going to soak it up. Landfills and chemical dumps are already flooded and leaking into the earth. Will the area be inhabitable? The EPA is concerned that it might not be for more than a year, and worst case scenario? Maybe *5.*
So the solution is not to try and cling to the memory of the host city of Mardi Gras, but to raze it. Burn New Orleans to the ground and try to purify it by fire. The air and water will eventually filter themselves, and perhaps in time enough can be done to start reconsidering a new New Orleans.
For the city itself should not be discarded, only the most recent version of it. New Orleans, like any metropolis, has evolved over the years, it has changed and grown and been battered and beaten and risen again. This time, though, it should rise from the ashes, instead of trying to reemerge on the shaky ground too far below sea level to support it.
I want New Orleans back. But I probably won't get it. The people *of* New Orleans want it back, but they don't deserve to get it this way--damaged and uninhabitable. Instead, the United States should take a Rooseveltesque approach and look at New Orleans as the next great public works
project. Our new Hoover Dam, our next Mount Rushmore, our next Alaskan Pipeline. Whatever
it takes to build levees that will protect the new city? Spend the dough. Whatever it takes in tax dollars to fix the refineries, spend it. Whatever it takes in assistance to get people in to work the jobs needed to first demolish, then clear, then build a city from scratch? Make it happen.
This isn't for one President to do. It will probably take two or three administrations to see it through. But this will put the people not only of New Orleans, but of all of Louisiana and Mississippi and neighboring states to work. To work in long-term, steady jobs that require the kind of commitment we made to putting a man on the moon. We've got folks who figured out how to land a rover on a distant planet and send back crystal clear pictures in the ultimate Kodak moment, we can reassign some of those geniuses to figure out how to keep the water flowing and out of the
streets of a brand new city. Brand new, but with an old name. It is time to give up on what remains of New Orleans, but not on the idea of New Orleans. They called it "The Big Easy," and rebuilding it will be anything but. Yet that is the task at hand, and perhaps no nation on Earth is quite so well
equipped to take on that challenge. What happens remains to be seen, but if ever there was a time for a visionary to make a stand and to act with bold,broad strokes in shaping the future, this is the time for that person (or persons). Fixing up what's left will never be good enough or
worthwhile. But will anybody have the guts to go down this path?
I certainly hope so.
