Requiem for New Orleans

[shereads]

Predictably, the lower middle-class neighborhoods that were essential to the character of New Orleans are the ones that will be condemned and sold to developers.

Experpts from a column in this morning's Washington Post:

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, January 13, 2006; Page A21

<snip>

The old New Orleans was unique in so many ways. The cityscape was like no other, with its thousands of little Creole cottages and shotgun houses. Before the flood, the city boasted 38,000 recognized historic structures; about 25,000 were badly damaged. All told, according to the report from the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, 108,731 households -- half the city's total -- were inundated with more than four feet of water.

Some echoes of the old New Orleans live on. The anything-goes atmosphere of the French Quarter persists. There will indeed be a Mardi Gras. As for the glorious cuisine, most restaurants in the dry parts of the city are functional, if barely -- a lot of the people who used to cook, serve, bus tables and wash dishes are scattered around the country.

And of course there's the music -- the city's greatest contribution to modern culture. You can still go out at night and hear jazz being reinvented. The city's "cultural ambassador," a young trumpet virtuoso named Irvin Mayfield who can make his horn sing like an angel or growl like a hungry dog, is trying to use his fledgling New Orleans Jazz Orchestra as an instrument of civic renewal. He envisions a living institution that honors the birthplace of the 20th century's most important musical form.

Mayfield's father, Irvin Mayfield Sr., lived in the devastated Gentilly neighborhood and did not escape the flood. Several weeks after the putrid water was pumped out of the city, authorities identified his body.

The great musician Fats Domino did manage to flee his home in the Lower Ninth Ward by boat. The plan city officials unveiled Wednesday envisions much of Domino's neighborhood being condemned and turned into parkland or sold to developers. Several property owners reacted angrily and threatened to resist the bulldozers, with physical force if need be, but the plan just recognizes the inevitable. The Lower Ninth will never be the Lower Ninth again.

Neither will Central City or a half-dozen other big neighborhoods that the city wants to condemn and sell for development. Much of what has always been considered the heart and soul of black New Orleans has in effect been wiped off the map. Former residents are dispersed; the few who got housed in local hotels are under pressure to get out so the hotels can make room for the Mardi Gras tourists.

The numbers are merciless: New Orleans has a sprawling "footprint," or infrastructure, to accommodate the more than 600,000 people who lived in the city at its height. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit, the population was down to 462,000 -- meaning that some neighborhoods were already blighted. At present there are only 144,000 souls, and the city estimates that in September 2008, the population will still be just 247,000.

The reason the old New Orleans is dead is that the people who made it special are gone and there is no path for them to come back. I doubt there's anywhere else in this country you could find so many black people who look white or so many white people who sound black. I know there's nowhere else you could find all the Creoles and Cajuns, nowhere else you could hear that odd New Orleans accent that sounds more like Brooklyn than Biloxi.

The Bring New Orleans Back Commission envisions a city with lots of green space and a new light rail system; it sees revitalized schools and world-class medical research centers, all protected by invincible levees. It might be a nice place to live, but it won't be the old New Orleans.

In the old days, at a jazz funeral, the "second line" of followers would sing and dance the departed to heaven. The music is still playing in New Orleans, but there's nobody to form the second line.

Tragedy = opportunity. Anyone want to venture a guess about the money that will be made by developers buying condemened property in New Orleans? The historic value of Creole cottages and shotgun houses will be the second thing bulldozed, after the culture of the families who lived in them. Worst case: a sanitized theme park version of New Orleans, with the French Quarter and the Garden District providing just enough history to attract tourists.

 

[Huckleman2000]

I feel horribly unqualified to comment on this - my visits to New Orleans were connected to conventions, and limited mostly to the French Quarter and the Convention Center. even so, while my experience with the geography of the area is limited, my experience with the people is mainly with those in restaurant and service jobs, apart from watching the musicians and performers on Bourbon Street. If they are the ones irretrievably displaced, New Orleans indeed will have lost its character.

 

[amicus]

Shereads paints a romantic, nostalgic and naive view of what was in reality one of the most backward and corrupt cities in America.

Jazz, a combination of black and european music began in New Orleans but soon migrated to St Louis, the Chicago and eventually New York City. New Orleans became a tourist trap for has beens and wannabees.

The mostly black population had one of the worst crime rates of all cities in the United States, the welfare rate was the highest and the unemployment rate also the highest.

The left over 'Cajun' history is a mixture of French (we bought Louisiana from the French) Indian and West Indian voodoo black migrants.

New Orleans was and has been for some time, a cultural morass of degradation, drugs and prostitution. Katrina was the best thing that could ever have happened to that abyss.

The good news is that the Port of New Orleans, which handles 25 percent of the agricultural output of the midwest, will now be able to import, upgrade and modernize and regain its world stature as a major international port.

For those of you who do not really understand, the true fault lies in the climate of the deep south. It is absolutely debillitating.

I have lived for extended periods of time in Florida, near Gainesville and Miami, in Arkansas, In Mississippi and from June through November the temperature can and usually does remain in the mid 90's F and the Humidity is stifling.

For those who know nothing of, or have not thought of, the influence climate has on humanity, consider the progress made in central African Nations and most all peoples around the world who live in an equatorial climate zone.

I came to this conclusion through some personal experiences, while living au natural' in Florida aboard a sailboat and then later in the Bahama's. Hemingway knew and wrote of the natural lackadaisicalness of tropical inhabitants and it infuriated him until he succumbed to the temptations of idleness and bare survival.

There is nothing to mourn about the loss of the 'old New Orleans', the deep black dark drums of the African Congo belong in the past, a nostalgic history.

I have learned that one can trust nothing SheReads writes, she always has an agenda, an ugly one.

that is sad...


amicus...

 

[Huckleman2000]

Oh, Amicus, you romantic softie!

Just wait until global warming brings that debillitating climate to a broader area! Judging from recent years, it happening quicker than we could ever imagine!

 

[amicus]

Oh, Amicus, you romantic softie!

Just wait until global warming brings that debillitating climate to a broader area! Judging from recent years, it happening quicker than we could ever imagine!

Whaddaya doin' Huck, chasin me around the rosies? geez...

Haven't you heard? Global warming was a farce, another ice age in nye at hand and the sky is falling!

Neither of us may live long enough to survive the current climatic cycle, which has been occurring for millenia. This current cycle has about 15 years of warming and more intense weather and storms before it goes into a lull and decline again.

tsk tsk...


amicus...

 

[shereads]

There is nothing to mourn about the loss of the 'old New Orleans', the deep black dark drums of the African Congo belong in the past, a nostalgic history.

I have learned that one can trust nothing SheReads writes, she always has an agenda, an ugly one.

that is sad...


amicus...

You are proud to be a rascist, aren't you? How predictably loathesome. Had you spent time in New Orleans, beyond the brief visit to the tourist center that I believe you have previously said was your sole experience, you would not have been able to appreciate the things that others saw and appreciated. All that Not-Whiteness and all of those Not-Like-You's produced one of the most sensual cities in the world, a uniquely American brew of cultures, music, culinary traditions, literature, art and architecture. One could not find a bad meal in New Orleans. Its street musicians are of a quality that would command the price of a ticket in any other city. Despite its crime and poverty, which were made even worse at every opportunity by people of your political persuasion, New Orleans was and could be again one of the world's favorite American cities. Some of its most productive residents were descended from survivors of one of the few cultural traditions outside your own experience for which you have ever expressed respect - slavery. They drew on other cultures and created something unique and irreplaceable. It's just as well that you never tried to see it; you could not have.

Edited to add: We agree on one thing. I hate humid subtropical heat. Yet I live in a subtropical climate and still manage to be smarter and better informed than you. Cuter, too.

 

[amicus]

I replied initially to Shereads thread start: "...Shereads paints a romantic, nostalgic and naive view of what was in reality one of the most backward and corrupt cities in America..."

I repeat it as I still maintain the same opinion.

I recall a film, from New Orleans, I think, featuring Brooke Shields, teenaged daughter of a prostitute who became a prostitute in the 'red light' district of New Orleans, you have all read about that, have you not?

It was still there when Katrina struck.

Shereads expresses a longing for a period of opium dens, and absinthe parlors of old Paree, thinking somehow, dumbheaded, that culture emmanates from ignorance and slavery, drugs and degradation.

It does not.

New Orleans was never a city of high culture, quite like Tijuana, Mexico, a home from drugs and prostitution, degradation and povertry brought about by the likes of you who patronize the Dionesian pleasures of the flesh and call it culture.

You live in the make-believe world of art and leisure, drugs and pleasure and show disdain for the 'real' people of this world and self proclaim your enlightenment as 'special'.

As with most of left wing world today, you produce nothing and take everything and look down upon those who provide you with sustenance as if you are morally superior.

You are not.

You represent the parasites who live in symbiotic existence, sucking the blood and life from the real people you infest.

You accuse me of being a racist, which has nothing to do with anything except as a weapon for you. Am I proud of western culture, basically from the Greeks forward? You bet your ass you bleeding heart liberal pussy, bet your ass.


It is a romantic Bohemian, rose colored glasses vision of most wannabees, who live through literature and dreams and not life itself.

New Orleans was a filthy city, not just from the unsanitary below sea level environment, the bugs and the mosquitos and cockroaches, but from an already decadent French European culture that rotted on the vine centuries ago and an African Voodoo mentality that existed on ritual and tribal chants.

Your emporer has no clothes, Shereads, is naked and nude and scrawny and pathetic in the light of reason and rationality.

Your time, your era, is over and gone, gasping its last bitter breaths, I did not expect you to go easily.

I am truly apologetic for being so forthright, but I grow tired of your righteous phoney claims to superior culture and intellect through acceptance of no culture as high culture.

You want to see real culture? Take in the steel and glass skylines, the lighted freeways, the busy cities and seaports and airports of major american cities where people live and thrive and prosper. Walk through the museums of American industry and agriculture, look at the machines that transport people and feed people around the world.

You want to see real culture, go to the Opera, go to Broadway, even asinine Las Vegas, turn on a television set anywhere in the world and watch and listen to American music, American films, American science and technology.

New Orleans was the worst we had to offer, it will not be mourned.


amicus...

 

[Somme]

(edited for both brevity AND cogency)

New Orleans was the worst we had to offer, it will not be mourned.


amicus...

I beg to differ. Washington is the worst you have to offer. Should it be inundated, I, for one, wouldn't mourn it. I doubt, concidering the rampant evil emenating from it, that the rest of the world would either.

I'm tempted to ask if you have ANY decency left, but it is so perfectly self evident that you do not.

 

[TheEarl]

I recall a film, from New Orleans, I think, featuring Brooke Shields, teenaged daughter of a prostitute who became a prostitute in the 'red light' district of New Orleans, you have all read about that, have you not?

This was the paragraph that struck me. As fara s I can tell, SheReads is basing her opinion on intimate knowledge of the city. You're basing it on one trip and a film.

She might be overly nostalgic and sentimental, but I'm going with her cause at least she has the knowledge at her fingertips.

The Earl
Currently disgusted with the left-wing policies of the Conservatives

 

[cloudy]

You are proud to be a rascist, aren't you? How predictably loathesome. Had you spent time in New Orleans, beyond the brief visit to the tourist center that I believe you have previously said was your sole experience, you would not have been able to appreciate the things that others saw and appreciated. All that Not-Whiteness and all of those Not-Like-You's produced one of the most sensual cities in the world, a uniquely American brew of cultures, music, culinary traditions, literature, art and architecture. One could not find a bad meal in New Orleans. Its street musicians are of a quality that would command the price of a ticket in any other city. Despite its crime and poverty, which were made even worse at every opportunity by people of your political persuasion, New Orleans was and could be again one of the world's favorite American cities. Some of its most productive residents were descended from survivors of one of the few cultural traditions outside your own experience for which you have ever expressed respect - slavery. They drew on other cultures and created something unique and irreplaceable. It's just as well that you never tried to see it; you could not have.

Edited to add: We agree on one thing. I hate humid subtropical heat. Yet I live in a subtropical climate and still manage to be smarter and better informed than you. Cuter, too.

What Sher said.

I'm very familiar with New Orleans, have loved the city from the first time I set foot in it, and I'm very sad it will never be the same.

Ami - sorry, bud, but your opinion means less than diddley-squat, since you've already confessed you know nothing about it - have never spent any time there, and are just using it for another one of your white-power rants.

Usually I gently make fun of you. In this instance, you disgust me.

 

[logophile]

What has happened to New Orleans has prompted me to change the way I live my life. I haven't been there, ever, and it was in the top 5 places I always wanted to visit. I read about the city pretty extensively and had an actual physical longing to wander through the neighborhoods, see the cottages, the side streets. But I kept putting it off and worrying over details like money, etc. Since Katrina hit, I've known it was now impossible to see the New Orleans I have long dreamed of and I'm so very sad about that. I've resolved to start down my list of places I want to visit and work my way through it. Money is terribly tight for me, but I know with advance planning, it can be done. People all over the world visit the places they want to see because it's important for developing oneself. I'm not going to wait until it's financially easy to start making these trips, because honestly in my line of work, it may never be easy. And I can't wait forever. I'm terrified of what else I might miss!

 

[shereads]

Amicus, you poor baby. Everyone's being awfully hard on you. Even I sometimes forget that you're role-playing. Wrong forum, but that's what makes you so much fun.

Usually, you're at your sexiest when you're pretending to be an embittered ex-Klansman who never got over being bullied in junior high. You do it brilliantly. Too brilliantly, sometimes. Yesterday's impersonation was so realistic it was downright creepy. I could have sworn that the only reason you never made Grand Dragon is that the other Klansmen were embarrassed by your racism.

They may also have noticed your mbarrassing tendency to defeat your own arguments by demonstrating your ignorance. You can't deny them that point. What the KKK failed to understand about you is how much courage it takes to gleefully critique things you've already admitted you know nothing about. Thank God for the Heritage Foundation, right? If not for their crack team of scientist (are there two now?) and creative historians, you wouldn't have any facts at all. Facts, even when they are laughably untrue, are the spice in the stew of debate.

But you don't like spice, do you. Sorry. I forget sometimes that you're a method actor, which means you must limit yourself to white bread, vanilla pudding, mashed potatoes and red meat. Now I learn that you've also limited your white influences to non-French and non-European. (Too swarthy. Too passionate. Roll their r's.) I'll bet you were tricked into eating escargot as a child! If parents knew how those little pranks can backfire, there might be fewer Jeffrey Dahmers.

Do I see New Orleans through rose-colored glasses? You pegged it. I do. But I do see it, at least. Those opaque lenses you wear have blinded you to something that ought to be obvious: everyone here has seen and experienced the things you name as worthwhile examples of respectable culture and commerce. Tall buildings. Museums. Symphonies. Yo-Yo Ma. (Oops. How did he get in there?) The works of Homer, both Simpson and The Iliad. The many influences of Greek civilization on western art, architecture and society, which unfortunately included trial-by-torture (mostly for slaves and the lower classes) and an inbred aristocracy who married the nearest cousin and knocked her up ASAP, so the men could get on with the serious business of state: sodomy! Pornography may have been discovered at Pompeii, but as usual the Romans stole the idea from the Athenians, who had it thrust upun them by the Spartans.

You sly dog. I'll bet you used to hide a Greek Studies textbook in a stack of Playboys.

Have I left out any of the cultural icons you claim for White America? Oh yes - Broadway. The Great White Way, so named because live theater is almost exclusively a product of our anglo-saxon heritage, despite the nasty rumour that those women in Dream Girls were real Negros.

Yes, I've seen all of those things. (Except Las Vegas. I've seen Disney World and some episodes of The Sopranos, if that counts.)

I've seen your list of favorites plus my own list, and plan to keep seeing and questioning and evaluating my home planet, without the safety-net of Absolutism. Unlike you, I don't stop looking when I reach unfamiliar territory or assume that what appears to be true, can't be if it conflicts with what I want to believe. I embrace some things about modern life and regret others. I see gray areas. That doesn't mean I don't see what you see; it means I see your world in context. (It's so tiny! So few closets, and hardly any windows. No wonder you're so cranky.)

Are you crankier than usual because the world keeps spinning out of your control? That can be a bitch. I know the feeling.

If it will make you feel better, I'll admit I have a Secret Agenda.

MY AGENDA:

This week, I'm supposed to distract you from whatever it is you've been doing out in the shed. Not that the Feds are planning to snoop around back there. Not at all! If you see a man with dark sunglasses speaking into a walkie-talkie, it's probably a neighbor looking for his cat.

Satisfied? Good. Now get back to your ward before you miss curfew, or you'll lose your Trustee privileges.

Fondly,

Evil Socialist Pussy

 

[LadyJeanne]

What's wrong with you Amicus? Like every other city in the US, it had its share of pverty, crime and drugs. I hardly think that New York, Chicago, DC, Dallas, Boston, LA, San Francisco, etc. are poverty, crime, and drug-free. That's the nature of cities.

Just because you never made it out of the Quarter, doesn't mean there wasn't more to the city than the tourist attractions. Believe it or not, there were lots of people who got up in the morning, put on their blue shirts and khakis, and made their way to the business district to sit in front of computers investing, selling, building, developing, designing, and banking and shopping.

They paid their taxes, worried about home repair, sent their kids to school and cooed over their refrigerator art, saved to buy a new car, invested for their kids' college educations, went to museums and zoos and opera and theater and Saints games, voted in elections, sent their boys to Iraq, and hey, some of them probably hated jazz and blues and tourists and voodoo, too.

So what?

Las Vegas isn't just the Strip, and NO wasn't just the Quarter. Just because you don't appreciate the history and culture doesn't make it a sewer. It just makes you small-minded. It wouldn't even make you small-minded not to appreciate the place, if you hadn't expressed your views in such a small-minded way.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I've spent much of my free time in New Orleans.

I won't comment on the ppolitics, but I will say this. New O isn't a place you visit. It's a place you carry around with you. there is a feel to it, a taste and a sound that never really goes once you have experienced it. It's so hard to set a story in New o, because capturing that feel with words is a job for A Tennyson or Wordsworth.

New orleans, no matter what for it eventually takes, will always be new Orleans. And when you go back, you'll take it back with you. From the heavy feel of the air before a rin, to the visual spelndor of the facades, moss coverd trees and cobbled streets. Everyone who visits will bring back the New Orleans they knew, and I feel sure, the city will renew it's mystery, appeal and wonder.

I'm not an optomist in most things, but I have boundless faith in the Big easy.

 

[LadyJeanne]

What has happened to New Orleans has prompted me to change the way I live my life. I haven't been there, ever, and it was in the top 5 places I always wanted to visit. I read about the city pretty extensively and had an actual physical longing to wander through the neighborhoods, see the cottages, the side streets. But I kept putting it off and worrying over details like money, etc. Since Katrina hit, I've known it was now impossible to see the New Orleans I have long dreamed of and I'm so very sad about that. I've resolved to start down my list of places I want to visit and work my way through it. Money is terribly tight for me, but I know with advance planning, it can be done. People all over the world visit the places they want to see because it's important for developing oneself. I'm not going to wait until it's financially easy to start making these trips, because honestly in my line of work, it may never be easy. And I can't wait forever. I'm terrified of what else I might miss!

Visit San Francisco first - you'll love it!

 

[Stella_Omega]

To lose New Orleans will be a terrible loss.
I don't know what can possibly take its place, a part of our soul is gone. You'll notice that I speak of it as a done deal- A second hurricane season would nail the lid on the coffin, really. I don't feel optomisitc about it at all...

I have amicus on ignore. Once in a while someone quotes him and I remember why I ignore him.
But I wonder why he would name himself "friend" since he is no one's friend to speak of. He exhibits no empathy and a most impoverished imagination.

 

[rgraham666]

To lose New Orleans will be a terrible loss.
I don't know what can possibly take its place, a part of our soul is gone. You'll notice that I speak of it as a done deal- A second hurricane season would nail the lid on the coffin, really. I don't feel optomisitc about it at all...

I have amicus on ignore. Once in a while someone quotes him and I remember why I ignore him.
But I wonder why he would name himself "friend" since he is no one's friend to speak of. He exhibits no empathy and a most impoverished imagination.

Amen Stella.

Every time I see our friend I wonder, "What language did the Romans use for the twenty four karat bamboozle?"

 

[Stella_Omega]

Amen Stella.

Every time I see our friend I wonder, "What language did the Romans use for the twenty four karat bamboozle?"

Greek

 

[Pure]

amicus on NO

he's glad Brooke Shields isn't there to be exploited. wait, she never lived there. oh.

amicus [NO riddled with] drugs and degradation.

and that's a problem because...?
---

it will be sad when the old corruption is replaced by the new. the famed
Mississippi Delta vanished to the oil companies some time ago.

 

[shereads]

What has happened to New Orleans has prompted me to change the way I live my life. I haven't been there, ever, and it was in the top 5 places I always wanted to visit. I read about the city pretty extensively and had an actual physical longing to wander through the neighborhoods, see the cottages, the side streets. But I kept putting it off and worrying over details like money, etc. Since Katrina hit, I've known it was now impossible to see the New Orleans I have long dreamed of and I'm so very sad about that. I've resolved to start down my list of places I want to visit and work my way through it. Money is terribly tight for me, but I know with advance planning, it can be done. People all over the world visit the places they want to see because it's important for developing oneself. I'm not going to wait until it's financially easy to start making these trips, because honestly in my line of work, it may never be easy. And I can't wait forever. I'm terrified of what else I might miss!

I want to see Venice once as an adult, before it sinks. (When I was five, I liked the boats but would have liked the city better with American TV. )

I want to see the Pyramids and the Valley of Kings and the Temple of Ramses before the middle east implodes or is paved over by Halliburton. I want to stay at the Mena Hotel and wear a Victorian split-skirt with a prim white shirt-waist and a broad-brimmed hat with a trailing scarf, while riding an Arabian horse. The Mena and the outfit are negotiable, as is the horse. I will settle for a camel.

I want to see Mount Kilimanjaro before the glaciers disappear. No glaciers, no "Snows of Kilimanjaro."

I want to see herds of giraffe and zebra and gazelles, tens of thousands of them, in their wild habitat. It's already too late for that. It happened in my lifetime. So I want to do the next best thing: a wildlife trek on foot with Masai trackers, offered through one of the national parks in South Africa.

I want to a glimpse the Arctic National Wildlife Revuge before the inevitable happens. If I never do, I want to know it's still there. When there are no longer any places left on the planet where we haven't mined, paved, pruned, opened a gas station, replaced a shadowy forest with a timber farm, killed the predators and culled the herd, our species will lose one of the essential ingredients of imagination: mystery.

Who will dream up the next Tarzan when there are no Lost Worlds and the lions all have tags stapled to their ears?

 

[oggbashan]

Rebuilding London

London has had to be rebuilt three times:

The first time was after it was sacked and burnt by Boudicca (Boudicea) in Roman times.

The second time was after the Great Fire of 1666.

The third time was after the Blitz of WWII.

Each time grandiose plans for rebuilding a better, planned city were suggested doing away with the piecemeal development that had grown over the years.

Each time the owners of the land insisted on rebuilding their property where they had been and the politicians argued and argued while the buildings fixed the City back largely as it had been.

You can still trace Roman London on the street plan of the 21st Century City of London. The changes were minimal compared to what remained as it was.

I hope that New Orleans can show the same spirit and rebuild better, but with the same sense of community that was there before.

Og

 

[Guest]

I've thought about New Orleans a lot since the hurricane, I suppose because I live in a famous and unique city constantly threatened by a natural disaster (earthquakes). I also presumed the 'reconstruction' would get all fucked up and political, etc. so I don't read about it. However, when you think of what really makes up a city, esp. one like New Orleans, it is not the government, developers, etc., but the core populations that created the culture.

It will take a very long time, but that core of 'real' people (perhaps very much new people, vs. the actual former citizens) will make it up, and I daresay there will be a great resemblance as the things that originally drew people to the place will be similar. There may be more prosaically middleclass structures replacing the old, but eventually the city will need all those 'lower' class laborers to do the countless menial tasks that keep a big city alive. Then we will see the 'old' New Orleans, though perhaps not in our lifetimes.

Weirdly hopeful,

Perdita

 

[shereads]

I've thought about New Orleans a lot since the hurricane, I suppose because I live in a famous and unique city constantly threatened by a natural disaster (earthquakes). I also presumed the 'reconstruction' would get all fucked up and political, etc. so I don't read about it. However, when you think of what really makes up a city, esp. one like New Orleans, it is not the government, developers, etc., but the core populations that created the culture.

It will take a very long time, but that core of 'real' people (perhaps very much new people, vs. the actual former citizens) will make it up, and I daresay there will be a great resemblance as the things that originally drew people to the place will be similar. There may be more prosaically middleclass structures replacing the old, but eventually the city will need all those 'lower' class laborers to do the countless menial tasks that keep a big city alive. Then we will see the 'old' New Orleans, though perhaps not in our lifetimes.

Weirdly hopeful,

Perdita

Well said. A Streetcar Named The American Express Desire® Co-Sponsored by Hilton Hotels will still be better than nothing.

 

[Guest]

Well said. A Streetcar Named The American Express Desire® Co-Sponsored by Hilton Hotels will still be better than nothing.

Smiling.

Btw, Sher, you've got time to get to Venice. She will sink some century but not in this one. The thought is actually one that makes me love the place more. Venice represents the sublime for me, and it must needs be ephemeral.

Perdita

 

[amicus]

Originally Posted by amicus
(edited for both brevity AND cogency)

New Orleans was the worst we had to offer, it will not be mourned.


amicus...



(Somme) "...I beg to differ. Washington is the worst you have to offer. Should it be inundated, I, for one, wouldn't mourn it. I doubt, concidering the rampant evil emenating from it, that the rest of the world would either.

I'm tempted to ask if you have ANY decency left, but it is so perfectly self evident that you do not..."
__________________
where were we?


I only made one trip to the Nations's capitol, just to see the monuments, but I visited New Orleans several times, gee, even outside Bourbon Street. But from what I have read, the crime statistics and Marion Berry, I rather think you are correct, Washington D.C. has even less to offer.

Ah, decency...do I have any left? Most would agree with you it appears.

I note that most of the 'usual suspects' have weighed in. Of course, no apologies will be forthcoming from the Amicus, would not wish to tarnish my image.

It remains mildly amusing so see all my Liberal antagonists, who are so anti-absolute and subjective on everything, band together absolutely and defend one of their own.

I must confess that I do not understand the 'tourist' mentality that SheReads seems to exhibit in her exhortations about traveling the world and being so wonderfully 'openminded' about decaying cultures and mosquito ridden swamps of 'pristine' reserved wildnerness.

I suppose the true answer lies in acknowledging the 'cloistered' boxed in lives these people live. My liberal antagonists seem to, in large part be confined to their own choice of a subjective vision of the world where only native culture and primal landscapes turn them on.

And even Ogg, which surprised me a little, when he spoke of how London was rebuilt time and time again. I shudder when I think of public funds and emminent domain being used to renovate 'historical' and traditional sites, I thought that was what museums were for.

I do have a pang of sadness when I read of SheReads wanting to see herds of Zebra's in Africa, riding a camel with her hair blowing in the wind, ah so romantic, such a dreamer, female type.

I suppose she and Cloudy and others would like to see the herds of buffalo roam again, with a pack of predatory wolves tearing the flesh of the new born, the sick and the old. Yes, such a wonderful world of nature.

And although humans were not yet existent when the dinosaurs bellowed and ate each other's young, (at least we can't be blamed for eating them into extinction), I still suppose SheReads yearns for those days too, so she could bask in the culture from 65 millions years ago.

I once thought to remain on campus and teach, to become part of that marvelous would I thought existed with the educated elite. But I found a myopic vision of yesteryear, a subjective one at that, infected the faculty, quite as it does more modern liberal dreamers and whiners.

Old ancient cultures, remnants of which still exist, remain because they are stagnant and are just that, remnants of the past. Liberals seem to think it was always better back then, that they were closer to nature, closer to the 'natural' role humans should take in life. Roles that meant following old traditions, old habits, respecting the past, in some cases worshipping and preserving the past.

I drew no pleasure from observing the culture of a decadent New Orleans or Reservation life of modern day native americans.

I personally value the present and work toward the future, I do not dwell in the past or past glories of other times and places. I find value and beauty in the works of men who create and maintain, men of vision and dedication who mold the world around them to suit their dreams and thus determine the future.

As we left behind the horse and carriage and diptheria, the typewriter and polio, we will leave you lilting ladies aquilting as you dream of place you never saw and things you never did.

Yup, loathesome and no decency at all.

Thas me.


amicus...