The Long Highway

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

The 9th Ward


The following are pictures I took yesterday while walking through the 9th Ward, the hardest-hit area of New Orleans proper but by no means the only site of devastation. It seems like everywhere for miles around is abandoned, half destroyed; you'll drive down a street and think, well, these places are still standing, I can see the water mark came up almost to the top of the first floor but maybe it's salvageable, then turn a corner and see a block virtually demolished. The grad student, Jeff, was driving me down a road like this explaining that it was under 9 feet of water. Surreal and horrifying to be driving down it now.

No matter what people say this is not a city that is quite on its feet again. It is functional. The people are amazing in their perseverance and good humor in the face of an utterly incompetent and uncaring Federal Government, bankrupt state and local governments and utilities. The fact that people outside New Orleans think life is anywhere back to "normal" here are fooling themselves. These are brave and hardy people with the greatest sense of civic pride and sense of belonging to somewhere they call home that I have ever encountered in this utterly unique melting pot of cultures and races.

My overwhelming impression when I was in the 9th Ward is that no lens, no camera could possibly communicate the immense and horrifying scale of the utter devastation. It is apocalyptic, literally like a horrible war was fought and lost here -- which in a sense, it was. The fact that there is no military presence here to battle this enormous and tragic loss and give the people who once lived here hope that the city they call home might one day welcome them is the greatest and most shameful sin I have ever seen visited on the American people. The police patrol the area and a few brave people make stand and stake their claim in the face of negligent government, implacable bureaucracy . . . some say there may still be bodies as yet undiscovered. Were we not, a few years ago, digging canals through the wetlands that might have absorbed most of the storm swell in the interest of oil companies, had the government -- federal, local -- stood up for the people they are sworn to protect and spent one thousandth of what we have spent in Iraq to shore up levees and improve pumping systems, had we not foolishly committed our young men and women to die in an unwinnable and unnecessary war of choice, so much of this may have been avoided. And the fact that to this day, months and months down the line, there is no power within miles of the affected areas, ghastly rubble remains essentially untouched, thousands of people have nowhere to call home, fills me with such rage I don't know what to do with myself. The main reason I'm down here is because many of the faculty and grad students were displaced, and we're helping to pump up their film program; my guide for this week fled the city, had his apartment flooded and lost everything. He is rooming with a professor until, like the other students, his FEMA trailer is ready for him . . . and the three students he will be sharing it with. His story is typical, and in fact he is one of the fortunate ones.

So much loss. So much negligence. So much completely, totally and utterly senseless and unnecessary destruction. A hurricane is a force of nature. But there is no question at all that better preparation, which all the concerned governmental bodies were well aware of the necessity of, could have minimized the worst of it. And don't get me started on the media, the Geraldos and the Anderson Coopers, or the Spike Lees and Jonathan Demmes carpetbagging their way down here to shoot their little documentaries, scoot back to their air conditioned suites at the Westin and jet back to LA the minute they have their footage. Or the lying, stinking swine who promulgated so many bullshit stories and ignored so many acts of heroism. One faculty member was in the hospital watching nurses heroically, manually keeping patients alive and dragging them bodily to the rooftop to be medivacced out for three solid days. A story that went unreported -- but the completely fabricated and unsubstantiated story that those same nurses in that same hospital were euthanizing patients got national press. I just can't believe the media anymore. If you want the facts about what went down here, go to nola.com. Ignore everything else.

Anyway. These pictures are from yesterday's visit to the 9th. When you see little childrens' shoes and toys, places where families, poor as they might have been, gathered to share their supper or go to church or do the simple little things we all take for granted, when you see all this wiped away it is hard not to get choked up. These photos do not do this disaster justice. It stretches as far and wide as the eye can see. Literally, to the horizon, just as if a giant hand came and wiped everything away. I saw the 9/11 site while they were still tearing down the iron and it was horrific. Imagine 20, 30, 50 times that devastation. And in a way, this is worse. 9/11 was the product of diseased, hateful minds but at least they believed in something, ignorant and mad as they might have been. There was a reason behind their actions, brutal and stupid thought it was. This disaster reached these epic and unspeakable proportions because people in power stretching back many years and spanning the whole political system believe in nothing but lining their pockets and making their rich friends richer. And I don't know what we can do about that, except remember that this is the ultimate cost we pay.







This enormous barge floated right over the breached levee and crushed several houses. Just to the left of where this barge lies pile drivers clang away, shoring up the levee.