« F-16s Strike Near The Syrian Border | Home | U.N. asks 9 agencies to pay Iraq oil-for-food funds »

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

“You speak of Lord Byron and me—”

John Keats, writing to his brother and sister-in-law, explains that there was “a great difference” between his contemporary and he. “He describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.”

And so it is with the horrific decimation, in the truest sense of that word, of Gulf locations like New Orleans and Biloxi. Dense areas; home to millions. No one is writing from inside New Orleans; there is no infrastructure there from which to upload. We leave it to somber and stony bullet points and somehow wordless photos to convey what is so undeniably true, yet must be imagined and reimagined with sorrow just to turn out a phrase. And that is why I have said so little of this disaster. If it is the more difficult task to describe what one imagines, how can one describe what is extant, yet cannot be countenanced?

I know that there is looting. Massive looting; not of water and of food, but televisions and jewelry by the temporarily (and we pray not permanently) orphaned children of listless parents. I know that there is a rebellious standoff at a prison, and that there hostages have been taken. I know that the storm was weaker than expected and that NOAA was wrong: there was no maelstrom-borne explosion of damage. The destruction has been slow, steady, and torturous: the result of levees falling in upon themselves. I know that the last efforts to sandbag these man-made walls were just abandoned. And that the pumps installed in those areas- just a few of the many failsafes that failed- will cease to function soon, and that by tomorrow morning the water in New Orleans will be up to nine feet higher.

I know that New Orleans’ airports are underwater. That every major artery into the city is unusable or gone. At least five feet of water everywhere in the city, with twenty-foot swells in some areas. There is no potable water. Chemicals are leaking everywhere, and a photo cannot be taken of New Orleans without the telltale rainbow of oily water.

Tonight, rescue operations will be conducted without rest, as there are no thoughts of salvage and no assays at burial of the dead. Residents numbering in the thousands are still atop their roofs awaiting Coast Guard helicopters and their dangling baskets. Meanwhile, those who had more foresight may have earned themselves little, as the Superdome is beginning to flood and is being evacuated along with the rest of the city.

In Biloxi, Mississippi, thirty people were put asunder in an instant when the Quiet Water Beach apartments crumbled and dissociated into the water.

The denizens of New Orleans are receiving word that they will be permitted entrance into the city in one week to retrieve belongings. And after that, the increasingly assumptive message goes, residents will be barred from entering the Orleans and Jefferson areas for one month.

Will there be an Orleans/Jefferson area in one month? The Big Easy was easily drubbed by Katrina. And weather patterns don’t look to be self-ameliorating. “Whither New Orleans?” is the final question that we in the northeast have the luxury of considering. Do we rebuild it?

For me, there is no consideration to speak of. The answers is yes. Yes, things are rebuilt. Yes, when we are attacked we rebuild. Yes, when there is a torrent we rebuild. Yes, things are rebuilt.

Words are being put in the mouths of radical preachers already: “New Orleans was inundated because of the decadent lifestyle it represented!” Anyone peddling such things cannot claim to speak under God’s banner because God would know that where good people raise good children and live happy lives there is not decadence ripe for ablution; there are pastoral homes worth saving no matter the cost.

For this city founded in 1718 and for the 1,337,726 Americans there and in its environs, there can be no greater measure of emotional aid than to cease discussion of letting New Orleans die.

Posted on August 30, 2005 10:06 PM. Permalink