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The Northernmost Caribbean City
by Dick Gregg, Jr.
New Orleans, the northernmost
Caribbean city, the Land of Dreams, took
the full wrath of a wicked trouble-seeking
storm, Katrina. Like Texas, Louisiana was
married more than once, so New Orleans
served under many flags, and like any
veteran of the marital toils and snares, the
city learned and absorbed as she suffered
through her exes.
We have a hard time making sense of
all that. These are what Tina Brown calls “a time when all is known
but nothing is understood.” It helps to view it as a patch quilt of all
she has been – French, Spanish, American, pirate, slave, confederate,
Marie Laveau and coonass. The city succumbed early in the Civil
War (thereby avoiding devastation by supposedly compassionate
carpetbaggers). Earlier, the city and the Americans fended off the
British in the War of 1812 in the Battle of New Orleans. She had a
history of misery.
Since those who suffer write the songs, they nursed it and rehearsed
it and Basin Street was the birthplace of the blues. She had mercifully
avoided the stern judgmental presence and influence of the Bible Belt
that runted the politics of the rest of the Southland with guilt like
a scowling old maid schoolmarm in a high-collared long black dress.
Like Galveston, she is a gris-gris, big easy home to an unusual mix of
Catholicism, Jewish tradition and voodoo. She stands facing herself on
both sides of the Mississippi River and, like the Krewe of Janus (the
god of two faces), she unabashedly welcomes Easter and Mardi Gras,
rich or poor, gay or straight, black or white with tarot cards, great food,
special music and inviting open arms.
Music is her dominant religion. It was and is spiritual. So she is a
happy and tolerant muffaletta of misery and blues in whatever mix
of ingredients show up each day. Everybody there was born tolerant,
grew tolerant or found themselves fairly sound when blown off course
by the winds of change. Truly, New Orleans is the most unique
city in America.
In a hurricane, one should always fear the people much more
than the winds. That was certainly true of Katrina. Engineers
had cashed their checks and drained the swamp. They built
smack dab in the bottom of the basin in the face of subsidence
and developments that eliminated the wetlands that had once
absorbed and buffered the wrath of the storms. They had
pridefully come of age under the efficient chicanery of Huey Long
and survived the Huey Long manqué, Edwin Edwards; but they
were blissfully unaware that they were in the tiny hands of the myopic,
inadequate and unprepared mayor-council form of government of Ray
Nagin and Bush’s brigades of bungling bureaucrats. A perfect storm.
So it goes.
We urge ourselves to follow our dreams. We say to our children:
Find a job and a place you are passionate about. I am passionate about
New Orleans. Hopefully, we all are. It appeals to our better angels and
features our choirs instead of our fear. The Land of Dreams is America’s
dream. It raised a weirdo or two but so did Salt Lake City and any other
city worth its salt (or cayenne in this case). Its difference is its charm
– New Orleans is a hoot and does not take
itself too seriously. A multicultural gumbo
made from a polyglot roux that has
welcomed, celebrated, nurtured and
inspired Louis Armstrong, Wynton
Marsalis, Randy Newman, Dr. John, Jimmy
Buffett, Mark Twain, John James Audubon, Paul Prudhomme, Alan
Toussant and all of us to one degree or another. We have to cock an
eye and turn an ear when the band strikes up. It has a third world,
Margaritaville, ashen mark of Lent smudged on a Mardi Gras mask
flavor that Tony Cachere only dreams of capturing.
May America honor its debt, dig deep, swing low and carry us home to our dreams.
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