Here's an excerpt from a musician's (Chris Chandler) e-mail i got today:
T.H.E. .M.U.S.E. .A.N.D. .W.H.I.R.L.E.D. .R.E.T.O.R.T.
The Muse and Whirled Retort
March 1, 2007
Volume VIII Issue v
Pensacola, FL
Thomas Wolf said, “You can’t go home again.” I don’t
think he meant it like this.
D. R. and I just spent several weeks in New Orleans.
It has been a while since I reported in on the
progress there.
I believe that Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome can
affect a place as well as an individual.
New Orleans, the grizzled veteran of American culture
stands on the expressway interchange – our cultural
cross roads – like a military veteran – homeless, on
drugs and prone to sudden inexplicable acts of violence.
She has a cardboard sign scrawled “will work for
food.” A few sympathy dollars have been stuffed into her
change box, enough for a Po-Boy sandwich today, but
like the homeless veterans – it has taken her all day to
get it. She can do little else. Survival.
New Orleans should be our proudest triumph, like our
veterans – but when we see her taking small chunks of
charity, suffering from extreme PTSS, stuttering and
staggering, on drugs and prone to violent pointless
flare-ups, we roll our windows up, turn up the stereo and
stare mindlessly at the traffic light hoping it will
change before we are approached.
But New Orleans is a combat veteran still seeing
active duty. She is herself a war zone. Twenty-one
murders this year. More than one hundred shootings.
Seventeen shootings and five murders in the two weeks I was
there.
As many of you know, most of my stories start off
with the phrase, “My car broke down.” This one is no
exception. I was in the 9th Ward waiting on the bus to a
mechanic up in mid city when I heard shots ring out
clearly in the block I was standing. I counted 5 shots
while keeping low and moving quickly away from the
shots and calling 911.
I lived there for many years and I am used to hearing
gun shots – but rarely so close and almost never in
the day time.
As I ran towards the next bus stop several blocks
away a cop approached. I was relieved. I flagged him
down. “I am the one who called, or at least one of the
ones that called,” I explained. “There were 5 shots
three blocks ahead on St Claude." With no
exaggeration what so ever, the cop did a U-turn around the
neutral ground and headed quickly in the other direction.
He was not responding to my call at all. He just
happened to be there, a coincidence. The cops never
responded to the call and the next day there was a double
homicide in the exact same place – two fifteen year old
kids were gunned down. It is a war zone. It is
America. It is a crime.
At the car repair place, I waited patiently for my
ignition switch to be switched out. Three hundred
bucks, Jeaze! A New Orleans cops walked familiarly into
the waiting room. He was greeted with habitual
how-do-you-dos as he walked behind the counter and sat at a
computer terminal. It turns out the cop had to go to
the car repair shop to get on-line to file his reports.
He has no lap top in his cruiser.
There is no infrastructure.
While much of the 9th ward has been cleared to vast
swaths of nothingness – there are still countless empty
houses and piles of rubble. Some houses still sit in
the middle of the streets. Few remain. Nine live in
one neighborhood, a dozen in another. Only the most
tenacious can survive. Orange extension cords run from
construction poles illuminating whole houses with desk
lamps. Gas inspectors are few, so people have tapped
lines themselves bringing the inevitable fires. In
many neighborhoods there is not enough water pressure to
put out the fire so helicopters still scoop water from
the Mississippi River to extinguish them.
I went down to the By-Water to do my laundry. The
By-Water only had three feet of water compared to the
twelve in much of the ninth ward, so it is coming back –
and due to the efforts of some amazing volunteers and
courageous residents it is in many ways better than it
was before.
At the Laundromat there was a notice of a place going
up for rent on Desire Street – a street I had lived on
years ago. I wrote a poem about it back then: (LINK)
– our rent was two hundred bucks a month. Now,
advertisement for a building two doors down was a thousand
dollars.
People are paying triple and quadruple rent, while
paying mortgages on what is left of houses and trying to
restore them while getting the run-around from crooked
insurance agencies and inept Federal Emergency
Administrators.
I took the senseless tragic murder of a prominent
white Canadian to make the country notice at all (LINK
http://www.helenhill.org/news/) The city, known for
parading of a different kind, took the streets. Black
banners decrying “ENOUGH” hung from balconies. Action
was demanded. Little has been accomplished since.
At the ensuing city council meeting the police chief
and district attorney pointed fingers at each other
and not at violent criminals. The end result is a 60
day revolving door policy in which perpetrators fail to
get prosecuted and are back on the street. There is
no crime lab. The evidence rooms are in disrepair and
crowded with rodents.
To illustrate the extent - in the middle of the
Bacchus parade, one of the largest Mardi Gras parades, one
of the largest economic engines the city has, one of
the biggest tourist attractions ever – in the heart of
the heart: my friends were at a hot dog stand when
shots rang out. The mobbed crowd of tourists scattered
in chaos. Another teenager had been shot in the chest,
one of several dozen since action has been demanded.
I guess I am unlikely to get that job with the New
Orleans Chamber of Commerce I was hoping for – but
someone has to say it.
A very tenacious woman I know in the ninth ward
actually rescued her refrigerator after having been
submerged for weeks. She cleaned it, scrubbed elbow deep
unspeakable maggot encrusted slime inside and out. She
fixed it – because she loved it.
It ran for a month. It is dead.
************************
B.R.E.A.K.I.N.G.. .N.E.W.S.
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