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Tears for New Orleans
Memories of One City, and Concerns for Others
by Sam Hall Kaplan
The images of desperate parents cradling exhausted children, despairing elderly slumped in wheelchairs, and irate youths spitting their invectives at an unblinking camera were too much to witness, and I turned off the television.
I am glad I'm not in New Orleans on assignment as I might have been years ago for Fox television, the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times. Let that challenge now be borne by more impassive journalists inured by youth or innocence.
I frankly also don't think I could have reported on this human tragedy as I have other less daunting scenes in the past without crying for, or with, the victims, and without spewing anger for the apparent utter incompetence of a federal government wallowing in the misdirection and mendacity of President Bush.
My television screen is blank, though the images in my mind of a ravaged New Orleans persist, mitigated by flashes of fond memories of a city with a distinctive sense of style, place and people. I can almost hear the wail of the Bayou borne blues.
Natural disasters happen, but the aftermath of Katrina from all accounts clearly could have been abated by preventive public works projects and public health and safety initiatives hampered by a budget cutting administration hellbent on tax breaks for the wealthy and a wrongheaded war.
The result of these perverted policies in New Orleans, as well as in many other cities across the country, including Los Angeles, has been the accelerating deterioration of vital infrastructure and services. This in turn has set the stage for local and regional catastrophes, as have the short-changing of needed housing and transit subsidies and environmental and education programs.
Our cities have become a mess, just as Baghdad and Iraq have. This president can't seem to get anything right, not even his lame, concocted excuses. His urban policy - when have you last heard that phrase? - is no policy.
Still, cities such as L.A. labor on. I was in fact going to write a commentary this week about the recently released cityscaping plan for First Street prepared for Project Restore. But in the wake of the debacle in New Orleans, I can't. It just seems too frivolous at the moment.
For now, my thoughts are with that special city on the Mississippi River I first encountered when I was mustered out of the Army in Texas in 1958. I took a detour there while ambling back to my home in New York.
New Orleans was certainly different than any city I had ever experienced until then. I loved the scale and style of the French Quarter, its richly varied 19th century vernacular buildings marked by the fine wrought iron balconies exuding a languid air that invited meandering.
The courtyards I peeked into all looked like seedy stage sets for the then-popular Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire. Of course I had to take the streetcar itself, which rattled through neighborhoods lined with ornamented cottages and faded late revival houses, shaded by moss-draped old oaks.
It was easy to get lost and cut loose in the Big Easy, enjoy a different cuisine, listen to some jazz and catchy Cajun tunes, and generally wallow in the city's overt sensuality. It was a perfect antidote to my military experience and I lingered longer than planned.
Returning some 20 years later to write about the city's historic preservation efforts was like coming back to visit an old friend. I got to tour several landmark mansions in the Garden District, had some singular dining experiences, and became addicted to breakfasts of blistering hot, lightly sugared beignets washed down with steaming café au laits. It is a city where I wish I had an extra day to wile away with conversation and food.
It is now hard to imagine this lifestyle returning, given the damage to homes, businesses and lives, as it is also hard to imagine such devastation and neglect in America.
Where I ask is the social contract so essential to democracy and the American dream that obligates government, in return for our goodwill and worth, to guarantee security and well being to all citizens, the rich and poor, the privileged and unprotected, black, white, yellow and brown? Has that hallowed contract that informed our Declaration of Independence and Constitution gone the way of so many other canons in a now meaner, more selfish America?
Can what has happened in New Orleans also happen in an earthquake devastated Los Angeles or San Francisco, a hurricane savaged Miami, or a pandemic anywhere across an America bereft of first responders and adequate public medical systems?
Think about it, and also about our nation's priorities, and of the state of its people. Perhaps the aftermath of Katrina could be the needed wakeup call for an America that seems to have gone adrift, just as aimlessly as the once shining cars now seen stalled in the fetid waters that inundated New Orleans.
Sam Hall Kaplan is the author of L.A. Lost and Found. He is the former design critic for the Los Angeles Times and a former Emmy Award-winning reporter for FOX 11.
page 5, 9/12/2005
© Los Angeles Downtown News. Reprinting items retrieved from the archives are for personal use only. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission of the Los Angeles Downtown News. If you would like to redistribute anything from the Los Angeles Downtown News Archives, please call our permissions department at (213) 481-1448.
I am glad I'm not in New Orleans on assignment as I might have been years ago for Fox television, the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times. Let that challenge now be borne by more impassive journalists inured by youth or innocence.
I frankly also don't think I could have reported on this human tragedy as I have other less daunting scenes in the past without crying for, or with, the victims, and without spewing anger for the apparent utter incompetence of a federal government wallowing in the misdirection and mendacity of President Bush.
My television screen is blank, though the images in my mind of a ravaged New Orleans persist, mitigated by flashes of fond memories of a city with a distinctive sense of style, place and people. I can almost hear the wail of the Bayou borne blues.
Natural disasters happen, but the aftermath of Katrina from all accounts clearly could have been abated by preventive public works projects and public health and safety initiatives hampered by a budget cutting administration hellbent on tax breaks for the wealthy and a wrongheaded war.
The result of these perverted policies in New Orleans, as well as in many other cities across the country, including Los Angeles, has been the accelerating deterioration of vital infrastructure and services. This in turn has set the stage for local and regional catastrophes, as have the short-changing of needed housing and transit subsidies and environmental and education programs.
Our cities have become a mess, just as Baghdad and Iraq have. This president can't seem to get anything right, not even his lame, concocted excuses. His urban policy - when have you last heard that phrase? - is no policy.
Still, cities such as L.A. labor on. I was in fact going to write a commentary this week about the recently released cityscaping plan for First Street prepared for Project Restore. But in the wake of the debacle in New Orleans, I can't. It just seems too frivolous at the moment.
For now, my thoughts are with that special city on the Mississippi River I first encountered when I was mustered out of the Army in Texas in 1958. I took a detour there while ambling back to my home in New York.
New Orleans was certainly different than any city I had ever experienced until then. I loved the scale and style of the French Quarter, its richly varied 19th century vernacular buildings marked by the fine wrought iron balconies exuding a languid air that invited meandering.
The courtyards I peeked into all looked like seedy stage sets for the then-popular Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire. Of course I had to take the streetcar itself, which rattled through neighborhoods lined with ornamented cottages and faded late revival houses, shaded by moss-draped old oaks.
It was easy to get lost and cut loose in the Big Easy, enjoy a different cuisine, listen to some jazz and catchy Cajun tunes, and generally wallow in the city's overt sensuality. It was a perfect antidote to my military experience and I lingered longer than planned.
Returning some 20 years later to write about the city's historic preservation efforts was like coming back to visit an old friend. I got to tour several landmark mansions in the Garden District, had some singular dining experiences, and became addicted to breakfasts of blistering hot, lightly sugared beignets washed down with steaming café au laits. It is a city where I wish I had an extra day to wile away with conversation and food.
It is now hard to imagine this lifestyle returning, given the damage to homes, businesses and lives, as it is also hard to imagine such devastation and neglect in America.
Where I ask is the social contract so essential to democracy and the American dream that obligates government, in return for our goodwill and worth, to guarantee security and well being to all citizens, the rich and poor, the privileged and unprotected, black, white, yellow and brown? Has that hallowed contract that informed our Declaration of Independence and Constitution gone the way of so many other canons in a now meaner, more selfish America?
Can what has happened in New Orleans also happen in an earthquake devastated Los Angeles or San Francisco, a hurricane savaged Miami, or a pandemic anywhere across an America bereft of first responders and adequate public medical systems?
Think about it, and also about our nation's priorities, and of the state of its people. Perhaps the aftermath of Katrina could be the needed wakeup call for an America that seems to have gone adrift, just as aimlessly as the once shining cars now seen stalled in the fetid waters that inundated New Orleans.
Sam Hall Kaplan is the author of L.A. Lost and Found. He is the former design critic for the Los Angeles Times and a former Emmy Award-winning reporter for FOX 11.
page 5, 9/12/2005
© Los Angeles Downtown News. Reprinting items retrieved from the archives are for personal use only. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission of the Los Angeles Downtown News. If you would like to redistribute anything from the Los Angeles Downtown News Archives, please call our permissions department at (213) 481-1448.
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