Alexandria

Other people are better at this than I am. Other people are more knowledgable. And I highly recommend both talkingpointsmemo.com and TPMCafe.com for the lowdown and the inexcusible behavior of the feds.

What is particularly tragic about this disaster on the Gulf Coast (other than the obvious loss of lives, livelihoods, and entire towns; and the embarassing, troubling fact that apparently evacuating a major American city after a disaster is beyond or ken) is what New Orleans is, what it represents, and the deluge of that with sewage. New Orleans is the literal embodiment of everything we are supposed to be as a nation. It is one of the rarest of cities, that sort of community that grows up to be a truely diverse and vibrant multiculti, racially mixed, socially and culturally alive place. New Orleans has become so culturally self sufficient and influential that it shows the path to cities many times its size and it becomes an identity unto itself--outside of traditional boundaries.

I can think of almost no other places that have ever had such a cultural legacy. The only one that spring immediately to mind is Alexandria. Alexandria too was a port city, at the mouth of the greatest river on its continent, built by colonizers foreign to the soil it was built on, and ultimately THE cultural force of its heyday. Jews, gentiles, Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, the Library, the first Greek translation of the Bible, the competition with Rome for the center of the early Church, the control of all that Nile produce that fed empires, the transmission of the Greek and Roman writers to the Arabs who reindruced them to Europe...much of what we call Western Civilization is Alexandria's doing. We might call it Classical and mean Athens or Rome, or Constantinople, but it was Alexandria that had learning and art above other cities at the end of the day, before the light went out.

And with New Orleans. The music, the food, the language, the architecture, the history, much of what we call American is, in fact, New Orleanian. They invented jazz for God's sake--and make no mistake, it was for His sake, the old guy didn't have anything to dance to up in heaven but harp music, why do you think they play it at funerals down there? Because that way the departed can carry a new tune to heaven, angels don't play horn for shit. Just as Alexandria re-taught the children of Greece and Rome who Pythagoras and Aristotle were, New Orleans retaught the children of Europe what the piano and the trupet were for. And it wasn't Wagner. It was a deeply religious town, with more weeping Jesuses and beatific Marys per square foot than you could care to imagine, but once a year they ate and drank and danced and sinned to put the rest of the wide world to shame. A New Orleanian could sit in a Viking hall and still be sober and unsated enough to complain about the poverty of the sauces with the mutton when the morning came. People think that New York or California lead the way, but those cities all have NOLA to thank, for the music, the glamour, the style, the glitz, the theme bars.

So that's what makes this worse than it could have been, that is was New Orleans that has been flooded. I don't wish it upon any other city, really, I just wish it had not happened there--in our Alexandria.