Death of a City?
David Steinberg
2005-09-08
Like everyone else, I have been glued to the news over the last week. While I have some personal connections to people in the affected areas of Mississippi, I am a music fan. My main focus and concern has been New Orleans. Ask the average jamband fan about New Orleans and one phrase comes to mind - Jazz Fest. I am no different. It's embarrassing that I expended any concern about a music event at a time when people were dealing with the loss of everything they owned. Embarrassing but understandable. Personalizing an impersonal event is something we do best. It makes it more real. Looking at the videos and understanding just how much has been lost is extremely difficult; we need some way for it to make sense. We tend to focus on people that we know - no matter how tangential their relationship to the area - and places we've been. Eighty percent of a city being under water just doesn't make sense. A favorite restaurant being flooded or a friend having problems or an event that we were looking forward to being cancelled does. As long as you don't let Jazz Fest be your only concern, no one should feel bad about wondering about it a little. That really shows the power of this hurricane. It's incredibly likely that an event eight months after the hurricane will have to be cancelled. New Orleans was destroyed in a way that seems somewhat inconceivable. So bad is the damage to the city - both physical and psychological - that the ultimate question is being asked - should we even rebuild New Orleans? The immediate knee jerk reaction to this is to scream about how stupid that question is. If we don't rebuild a city that is in danger of a flood, why should I be living in an area prone to earthquakes where you can see an active volcano on a clear day. Between hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and the water shortage of the Mountain Time Zone, there are very few safe places where people can live in this country. We can't all live in the northeast after all. However, New Orleans is an extreme example. Phoenix and Las Vegas are severe environmental strains on the desert, but they aren't dependent on an elaborate system of pumps and levees. The horrible thing about New Orleans is that the harder the city fights to keep it safe, the more damage it is doing to itself. The levees prevent the city from filling up, but it also blocks the Mississippi from depositing silt to fill the bowl in more naturally. The pumps drain the city after a thunderstorm, but they also lower the water table which accelerates the sinking. At some point we're probably going to lose this city forever. Knowing that, it doesn't seem to make sense to rebuild. Of course, New Orleans is far more than a set of buildings. Almost unique in the United States these days, the city has a distinct culture. Anyone who has ever visited the city understands that there's a treasure there that needs to be saved. It's not just a place to see live music and get really drunk. There's a sense of place there, a feeling that the area is special. Surely that needs to be saved. Unfortunately, it's far from obvious that a rebuilt New Orleans would be able to keep that. As helpful as it is that the French Quarter (as of present writing at least) remained intact, it takes more than architecture to create a spirit. Las Vegas has an Eiffel Tower, but no one would ever confuse the Paris Casino with the real thing. New Orleans has managed to cultivate a sense of danger and adventure that most towns are trying to get rid of. As many people have pointed out in the wake of the disaster, the city is akin to a slice of the Third World thrown inside the borders of the United States. That's great as long as it just means there's somewhat colorful panhandlers offering us a chance to bet that they know where we got our shoes. The poverty and ineffectual government of the city has been romanticized as charm. That can't survive seeing people trapped in the Superdome dying due to a lack of water. So much of what people love about the place comes out of the intense poverty. If the economy were stronger, fewer people would be drawn to the music world. If the education system were better, there would be more ironic detachment in the Voodoo shops. If the city were better run, it wouldn't be so suffused with a sense of its own mortality. When the price for the suffering is hidden, we might think of it as being a fair exchange, but now it's out in the open. The class and racial divides aren't an abstract concept anymore. Who lives in higher ground and who lives in the areas that will flood? Who is able to evacuate and who is left on a rooftop holding a sign begging for help? New Orleans thrived on mystery, but now we know its horrible secrets and won't be able to plead ignorance again. The decision to rebuild might be out of our hands. People and businesses are going to be displaced for months. That's not an evacuation, it's a move. While many people will feel the draw to return, others will be unwilling or unable to transplant their new lives again. No matter how it returns (and despite my worried comments above, I expect and hope for there to be a city at the mouth of the Mississippi), the New Orleans that existed in 2005 will never return. Here's hoping what replaces it somehow manages to be as fascinating and inspirational as what was there. David Steinberg got his Masters Degree in mathematics from New Mexico State University in 1994. He first discovered the power of live music at the Capitol Centre in 1988 and never has been the same. His Phish stats website is at www.ihoz.com/PhishStats.html He is the stats section editor for
The Phish Companion and is on the board of directors for the Netspace Foundation. You can read more of his thoughts at .
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