Devil Sent the Rain

by Tom Piazza

  You say that legions of nameless “people around the country” took the televised images as evidence of the affected people’s irresponsibility, and if you don’t agree with them, you certainly didn’t make much of a case for the other side. If that is how you yourself feel, you ought to have the courage to come out and say it. Don’t put it off on others, or try to camouflage it with remarks about my “condescension.” Don’t try to preserve your view of yourself as being more objective than you really are. I am well aware of the ways in which many people in other parts of the country interpreted the very processed and selected images they saw on television and in magazines during the time that the media’s attention was focused on New Orleans and Katrina. I am aware because for the past year, as a result of the publication of my book, I have traveled all over the country talking with people about the future of the city and its citizens. I have been to New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Rochester, Tallahassee, Austin, Houston, Princeton, and many other smaller towns in Ohio, Vermont, New Hampshire, Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, Connecticut, and elsewhere. Except for a small, scattered handful of hardened bigots, people raised these questions as genuine questions. They wanted to understand. They had no experience with New Orleans. You pretend to raise questions, but your questions are only rhetorical.

  Is the lot of New Orleans’s poor people their own fault, or the fault of their environment? Probably some of both. But if it is largely their own fault, if the poor people of New Orleans are, as you imply, lazy and ignorant and parasitic, then they will be that way anywhere, and your claims that relocation will offer a new start with more opportunity is disingenuous at best. Perhaps it would be better for you to be honest and admit that the agenda is not really the improvement of their lot; the agenda is to get rid of the “burden of the underclass” by sending them someplace—anyplace—else, so that New Orleans can become a “museum city” as you call it.

  Where, after all, was all this solicitude for the poor, this desire for them to have a better life, when we had a chance to do something for them in the place where they had built lives and community for themselves over decades? Where was the community effort on the part of leaders black and white to improve public schools and provide good jobs and day care and training? So many of those who could have lent their resources to an effort to really help their less fortunate and less sophisticated and less resourceful brothers and sisters instead fled the city, stuck their children in private schools, and let public education and the city’s tax base go to hell around the ears of the poor. Then they blamed and blame the situation on the people who had the least power to affect it in the first place. Instead of lobbying now to displace hundreds of thousands of people permanently from the only homes they have ever known under the dishonest guise of offering them more opportunity elsewhere, wouldn’t it be more decent and honest to try and increase the quality of the opportunity and education available to them wherever they choose to be, even if it is New Orleans?

  Of course, that takes a lot of hard, tedious, unrewarding work, and among people whom one would never invite to the ——— Ball. Easier to get out the leaf blower. Send the stuff someplace else. Let it be someone else’s problem. Look how nice my showplace looks. The idea of turning one of the great, thriving, complex living cultural centers of the world—with all its problems—into a manicured jewel box like Savannah or Charleston, a “museum town” with “a world-class university in Tulane, lots of great architecture in Uptown and the French Quarter, and not much else” is nauseating and despicable. It doesn’t have to come from an actively evil motive. All it needs is the turning of the back in the manner of Pontius Pilate, who washed his hands before the multitude and proclaimed his own innocence.

  Tom Piazza

  Other People’s Houses

  My house was finally broken into, after fifteen years of waiting for it to happen. It used to happen to other people. Now it has happened to me. Luckily, I own more or less nothing of any value to a thief, except for a handful of small items, which they took. They also managed to ransack the place pretty well. “Trashed” would be the word.

  The break-in happened the day before the Katrina anniversary. On that same day, our governor signed an agreement that would allow marshals and bulldozers to come in and seize hundreds of people’s homes in lower Mid-City to make room for a hospital complex that could easily be built on a different site.

  Yes, I am upset that a thief broke in. But nobody is coming to take a house that I rebuilt with four years of hard labor after the levee failures. The city that I fought to come back to has not decided to summarily wipe away all my hard work and faith. That is happening to other people.

  Four years after Katrina, New Orleans is at a crossroads—not just a logistical crossroads, but a moral one, and one might as well say a spiritual one. We are all rightly concerned about crime—violent crime, like the kind that took the lives of Dinerral Shavers and Helen Hill, and nonviolent crime like the house break-ins that might now fairly be called an epidemic.

  But there is a different kind of crime about to happen in our city, and in some ways it is more ominous because it travels under the cloak of the law. With a stroke of a pen, an elected official, serving the interests of a cadre of greedy and selfish developers, has just wiped away the hopes, the work, and the dreams not just of a single victim, but of hundreds of hardworking people who trusted and loved this city and worked to rebuild it.

  Would I like to get my hands on the thief who broke into my house? You bet. But he (she?) probably lives a wretched existence, sneaking around and stealing. Probably not being very highly rewarded for it either.

  The people who will profit from the rape of Mid-City are already well-off. They sit on the boards of LSU and Tulane; they stroll the halls of the State Capitol, City Hall, and the Governor’s Mansion. They won’t hear the sound of the house they rebuilt being crushed by bulldozers. It will happen to other people.

  Charity Hospital sits empty. Most of downtown, for that matter, sits empty. Instead of spreading out into Mid-City, the badly needed medical facilities could be built much more quickly, much less expensively, and much more humanely by updating and using Charity and the surrounding medical district. It would give downtown a badly needed revitalizing mechanism, and it would save people’s homes, and it would get medical care to the city more quickly.

  Why isn’t it being done? Because a handful of greedy bastards want a shiny monument to their own power and ego. It’s not about getting health care to the people of New Orleans. It’s about money and power.

  If you live somewhere else in the city, as I do, you can tell yourself that it’s happening to other people. But if we learned one thing from Katrina, it is that we are part of an integrated social and geographical and spiritual ecosystem. We can turn our heads as long as it is going on somewhere else and happening to someone else. Or we can get mad now, and make a stand for human dignity and fairness against greed and power lust.

  In his song about the bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd, written seventy years ago, the singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie sang,

  As through this world I’ve wandered, I’ve met lots of funny men.

  Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.

  He could turn a phrase, that Woody Guthrie. He ended the song thus:

  But as through this world you travel, and as through this world you roam,

  You will never see an outlaw drive a family from their home.

  A crime doesn’t stop being a crime just because the law is on its side. And Judas Iscariot was paid handsomely by the law for his services. There’s still time, but not much, to rescue the soul of this city before the bulldozers crank up.

  From the New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 5, 2009

  Incontinental Drift

  Already the Captains and Kings have departed, along with their attendant media grandees. It was nice of them to stop by New Orleans for the anniversary and give everybody around the country, and th
e world, a look from what must seem a comfortable distance.

  Just five years ago, water was cascading into the Lower Ninth Ward, into Lakeview, into Gentilly and Mid-City and Broadmoor and St. Bernard. It would take a day or two, but the entire world was about to see what was possible in America, circa 2005.

  At first it looked as if New Orleans had been smacked by a hurricane, which, of course, it had. It would take a while longer for people to understand that the images that halted the coffee cup en route to the mouth, or that kept their eyes open and fixed on the news past bedtime, were the result not of a natural disaster, bad as the hurricane was, but of a catastrophic planning and engineering failure on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers. Many still don’t realize it. Of course, many also think that Iraq planned the 9/11 attacks.

  And then, this summer, BP. It became a mantra: “You poor guys down there . . . First Katrina flooded your city, and now this . . .”

  All this spillage. It was getting kind of . . . embarrassing. To be an American, I mean. We had had some dicey moments before Katrina, to be sure. The savings and loan scandal. Then Enron, then WorldCom. They proved relatively easy to contain and, importantly, they offered no searing visual images to disturb the sleep of the republic. By the time Katrina hit, we had been hemorrhaging money, human blood, and credibility in Iraq for two years, but we had a story to cover that: We had been attacked. The mainstream media mostly went along with that particular narrative, even though it had nothing to do with the war in question.

  Katrina, however, was different. Katrina exposed something rotten at the root. The federally built levees were weak as a wino’s teeth, and the governmental response to their failure was worse than inept. The federal government suddenly, glaringly, resembled a drunk who had all too publicly lost control of his, shall we say, faculties.

  Three years later, in 2008, at least partly as a result of the previous losses of financial control, Wall Street and the housing market sheepishly said, “We’ve had a little accident . . .” and a massive dose of antidiarrheals in the form of endless debt for future generations was required to keep the body politic from draining out completely.

  Two years later, another manifestation of the Great Incontinence, an oil well that ruptured and could not stop, millions (billions? who’s counting?) of gallons of oil billowing out into some of the most ecologically sensitive waters on the planet. The government stood by, wringing its hands, as BP lunged at a series of ill-considered and untested solutions, one after another, falling repeatedly on their faces like country boys trying to catch a greased pig.

  As their veins become less forthcoming, junkies, old-timers who have been shooting for years, are known to look for a place to hit anywhere—between their toes, in their groins. Well, we Americans were famously “addicted” to oil. And with the Deepwater Horizon blowup, the needle had broken off and the earth itself seemed to be bleeding uncontrollably.

  It was an image from the darkest wells of the collective psyche, a nightmare. They tell us that dreams exist to bring to light material that we are having trouble facing directly when conscious. What are these bad dreams telling us?

  The result of uncontrolled indulgence is, ultimately, a lack of control when you need it most. Americans don’t want to hear it. But we’re not kids anymore, no matter how hard we try to act like it. There is an incontinence at our center now that is the result of years—decades—of telling ourselves that our destiny was manifest, our entitlement endless. We could spend uncountable amounts of money on a foreign war and offer tax cuts to the wealthy at the same time. We could consume energy without giving it a second thought—after all, we would be dead by the time the account ran dry. We could toss the regulatory chains from the shoulders of the oppressed banking and investment industries—sorry, industry. The regulations were, after all, so 1933. We could cut corners on crucial infrastructure projects since the odds were that the levees and bridges and pipelines and dams wouldn’t fail anytime soon. As a result we are finding new orifices from which to bleed and drain at an ever-accelerating rate.

  How is New Orleans doing? We are doing all right. We have a new mayor, we are strong. But how are you doing? The levee failures, the BP spill, the financial meltdown, all share the same root. Somewhere the nation lost the commonsense understanding that corporations and government agencies can’t be expected to regulate themselves. Or perhaps we have only lost the will to act on the understanding.

  The levees have been repaired, yes. In the places where they broke. The oil well has, finally, been capped, and all the oil has either evaporated or been eaten by microbes (you believe that?). The too-big-to-fail financial institutions have had their bad gambling debts paid by Big Daddy. Sleep well.

  It may be comforting to imagine that Katrina and this year’s BP disaster happened “down there,” but from down here they appear to be happening right in the middle of everything. On the day of the anniversary, the president for whom I voted so proudly not even two years ago, spoke in New Orleans, promising, as did his predecessor, a Full Recovery. But on the larger stage he is, dare I say it, pissing away his chance to articulate that oh-so-crucial sense of urgency, summon the necessary will to address a flawed underlying logic, rather than merely cleaning up the mess afterward. I know he doesn’t want to be called a socialist. But if we can’t figure out a way to grow up, and fast, there will be no diaper in the world big enough for us.

  From The Huffington Post, August 31, 2010

  It was my great good fortune to get to know my first literary hero when I was still young enough for it to feel like magic. “Norman Mailer: A Remembrance,” published in the 2008 memorial issue of The Mailer Review, tells the story of how I met Norman in 1981; he remained a close friend until his death in 2007. The companion piece here appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, as part of its Second Read series, in which an author revisits a book that was important in his or her development. It makes the case as well as I am able for what I consider to be the heart of Mailer’s value as a writer and intellectual.

  Citizen Mailer

  Early in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, the poet Robert Lowell tells Mailer that he thinks of him as “the finest journalist in America.” One writer’s compliment is plainly another’s backhanded insult. Mailer had a lifelong ambivalence about his reportorial, as opposed to his novelistic, work, considering fiction to be a higher calling. “There are days,” Mailer responds, tartly, “when I think of myself as being the best writer in America.”

  A year after Mailer’s death in November 2007, at eighty-four, maybe we can begin to be grateful that he worked both sides of the yard. He was always an interesting and ambitious novelist, yet Mailer’s loyalties were divided between his fictive imagination and his fascination with the way society works. At his best, the two merged, and the results made for some of the most extraordinary writing of the postwar era.

  When Mailer died, commentators lined up to bemoan the dearth of serious writers who, like Mailer, were willing to match their own egos, their own perceptions and sensibilities, against large contemporary events. We suffer from no shortage of gutsy reporters eager to cover trouble spots around the world. But rarely does that kind of journalistic impulse coexist with a personally distinct literary style, an ability to use one’s own point of view as an entry into the reality of a subject. For Mailer, that subjectivity was not just a stylistic trait but a kind of ethical tenet, the door into a larger—he would call it novelistic—truth.

  Mailer brought this approach to its peak in The Armies of the Night. His journalistic mock epic of the 1967 March on the Pentagon first appeared in Harper’s, occupying the cover and taking up practically the entire issue, and came out in book form in the spring of 1968. By that time, the so-called New Journalism was in full bloom; Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, George Plimpton, Truman Capote, and others had already done significant work, bringing highly individual styles and sensibi
lities to a form that had stubbornly held to its conventions of objectivity.

  The Armies of the Night stood out from all their work in some important ways. Most New Journalism focused on a subculture—motorcycle gangs, hippies, a football team, Hollywood celebrity—and, by rendering it vividly, attempted to make inductive points about the larger culture. Mailer had a different approach. He got as close as he could to the gears of power and then used his own sensibilities as a set of coordinates by which to measure the dimensions of people and events on the national stage: presidents and astronauts, championship fights and political conventions.

  He had shown this predilection before writing Armies. There was his Esquire article about John F. Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic convention, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” and “In the Red Light,” a piece on the 1964 Republican convention. There was also the audacious interstitial writing, addressed directly to Kennedy, the new president of the United States, in one of his most interesting and neglected books, The Presidential Papers. But in Armies, Mailer upped the ante by placing himself at the center of the narrative, turning himself into a self-dramatizing (in the purest sense of the phrase) protagonist. He gave his consciousness not just eyes but a face.