September 9, 2005
Should We Rebuild? Posted by Richard F. Snow at 03:00 PM EST There’s been some talk in recent days about simply letting New Orleans go: The town had a great run, but now it’s time to concede the game to nature, whose imperatives the city has taunted since its earliest years. The money and effort involved in rebuilding could more prudently be spent elsewhere. And I suppose that’s true—the “prudently,” I mean. But New Orleans has never been a prudent city. Few of our cities have: San Francisco straddling a volatile flaw in the planet’s crust; Manhattan on its preposterous little sliver of an island; Los Angeles summoning the water on which it survives through a not entirely benign alchemy. New Orleans has also always been “challenged” ( to use the annoying goody-goody word the TV stations have affixed to this catastrophe). Over 40,000 of its citizens died of yellow fever between 1817, when records were first kept, and 1905, when the city was host to the last epidemic of the disease in America. One of these scourges killed the Confederate general John Bell Hood and his wife, leaving ten orphaned Hoods all under the age of ten. But the city has always been more than a dangerous goad to nature. When in 1908 the playwright Israel Zangwell declared America a “melting pot,” he was almost certainly thinking of New York City, a crucible where the heat was intense but the ingredients had come of their own accord. New Orleans is different. The ancestors of many of the people we’ve been seeing in the wrenching newscasts came to this place against their will and under conditions worse than those in the Superdome. Many of their neighbors came at bayonet point, as it were, when the British kicked them out of Canada once the French and Indian War was over. These of course were the Acadians—the Cajuns. Under the lower heat of their particular melting pot, the Africans and the French—and the Spanish, and all the rest—gave their country and the world the most wonderful lesson about the resilience and ingenuity of the human spirit. The society they eventually formed was restless, sometimes brutal, ravaged by every horseman of the Apocalypse—and increasingly bright, buoyant, and shining with genius. So we have jazz, and a city in a swamp that for generations everybody has wanted to visit. New Orleans is America’s Venice, a place of spooky, wise ancient buildings that have seen it all yet still can throw off the occasional sunken flash of immediacy, of sexuality, of fun. And so much of that fun is the product of a long, painful struggle to overcome every kind of affliction that the world can deploy. I think we have to rebuild New Orleans just the way Italy has so far rescued Venice from the marauding waters. New Orleans is our Venice without that ancient state’s dispiriting redundant history of murdered doges. Of course it WILL be rebuilt. It is easy to forget amid the happy chaotics of Mardi Gras that this is a great commercial center which generates a substantial portion of America’s wealth. But it is also an irreplaceable part of America's soul.
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