The Party's Back On in New Orleans, Even if Katrina Never Really Left

NEW ORLEANS, LA -- It was my willing plight this week to be wandering the streets of the French Quarter witnessing a hedonistic rite known as Mardi Gras, the French term that can be loosely translated as "Drink until you no longer can control your bodily functions." It is a ritualistic contest of endurance designed to see whom can consume the most booze and still maintain a measurable pulse. The real seeming object: to test the physical limits of the human liver.

Given that this city actually offers drive-up alcohol service -- which is a bit like a cutlery company gifting a new set of steak knives on Jack the Ripper -- the wretched excess is very much in keeping with New Orleans' party-hearty spirit. The famed Bourbon Street and its surrounding blocks teemed with mostly youthful tourists whose sole focus is untamed debauchery and raucous exhibitionism on a grand, masquerade-driven freak show scale. Which is to say, it's charming.

Welcome to Spring Break, Southern-style.

Early this week, I spied a man dressed exactly like the Pope, a woman decked-out to resemble a life-size bottle of Tabasco, a man in diapers sucking a pacifier while donning a rubber President Bush mask and pink bonnet, and a wizardly-looking gent sporting a placard that said simply, "I Read Breasts." Intriguingly, it appeared he was offering this unique spiritual service free of charge. There also were topless women whose chests were adorned only in glittery paint, evidently to make the breast reading dude's job easier. No lifting necessary, heavy or otherwise.

Yes, Hurricane Katrina or no Hurricane Katrina, Mardi Gras lives on. In the rest of the country it was Super Tuesday. The nation's future hung in the balance. But here it was Fat Tuesday, where only the hard liquor industry's profit margin remained in doubt. The choosing of our next President would take a distant back seat to the tracking of the Zulu chief and the obsessive quest for beads, the procurement of which consistently inspired otherwise modest and conservative women to lift their top, lower their bra (if any) and launch into an impromptu, wild-eyed shimmy.

Mind you, it isn't as if everything in New Orleans is back to normal. The scars -- indeed, the open wounds -- simply have been hidden like WMDs (except that these actually exist). They may be partying like it's 1999, but if you wander a few miles outside the French Quarter it's clear that much of this shattered metropolis remains time-stamped on Aug. 29, 2005, when the hurricane's fury in tandem with the failure of a substandard levee system literally wiped portions of the historic city from the map. A tour of the outlying areas of New Orleans, including the pulverized Ninth Ward, show that much of The Big Sleazy very much resembles a waterlogged ghost town pockmarked with wide swaths of untouched damage. Meanwhile, those who dared stick it out -- or more likely, had no choice -- are forced to live in flimsy FEMA trailer housing where their homes once stood.

The local and national media don't really talk about this stuff anymore, as Hurricane Katrina is yesterday's crisis. It's also far better for tourism and for the city's tenuous self-esteem to promote the fact that New Orleans' self-gratifying, anything-goes character is back in full. "New Orleans Hotels at 90% Capacity -- and Counting!" exulted one headline. The only hurricane you seem to hear about anymore is the one that's served in a glass (dark rum, pineapple juice, splash of grenadine). It's all something of a facade, of course, but that's spin marketing for ya. There's simply not as much to be gained from peddling the slogan, New Orleans: Merely a Shell of What We Once Were.

It's as if the poor and forgotten of Nawlins are being victimized all over again by abandonment and chronic neglect. If you drive through the Ninth Ward and some of the other, more affluent areas of the city that likewise took a direct hit from Katrina, the thing you rarely see is construction or repair in progress. Many "houses" sit on barren plots of land, mere collections of splintered wood and debris. Other dwellings appear relatively undamaged on the outside but prove to be empty shells on the inside, looking as if someone had taken a sledgehammer and demolished everything in their path while leaving the exterior mostly intact aside from a ghastly water line (often just below the roof). Not merely whole streets but entire neighborhoods are still literally frozen in time, like the bedroom of a recently deceased loved one -- or, in this case, some sick shrine to Mother Nature.

Only in a few areas were there clear exceptions. In one, the heroic efforts of Habitat For Humanity had resulted in dozens of colorful, sturdy homes being erected for some of the most severe victims. In another, we can see the beginning of Brad Pitt's altruism in committing to putting a small patch of real estate back on its feet -- a slice of recovery we might one day call Pitts Burg.

I asked Joseph, the driver of our tour minibus, why it appeared that little or no work had been done to clean up and rebuild the worst hit areas of the city in the 2 1/2 years since Katrina, a.k.a. The Bush Blunder That Fueled the 2006 Midterm Democratic Rebound. Where had all of those billions in aid to return New Orleans to something resembling its former glory gone if not to glue the broken shell back together?

"That's a question we've all been asking ourselves for a good while now," Joseph replied. "Several hundred thousand residents still haven't returned here since Katrina hit, and I think a large part of that is they've got nothing to come back to. It's like we all keep getting slapped over and over."

But let's all just forget about that, shall we? Apparently, the real story here is that Mardi Gras is again HAP-PEN-ING, baby! We can all sleep better knowing that New Orleans is once again safe for the rowdy and the inebriated, the naked and the perverse. For a city that's still struggling to crawl out from under the lingering devastation of Hell and high water, it now finds itself drowning in denial, which rapidly has become the most powerful of opiates for these huddled, thinned-out masses.

Comments

[Mark Folse]

For local's it's not denial; it's life. The crowd in which you saw the diaper president is the Krewe of St. Anne's, one of the most elaborately costumed marching clubs. The people who worked half the year on fantastic costumes in spite of the state are the city are no different than my wife soldiering through celebrating Christmas while her mother died. We're glad the tourists are back, even the vomiting hordes of Spring Break in Hell types. We need their business. Tourism remains a top industry. For people like the Krewe of St. Anne and all of the people you saw following them, it was not a denial but instead a celebration of who we are, of why we live here. It was an affirmation that we do live here, that we will live here, come hell or high water or both.

[doctorj]

I have to second everything Mark said. On top of that I have some added observations. First of all, some of you tourists might like to get out of the Quarter one day and see the real Mardi Gras; the one of familes on the Avenue, cooking, drinking not to excess, catching beads, and enjoying a sense of community that rarely happens in America today. Those people living in trailers had to fight like hell to get them, so they live there because more than ANYTHING they wanted to return home. It would have been much easier to stay elsewhere. They are heroes. We in SE LA know everyday what Katrina did (and more specfically the breached federal levees) and what the government did not do. We "lived" our government and many of its supporters doing everything in their power to destroy us with neglect at best and out right hatred at worst. And we survived. We are rebuilding our city as best we can with the resources we have available. We look to the future with hope and the past with sadness and anger. The hope is that we can make our city better than it was before, for surely something good must come from all the pain. The sadness and anger comes from knowing there is no such thing as the "United" States of America. My added hope is this next election can change that fact and I can be considered a citizen of my own country again. We need to take our country back, so it can represent the good of this country, like the millions of volunteers that continue to come and help their fellow citizens in need, not just represent the robberbarons of the world. Mardi Gras this year was wonderful. Many people said it is the first one since Katrina that felt 'normal". Normal is a good thing.

[Kevin]

Ray, anything that keeps the city's ongoing plight in the national media is a good thing, but no one in the media seems to be able to adequately capture what Mardi Gras really is.

It's not a day. Nor is it the (literally) seven blocks of Bourbon Street where the tourists gather to hoot for boobs and beads. It's a *season*, with all that goes along with it, like Christmas, and it's like mistaking the one hour of gift-ripping on Christmas morning for the entire Christmas season.

In the weeks before Christmas, we listen to special music, gather with family and friends, have office parties and luncheons and decorate our homes. Same with Mardi Gras, which begins Jan. 6 every year (the exact date of Fat Tuesday fluctuates). It's something that Louisianans do for themselves, not as a tourist draw, and they welcome visitors to participate and celebrate with them.

The post-Katrina position put forward by some that "Mardi Gras should be cancelled" (how would that be accomplished, anyway? how do you "cancel Christmas"?) ignores the reality of more than 100 years of family tradition in the city, and of the human spirit itself. When a bomb goes off in Israel, should Yom Kippur be "cancelled" until things get back to normal? Or should the populace spit in the face of cruel fortune and show that they won't be bowed by clinging even faster to their traditions?

Your tour guide was right; we do keep getting slapped in the face, over and over. But Mardi Gras isn't the locals' chance to get pukey drunk on spiked Hawaiian punch -- it's now, more than ever, a chance for us to tell the world (in the title of a popular local revue): "I'm Still Here, Me."

[Frolic]

I second all that was said above.

I'm sick of ignorant and lazy reporters like Ray Richmond coming to New Orleans and getting everything wrong. Yeah, yeah it's fun to blow you expense account on booze. But if he bothered to do any reporting, to sit down and talk to a single local other than a tour bus driver, to actually walk a few blocks beyond the French Quarter, then he might have gotten a clue about what Mardi Gras and New Orleans are actually about.

[Sherry]

I love ya Ray and think you are an awesome writer....but you missed the big picture of what Mardi Gras is really about. You were like the blind man who only felt the tail of the elephant and thought he understood the concept of "elephant." However, you did a great job of describing the tail.