Thursday, August 30, 2007

From the 'Sent Mail': Get back to class!

From: The Mighty Favog
To: **** ******
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2005 01:19
Subject: Here's why classes need to resume



Prior to Chancellor O’Keefe’s town hall meeting on Friday, I had serious doubts that LSU would be ready to resume classes on Tuesday. I’m now convinced the university will attempt to start again, but now I’m unsure of the wisdom of that idea.

There remains a massive triage operation and special needs shelter on LSU’s campus. Helicopters, buses and wailing ambulances bearing evacuees are still coming in frequently. This operation will be going on for weeks at the very least.

Dear ****,


Here's why classes need to resume this week at LSU: The future of Louisiana. Hurricane Katrina wasn't a catastrophe for just New Orleans; it will have untold effects on all of Louisiana and, indeed, the nation. That's not even looking at the unfathomable human suffering, which isn't my point in this E-mail.

The point of this E-mail is what will happen in terms of "How will we live out our economic and civic lives, then?" In those terms, Louisiana will suffer grievously. Consider: A tremendous blow has been dealt to Louisiana's economy at a time of ongoing budgetary hardship. Really, you don't want to even think of the budgetary hit the state began to take, starting last Sunday, when New Orleans became an economic non-factor.

Louisiana lives by the sales tax, and it is about to die by the sales tax. The tourism industry just shrank to a dim shadow of its former self. No longer can the Gret Stet make a even a hard-scrabble living while remaining one of the most pathetically uneducated and unindustrious of these United States.

A population that remains inordinately poor and ignorant -- and I am not referring to just poor African-Americans in New Orleans, there are far too many white Louisianians who possess far more educational and economic opportunities yet possess even less interest in exploiting them -- just ain't that charming absent a good drenching of Old World charm in dishabille and Jack Daniels. Excitement-starved Ohioans will pay thousands to vomit in a Bourbon Street gutter because it is colorful and exotic spewing.

Throwing up on Chimes Street is just throwing up on Chimes Street. (God, how I miss The Bayou. Don't miss the throwing up or making an ass of myself, though.)

Someone leaving a handbill reading "Good jazz too-nite. Sho start at Elevn O-clok" posted at Tipitina's will leave color-starved tourists with the warm fuzzies about the "local flavor." A similar sign at Val's Marina in Head of Island just makes Yankees think "Deliverance" and "Squeeeeeeal like a pig, boy!"

See?

I think Jonathan Alter put it exceptionally well in the latest issue of Newsweek online:

I haven't seen them yet on TV, but vultures may have already descended on the carcass of New Orleans. We know that human vultures are swooping in. And the hangman prepared his noose this year, when the Bush budgeteers cut the Army Corps of Engineers' request for fixing the levees by two thirds. For the antitax conservatives who rule so much of the Gulf Coast and Washington, this is a comeuppance. Remember Mumford's history: Government matters. Not entertainment.

To survive, New Orleans must rewire its insouciance into seriousness. The city is at once enchanting and exasperating, romantic and fatalistic. Will the Big Easy learn to work hard enough to resurrect itself? Or is it, for all practical purposes, gone—a place on the map and not much more? History can make the argument either way.

The first week augurs ill. If House Speaker Dennis Hastert is saying now—with sympathy at its peak—that pumping billions of federal dollars into restoring a city below sea level "doesn't make sense," then aid from Washington will plummet in a few months when attention turns elsewhere. Some wealthier refugees are saying privately that they've all but given up on the place. The pictures of looting seemed to burst a psychic dam inside them. Invest in this? Pay more taxes for them? That's a recipe for white flight—overnight. On the other side are blacks—well over half the city's population—who are fed up with a power structure that could not keep them alive, much less house and educate them. Whites and blacks in New Orleans were swimming in a fetid swamp of racial tensions long before Katrina showed up.

The "before" is critical. Experts in urban recovery say that the most important factor in how a city fares is not the extent of the damage but the pre-existing trend lines. Chicago was mostly destroyed by fire in 1871 and San Francisco by earthquake and fire in 1906. But both cities had been on the way up beforehand. So while the rubble still smoldered, entrepreneurs were already getting loans to rebuild. Almost overnight, San Francisco constructed 8,000 barrackslike "refugee houses," with six to eight families in each. Within seven years it had recovered enough to host a world's fair.

The same dynamic applies to more recent disasters. Los Angeles, built on a fault line, is as geographically nonsensical as New Orleans. But it bounced back from an earthquake and riots in the early 1990s. The difference this time is that New Orleans has been in decline for decades. The headquarters of almost every energy company in town has moved away, usually to Houston. Its business establishment lacks the entrepreneurial dynamism of other Southern cities. Its work force is largely poor and uneducated.

The good news is that Mumford's litany of doomed cities is less relevant in modern times. "In the last 200 years, city rebuilding has been almost ubiquitous," says Lawrence Vale, professor of urban studies at MIT. "There's a deeply rooted necessity to turn disaster into opportunity." Vale says it was only a few days after 9/11 that he first saw that word — "opportunity" — in
The New York Times.
I was amazed to read this today. The man nailed it. My wife and I, as well as old Baton Rouge friends (none living in Louisiana any longer) have spoken of JUST THIS many times. And not only in relation to New Orleans -- the unfortunate phenomenon isn't confined to what was the Big Easy. It's also a large part of why my wife (an Omaha native) and I no longer live in Baton Rouge.

Compared with the Gret Stet, life in Omaha lacks a degree of color. But it possesses more quality. That requires a certain degree of seriousness, and it damned well requires a level of taxation that Louisianians never have been willing to endure. Good schools and a functional infrastructure cost money.

Sacrifice is a virtue, not just a bummer.

We were in Baton Rouge for a week a little more than a month ago. The positive changes downtown impressed us. The remodeled J-school building amazed us. The growth of Tiger Stadium awed us.

But after spending a week of near strokes every time my mother uttered the words "damn niggers" (all the while sweetly patronizing an African-American professional who had been extraordinarily kind to her . . . and possessed 475 times more education, by the way), after a week of driving past bombed-out looking storefronts on Florida Boulevard, after a week of reading about the troubled state of the East Baton Rouge Parish public schools (primarily because well-off and middle-class whites hauled ass starting in '81), well. . . .

Let me put it this way: As my wife and I sat, and sat, and sat in traffic on Bluebonnet Road, I finally turned to Betsie and asked "Why in the HELL would anyone want to live here?" A month ago, Baton Rouge was a little more than half the size of Omaha but had twice the traffic problems.

Now it's bigger than Omaha. Uh-oh.

What capital does the state of Louisiana have to deal with the challenges the future brings -- a future indefinitely without a New Orleans? Great infrastructure that will make growth easier? A diversified economic base, one with many well-paying jobs? A well-educated population that values intellectual pursuits? A public and a government which will spare no expense or bypass any opportunity to build up and educate its most disadvantaged and vulnerable citizens?

No, no, no and no. Absent an influx of federal aid unparalleled in American history, y'all in big trouble.

Bottom line: The culture matters. It matters on, oh, so many fronts.

It matters if New Orleans is to be reborn. It matters if Louisiana is to survive this catastrophic blow to its economy and its spirit.

The key to Louisiana's surviving and prospering in the future is finding a way to preserve what is charming, enlivening and beautiful in its civic culture while changing what has been shackling and destructive. The job of your generation of Louisianians is to do just that.

Day One of your job is Tuesday. Tuesday is the first day of rebuilding New Orleans and saving Louisiana. Your job lies in the classrooms of Louisiana State University.

The best thing LSU students can do for New Orleans and Louisiana is to get back to work. Don't let the dead of Katrina have perished in vain.


-- Favog

No comments: