Louisiana: Lebensunwertes Leben?

Douglas Brinkley, the well-known historian and professor, has an op-ed piece in Sunday's Washington Post, and he's wondering whether the federal government's relative inaction in rebuilding New Orleans isn't a deliberate policy action in itself.

The stubborn inaction appears to fall under the paternalistic guise of helping the storm victims. Bush's general attitude -- a Catch-22 recipe if ever there was one -- appears to be that only rank fools would return when the first line of hurricane defense are the levees that this administration so far refuses to fix.

New Orleans appears to be largely abandoned by the Department of Homeland Security, except for its safeguarding of the Port Authority (port traffic is at 90 percent of pre-Katrina numbers) and tourist districts above sea level, such as the French Quarter and Uptown. These areas are kept alive largely by the wild success of Harrah's casino and a steady flow of undaunted conventioneers.

The brutal Galveston Hurricane of 1900 may be a historical guide to the administration's thinking. Most survivors of that deadly Texas storm moved to higher land. Administration policies seem to tacitly encourage those who live below sea level in New Orleans to relocate permanently, to leave the dangerous water's edge for more prosperous inland cities such as Shreveport or Baton Rouge.

After the 1900 hurricane, in fact, Galveston, which had been a large, thriving port, was essentially abandoned for Houston, transforming that then-sleepy backwater into the financial center for the entire Gulf South. Galveston devolved into a smallish port-tourist center, one easy to evacuate when hurricanes rear their ugly heads.

To be fair, Bush's apparent post-Katrina inaction policy makes some cold, pragmatic sense. If the U.S. government is not going to rebuild the levees to survive a Category 5 storm -- to be finished at the earliest in 2015 and at an estimated cost of $40 billion, far eclipsing the extravagant bill for the entire Interstate Highway System -- then options are limited.

But what makes the current inaction plan so infuriating is that it's deceptive, offering up this open-armed spin to storm victims: "Come back to New Orleans." Why can't Bush look his fellow citizens in the eye and tell them what seems to be the ugly truth? That as long as he's commander in chief, there won't be an entirely reconstructed levee system.

Shortly after Katrina hit, former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert declared that a lot of New Orleans could be "bulldozed." He was shot down by an outraged public and media, which deemed such remarks insensitive and callous. Two years have shown that Hastert may have articulated what appears to have become the White House's de facto policy. He may have retreated, but the inaction remains.

IT'S NOT THAT NEW ORLEANS is below sea level, for the most part, that's driving the government's proactive policy of inaction as an American city founders two years after it went under water. If New York City went under the choppy Atlantic, if the Big One sent Los Angeles sinking into the Pacific, if Chicago were overwhelmed by an angry Lake Michigan, the ingenuity and treasure and will of the American nation would be marshaled. Fast.

None of those cities would be allowed to fade into the dog-eared pages of long-unopened history texts.

New Orleans is. Dozens of communities in South Louisiana are . . . in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, now two years past. Brinkley again:

Unfortunately, right now New Orleans is having a hard time lobbying on its own behalf. Minnesota's Twin Cities have about 20 Fortune 500 companies to draw in private-sector money to help rebuild the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis. New Orleans has one, Entergy, which is verging on bankruptcy. So besides U.S. taxpayers and port fees, New Orleans must count on spiked-up tourist dollars to jumpstart the post-Katrina rebuild.

But this is where the bizarre paradox of living in a city of ruins comes into play. Out of one side of its mouth the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce says, "Come on down, folks! We're not underwater!" Yet these same civic boosters -- viscerally aware that the Bush administration is treating the desperate plight of New Orleans in an out-of-sight, out-of-mind fashion -- don't want to bite the hand that feeds them large chunks of reconstruction cash. New Orleans is both bragging about normalcy and poor-mouthing itself, confusing Americans about what the real state of the city is.

Recently Mayor C. Ray Nagin, born with the proverbial foot in his mouth, tried to explain why the homicide rate in New Orleans is so appallingly high. When a TV reporter asked, Nagin merely shrugged: "It's not good for us, but it also keeps the New Orleans brand out there." This absurd comment -- and dozens like it -- hurts New Orleans's recovery almost as much as Bush's policy of inaction.

Everywhere I travel in the United States, people ask, "Why did you guys reelect such a doofus?" There is a feeling that any community that reelected a "first responder" who stayed in a Hyatt Regency suite during Hurricane Katrina, never delivered a speech to the homeless at the Superdome or Convention Center in New Orleans, and played the "chocolate city" race card at a historic moment when black-white healing was needed probably deserves to get stiffed by the federal government.

And Nagin isn't the only bad ambassador New Orleans has. It also has City Council member Oliver Thomas, Sen. David Vitter and Rep. William J. Jefferson -- all currently in deep trouble for potentially breaking the law. Dismayed by such political buffoonery, Americans have simply turned a blind eye to New Orleans's reconstruction plight. There is a scolding sentiment around the country that Louisiana needs to get its own house in order before looking for fresh levee handouts.

TRANSLATION: New Orleans and Louisiana are poor, they're basket cases, they're full of buffoons . . . of what use are they to us? In politics today, as in society today, a vulnerable city or region (like an unborn child, the desperately ill or the profoundly disabled) will be allowed to survive only if we decide there's some percentage in it for us.

We believe there's such a thing as Lebensunwertes Leben . . . life unworthy of life. That is the societal and political milieu in which we live today. I don't like it. Neither should you. But it is what it is, at least for the foreseeable future.

And the American political structure -- and apparently the American people -- have given up on New Orleans . . . on Louisiana.

IN THAT LIGHT, I keep coming back to the persistently sad state of my home state, and I am compelled to ask hard questions of the people there.

Here's the question that came to me as I read Doug Brinkley's piece:

Louisiana, how can you expect America not to give up on you when you've given up on yourselves?

You look at the catastrophic mess that was the New Orleans public school system before Katrina, and you know that that city had given up on its children -- at least the ones whose parents couldn't swing a pricey private education for them -- long before America was being begged for help.

You look at the long tradition, both in New Orleans and in Louisiana as a whole, of corrupt and dysfunctional government. And you know that Louisianians had given up on a functioning civic culture generations ago.

You look at the horrible poverty statistics and the worse educational-attainment statistics, and you know that Louisiana never had any realistic hope for the future. That the state's citizenry never put enough stock in the virtue of hope to commit to the kinds of actions a hopeful people take.

Hopeful people stay in school, seeking to better themselves. Hopeful people help the poor, and they try to find ways to disrupt the self-fulfilling culture of poverty.

It's the bottom of the ninth, and Louisiana is 0-2 with two out and nobody on.

IN ALL MY COMPLICATED and conflicted thoughts on my home state -- my people -- I also can't help but add my heartbreak at what has become of my old high school, Baton Rouge Magnet High. That school did much for me at a time when I needed much to be done. It was a magical place in a beautiful old building that had been spruced up and modernized for its new role -- this, in 1976 -- as a selective-admission, college-preparatory school for academics and the performing arts.

I understand magic still is made there, but it is made in the confines of a rundown dump, with sagging floors, crumbling masonry work and peeling lead paint.

Obviously, maintenance has been horribly neglected. Obviously, the parish (county) school board has been indifferent to some of its best, brightest and most dedicated students -- the children of their constituents, for God's sake -- spending eight-plus hours a day in facilities they wouldn't inflict upon their pets.

And now it's so bad, no one knows what to do. Renovate the school for $37 million? Tear it down and rebuild for $40 million?

Given all that's been outlined above, would you have any confidence that any brand-new school the school board built wouldn't be just as big a dump and safety hazard in 20 years' time? That the board would ensure any new school were built even half as well as the old one -- which has stood for 82 years (and withstood, sort of, the neglect of its stewards)?

IT ALL GOES BACK to the central premise, doesn't it?

We, unfortunately, live in a utilitarian society. Louisiana can't even give its children schools that the rest of us in America would deem fit for our dogs. Of what use is Louisiana to the rest of us?

Why shouldn't we cut our losses, cut off the money and let the whole dysfunctional lot stew in their own juices until they're as cooked as a crawfish? Why?

Louisianians seemingly don't even love themselves or their children enough to pull themselves out of a cesspool largely of their own making. Why should the rest of America love them any more than they love themselves?

Come on, Louisiana, we're post-Christian and steely-eyed. Give us a reason why.

Please?

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POSTSCRIPT: Douglas Brinkley, author of the WaPo op-ed and a tireless advocate for post-Katrina New Orleans was a history professor at Tulane University. Was. In May, he resigned from Tulane to take a post at Rice University.

In Houston.