Sometime the Flood Prevails

September 1, 2005

Over at GetReligion tmatt talks about the allure New Orleans has had for adventuring boys and restless girls growing up in Port Arthur. He discusses the Two Views of locals about New Orleans, and wonders if a kind of Puritan-Libertine split may come to the fore in restoring the city.

GetReligion is about media context and coverage, and our response veered into our ideas about the issues rather than the coverage of them, so we are responding here rather than over-filling his comments.

He concludes the essay:

I am pretty sure that the sermon [“Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God” by the great early American evangelist Jonathan Edwards] did not claim that God’s wrath was zip code specific. And if you say it is behavior specific, let [him] who is without sin cast the first stone.

Our comment follows:

Absolutely! it is the mercy of God that any of us are not consumed, washed away, or destroyed in the instant. The Divine Preserver is daily more faithful to us feckless primates than we can know this side of eternity. Disaster falls in a moment, with meat in our mouths, and our days are as grass passed over by the wind.

That said...

Looking at the New Orleans poor, a few looting and so many needing rescue from the roofs of shotgun houses, the thoughts that come to mind are not at first about good and evil, but about resilience of cultures.  It is probable that real-time Catfish Row styles of life long found a balance via kin, history, invisibility, and to some degree shared and tolerated dysfunction and a common worldview. Now one particular situation in the world has been Stirred with the Stick of Disaster. The life is impossible to recreate. Any such effort would be another public housing-ghetto debacle
[Update: public-housing debacle].

Likewise, it's hard to find very relevant how fluent and nostalgic Howell Raines and his cohort (including some of our valued friends) are about flowing liquor and brothels and smoky jazz and escape from respect for socializing pressures and inhibitions. Without getting sidetracked here about what's mortal sin and what's charming over-perfumed decadence -- the tonic frisson, the appeal of so much of NOLA'ns' tourism romanticism, has tended toward vice.

[Update: See Architecture and Morality on elite patronage and the poor, It Was Never Easy in the "Big Easy;" Masques of Death and Treaudeaupiate for more relentless indictment; and Stephen Green's balanced Elegy; as well as a more nuanced moral view at Amy Welborn.]

It is an article of faith here that happiness and virtue cannot permanently be uncoupled, or re-defined into meaninglessness. Thus it seems perverse indeed, in terms of human happiness and even creativity [creativity being far broader than "art" discovered in quaint stony streets and reclusive gardens], intentionally perverse in bricks and mortar, to construct anything, including a new New Orleans, with vice as the leitmotif.

We just wonder therefore if the Zeitgeist is presenting a Big Question for our generation: will we become more honest and accurate, more inquiring about what really sustains us? It is one thing to turn a prudently blind and indulgent eye to excesses that have developed a culture around them, and are self-supporting. But are we so contemptuous, so repelled by the dull and dutiful, that we want to rebuild what must at this juncture be a Theme Park of Vice?

Or are we ready to care for and with the displaced while the vision clears, let the Mississipi take its course, honor the nature of things, reconnect the very basic infrastructure, find and fund the things worth building and rebuilding, and ripen beyond contemporary romanticism -- that thoughtless fashionable default to the state of former adolescence, wandering through a wailing Saturday night of blues, looking for a back door to Eden?

Which makes us, we suppose, card-carrying puritans.

In our defense, we wouldn't have brought it up but for GetReligion commenting on the near-blackout of discussing the race and class issues now swimming on our screens.

And that's enough for now. Back to finding out what's needed at Burger Center, Austin's larger shelter. The emergency response communications staff says the American Red Cross is supervising, and needs donations more than stuff or volunteers.

Update: One Louisiana contact says ARC is not much in evidence as far as he can see, the Salvation Army is more active. The above Red Cross recommendation refers only to support for the Austin shelter. We trust the Southern Baptists and their mobile kitchens (no overhead taken from contributions) for immediate disaster aid.