perfidy

I have never been to New Orleans.

It seems I never will.

I am not concerned for the physical structures of the city. The distinctive architecture of a cityscape, of this unique cityscape drenched in history and bourbon, will survive. They almost always do, don’t they, the oldest buildings with the longest memories weather catastrophe in a way that modern homes and mods and pods don’t.

There is a metaphor there, for deeper thinkers than myself to consider: the impermanence of modern creations, built on the same capricious sediments as the old, but lasting only a second. Or a primeval sentiment, the lifetimes of achievement and struggle, erased by a force of nature. I remember Thucydides…or maybe it was Homer? …in the earliest histories of our civilization describing desolation wrought by war as though it were caused by a storm. The most destructive natural force that society of pre-gunpowder, pre-industrial, pre-nuclear seafarers could conceive of was a hurricane.

And so it is again, a prehistoric monster has risen from the sea, storming ashore to rend and break; steal, scratch and kill.

Or we can drop the poetics and just say that Katrina kicked the country square in the balls.

Even though the buildings will stand or fall, and the fallen ones will be rebuilt and the damaged ones repaired, my concern is not for them. Any city is greater than the arrangements of steel and stone that serve as its signature. They’re about people, at their core, not about the Sears Tower or the Empire State Building or every refurbished French Quarter brothel.

And it’s the people I see now that give me pause.

Continual reports of armed gangs roaming, pillaging at will; firefights over both booty and supplies; rescue personnel, helicopters, boats, doctors, and hospitals all coming under fire; hopelessness from those victims trapped between the toxic floodwaters, flowing by high as a house, and the toxic souls of the thugs who prey on them. Even the Superdome, the best-case accommodation for the worst-case scenario, has quickly fallen to a public health nightmare, complete with dysentery and gunfire in the night.

It’s less the people themselves who scare me, though. It’s that they confirm my worst expectations, my deepest beliefs about what would happen if our civilization broke down. In just a matter of days, perhaps 48 hours, New Orleans is what happens. Not Mogadishu, not Ivory Coast, not East Timor or Fallujah. Not them. Us.

And sadly enough, this scenario has come and gone a thousand times in a thousand works of fiction. Roving brigands are a staple of the post-apocalyptic landscape: Jerry Ahern’s The Survivalist; Robert McCammon’s Swan Song; Stephen King’s The Stand; Larry Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer (which also gave us extensive flooding and a glimpse of coming to grips with an inundated landscape) … and on and on and on, through a deep bench. Film of course has excelled at mirroring our fears of disaster or lawlessness; Mad Max alone did it three times, and there are dozens and dozens more. Even zombie movies seem a tad prescient lately. New Orleans might also suggest what’s to come if someone pops a nuke in a shipping container in Los Angeles or New Jersey or Virginia; see Schreiber and Kunetka's Warday for scaries in that vein.

We are told that it is criminal gangs largely running amok through the city. I am highly skeptical though that MS-13 or the Bywater Crips are up on their eschatological fiction; they’re not following a script, which leads me to believe that there is something deeper, something more fundamentally homo sapiens, that finds delight in making other peoples’ lives hell on Earth. We’ve all seen it before in crises around the world, but maybe there was apart of me that thought our society was above all that.

If I do someday make it to New Orleans, what city will I find? Will it be again the polis that was, or the lobotomized remains?

[wik] (JOHNO SEZ): GL says it right. The entire situation seems absolutely batshit insane in its apocalyptic sweep, just like something out of the novels we nerdy types read to titillate our jones for simulated eschaton. On September 11, 2001, part of my brain could not help but judge the quality of the special effects used to simulate the collapse of the World Trade Center (wow... it's just like the movies!), demonstrating that I was securely in the grip of a merciful sort of shock that insulated me from the full truth of the horror unfolding before my eyes.

And so again. Nobody, no novelist, no hater of the Gulf states, could write a tragedy this ugly, so outrageously terrible in its cartoonish excess. (A note: I felt the same way about the tsunami earlier this year. Some things are just too immense to feel real.) Think about it: if the water doesn't get you, the industrial chemicals will. If the industrial chemicals don't get you, the raw sewage will. If the raw sewage doesn't get you, the giant rats will. If the giant rats don't get you, the nutria will. If the nutria don't get you, the water moccasins will. If the water moccasins don't get you, the alligators will. If the crocodiles don't get you, the floating balls of fire ants will. If the floating balls of fire ants don't get you, the roving bands of armed marauders will. And if you somehow manage to survive all that, you still stand a chance at getting your ass shot by a New Orleans policeman looting your local Wal-Mart.