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The city that care forgot

Tuesday, 06 September 2005 05:07 PM

Continuing from my previous post on Letters From New Orleans: Rob Walker was interviewed by Flak Magazine several weeks ago about his book, and that interview now seems eerily prescient.

Since Hurricane Katrina hit and throughout the still-unfolding aftermath, he has been asked many times his thoughts on the situation in New Orleans. Here is his latest response.

The aftermath of Katrina will, I suspect, have the effect on many people of feeling that they have seen a mask fall away. Certainly anyone who has lived in or really knows New Orleans already knew that behind the beauty of the French Quarter and the Garden District lay a sprawling and sometimes desperate underclass. Generally this is mentioned only in the “arts and culture” context, as a backdrop to, say, the creation of jazz, or more recently the rise of several major rap stars. But obviously it is just as true in a socio-economic context: The city has long been full of people living in brutal poverty; the city has long been full of cheap violence.

I was back at home in Jersey City by late Tuesday night, watching with anyone else who cared just how badly things can fall apart, and reading reports the systematic theft of guns, of a forklift commandeered to rip through the metal gate protecting a drugstore, of shootouts, of breakdowns in basic social behavior. It is likely that as the stories of life in the Superdome and elsewhere in the city for those days eventually reach us, they will be ugly and grim. It is hard to believe the idea of the city that care forgot disintegrating into chaos and misery. It makes me angry and it breaks my heart.

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