The Big Easy Bucks

It doesn’t take much prescience to foresee that the reconstruction of New Orleans will be a pork barrel free-for-all, if it is not already so. I am waiting for much of downtown NO, specifically small residences and businesses, to be condemned by the state under eminent domain, triggering a massive land grab for business - voila, Disney New Orleans! – Nor is it necessary to be a psychic to foresee the corporate/theme park reincarnation of the city and its forceable “improvement” (i.e., made safe for tourism) by removing pesky, aesthetically unpleasing, behaviorally unpredicticable poor local folk to Habitat for Humanity-style boxes a safe distance away from the business of creating a simulacrum of the city whose peculiar charm and character they helped form. After all, much of New York’s Time Square area underwent a similar transformation in the 90s—one of the primary architects of which was…Disney!