Saturday, January 07, 2006

A Confederacy of Chiselers

The Feds have decided not to grant funding for the rebuilding of New Orleans' Ninth Ward for residential use, citing the neighborhoods chronic vulnerability to hurricane and flooding destruction, a decision that at first glance makes sense. In a rational world people would not choose to live in areas that are unstable--floods, earth quakes, tornados, etc. But of course the Feds have also chosen to overlook their yearly bailing out of devastation-prone areas located across the flood plains, earth quake, mudslide, fire and tornado alleys across the nation. Consider, for example, the near continual rebuilding of the coasts of Florida and California. Also, it begs to be noted that until Hurricane Katrina the levees in New Orleans worked surprisingly well until the natural barrier that helped slow previous hurricanes diminished to the point that by the time Katrina hit in 2005 there wasn't much swamp and forestation to cushion it's impact. They could both strengthen that barrier and rebuild the levees to new, better levels of protectiveness, so why not allow the residents to move back, hmmmm? Is it rude of me to observe that the miraculous removal of nearly all of a poor and crime-prone class of people is a poor city's chamber of commerce bonanza? Let the land grab begin! So when sentimental readers of John Kennedy Toole make a pilgrimage to New Orleans to sample the locales and colorful characters he wrote about so engagingly they will discover instead a near life-like simulation created by some Disney-esque corporate giant.

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