KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis New Orleans is the Lost City of America. New Orleans has disappeared as surely as the lost city of Atlantis or the lost city of Pompeii, which former mayor Marc Morial and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA.) have compared us to in their statements. That New Orleans, the New Orleans I mean to tell you about, that will never, ever, exist again--that city of love, lust, death and sex--will never exist again. A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need. Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now! A small, independent and outspoken magazine like this one can't reach you every week without the support and patronage of its readership. As our way of thanking those who have committed to keep your World's Magazine here on your desktop through their generous donations, we feature their names and cities here in our Roll of Honor. SUSTAINING PATRONS RON DIENER, Wendell, NC, USA DARHL STULTZ, Largo, FL, USA MATT STOWELL, New Orleans, LA, USA TIMOTHY MEADOWS, Anaheim, CA, USA CHERYL HILL NATION, West Fairlee, VT, USA DRAGAN & DRAGANA VICANOVIC, Belgrade, SERBIA LESZEK MICHAELWICZ, New Orleans, LA, USA TERRY TERRIAN, Sebastopol, CA, USA BECKY ALTEMUS, Houston, TX, USA Supporting Patrons BARBARA ATWELL, Berkeley, CA, USA IAN CRYSTAL, Ph. D, New Orleans, LA, USA LARS KEFFERSTAN, New York, NY, USA MARIE SINSABAUGH, Granville, OH, USA MEREDITH TUPPER, Tampa, FL, USA NGOZI RAZAK-SOYEBI, Jos, NIGERIA NICK ALLEN, New Orleans, LA, USA RIC WILLIAMS, Austin, TX, USA ROBERT PURVIS, Montclair, NJ, USA STEVE VIVIAN, New York, NY, USA STUART ALTMAN, ESQ., New York, NY, USA We encourage you to add your name to this Roll of Honor. GENERATOR 21 cannot continue and thrive without your support. Thanks in advance. To support G21, please send checks or money orders to: G21: The World's Magazine Attn: Rod Amis 1116 Crestline Road Wendell, NC 27591-9245 USA To donate by credit or debit card, please go to the Western Union website by following the highlighted link. Should you donate via Western Union, please notify us via e-mail. Please make all remittances payable to Rod Amis. Again, thanks. CURRENT MOON lunar phases

Rod Amis - Unbound

Lizard Lick, NC, USA - "100% of the shots you don't take don't go in." - Wayne Gretzky

29 September 2005: A writer I know began his diaristic, blogistic journal like this one time:

14 September, 2003: The past is always more glorious, safer, more heroic, more manageable than the confusing and unruly present. This is so because we have had the time to rationalize the events and concerns of the past. When we think back on the incidents of our lives, they become part of a revisionist narrative meant to explain their result: the person we are today, the author of a personal history. When relating our pasts to others, as in done by politicians and moguls in "authorized" memoirs and autobiographies (as opposed to "unauthorized" biographies), we have the benefit of rationalizing everything done or said as being part of the larger result. We never reveal what we actually thought or felt at the time because it would only mar the narrative and reveal that we were as confused and uncertain in that distant present as we are in this one.

No matter where we are in the timeline of existence, the future is always either filled with hopes or threats.

When I went back to read this, working on another piece of literary reporting, I thought of Martin Amis.

Specifically, I thought of his book Time's Arrow which I shall always hate him for; but that is only the second reason I have for hating Martin and his father, Kingsley. Long-time Loyal Readers know that I hate those two blokes for being ahead of my on any bookshelf in any library in the world.

Doing a Google-search, as we all do nowadays, you must choose Kingsley, Martin or Rod, not simply Amis, because we are all there. Why couldn't my parents have named me "Aaden?"

Luckily, Martin's referents no longer come up when you do a Google search for me. They did for many years, much to my chagrin.

I must hope that now, as my own output has been increasingly catalogued by the omni-search engine, when Martin looks in his Vanity Search, he finds me and knows that we share a surnymous conflict.

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WHAT NO ONE IN THE MOUTHPIECE MEDIA (MM) in the Untied States wanted to say, watching those pictures from New Orleans on television every day was that those pictures brought up the issue of America's legacy of Black slavery. There are three understandable reasons for that. Those reasons have to do with the fact that the legacy of slavery is a White problem. White people in America today have three reactions to the legacy of slavery:

1. Black slavery in America, like the Holocaust in Europe, never happened.
   
   
2. I wasn't alive then. I didn't own any slaves. I don't understand why Black people have such an attitude about this. I don't owe them nothing.
   
   
3. We have allowed Black people to vote [Editor's Note: Except for some neighborhoods in Florida, Georgia and Ohio-RA] and that means the playing field is now level. Blacks should not complain because they built this country, and - oh yeah - made my family wealthy without compensation. They should suck it up and build their own prosperity the way the rest of us did, even if I and my friend refuse to hire anybody who sounds like they do.

I hear variations, veiled in pious homilies, from White folk every day and try to keep myself from rolling on the floor and laughing - or grabbing a gat.

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20 September, 2005: Immediately after the Presidential election, I made another of my now-predictable predictions. I said the George W. Bush, like every second-term President of the twentieth century, was vulnerable to the Second Term Curse. That was not a risky prediction to make; I had history on my side.

What is remarkable about the Bush second term, in my view today, is that - while still having very low approval ratings for most of his performance, from appointments to foreign policy - nothing has shaken his base. (As John D. Goldhammer points out in the first of his two-parter on our OpEd page, "the haves and the have mores.") Bush's base has remained relatively solid, even as he moves the nation toward financial bankruptcy.

Mr. Bush has also had the added benefit of a weak and uncertain opposition party who can't gain confidence within their own, increasingly independent-minded base. This is an historical anomaly. Every President from Wilson through Clinton faced a galvanized opposition during his second term. Bush gets another free pass.

The credit for this success speaks less to Mr. Bush's political acumen than to the forty year effort of the far right wing of American politics to offer power to evangelical Christians, engender think thanks and activate the neo-conservative foreign policy establishment with the ephemeral dream of running an empire that means to make history rather than learn from its precedents.

The weakness of the American left, in this view, is that rather than basing its nostrums on solid social democratic principles, as its European cousins did, it focused on trying to out-mainstream the radical right.

A more successful strategy would have been an embrace of the radical left, whose fervor is just as hot as that of the radical, evangelical right. The drift toward an imaginary "middle" was doomed from the start. Americans like revolution and revolution calls for the simplicity that only dissidents can offer.

The 1983 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism this way:

- A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.

Sound like any place(s) you know?

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4 October 2005: ONE OF MY RULES goes: If you can't sleep, stopping frustrating yourself. Get up and get something done.

That's the way it was at 5:30 a.m. today, when I got sick of tossing and turning and trying to wish myself back to sleep. I was simply too stressed.

There are loose ends on the book I needed to get resolved with the publishers. I am worried that we were losing our momentum. I'd been in a funk since completing the work. A version of the post-partum depression that I feel regularly here after getting a new edition launched, only this time it is increased exponentially.

I didn't want to eat. I never do when I'm tense. I let my housemate, Ron, know that I was going to forego dinner.

I certainly didn't want to talk to anyone. I did field a call from my pal, Matt, who is still on the road while waiting to return to New Orleans. He had family business to resolve and needed a chance to vent about some of his frustrations, including an unscheduled trip to Washington, D.C., that he absolutely dreaded. I tried to be sympathetic and helpful.

I tried to shake the funk yesterday by doing two things:

• Getting a heavy dose of quiet time. All I did was read. I only checked my e-mail twice, for about five minutes each session - unusual for me - because even the sound of the computer's fan seemed to irritate me.
  
  
• I took an afternoon nap of about two and half hours. Again, not so usual for me.

Apparently, neither of these strategies helped. When I tried to go to sleep at 10:30 p.m., all I did was fret and toss and turn. So I started reading some more to try to relax myself. I must have read until at least two in the morning.

I only managed to sleep for an hour or so and then it was back to the restlessness.

So I got up, put on a pot of coffee and got busy. Been like that for the last five hours or so ä

It didn't help that, after getting the final chores done for this edition, I was still in a raw mood and certainly no mood to finish this week's entry for this column. Everything I had slated to enter here seemed stale and uninspiring. Thus this apologetic post instead.

Maybe I'm just "written out" for a while.

Thanks for coming back this week. Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.

THINGS I PRAY FOR THIS WEEK

1 - A lower stress level and feeling more "centered," as they say.

2 - Selling lots of books.

3 - A girlfriend.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "

Love,
Rod

ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at the (U.S.) Public Broadcasting System (PBS's) WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS Internet magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

In 2002, he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia.

Our Resident Philosopher has exchanged his legend mobility for a means of keeping your World's Magazine. Now he must become earnest about gaining a financial underpinning for this enterprise. (Read: Buy back his freedom.}.

In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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