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! To order on Amazon.com, go here! 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 TIMOTHY MEADOWS, Anaheim, CA, USA TERRY TERRIAN, Sebastopol, CA, USA CHERYL HILL NATION, West Fairlee, VT, USA DRAGAN & DRAGANA VICANOVIC, Belgrade, SERBIA LESZEK MICHAELWICZ, New Orleans, LA, USA MARIE SINSABAUGH, Granville, OH, USA BECKY ALTEMUS, Houston, TX, USA Supporting Patrons BARBARA ATWELL, Berkeley, CA, USA MATT STOWELL, New Orleans, LA, USA LARS KEFFERSTAN, New York, NY, 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 IAN CRYSTAL, Ph. D, New Orleans, LA, 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 G21 at FeedBurner Rod Amis at the Huffington Post

Rod Amis - Unbound

SMOKE & MIRRORS - THE OLD MAGICIAN: Our publisher, ROD AMIS gets agro in "New to Rod" this week then goes on with his personal riff on three-dot journalism.

SMOKE

"Where there's smoke, there's fire ..." Popular Adage.

10 April, 2006: In background, the regular writers and special contributors and I have been discussing a re-organization of your World's Magazine during the last weeks. A monumental change, in my view, is that we have reached the consensus that - after a three year moratorium - G21.net will join our peers in the "general interest" magazine category and offer a Fiction section once more.

As long-time Loyal Readers know, I have been resistant to identifying your magazine as a fiction publisher because I believed that opened the floodgates to an area that was not our strong suit and did not fit my own personal vision of why people should read what we have to offer.

There are two reasons for the moderation in this view as we move into our tenth year:

1. Since starting the G2 1 BOOKS imprint and having Africa Fresh! do well in the fiction category, it's been brought to my attention that the policy of the magazine is inconsistent with the goals of the book imprint.


2. My personal resistance to publishing fiction should not stand in the way of the greater goal of the re-organization to modify the demographic of the magazine and become inclusive of a new generation of readers.

So our Guidelines have been modified beginning with this edition.

The second seismic shift here is that I have begun a redesign of both the "cover" (a.k.a. "Homepage") and article pages in mid-stream. Normally the page design changes have happened in either January or August. As you might have seen if your entrance to the site this week was from the cover page, that has changed for the first time in recent memory. My personal jury is still out as to whether to keep some "preview" version of the top features on the cover or not. The determination will me made entirely based on your response to the latest cover design.

NEWS TO ROD: Race

It's become abundantly clear recently that this country, the United States, has lost the ability or inclination to talk honestly about race. I'm made to think of this because of the recent vilification of Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney in the Mouthpiece Media (MM.) In my view, it would be cowardly not to talk about this issue. McKinney has suffered much in her eleven year Congressional career, mostly because she lacks the ability to "go along to get along," a trait we share.

The latest gang-bang she has suffered is only one more example of how being Black and out-spoken or having any sense of personal dignity and pride means that you are targeted as "uppity" or mad-dah. McKinney doesn't deserve this but life is not fair.

On the larger stage, her treatment on all the MM outlets from CNN to MSNBC to the editorial pages of national newspapers and the (shameless) commentary of disgraced and corrupt Representative Tom Delay speak volumes to what the lack of an honest racial dialogue in the U.S. is all about.

It's a generally accepted tenet of "conventional wisdom" these days that the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, particularly as regards the images from New Orleans, put the issue of racial inequality back on the table for the babbling classes of the U.S. body politic and was the first nail in the coffin of Mr. Bush's plunge in the popularity polls. What Cindy Sheehan had only begun to accomplish, the reporting from Katrina did right away. It was all down hill from then for this President because the United States had been in denial about the race issue for over two decades. We are a so-called "color-blind" society if you asked the MM, even though most Black people knew that was a bald-faced lie.

From this chair, the evidences of the denial about racial injustice in the United States were widespread and ubiquitous prior to Katrina. Because of my peripatetic nature, I'd lived all around the United States before fleeing to Europe and so I had and have a broader view of the primary symptom.

Almost invariably, wherever I chose to live, the accepted view was that locally the issue of race had been resolved and that the local situation was misunderstood. The local view was that "outsiders" did not understand and often misinterpreted the situation while the problem, what there was of it, of racial injustice was basically elsewhere, somewhere "out there" beyond the equanimity and understanding that obtains in the local arena of the interlocutor. I found this denial all over the pre-Katrina landscape.

1. In southern Louisiana and particularly New Orleans, people touted the fact that there had been free Black people there before the American Civil War, pointed proudly to the Treme district as the oldest community of Black people in the country, while at the same time ignoring the Haiti-like conditions of the Lower Ninth Ward* and the general inequity of the labor and compensation structure, that the vast majority of those living below the poverty level just happened to be Black and that the neo-plantation system of employment that obtains had a casual link to the deplorable educational system - a national disgrace - upon which it fed.

   "We are misunderstood and wrongly denigrated," was the mantra down there pre-Katrina. Political corruption and one of the largest gulags in the world - which mostly housed Black people - were just unpleasant facts of life.



2. Living in California, years earlier, where the City and County of San Francisco's Human Rights Commission documented the fact that public policy and corporate influence colluded to reduce the incentive for the Black population of the city to remain there, the denial was equally as evident. The response of San Francisco community leaders was that Baghdad by the Bay was the "most liberal city in America" and that the policy was race-neutral. It was just an accident of history" that the black population was on the decline over two decades and that one was a hard-pressed to find black executives or even middle managers in the financial district of this "liberal" city. the city and county's own human rights commission report seemed to disagree strongly with this blatant example of denial, nonetheless.


3. Whether in Manhattan or Baltimore, my personal experience (admittedly anecdotal evidence) has been that the discussion of this issue in the United States has been muted, avoided or reticent. Except in the most intimate of circumstances, over sharing a meal or a socially-lubricated discussion among people of the races who have developed some level of trust and camaraderie, the discussion never comes up.

   When it does, it is in the circumstances of (grudgingly admitted) confusion among Whites that the discussion should be had at all and (almost patronizingly apologetic) surprise among Blacks and Browns (Latinos) that it should continue to be avoided.

   In my own circumstance, because I am considered "reasonable," the question invariably arises as to why there is still so much Black rage, especially among Black males. I am accosted about my role as an editor and publisher because I continue to support what a columnist like Raheem has to say about the issue(s.)

   In these circumstances, as the editor and publisher, rather than the Black man, I would like to respond to the issue of intellectual honesty. How can "my" publication, I'm almost compelled to ask, champion the human rights issues of the Irish, the East Timoreans, the Serbs, the South Africans and ignore the same salient issues of African Americans and make the claim to intellectual honesty? How can I ignore the elephant in my own living room, the issue that is the essence of my definition as a human being on this blue marble and my daily experience and believe that I am doing my job?

   Out of politeness and politesse, I normally don't pose the question. I make most people uncomfortable enough as it is.

But whether I look at the current McKinney imbroglio in this nation, my own experience of the so-called criminal justice system in Louisiana or the latest from North Carolina - where my first reporting was on the cross-burnings in Durham less than a year ago and the latest international news is about a seemingly racially motivated gang-rape by the Duke University lacrosse team and all of its fall-out and attendant issues and incidents, here in the "genteel" New South - I have to wonder that the questions that demonstrate denial can still be asked at all.

That's news to Rod.

---

9 April, 2006: Here's a factoid to put in your hopper: 100 million Americans, half the adult population of this country, shop at Wal-Mart every week of the year.

---

We all know about what happened in South Dakota. Th is is a video about a brave Lakota woman that I hope you see. (Props to Truthout.org Multimedia.)


MIRRORS

7 April, 2006: When I returned to this country from my time in Egypt, my very first job was working in mental health. I worked first at a state mental hospital, on the locked male Admissions ward, and then moved to a private institution, across the Connecticut River, and got very much involved in doing family therapy.

Family therapy, I believed then and continued to believe today, is the only effective form of therapy for mental disorders because, if you live with a sick person, you cannot but be affected. Families are, by their very nature, pathological systems (that's my personal opinion, not a tenet of therapy) and thus the introduction of additional pathology only increases the pressure of the mix.

It is difficult living with people, in general. Living with a person suffering a mental disorder is draining.

I am being drained right now.

---

ITUNES VISUALIZER is so cool, isn't it?

I KNOW those of you who have iTunes have been using it. Don't lie to me. Those of you who like getting herbally elevated have used it quite a bit, I'm sure. (Not that I do anymore or would recommend it.) Stop laughing.

---

11 April, 2006: A woman named Michelle in California, who I've never met but who seems to like this magazine, sent me a box of cookies this morning. They just happen to be my favorites, peanut butter cookies. But these are Vegan, non-dairy peanut butter and apricot cookies. I am so chuffed!

Nice things do happen once in a while, don't they?

What I'm wondering right now, though, is Is Michelle psychic? How did she know that peanut butter cookies were my favorites? Oh-oh!

---

WHAT IS IT ABOUT CALIFORNIA EXACTLY? Is it really the magical place that it seems?

You might recall that I spent most of my adult life there - totally against my will and as an accident of fate. G21.net was born there, those many years ago. Most of the intimate relationships of my life took place there, too. I haven't found a single woman since I left Cali who I was inclined to love. Hmmnnnnn ...

What is it about California?

---

My friend Robin "Roblimo" Miller thinks that Florida is the new California, at least for Baby Boomers. He might be right. But I'm not sure. I think I like the real California better. Maybe it's because of the cheese.

---

Like I used to tell once of my customers, back in my bartender days, "Please me; don't tease me."

A couple of good friends have reminded me that, at the end of the day, it's my life.

I have a tendency to consult other people about major life decisions. I'm a consensus kind of guy, maybe because of my Socialist orientation. It seems that I take that orientation too far when dealing with what I want to do; I have this bad habit of seeking validation before I do anything. That has to stop.

Like sitting in the Big Chair at this magazine, I need to decide that I'm the one in control of my own life. I shouldn't give a damn what other people think; I'm too old for that.

So that's a change-up, too. No more wanting everyone to love me. Seems logical since most people don't anyway.

Thanks for coming back this week.

---

* 15 April, 2006: On the day of publication, I received a remonstration from Tracy Harris-Flores regarding my comments about the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. She wrote me:

"ignoring the Haiti-like conditions of the Lower Ninth Ward", Ummmmm, Rod, what on earth could be worse than Central City??? In all my 33 years of living, I'd never seen a crack deal go down until moving up here to the central city area post Katrina!!!! Also, the shanty houses between Earhart and S. Claiborne along Second and Third street are all rentals. Not one house is owner occupied, nor a single dwelling unit, all are doubles (duplexes) or other multi unit dwellings. You're screwing my points here my friend, the masses are looking for a reason to get rid of us and I'm trying like hell to go home. Ouchie Ouch Ouch Ouch

Peace and Blessings,
Tracy

I promised that I would make it clear that the Lower Nine is NOT the only area of New Orleans that reminds anyone of outside of Haiti. As she points out, there are equally horrid or worse conditions in New Orleans East and other parts of the city. But gaping potholes are gaping potholes, partially paved streets are what they are. Anyone who has seen the post-Katrina pictures, looking past the devastation, would get my main point: conditions in New Orleans were far below in most of the rest of America, barring, perhaps, Mississippi.

THINGS ROD HOPES FOR THIS WEEK

1 - Success in my latest job application efforts.

2 - Getting back on top of generating more book sales.

3 - Beginning to plan the rest of my on-going Hejira.

"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, r eaching 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. When he's not busy here, he writes technology columns for IT Manager's Journal and business columns for Enterprise Leadership. Rust never sleeps.

Our Resident Philosopher has exchanged his legend mobility for a means of keepin g your World's Magazine going. 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.

---

| HOME | THE THE PREVIOUS SMOKE & MIRRORS | THE NEXT SMOKE & MIRRORS |

CREDITS || TABLE OF CONTENTS || SEARCH ENGINES || LINKS ||
VOX POPULI is YOUR PAGE to talk back to us. I'm glad you're not bashful. Keep those cards and e-mails comin', Kids!

RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE

---

Our Editor does listen!

© 2006, GENERATOR 21.

E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your kudos, brickbats and suggestions to rod@g21.net.