-> SMOKE & MIRRORS
 KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis
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SMOKE
"Where there's smoke, there's fire ..." Popular Adage.
15 October, 2005: According to accounts I've received from my sources on the ground in New Orleans, as I have reported, the Gold Rush has begun. Speculators with reputed Deep Pockets are already picking off real estate listings for $800,000 (USD) and up that had been there for months before Le Deluge.
This had been rumored in other press sources but now we can report as a fact that it is true.
As to rental listings, the phones are ringing off the hook. And, as Katy Reckdahl mentioned at the conclusion of my book, landlords are giving former residents of the high ground near the Quarter and elsewhere the Bum's Rush. My former roomie Shawn, who lived on Esplanade, got a call this week recommending that he come to New Orleans right away if he wants to keep his place. He is there this weekend.
For many of the former residents of the New Orleans I knew, ultimatums are the order of the day. Get back now, give me some money or don't come home. I'll put your stuff in storage until you can afford to come down and pick it up.
17 October, 2005: Most troubling is an article in the San Francisco Chronicle of Wednesday, 12 October, ("As locals struggle, migrants find work in New Orleans" by Eliza Barclay) stating that migrant workers in places like northern California and Arizona are responding to ads running on Spanish-language television station Univision (but not Black Entertainment Television, we note) offering $15-$17/hour to come rebuild New Orleans. I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees a significant political motivation in this advertising/rebuilding choice.
The article states, in part,
... Recognizing the demand for migrant labor, and to help speed reconstruction in the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended rules mandating employers to prove that workers they hire are citizens or have a legal right to work in the United States. ...... The Louisiana Department of Labor says it has received requests from contractors to certify 500 illegal migrants. Agency officials estimate that the actual number of illegal migrants already working for contractors is far higher, because many employers are not bothering with the paperwork. ...
... "The local people can't participate in their own recovery," said Jack Donahue, whose Mandeville, La.-based firm Donahue Favret Contractors Inc. specializes in such construction tasks as sheetrock and flooring removal and mold remediation.
Part of the problem, Donahue said, is that local construction workers scattered during the evacuation and are just beginning to come back. Many are returning to destroyed or severely damaged homes and have discovered that the hotels in the region are full of out-of-state workers, including migrants.
This is the shape of what the "new" New Orleans is starting to exhibit.
COMMENT to "Smoke" intro of 20 October
News to Rod
ITEM ONE: SMILING JOHN UPDATE: "Real Time with Bill Maher" (on HBO television) followed our last "SMOKE & MIRRORS" mention by featuring former North Carolina Senator, former Vice-Presidential candidate (a.k.a. "Two Time Loser") John Edwards as one of its remote interviews this Friday.Edwards failed to mention the new Wall Street job reported here, and at BusinessWeek, in our last journal entry. Instead he was working on his 2008 Presidential campaign, as per usual. This time he was pushing yet another Web site started to help his Presidential push. This one takes a page from the Howard Dean playbook. This one's called OpportunityRocks and is promoting his college tour, attempting to recruit the young (and naÔve) and any other activists he can rustle up toward his cause.
You gottah hand it to Smiling John ...
ITEM TWO: It's reported that there is a warehouse of bodies recovered, after being delivered at Charity Hospital in New Orleans with bullets to the back of their heads. The discovery has lead to former Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Foti - mentioned in these pages in past articles - who is now Attorney General of the State of Louisiana, asking for an independent investigation.
Former Senator Max Cleland (D. - GA) seemed to imply on "Real Time with Bill Maher" that the discovery of these bodies would lead to a wider investigation of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD.) [G21 has contacted "Real Time" for a confirmation of the allegations. - RA]
We've all (in the United States) seen the videos of sixty-four (64) year old Mr. Davis from Atlanta getting a brutal beat-down by the officers of the NOPD.
I know the NOPD. There's MUCH MORE to come out of both these stories. Mark my words.
When you delve into Louisiana politics and civil affairs, you're opening up a big can of worms.
As to allowing Mr. Foti to investigate anything in Orleans Parish. Can you say "Fox. Henhouse."
ITEM THREE: Speaking of Orleans Parish, first DemocracyNow!, then Human Rights Watch, reported that the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Department had completely abandoned the Templeman III facility (where I was held during my unjust imprisonment in New Orleans, awaiting trial as many inmates there are) leaving people to fend for themselves in chest high water. Then investigators from Human Rights Watch, after getting records of those held at Orleans Parish Prison (O.P.P.) discovered that over five hundred (500) inmates were completely unaccounted for. Neither Human Rights Watch nor DemocracyNow! has been unable to determine the disposition of these hundreds of people.
G21 contacted Attorney General Foti's office seeking information about the disposition of these inmates in late September. We have received no comment to date.
COMMENT on "News to Rod" of 20 October
Lessons Learned
One thing I have to accept from the comments to the debut of this column in our last edition, people on the Web militate against newspaper style columns.This Editor, personally, prefers them. But, while getting you used to this experiment, I've decided to bend to your preference. (I still mean to find a way to make the columnar format work, though.)
MIRRORS
I openly admit to the various internal conversations I carry on with myself all the time, the oppressive presence of my Super-Ego, and the fact that multiple personalities are something to be embraced. I let the personalities take turns defining what it means to be me. Why not? They each deserve a turn.
People viewing this manner of living, from the outside, claim that I re-invent myself more often than Madonna. From my view, it's not "re-invention," though. I just get bored easily. I have a need to try out a new "me" and see how he works out.
You do, too, I suspect. It's simply that you value comfort and security over freedom. I don't need comfort if I feel I am free to do as I like.
As lots of people -- ex-girlfriends, friends, lovers, the ex-wife -- have learned, the best way to get me to do something radical, even militant, is to hem me in, make me feel trapped. I don't like feeling trapped or controlled. I immediately start plotting my escape. That's where the "escape artist" persona comes in. I know there is always someplace else, some other container whose shape I can take - as long as I don't feel that the container wants to be a prison.
COMMENT on MIRRORS 20 October Intro
About this Column
You will have noted from the COMMENTs sections of the "beta" of this column that you, my Loyal Readers, have split almost evenly on my decision to retire the "My Glass House" column and go in this direction.I can't say that was unexpected. Most people hate change. I take the enormous risk of losing readers whenever I make change at your World's Magazine. The enterprise would not be worth the appellation if I ever demurred from taking these risks. Each one, prior to this one, has proven to be a success.
As long as I feel that my "nose" for the Zeitgeist remains intact, I'll likely keep taking them.
Of all of the people who commented after I released it, in my view, only Tim, from Switzerland, got the game that was afoot. I am still playing "Kabuki theatre of the mind."
I owe it to this experiment to give it enough time for you suss out what my intentions and vision are. It took most of you years, you'll recall, to figure out what I was attempting to do with your beloved "My Glass House." By then, I could foresee that there would come a time when the column cried out for evolution. Thus this new approach.
Recall that I bore, too. I'd done more than four hundred of those, with only minimal format changes. It was time to make an end.
COMME NT on Mirrors/About this Column 20 October
Life of Rod
I told my dear Barbara during our telephone conversation, I expected October to be a highly stressful month for me this year. That's a lot for someone whose entire life seemed based on stress, as mine is, to say.Firstly, this is the month when the people on the Kiplinger Fellowship Committee at Ohio State University will decide if I still have the chops and potential to go back to school for my next degree and work on the project I've proposed to produce and publish a major investigative series on the Louisiana prison system.
Then there's the Katrina book, which had brisk sales the first days out of the box and now is limping along, in my view. You can buy the book directly from Lulu.com here or from Amazon.com here. I have a lot of emotional freight tied up in that project.
15 October 2005: ITEMS on the SMOKE side of this journal evidence that New Orleans is still a major topic in my life.As I've said, I'm haunted.
For you, it's a new news topic; for me, it's my old life being with me every day, every minute.
Dragana writes me from Belgrade that it's okay to be very nuts but that the notion of returning to a "wrecked and dead" city is insane.
I remind her that I have a penchant for cities that have faced destruction. I went to Cairo, Egypt, after the Israelis had bombed it in the 1970s and to Belgrade, in her native Serbia, after NATO bombed it in the 1990s. I'm attracted to places that refuse to be destroyed.
Returning from the dead is one of my themes, after all. What did Lynda say when we connected, "You're not dead yet?"
Matt called today to give me an update of the latest people returning to New Orleans -- to recover their pets or their homes.
Utahna Faith, the poet and flash-fiction friend of mine whose work often appears in 3 a.m. magazine and Andre Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse owns a house in the Holy Cross section of the Ninth Ward. The water, in her high-standing house, must have risen waist deep, Matt said. (Matt stands at six feet.) That tells me that the water in Utahna's house, near the levy, was chest deep on her street.
It fits the picture of moldy houses I've gotten from Greg and others.
"The smell," Matt told me, "was so intense that four hours later, I felt like it was still stuck in my sinuses."
I replied that other people had mentioned the smell that lingers in some parts of the city and admitted that I could not imagine what it would be like.
"Take a towel," Matt said, "put it in a bucket of dirty water. Take it out and let it air dry and mold for about a few days and then wrap it around your head all day. You'll know what the smell is like."
No thank you.
"The worst part," Matt continued, "was that I went to the Lower Nine to give Utahna moral support and help out if I could. I didn't want to say it to her but I felt damaged. I felt like something emotionally bad had happened to me.
"It's like a wasteland ... "
COMMENT on Life of Rod 20 October
Basic Rules of Life
One of the Basic Rules of Life, as far as my experience goes, is that you don't romanticize or idealize it until its gone."Oh really, Rod. You fickle bastard!"
Everything looks better in retrospect.
What I acknowledge is that I'm a master of idealization -- but not idolatry. I can look back much better than I can look around. For example, I'm sure that I'll look back at my life out here at "Green Acres" as one the best times I've had to read and write in too long. It's only the isolation that's killing me ...
Well, that and the on-going transportation problem. To really go anywhere I want to go (the supermarket or ABC store) I have only a few options:
The last option is the most unpleasant but the only way I can really get around, with the closest supermarket being almost ten miles away, et cetera.
- Hope that Ron is around and wants to go to the store.
- Hope that it won't be too much of an imposition on his brother or sister-in-law to drop over and take me shopping if and when they plan to do so. This entails their coming out here and picking me up and then bringing me back. So I try not to ask often. As recompense for their help I'm saving a few ducats to take them out to lunch. I have to do this right away as they are moving to Atlanta soon.
- Pay $30/round trip plus tip to the only local taxi service out here to take me where I need to go. That means I have to shop fast and smart and not eat my liver as I watch the meter running.
For a City Boy, used to having most things in walking distance, this a precinct of Hell.
I'll look back at "Green Acres," no doubt, as a respite in my incredibly tumultuous life. It gave me the time to pound out "Katrina," after all.
Okay, like I've said before, every story begins with a woman.]
I've noted, if you haven't, that as I work on this part of my column, the moon waxes again. Within days, it will full and wonderfully glorious again.
I can't wait but it deprives me of sleep. I am, again, losing the Rules of Sleep.
Another of the Basic Rules is that we all carry a mythology inside of us. We have an iconography around which we shape our ethics, our weldanschaaung, even how we interact with others.
Some admit this Rule, others pretend they are "practical." The latter people are pretty much bullshit and we all know that.
ON ROD'S OLD SCHOOL MUSIC LIST THIS WEEK: Isley Brothers, "Voyage to Atlantis"
NOW HERE'S A SCARY ADMISSION: It dawned on me after my shower today that most of the people I've talked to (usually on the telephone but also by e-mail) for the last seven weeks are either actually in right now or from New Orleans. I get near-daily reports on what is going on in a city that barely exists and that I don't live in anymore.Now you know what I mean when using the term "haunted ... "
20 October, 2005: IN CLOSING, there is something I'd like to explain to long-time Loyal Readers. A few of you have commented that my retirement of the "My Glass House" column strikes you as something akin to " ... losing an old friend." I sincerely regret that. Looking at the statistics for this Web site over the years and reading your e-mails at the VOX POPULI page, I could not but notice that it was a wildly popular column.However (I think of the joke about that word even as I type it,) after doing a column for years, it falls into a certain formulaic rut. I respond to those features of the writing to which you respond, as any writer would, wanting to please, and become less "Unbound." I reach for what I called the "grace note" at the conclusion of the column and accompany it with the animated butterfly that was part of my iconography, expecting you to have a Pavlovian reaction.
When I feel that I want to be snarky (see "Smiling John Department" in the SMOKE section of this new column,) I cannot because such a comment would be inappropriate to the "My Glass House" voice long established. Thus, I am rendered, as a columnist, no longer "Unbound" at all. I am just going through the familiar motions and the expectations we have established.
Just as it has been necessary for me to retire other columns and columnists over the year for your World's Magazine to grow and continue to be challenging, in my view, once I began doing sub-sections like "News to Rod" in MGH earlier in the year, it was clear to me that MGH needed to be retired.
As I mentioned in that column months ago, I no lo nger wanted or needed you to have so many details of my own daily existence. The "My Glass House" formula, what had made it successful, yes, had begun to feel like a strait-jacket to me. I had other things I wanted to do and be as a columnist here and as the Editor and Publisher, therefore the standard-bearer. I couldn't do that within the confines of a column with such a calcified format and agreed upon conventions.
A new column was called for, based on the new vistas I wanted to pursue.
I regret that some of you miss the old style, but I hope that you will warm to a loosening of my approach to the pronouncements from The Big Chair. We shall see.
Thanks for coming back this week. Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.
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 and then go home.}.
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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