[I can’t quite
believe it, but this week marks the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating
landfall in New Orleans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the hurricane, its
even more devastating aftermaths, and a few other contexts for this tragic
and telling 21st century story.]
On why I’d call
New Orleans the most American of our major cities.
I’ve written a
good bit about New Orleans in this space: from this
early city-centric post inspired by Mardi Gras and my first visit to the
city; to this one
from the same blog era on one of my favorite American novels and a book
that’s as much about New Orleans as it is about its huge, multi-generational
cast of characters, George Washington Cable’s The
Grandissimes (1881). Those posts illustrate a few of the many reasons
why I believe New Orleans is so distinctly and powerfully American, as I hope
have this week’s posts in their own ways, despite the specific focus on Katrina.
And indeed, the responses to and aftermaths of that horrific storm likewise reveal
some of the worst as well as the best of American history,
society, culture, and art; on that final note, I should highlight one more
time a text I could definitely have featured in the week’s series and one of my
favorite 21st century American novels, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage
the Bones (2011).
To say much more
eloquently than I ever could a bit more about why I’d define New Orleans as so
deeply American, here’s one of the central characters from Treme that I didn’t get to analyze in Wednesday’s post, Steve Zahn’s DJ Davis
McAlary. As a radio DJ, and a highly opinionated person to boot, Davis is
often ranting, much of it about the best and worst of his beloved New Orleans
(and all of it a combination of communal and self-aggrandizing, convincing and
frustrating). But my favorite Davis monologue, in the opening scene of the
Season 4 episode “Dippermouth Blues,” is far quieter and more thoughtful.
Coming out of playing a hugely cross-cultural song, Davis calls it, “A stellar
example of McAlary’s theory of creolization. Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, the Great
American Songbook meet African American musical genius. And that’s what America’s
all about…‘Basin Street, is the street, where all the dark and light folks
meet.’ That’s how culture gets made in this country. That’s how we do. We’re a
Creole nation, whether you like it or not. And in three weeks, America inaugurates
its first Creole president. Get used to it.”
Those of us who
loved that aspect of Obama and even
called him “the first American president” as a result didn’t have to “get
used to” anything, of course. And as for those whom Davis is addressing more
directly in those closing lines, well to say that they seem
not to have gotten used to it is to significantly understate the case
(which of course David Simon and his co-creators knew all too well, as that final-season
episode of Treme may have been set
around New Year’s 2008 but was made and aired in late 2013). Indeed, when I’ve
been asked by audiences during my book talks for We
the People about why we’ve seen such an upsurge in exclusionary
rhetoric and violence over the last decade, I’ve frequently argued that backlash to Obama—as a
representation of so many perceived national “changes”—has been a central
cause. Which is to say, it’s not just that we need to “get over” the reality of
our creolized history, culture, and identity—first the we who love those
elements need to do a better job making the case for them, both as valuable and
as foundationally American. There’s no place and no community through which we
can do so more potently than New Orleans.
August Recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Katrina histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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