GLOBAL COLUMN© BY TED CORDOVA

New Orleans’ Blues

If you have never visited New Orleans, it’s too late. New Orleans, one of the dazzling cities of the United States, no longer exists as we knew it.

Let me tell you why. When New Orleans suffered the terrible megaforce of hurricane “Katrina”, it was an implacable punishment, like the wrath of God unleashed over the Gulf region.

In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune of New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment were in Iraq.

In her poignant but elegant style NY times Columnist Maureen Dowd, a frequent critic of the Bushes wrote under the title “United States in shame”: “America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a gutted police force insufficient troop levels and criminal negligent government planning. But this time it’s happening in America”.

Other columnists overseas suggested that Bush’s negligence was downgrading the super power to the level of a Third World country.

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

Today you cannot go to New Orleans and, following the guides of Truman Capote find the best gumbo or Cajun red beans and rice near the lower ninth ward. Neither will you find the area where Tennessee Williams imagined a street car named desire or the suburban environment of Faulkner’s long hot summer.

It’s impossible for the time being to listen there to the trumpets of Kermit Ruffins and Wynton Marsalis, those true reeditions of the great Louis Armstrong, another Neworlandaise.

Many are waiting for a comprehensive and unbiased evaluation of what could have been done to avoid extraordinary damage, inadequate relief efforts that exacerbated the dislocation and suffering of thousands of Americans, as Senator Hillary Clinton is demanding.

In the meantime, just wait until we hear again a band playing that “the saints are marching in.”

BIP