Wednesday, April 21, 2010
By Steve Janoski
When the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl this past February amongst a chorus of “Who dats” and pre-Mardi Gras debauchery, we all heard about was how good this would be for the people of the city after the apocalyptic destruction that Hurricane Katrina had heaped upon them.
Katrina? I thought. Wasn’t that like five years ago?
Saying that the Saints winning the Super Bowl made people forget about Katrina seemed like saying the Bears want to win this year so Chicagoans can get over the great fire of 1871.
After five years, I thought, the city was probably back to where it was before with high-rises a Superdome and Cajun food, because this is America, and we rebuild speedily and without mercy — and I rooted against the Saints because of this.
How wrong I was.
I didn’t understand this until I stood in Pequannock’s lower end last month, and saw for myself what a flood does. It not only destroys houses, but after throwing up all of the trash and sewage we dump in it, sucks the people’s spirits with it on its return to its banks.
It was in the despondent eyes peaking out from under slouched hats as the men gazed towards their swamped homes, or the aimless wandering that people do when they have nowhere to go, nothing to do except stand in the rain.
The only chorus in Pequannock that day was the rattling machine-gun song fashioned from the generator engines that showed that some folks just wouldn’t leave, come hell or higher water.
The cleanup has been massive, and the reconstruction will be that much harder.
Many people have had enough, and are looking to be bought out so they never have to deal with a watery plague ever again; ugly catchwords and phrases like “FEMA,” “catastrophe,” and “Army Corps of Engineers” are uttered in our own streets.
Coinciding appropriately with our own flooding, HBO has begun running a new drama called “Treme,” which focuses on the people of New Orleans immediately after Katrina — and finally the vicious picture has begun to gather in my head.
The Pequannock flooding was unruly — the New Orleans flooding was armed to the teeth while on steroids and meth.
We’ve all seen the pictures of the bodies floating in the hurricane water, heard the ugly stories about the armed mobs and the utter devastation — we’ve been under a media inundation for the past five years about Katrina that rivals the height of the waters themselves.
Under those conditions, it becomes easy to have a calloused heart about the city and to believe the positively selfish idea that, “It’s their problem. We’ve all got our own.”
But Treme is the first show that’s put a regular face on the people and doesn’t ask us to pity them, but to just acknowledge that they’re still there.
It is written with the colorful flair and fiery style that only New Orleans has, and writer-producer David Simon focuses (as he did with Baltimore in his previous series “The Wire”) on the city as a living, breathing character, not simply a place where people live.
The human characters’ eyes hold the reflections of the those shattered neighborhoods in the pictures we’ve all looked away from, while the city’s character stems from all the things that New Orleans has become famous for, from the jazz players (many of whom play themselves in the show) to the food to…yes, its football team.
So I take it back, Saints.
Your city needed that win to strengthen its spirit, to remind the people that the Superdome is more than just an evacuation site, and that if a team once nicknamed the “Aint’s” can beat Peyton Manning in the Super Bowl, anything can happen.
I hope that it steels the spines of that trickle of people who are, five years later, just returning to their homes, and makes them fiercely determined to build New Orleans into the great city it once was, a city that, in John Goodman’s character’s words from Treme, “lives in the imagination of the world.”
If it does, then that game was worth its weight in old New Orleans rum.
By Steve Janoski
When the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl this past February amongst a chorus of “Who dats” and pre-Mardi Gras debauchery, we all heard about was how good this would be for the people of the city after the apocalyptic destruction that Hurricane Katrina had heaped upon them.
Katrina? I thought. Wasn’t that like five years ago?
Saying that the Saints winning the Super Bowl made people forget about Katrina seemed like saying the Bears want to win this year so Chicagoans can get over the great fire of 1871.
After five years, I thought, the city was probably back to where it was before with high-rises a Superdome and Cajun food, because this is America, and we rebuild speedily and without mercy — and I rooted against the Saints because of this.
How wrong I was.
I didn’t understand this until I stood in Pequannock’s lower end last month, and saw for myself what a flood does. It not only destroys houses, but after throwing up all of the trash and sewage we dump in it, sucks the people’s spirits with it on its return to its banks.
It was in the despondent eyes peaking out from under slouched hats as the men gazed towards their swamped homes, or the aimless wandering that people do when they have nowhere to go, nothing to do except stand in the rain.
The only chorus in Pequannock that day was the rattling machine-gun song fashioned from the generator engines that showed that some folks just wouldn’t leave, come hell or higher water.
The cleanup has been massive, and the reconstruction will be that much harder.
Many people have had enough, and are looking to be bought out so they never have to deal with a watery plague ever again; ugly catchwords and phrases like “FEMA,” “catastrophe,” and “Army Corps of Engineers” are uttered in our own streets.
Coinciding appropriately with our own flooding, HBO has begun running a new drama called “Treme,” which focuses on the people of New Orleans immediately after Katrina — and finally the vicious picture has begun to gather in my head.
The Pequannock flooding was unruly — the New Orleans flooding was armed to the teeth while on steroids and meth.
We’ve all seen the pictures of the bodies floating in the hurricane water, heard the ugly stories about the armed mobs and the utter devastation — we’ve been under a media inundation for the past five years about Katrina that rivals the height of the waters themselves.
Under those conditions, it becomes easy to have a calloused heart about the city and to believe the positively selfish idea that, “It’s their problem. We’ve all got our own.”
But Treme is the first show that’s put a regular face on the people and doesn’t ask us to pity them, but to just acknowledge that they’re still there.
It is written with the colorful flair and fiery style that only New Orleans has, and writer-producer David Simon focuses (as he did with Baltimore in his previous series “The Wire”) on the city as a living, breathing character, not simply a place where people live.
The human characters’ eyes hold the reflections of the those shattered neighborhoods in the pictures we’ve all looked away from, while the city’s character stems from all the things that New Orleans has become famous for, from the jazz players (many of whom play themselves in the show) to the food to…yes, its football team.
So I take it back, Saints.
Your city needed that win to strengthen its spirit, to remind the people that the Superdome is more than just an evacuation site, and that if a team once nicknamed the “Aint’s” can beat Peyton Manning in the Super Bowl, anything can happen.
I hope that it steels the spines of that trickle of people who are, five years later, just returning to their homes, and makes them fiercely determined to build New Orleans into the great city it once was, a city that, in John Goodman’s character’s words from Treme, “lives in the imagination of the world.”
If it does, then that game was worth its weight in old New Orleans rum.
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