Yesterday: a bit of dog-whistle we're-not-racists racism from the National Review, compared to the hardly disguised thing from the same source, 30 years ago.
Today: NOLA and the Danziger Bridge sentencing, nearly seven years after Katrina—
New Orleans was a tragedy, and then it was a crime, and now it is barely a memory. The city was holding its breath this weekend over what the judge was going to do. You could feel the tension every time you stepped outside the bubble of the Final Four festivities. Underneath the undeniably unquenchable spirit of the place, and underneath all the Chamber of Commerce rah-rah bullshit that is that spirit's tawdry public doppelganger, there remains a sense of abandonment and loss. In the Ninth Ward, the most poignant things are the steps to nowhere. Row after row of short brick staircases that end, abruptly, in the air, because the houses to which they were attached are not there any more. Who walked up those stairs, you wonder, after a hard day's work? What children took them all in a single bound, coming home from school? What neighbors stood at the top of them, bouncing nervously, one foot to another, carrying some food because someone in the house had died? The steps are a hundred stories that die in their middles. What happened on the Danziger Bridge is one of the rare ones. It had a beginning and a middle, and now it has an end. The storm, it seems, is never-ending.
Ted Jackson/The Times-Picayune
"Searching for Solace - Katrina Survivor"Draped in his mother's casket flag, Robert Green, Sr. stands on the steps that once led into his mother's Lower 9th Ward home in New Orleans, which was directly in the Industrial Canal breach during hurricane Katrina. Green's mother died while clinging to the roof, and his granddaughter perished in the floodwaters.
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