The Nigger of New Orleans' Narcissus

The President At Zephyr Field in New Orleans, April 2001 (White House photo), surrounded by an unusually white crowd for the second-blackest city in America. He was bathed in white again Thursday night, minus the people.


Waiting for the president to speak from New Orleans. But waiting for what? He’ll go on, speak in his halting cadences, rattle off ands like they’re his rhetoric’s ropes, use those power words (resolve, won’t fail, success, rise, prevail), he’ll attempt to recreate the aura he created after September 11 or reach for something like the Apollo program, associate himself with the inevitable victory ahead, wed his name, his party, his presidency to the fortunes of “the Crescent City” and wouldn’t you know it, its reconstruction as a nice white new suburb of a city cleansed of its riffraff, its “welfare mentality,” as my inelegant correspondent of yesterday put it. And there it will be: a foundering presidency reborn. What luck. Every time he crashes, a vivifying tragedy to ride back to approval. I’d like to think that it won’t work this time. The destruction is too close to home. It is home. The death toll is tool near, distant—black—though it is from most. If this was Iowa or Nebraska, a thousand white Lutherans abandoned and bloating up to the sun, the guy would have had to resign by now. But no. They’re merely black, merely poor, merely scatterable, eventually forgettable, niggers of a 21st century narcissus a modern Conrad should one day immortalize, though the story is in reverse here: James Wait is the only white man on a ship bound not from Bombay to London, but from 38 percent back to, Wait prays, the middlin 50s, satisfactory enough for this homage to mediocrity. The opportunity here is not to rebuild a city in its own image, but to remake New Orleans in Republicans’ image, a new urban suburbia with its French Quarter (renamed Freedom Quarter while you’re at it) and festivals to be sure, but the way Epcot might recreate a taste of Thailand or a cookie-cutter developer might recreate “that old Florida feel” with six palm trees, balustrades made in Taiwan and a marketing brochure straight out of the laptop of a first-year intern on Madison Avenue.