[mobglob-discuss] FWD: Rant: a "Sept 20th - 24th Housing Crisis" for Bodies Still Rotting in New Orleans

[Gordon Flett]

A rant from a Washington, DC activist:

Sorry fer the negativity, but...

While the wealthiest areas of New Orleans, Cajun restaurants, and
strip clubs are already re-opening for business, bodies are still
lying in the streets in no-longer-flooded parts of the Ninth Ward:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4832252

[photo taken September 20]

...their homes standing intact ready to be bulldozed by the
proud new owners, ...as soon as the former owners are sufficiently 
dessicated
that they can no longer be identified (and hence no responsibility
of contacting next-of-kin: or allowing them back in to pick up the
pieces of their family's lives -- yes, that is how it works at the
coroner's office.)

In the eyes of the State and Federal Gov't, both the
Living and the Dead can stay as they are -- they are
"in a better place!"

-- Houston -- or Heaven -- as the case may be.

Meanwhile all that matters is the tourist New Orleans -- survived.

"The part that matters, the heart and soul of the city, is undamaged"
as one restarateur described it.

Well, sure -- and so did many shacks owned by slumlords, which
the tenants sought to be refurbished, which will not now be
refurbished.  Better to tear them down and relocate the former
occupants -- forcibly -- than refurbish their family homes with
federal $$, shotgun houses which in a hot-market town would be
deemed a "fixer-upper".  (Just go to Allegany Avenue in Takoma
Park, MD -- formerly known as "Hells Bottom" -- if you don't believe me...)

And of course, "Forced Relocation May Ultimately Help The Poor",
says the Washington Post and Daily News.  After all, they don't
have to ever see their relatives bodies -- again.

Why would they, the condition they are in?   The Army Corps
maintains it is worried about bodies clogging the pumps and
slowing down the draining process (I am not joking)...

They won't be allowed to return, and latest reports say, official
counts will not include unidentifiable bodies (no death certificate,
such bodies are simply burned and disposed of in Potter's Field
next to the landfill in any city.)  Not counted in any report,
not added to any insurance estimate -- and note -- no "photo walls"
of the missing allowed -- it could cause a riot!

Any "poor person" who actually wants to return is clearly confused.

Why not accept a $2000 check, keep quiet about your dead relatives

(we can trust that anyone sufficiently angry and in-the-dark to
believe the levee breaches are deliberate - a rumor circulating
since 1927 - can be cowed into silence by their own paranoia)

and accept that your old neighborhood will remain sealed off
by the military until all buildings are demolished
so that "liberal visionaries and traditional conservatives",
according to EJ Dionne, can join forces to build PARKS AND PROMENADES,
MASS TRANSIT -- where their belongings and houses stand today?
Sealed off from the prying hands of their former owners?

All New Orleans is now a Neutral Zone!

That is considered the LIBERAL, even LEFT-WING alternative -- to do
something WITH the land benefiting the "middle class", as EJ Dionne
and others call it, after the state bulldozes all that the former
owners personal belongings have remaining!  Fort Trumbull, LA!

Because we all know that the opinions of the "middle class" -- 
folks in Gretna, mind you -- extolled on All Things Considered
for keeping New Orleanians out of their military sector and
preserving their "middle-class-ness" -- we all know that the
opinions of the "middle class" are what matters to whether a
neighborhood should be rebuilt -- that is how "livability" of
a neighborhood is defined after all -- number of residents
who are on a "livable" income -- maximize that number and you
increase "livability" -- or how many poor people should be
given RESIDENCY PAPERS for internal travel and allowed to
return to their newly "middle-class" neighborhoods as internally
displaced refugees (permanent 2nd Class Citizens) and allowed to
return in politely dispersed dribs and drabs once their
offending relatives have been ground up, burned up and cremated
and sent to Potters Field with or without their permission?

Why, that would decrease the "livability" of the neighborhoods
and return them to their pre-Katrina condition!  No, best to
relocate them to a trailer park -- a double-wide is much more
American than a cypress shotgun house.

After all, they can't even pick thru their belongings or attempt
to rebuild their homes -- danger of toxic mold! -- No liberal or
conservative would allow it -- here in DC area you can't stay in
a rental house that has an asbestos problem, or even combined
utilities -- if a new owner buys it, he must bring it "up to code"
-- which mysteriously makes the home habitable for single family
or full-floor condo residences, sometimes with the asbestos
"fully mitigated" i.e. intact and undisturbed.  Whitewashed.

But a (white) developer can hire a professional environmental
engineer / handwaving shaman to dispel the problem with a flick
of a switch on the bulldozer, or flick of an exacto knife on the
infested drywall in what used to be someone else's house -- 
environmental engineering is not rocket science, it's a question
of safe disposal -- in this case safe disposal of "toxic" deeds
and ownership records -- and the actual owner's bodies are still
laying outside being picked over by animals while we sit around
and worry about a housing shortage for activists who have houses,
most of whom aren't even prepared to march without a permit
for a war that in their eyes, is an entirely separate issue
from just another "Act of God" affecting people who, in their eyes,
shouldn't be living in the Gulf in the first place.  But yes, sure,
Bush handled it incompetently, and boy, lets hope that reflects
badly as possible on him so we can end the war in Iraq!

The Post went so far as to say that a man who saw his entire
family drown before his eyes is better off for it because he
(a) never has to return--let the government dispose of their
bodies, is the message; (b) gets to live in Fayetteville Ark...!

A place much, much more hospitable to African Americans,
because, after all, there are fewer of them! That makes
it a more attractive place to live -- in the eyes of suburban
white liberals.  If only we could all live in such a place...

or better yet, for us "urban dwellers" let's make room for
"ourselves" in an improved, more "middle-class" urban environment
free of poverty!  By all means keep the poor who WISH to remain -
somehow - but sprinkle in a few artists, a few activists.

Seattle on the Potomac.  Celebration on the Mississippi.
Mission Accomplished!  In Fayetteville there is no East
or West, there is no dead bodies lying undisturbed, not that
we need to see on TV, at any rate.  You can dump 10,000
tons of pig shit on the RURAL poor (it's been done) and
it will only prove that in the eyes of America those folks
do not even exist.

Perhaps when the war is over, we can all live in Fayetteville
Arkansas.  We will have to defeat Oceania first.

After that, Bush.  Or Hillary.  Pick your scapegoat, America.

Eventually (after the Rapture?) we will all get to Fayetteville.

Next Year in Fayetteville, we will join the blessed former
New Orleanians who are free of care for their departed relatives
who they never got to see buried, who are free of the problems
of poverty that, we all know are purely geographical in origin --
stemming from their "shiftless" inability to abandon their city
years ago and move to "a better place". Only the rich can afford
the problems of living in such a horrible place as New Orleans
-- or DC.  That's why so many of them do -- and will -- in the
New and Improved New Orleans!  Especially problematic for the
rich is not having a drivers license in an age when internal
travel papers and photo ID (and soon, National Service
eligibility) are apparently essential for 1st class citizenship.

But that is a problem that cities can easily solve by modeling
themselves on places like Silver Spring Maryland that have
plenty of parking and ample security features such as privately
owned streets to keep loiterers at bay.

And shortage of space in the morgue will NEVER be a problem for
the affluent future residents of the New and Improved Whitewashed
Urban America -- ever.  You can take that to the bank.

--BER