Only a Yankee could ask the question
Posted by TFG on August 30th, 2005
Should New Orleans be rebuilt?
Call me a romantic, but I’m afraid I simply can’t imagine an America without New Orleans. It does not compute.
Now if the question is, should it be rebuilt 100% with 100% federal tax dollars, that’s valid. But like some say, let’s block the breeches, put out the fires and bury the dead before the question even gets asked. That means you, too, Congress.
August 30th, 2005 at 10:16 pm
My own ancestral roots are deep into Louisiana, and like you, I cannot bear to think of no more New Orleans. I have only had one visit to this grand old dame, and I am heartbroken to think it may have been my first and my last…
August 31st, 2005 at 7:08 am
Damn, why can’t he let them find the dead and rescue the living before he pundifying?
August 31st, 2005 at 9:33 am
Now, what kind of pundit would you be if had the good taste and good sense to NOT be a knee-jerk jackass?
August 31st, 2005 at 5:09 pm
This isn’t a surprise coming from Jarvis: he’s just a typical NewYorker-American — does anything of any lasting importance really exist outside of the New York/New Jersey Megacity? (Speaking of impractical locations and wacky cities on the edge — whatever happened to all those doomsaying articles on how New York was especially vulnerable to those once-every-ten-thousand-years earthquakes? They were in vogue back in the nineties when everyone was supposedly content and happy under the reign of the Queen Billary.) Anyway, I could swear that it was on his website last year that I read (either him or someone else) moaning that the entire state of Florida (never mind just one city), after four hurricanes, was obviously too expensive to support any more and should just be sawn off or expelled from the union or banished into the fifth dimension or something that wouldn’t touch his sweet, sweet tax money.
August 31st, 2005 at 9:41 pm
Well, I am a Yankee, but I don’t think I asked this question — at least, I certainly hope not. It is fair to ask how long it is going to take to repair, but it would be foolhardy to imagine that the people of New Orleans lack the same self-starting capability that everyone just naturally assumes the rest of America would possess. After all, I always thought Cajuns were some of the toughest sumsabitches that you could find anywhere.
But it is going to be a long, hard slog.
August 31st, 2005 at 10:10 pm
You ain’t no yankee…you’re in Missouri, my ancestral homeland (my mama’s mama’s side – Springfield area).
September 1st, 2005 at 11:01 am
I agree with him. Rebuild the French Quarter, but let the rest of it turn into bog. Hell, only a bunch of coonasses could think that living in a bowl that you have to constantly pump water out of was a good idea. The French Quarter is above sea level — to hell with the rest of it.
We have places like New Orleans here in Texas, too. We call them “lakes.” Sure, we like to visit them and get drunk (just like New Orleans), but we don’t live inside of them!.