As the city that was New Orleans descends further into chaos, worsened detrimentally by much-belated national relief efforts, there are no words. As looters take potshots with stolen guns at relief workers in helicopters, demanding rescue or else, halting relief efforts instead of progressing them, what can be said of such raw desperation? Seeing the online deluge of reports, images, and message board queries with glimpses of families torn apart, pillage, attempted murder, and rape, all evoking a war-ravaged third world country, littered and floating with the dead, how does one react to pandemonium beyond outrage and a personal promise to donate to the Red Cross? As the city's poorest turn on cameramen, shooting birds, demands for basic help, and curses at officials with power to send aid who fail to do so with urgency, how can one feel anything but horror?

"The horror, the horror," said Kurtz infamously in Heart of Darkness, which is exactly what those confined for over half a week in the Super Dome and the Earnest N. Morial Convention Center now face, much less those "rooftop communities" atop hotels still awaiting rescue and fending off invaders, much less the residents still stranded on their island roofs in far-flung St. Bernard parish because helicopters fill up too quickly before reaching them and must turn back to triage and transport centers. The first "horror" is for acknowledging the horror itself and the second for being forced to endure it without succor. Bush said "to be patient," presumably directed at those pleading for help, as if communications were functioning and they could hear his incongruous instruction.

Waxing literary feels, at best, beside-the-point in a time of national crisis, but with New Orleans on the mind perhaps there is no better occasion to discover or remember The City that Time Forgot—one of many under-used and misunderstood nicknames—through the eyes of southern writers. When faced with speechlessness, the words of others, especially on a subject as tricky as New Orleans, can be of significant import in getting one's mind around what exactly might have been lost. Although the uniqueness of New Orleans is (hopefully) self-evident, there still exists no better method of understanding its peculiar ethos, its DNA double-helix of fantasy and fatalism, its devil-may-care raison d'etre than to read the books that bring that several-mile swath between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain to life. Indeed, the time to realize and rekindle all that New Orleans embodied is needed now more than ever in its often-beleaguered three hundred year history.

Evidence of this need can be seen in U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert's remarks (R-Illinois) who questioned whether New Orleans should even be substantially rebuilt, insensitively suggesting that it be bulldozed as if the city was some unruly child with a death wish who should be put out of its misery. Never mind that New Orleans is a working man's city with strong blue collar underpinnings; that the bulk of the nation's goods enter through the Port of New Orleans; that most everyone, especially the Bush Administration, sure appreciates the millions of barrels of crude oil refined in the city's environs; or that permanently relocating well over a million people in forced diaspora from their homes and jobs (as the Acadians, the forefathers of the Cajuns, encountered in Nova Scotia) because the city is encompassed and threaded with an immutable fact of geography is, alas, a grossly illogical brain fart. No, Hastert is clearly ignorant of what lies at the heart of New Orleans, a world unto itself that transcends a sense of place and that has been rendered devastatingly placeless.

The same empathetic shortcomings may be found in the editors of the Waterbury Connecticut Republican-American, who in an op-ed ditty on Wednesday questioned whether it was worth taxpayer dollars to reclaim the city in the long run, positing that perhaps the nation's nose should be cut off to spite its face. They want to come out and say so badly that Katrina punished "the recklessness of Americans' desire to live along storm-prone coasts" as opposed to, say, those who desire or simply have no other choice but to live on the tornado-prone stretches of the Midwest and Southeast, the earthquake-prone west coast, the winter storm-prone Northeast, or, going a step further, anywhere in the U.S. that has been further endangered by the U.S.'s actions in the Middle East. If the party line is compassionate conservatism, why break from it on this issue of all grisly issues?

If I am going to skirt the edge of Romanticism below, allow me to call out racism when I see it from the get-go. As bloggers were quick to highlight, obvious racism, however inadvertent, appeared in captions to images of looters: blacks "stole" while whites "borrowed." Moreover, apart from journalists and the elderly, the number of Caucasians on Thursday seen in New Orleans throughout my near-constant viewing of streaming, downloaded, and televised reports could be counted on two hands. The white-to-black proportion has been practically the same in preceding days because the city is well over 60% African-American, many of whom already live beneath the poverty line; over half of New Orleans' children are estimated at living in poverty. The ones without water, food, and much-needed medical attention are those who did not have the means to evacuate and/or were to frail and sick.

The rebuilding naysayers, however, morphed them into other definite but certainly not pervasive demographics, who in their eyes do not deserve a city: namely the poverty-stricken who did not evacuate and chose not to find their way to the Super Dome last weekend because they did not want to surrender their alcohol, drugs, or weapons upon entry, but now, of course, must do so for evacuation to the Astrodome in Houston and San Antonio. I seriously doubt Hastert the editors of the Republican-American have visited New Orleans and seen its array of denizens living amongst and working with one another, knowing unilaterally what is special about the city—that it is, in fact, not some quirky, hedonistic afterthought in American history. For everyone remaining in the city is in the same boat, so to speak, frantic and ready for escape or any assistance whatsoever, not to mention the three-quarters of the city's populace seen only in interviews on local and regional television stations, watching and waiting.

If these particular republicans had gone south, they would know that the city from where Eracism emerged is minutely sensitive to bureaucratic rhetoric's thinly-veiled lacerations and can detect racism and reverse-racism by reverberations in the air well before a circumspect comment is issued. After all, prejudice—white on black, both of those on mulatto, French on Spanish, U.S. on French, Confederates on the Union and vice-versa, and more permutations involving the Germans, British, and Irish—is part of the region's blood-splattered fabric. Otherwise, they would have curtailed such ignorance, if only marginally. (After a month-long vacation of escalating death tolls in Iraq and hiding like a child who feels superior to Cindy Sheehan's bumper-sticker politics, Bush decided to cut his time in Crawford, TX, short by two days to return to the White House in the face of this mounting crisis, only to drag his feet. My first thought on his touted sacrifice vis-à-vis reports of the Apocalypse in the Big Easy was, "Wow, that's mighty white of him.") They would have realized the many ways in which New Orleanians' stubborn tenacity, their urge toward self preservation, no matter how inhibiting, will carry the city through any crisis, as it did multiple fires and outbreaks of yellow fever in the nineteenth century, and even this catastrophe that promises to stretch out for months and years.

"The South we encounter," wrote W. J. Cash in his landmark but exquisitely flawed classic The Mind of the South, "is really one that has reached a sort of temporary equilibrium upon its ancient foundation." The same may be said for New Orleans, geographically and psychologically. Its temporary equilibrium has involved many opposing forces over the years, most all represented in the city's literature: southern propriety and violence, sex and death, decadence and poverty, elegance and decay, Catholic fervor and indulgent sin run amok. Like God and the devil for Job's soul, these extremes battle it out for the city's spiritual landscape, resulting in a dialectic that transcends nearly everything, from personal relationships to politics. The fact that none of these can be fully reconciled, most of all the tension between memory and history, cuts to the heart of this week's disaster for those who eat, sleep, and breathe this existence, who use this uncertainty as a peculiar sort of hope when times turn tragic (ergo, the jazz funeral). Surviving in New Orleans always involves living on a prayer, whether gazing either upward or eye-level at the river in the south or over the earthen levee to the lake in the north. The precariousness of life itself is felt underfoot, consciously or unconsciously, as a constant topographical metaphor, which feeds the city's inevitable, insular love affair with itself.

This affair—a love/hate relationship, naturally—is the city's blessing and curse. New Orleans has refused so far, for example, to enter the twentieth century in any progressive sense, digging in its heels at the rise of modernism. The mythos of the South has something to do with this hesitancy as well as the fact that the city's economy is like the Hindu caste system: people either have disposable income or they don't; there is almost no middle class. Even they conglomerate toward the bottom end of the spectrum, and it is often constituted more by the transplanted student bodies of universities than permanent residents.

This economic structure leads to, among other things, a severe lack of serious business investment, one of the nation's most over-educated working classes outside of New York, and a schitzophrenic class-consciousness, which, thankfully, is transcended by a rare identity that feeds off the city's historical, geographical, and psychological sense of being cut off from the rest of the country, even as it paradoxically and graciously feeds the nation.

Although she hails from Mississippi, Blanche DuBois is perhaps the most known literary figure conflated with New Orleans aside from Ignatius Riley, the comic hero of The Confederacy of Dunces by John Kenney Toole. However, when Tennessee Williams was asked by a reporter in that earnest, mid-twentieth-century manner, "What is the theme of A Streetcar Named Desire?" he replied thoughtfully and with equal seriousness, "Well... I think that it is a plea for the understanding of delicate people."

Considering the miles of water trudged and swam and the dehydration and starvation suffered, "delicate people" hardly seems like the appropriate description for the stranded refugees of Hurricane Katrina. Yet given the rising death toll, that is increasingly what they are becoming—a substantially delicate situation that has been handled by state and federal officials so ineptly to render it indelicate, to put it nicely. The city famed over and over for aiding those who "have always depended on the kindness of strangers" has not received that same altruism in its darkest hour.

Forever intimately tied to its French heritage, New Orleans is a city of readers and bookstores, many with more extensive histories and narratives than the books they sell, so reading after donating is a way to come to grips with this tragedy for those powerless to do anything else. Aside from the books glossed over earlier, for a deeper look at the city's laissez-faire spirit, see Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a distinctly southern, profound response to the French existentialist novel, as well as French Quarter Fiction: The Newest Stories of America's Oldest Bohemia, a handsome, authoritative survey of contemporary variations on the city's classically distinctive themes. Also Dean Paschal's By the Light of the Jukebox, another collection of short stories, revitalizes the southern gothic genre as no other author has done as successfully in decades; its story "Moriya" was selected for the Best American Short Stories of 2002.

Finally, Valerie Martin's overlooked classic A Recent Martyr, which plumbs the depths of a love triangle in the midst of New Orleans paralyzed by a contemporary bubonic plague outbreak, should be read and re-read. In certain ways, this excerpt has been a prayer for those who live in the city, who live on the edge of facing "the horror, the horror" and choose to abide it:

"It's an odd sensation to recognize in oneself the need to be in a particular physical environment, when one longs for the home ground no matter how terrible the memories it holds, no matter how great the efforts made to leave it behind... Where else would I find these hateful, humid, murderously hot afternoons, when I know that the past was a serious of great mistakes, the greatest being the inability to live anywhere else but in this swamp? ... I don't think I will leave the city again. The plague continues, neither in nor out of control, but we have been promised a vaccine that will solve all our problems. We go on without it, and life is not intolerable. Our city is an island, physically and psychologically; we are tied to the rest of the country only by our own endeavor. The river from which we drink drains a continent; it has to be purified for days before we can stomach it. We smile to ourselves when people from more fashionable centers find us provincial, for if we are free of one thing, it's fashion. The future holds a simple promise: We are well below sea level, and inundation is inevitable. We are content, for now, to have our heads above the water."


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