America has a wild west again. Tombstone has long gone legal, the OK corral a cute tourist attraction. The gold rush has emigrated to Africa. The frontier towns of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Deadwood are just that: alive only in film and teevee. But New Orleans is dissolving into something old-fashioned and lawless, giving us a dangerous frontier for the first time in over a century.

The city is a crossroads that has long maintained a distinct drive-through-daiquiri-stand flavor, that has welcomed wave after wave of sorority girls and their attendant Girls Gone Wild cinematographers without totally succumbing to the Times Square, Orlando, Las Vegas temptation to package vacation into an utterly sanitized, entirely sleazy, and oddly-recognizable mash. Now it's an outlaw town and it doesn't seem likely that that's going to end soon.

The federal government is strapped to the financial breaking point. If New York bitched about getting its relief monies after 9/11 how is New Orleans going to fare 4 years later? The National Guard is, bafflingly, rebuilding a different, far-away nation. Homeland Security will have to forgive those of us who look askance at their claims that, any day now, more troops than necessary will arrive in New Orleans, cavalry style, to save the day. It all sounds too familiar. "The violence will stop soon." "We're moving as fast as we can." "Our ability to respond is not affected by our other military commitments." Really? The evacuation of the Superdome was announced and then... not a whole lot for several days.

Since 9/11 our consumption of oil is up and now the Gulf, gateway for one third of the country's fuel, is on its knees. If the President recently gave the impression that anything other than getting oil production back up and running and prices out of three dollar territory was his chief priority, he didn't mean it.

Late last week the New Orleans' mayor ordered the police to stop with the search and rescue and crack down on looters. How this move was designed for anyone but those at home dry and watching Good Morning America is not immediately evident. After all, there are people trapped on roofs, bodies floating in the water, just waiting to start spreading disease. Amidst the $25 billion in damage, the mayor is concerned the starving and dehydrating of New Orleans are helping themselves to what little remains? Guns are being looted along with food and those who still have property to defend are getting out their own arms. That is unsettling. That cuts closer to the sexy-but-terrifying, kill-or-be-killed primacy of frontier lore. Nonetheless, finishing that evacuation and feeding people ought to be strong candidates for courses of action one and two. Anything else is just the talk of a mayor who suddenly finds himself on national teevee every day.

The American history of murder and survival was not buried so very deep after all. A few feet of flood waters and it is rinsed off and held up for us all to see. But what exactly does this strange mix of faux-world charm, fatalism, fuck-you, poverty, flooding, and shotguns so far below sea level bring into relief?

First off, and right on cue, the reemergence of the brutal spirit of the frontier has quickly revealed the aw-shucks, help-a-neighbor-out, flip-side of the American coin. As the city of New Orleans looks increasingly nasty and out of control, Houston is displaying its gregarious, oversized charm and hospitality for the whole country to see.

The contrasts will not all be so heartwarming. For a few weeks we are going to get a real taste of the cowboy spirit that the President so loves to affect. The administration's love of putting on big cowboy hats to practice ranching and John Wayne grimaces is going to be sorely tested. Behind all the cowboy swagger the President has signed the Patriot Act, appointed interior officials eager to hack away at the National Parks, and solicited the help and direction of the religious extremism that is of a different breed than the pray-and-leave-well-enough-alone stoicism of the frontier. New Orleans has submitted to its hellish baptism and been born-again as a lawless, abandoned archipelago in the middle of an increasingly fascist country. The fierce and frightening independence of the cowboy is on display again in New Orleans and it's going to make the play-acting in Washington look insensitive, immature, and idealistic.

The President may exude a love of hard-working independence and self-reliance but as he moves forward to meet this unwieldy situation, armed only with a budget that will make Congressional resolutions and actual aid money two very different things and a National Guard already stretched thin, he will have to reveal himself as something other than a cowboy. To meet the real life desperadoes and rebuild New Orleans into something more than an outlaw town suitable only for filming terrible Kevin Costner movies, the President will have to take off his ten-gallon and put on his corporate fright wig.

Social security outlook poor? National Parks annoyingly undeveloped? Iraqi resistance not in its last throes? Public broadcasting too damned independent? Public schools failing? Public prisons bloated with drug offenders? No need to panic. This administration has a great big box of Privatization band-aids. Enough for everyone.

While the government goes about the important work of reconnecting the American Addict to its oil IV, it may well farm out the business of rebuilding New Orleans. After all, it will be cheaper and more effective to retouch New Orleans' unique and mosaic history with the big, brown paintbrush of generic logos and facades. Katrina and the resultant flooding will finally do what years of Spring Break and a reputation as a place with non-threatening history lessons could not. The National Guard has irrigation ditches to dig in Iraq so Kellogg, Brown and Root may well be called upon to enhance the levees of the Big Easy.

When the floodwaters are pumped away and so much of the French Quarter's grit and architecture has been cleansed, who better to come beautifully to our rescue and help us recreate it than the world's great dream factory. The movie studios and cable conglomerates could make such a nice theme park of the whole thing, complete with a memorial roller coaster dedicated to those who gave their lives so we could go on vacation without feeling like we were somewhere different.

Mr. Show, the inspired and therefore, by necessity, short-lived, sketch show on HBO once devoted a healthy part of its half-hour to a San Francisco bought up by GloboChem and turned into a family-friend theme park, complete with non-threatening chinks, queers, and hobos. All the excitement of a dynamic, progressive culture without all that dynamism or progressivism. The sketch looks less like satire ever time I watch it.

America has a wild west again and it's not because we elected a Cowboy to our highest office. What happens to our new, gritty reminder of this country's real frontier spirit will have everything to do with his very un-cowboylike love of corporatism.

« Previous Next »