New Orleans & the News

I have no photos from my 2.5 hours in the French Quarter, 3.5 years ago. I stood on Canal Street and watched a patchwork group of what seemed like homeless guys play something that sounded right out of the 1910's, and it had banjo and trumpet and trombone and tambourine and a few other things. I want to say they were playing "When the Saints Go Marching In", but that doesn't seem right because it seems way too cliché. I can't remember.

I ate crawfish etouffee and I walked by the Royal Orleans and I stopped in a bar and had a drink and thought about how everyone seemed poor and happy at the same time.


New Orleans is gone. And I don't think I'm being melodramatic when I say that it's not coming back.

A town will be built there, and it will be called New Orleans. But it will not be New Orleans.

It is pretty surreal to see the complete subtraction of a major U.S. city, when I am somewhere far away in my electric lights and air conditioning, watching a television screen. Have you ever witnessed the complete subtraction of a major city, ever?

The television screen makes me want to vomit, though. And not just from the catastrophe, but from these two-bit hacks who claim to be newspeople. I had always heard how terrible cable news has become, but I guess it never struck a chord until now. Who the fuck are these manipulative, pompous pieces of shit with microphones in their hands?

When was it decided that Anderson Cooper and Bill O'Reilly make competent newsmen? My God, I want to pistol-whip them both. Anderson Cooper is such a fucking phony I can hardly stand it. And O'Reilly just interrupts people until he can get at the real issues: people who deserve to be punished and the price of oil. What sells? Sensationalism does!

What ever happened to Walter-Cronkite objectivity and professionalism? I miss Tom and Dan and Pete. Jesus Christ, why Pete?