Turns out we weren’t the only ones to note James Lee Burke’s take on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Chicago Trib columnist Mike Downey cited it, too. So did Barbara Shelly in The Kansas City Star. And yesterday USA Today got hold of the prolific Louisiana novelist for his thoughts about Hurricane Katrina’s damage to the city’s cultural heritage.
“I’m not sure the city can come back,” Burke told USA Today. He “believes the flood merely exacerbated the city’s decades-long spiral of descent and social deterioration from illegal drugs, crime and government neglect,” reporter Gary Strauss wrote. CNN news executive Kim Bondy, a New Orleans native, is pessimistic, too. “It’s so steeped in culture,” he said. “But now I feel like that spirit is broken. The thing that hurts me so deeply is that these are things you can’t rebuild and you just can’t get back.”
Leave it to James (“Ragin’ Cajun”) Carville, though, to draw the opposite conclusion: “No one forgot how to play the saxophone or how to cook or write,” he says. “Or have a good time. That’s all still there. Calamities and disasters are part of New Orleans’ history. This too shall pass.”
— Tireless Staff of Thousands
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