There’s been some hullabaloo today in HuffPo that Brangelina is coming to live in the French Quarter while Brad is making a film.  Of course, they’re also coming at a good time, before Mardi Gras season begins.

And the kiddies will be going to private preschools, not any preschool connected with that torn-up system barely making a blip.

And who can forget their humanitarian efforts? “Angelina has asked for places she can do charity work,” says the source, who adds that Jolie had inquired about a school for disadvantaged youth. And construction is set to start this month on the 20 environment-friendly homes Pitt, 43, jointly commissioned with Global Green USA.

Yeah.

In contrast, I’ve missed Bob Herbert’s columns in the New York Times about Katrina, but this new one came via Portside, published yesterday:

I was surprised recently by a sudden shift in the tone of a veteran cabdriver, Stanley Taylor, who had been kind enough to take me on a nearly four-hour tour of the flood-wrecked regions of the city.

For most of the afternoon, Mr. Taylor had been wonderfully informative and polite, and his comments
had been filled with sympathy for those who had lost so
much to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

But as we headed back to my hotel, and darkness began
to fall over the eerily still neighborhoods, his tone became unmistakably bitter.

We had been talking casually about the thousands of extremely poor evacuees, most of them black, who were still stranded outside New Orleans, some of them scattered to the far reaches of the United States.

Mr. Taylor, who is black, snapped that maybe it would
be better if some of them didn’t come back. “The poor
people that’s gone,” he said, “they’re gonna have to
stay gone. That’s where all the crime was coming from,
see? Folks here want people to come back, but they want
people with money to come back. The criminals? Shame on
’em. Sorry for ’em.”

During the immediate post-Katrina period, there were
essentially two visions of a resurgent New Orleans.
One, widely decried as racist, saw the new, improved
New Orleans as smaller, whiter and more prosperous.

This was openly advocated. Just a few days after the
storm, a wealthy member of the city’s power elite,
James Reiss, told The Wall Street Journal: “Those who
want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a
completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically.”

Mr. Reiss, who is white and served in Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s administration as chairman of the Regional Transit Authority (he has since left the government),
said that he and many of his colleagues would leave town if New Orleans did not become a city with better
services and fewer poor people.

Well, even rich New Orleanians, with blood ties to this town, are considering leaving. Not just the middle class or the poor.

Perhaps that is also why, Brangelina, courtesy of the film industry, is choosing to spend part of their time there. A little tinsel also goes a long way in window dressing, showing folks that if they think that it is safe, then…

An alternative (and more widely desired) model of the city coincided with the approach that President Bush seemed to be taking when he made his dramatic appearance in floodlit Jackson Square in mid-September 2005. Mr. Bush promised not just to help rebuild New Orleans, but to confront the long-simmering problems of race and poverty with “bold action.”

Well, we know what didn’t happen then.  Bush is no FDR, although he may fancy himself as magnanimous as that certified patrician. The Red Cross chose to keep their millions of dollars reaped from the horrors shown on TV.  Our borrowed dollars went down the drain in Iraq.  The levees remain unsafe. And violent crime is growing too obvious to be ignored even by the remaining middle class, who are also running out of patience.

Supporters of this approach envisioned an effort that would bring desperately needed assistance to the hurricane victims, helping to get them housed and back on their feet, while at the same time constructively engaging the contentious issues that have kept America’s blacks and whites in a state of perpetual hostility, and much of the poor in an all-but-permanent morass of ignorance and deprivation.

What is actually happening is worse than anyone had imagined.

New Orleans is a mess. It was brought to its knees by Katrina, and is being kept there by a toxic combination of federal neglect and colossal, mind-numbing ineptitude at the local level.

Bush and Nagin.  

Together again.  

Partners in a continuing crime.

It has been said before, even by a disgusted, local black leader during the 2004 mayoral campaign, Bishop Paul Morton, that Nagin is a white black man, or the whitest black man in America.  Meaning, in our parlance, that he has swallowed whole everything about salesmanship, entrepreneurship, and glad-handing, but he knows absolutely nothing about what leadership is or what it means for his own constituency.  Nagin, it appears, only knows how to benefit Nagin.  As Michael Eric Dyson showed in When the Levees Broke, Nagin didn’t take decisive steps to help his natural constituents.  Instead, he raced to the business community–mostly Republicans–to obtain their counsel. (I still wonder what they advised him to do.) He complained about not getting the Guiliani pass.

While I did not wholly trust Mitch Landrieu, whom all of the white power brokers supported against the incumbent last year, I distrusted Ray Nagin more and his statement about keeping New Orleans a chocolate city.  In hindsight, it becomes more obvious how silly, pandering, and divisive it was.

I love my peeps, as folks might say these days, but we are all the more betrayed by black politicians who may not have our interests at heart but keep insisting that similar skin color trumps all doubts.

I’m here to say that not always.

Increasingly, I’m looking at results, not just skin color.

Nagin’s heart is as large as a matchbox, and just as empty of potential.  Nagin makes a big show about being mayor, but he appears like a toothless old elephant looking for a few bulls to do him in so that he could shamble to the elephants’ graveyard.  Or vacation in the Caribbean as he did immediately after the disaster.

As I saw that picture of him relaxing among other vacationers on the beach, I thought to myself, what the fuck is he doing there? From all reports, the emergency was still going on.

It’s the same thing I thought about seeing photos of Barack Obama frolicking barechested in the surf.

Just what are these cats really doing?

The police department here is a sour joke, and crime is out of control. More than 16 months after the storm, children roam the streets with impunity during school hours. Debris still covers much of the city. Doctors, hospitals and mental-health facilities are in woefully short supply. Thousands of residents are still living in trailers, and many thousands more are stuck more or less permanently out of town.

The result is that blacks and whites, feeling unsafe
physically and frightened by the long-term prospect of
dwindling opportunities, are eyeing the exits.

Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who lost the mayoral race last
May to Mr. Nagin, offered a grim assessment. While the
ethnic breakdown may remain roughly the same, he said,
the city is on its way to becoming “smaller, poorer and
worse than it was before.”

Class, at the moment, is trumping race, which is how
Mr. Reiss and Mr. Taylor, the cabdriver, came unwittingly to similar stereotyped conclusions. Unless
the foundations of a livable city can be put in place –
and they are not being put in place now – those with
the ability to leave will do so. The poor, neglected as
always, will be left behind.

And this is why someone like FDR, as vilified as he was from his time to the present, showed Americans what he was doing on their behalf.  Fireside chats.   being filmed signing legislation for work programs.  Explaining why he was rebuilding infrastructure. Explaining why he asking for a bank holiday.  Sending the reformist wife out to visit coal mines and soup kitchens (and pick up unfiltered information).  It was just that important to show the American people that their president and government cared about them in their time of need.

Nagin seems to have done little since the election.  His wife, the First Lady of New Orleans, is probably shopping in Dallas in relative ease, with her children in private schools or attending college elsewhere.  Teeshirts bought and worn by New Orleanians ask whether they’ve seen him in town or not.  He’s reflexive rather than responsive.  He goes to seminars a lot.

After Dinerral Shavers and Helen Hill were shot dead, and the constituencies made ready to march on City Hall, Nagin tried to head off the demonstration through intermediaries, and then failing that, walking in on a group handing out placards and leaflets, saying that what they were doing was a great idea.  Of course, they looked at him as if he were nuts.

“The same thing is moving African-Americans as is moving whites,” Mr. Landrieu said. “Everyone is asking: ‘Is it safe? What’s the school situation? Can my kids play outside? What does the future hold for them?’ “

Without a creative new plan and energetic new leadership, New Orleans will be unable to save itself.
Right now it’s a city sinking to ever more tragic
depths.

And I am still wondering when and whether the Democrats  have the will to stymie Bush’s escalation of the Iraq War by shutting off funds…funds that could be allocated for New Orleans’ renewal.  And whether they have a plan. And whether they care that Bush would rather spend a billion bucks on jobs in Iraq to mollify the Sadrists, than save New Orleans.

Is it any wonder that when Iraq vets return to New Orleans, they feel as if they are back in The Sandbox?