Pinot New Orleans
I have visited New Orleans a couple of times in my life. Its something no Southron boy can avoid since it was only a few hours drive away from anywhere in the old Confederacy, thanks to Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate system, and it is the REAL sin capital of the continent. Yes, I know Las Vegas claims to be such but that’s an empty claim, something akin to the size taxonomy of detergent boxes. Besides all you can do in Las Vegas is gamble at rather tame games, and watch some “look a little, but don’t touch” shows. In New Orleans they have (or had) real gambling – Russian Roulette – and brothels on the street. In New Orleans it isn’t a blue plate special menu list of what you can do, its more a short list of what you can’t, and that list is shorter than anywhere else I know of.
Since the Katrina went through there has been a lot of grrr brrr on the subject of future of New Orleans, and I got pinged on that this morning with an article [Link] on how New Orleans may never get bigger than half its previous size. And I am immediately struck with an association to Peter Sellers and “The Mouse That Roared”. The combination flows from the ubiquitous nature of Mr. Sellers in the film version, but what is key here is the premise of the play that the movie is based on.
That premise, incidentally, is based on the Marshall Plan, and it is that if a small, poverty ridden country declares war on the Unites States of America, then after the war the US of A will rebuild the country better than before. It now looks like something similar may be happening in New Orleans.
First of all, the Yankee government has put a lot of effort in replacing and repairing a lot of crumbling infrastructure that had bee “good enough” until it got overwhelmed. It also gave a lot of dehomed folks the wherewithal to move elsewhere. And this I suspect will turn out to be the key to the whole recovery.
Lest we wring our hands too hard, let’s not forget that New Orleans has some strategic and tactical advantages. Its still at the mouth of the country’s biggest river and thus has strategic value as a clearing house for goods going both ways. It also has a sizable tactical advantage as an adult theme park. These two are sufficient to re-establish a viable city, especially if the third or fourth level money users have gone elsewhere.
I’ve blogged on this previously. The primary level money users are the folks who bring money into a community. The second level are the folks who work for the primary users, and so forth. The further you get down the hierarchy, the more unsure you are of existence, and a bigger potential drain on the public purse.
So we may look back ten years from now on a vibrant, if global warming doesn’t dump them in the Gulf, New Orleans whose recovery was more a matter of reducing the economic plaque of the cities arteries than any concerted effort of government.
