I always thought that there was something romantic about the concept of society being totally wiped out. Those men and women who were left would build a new society, a better one where individuals survived on their wit and strength alone. When threatened by those who embraced violence as a way of solving problems, normal people would become heroes, come together and fight off the attacking hoards of bad guys. Kind of like a Mad Max movie, I guess. I thought that until I finished watching this evening’s New Orleans mayoral debate on C-SPAN2. I realized that rebuilding would not be like a Mad Max movie. It would be more like sitting at the DMV for a couple of hours.
This is the second mayoral debate that I watched, the first having been televised on MSNBC on April 17th. For a series of debates that is being hyped as a pivotal step in the rebuilding of the Big Easy, you would think that you would actually hear something being said that was at least borderline visionary. But it seemed that the debate broke down into an extended discussion of how quickly the remains of people’s destroyed homes could be torn down. It seemed like everyone was in a hurry to do this, especially tough-ass Republican Rob Couhig. It seems that he prefaced a lot of his statements with “my way or the highway type” statements. This was the most disturbing aspect of the evening for me. I mean, if I had lost my house and all my belongings, I would still rather have a pile of rubble than nothing at all.
It also rubbed me the wrong way for a couple of other reasons. First, there’s this tendency for people to look at their neighbors house or the way they raise their kids or whatever and pass judgement on them like they are not doing their jobs. These people who have time to pass judgement on others have a hell of a lot that they could devote to helping their neighbors, but they typically choose not to. Second, in this economy not a lot of people have a lot of extra funds to put toward their house. This is sometimes hard to believe if you drive through the parking lot of Home Depot on the weekend, but these people are out there. And I’m sure that New Orleans, the rest of Louisiana and Mississippi have their fair shares. Typically, people who are at a rush to tear down other’s homes (and use the force of the government to do it) are much better off than those people who have the aforementioned pile of rubble and nothing else.
I was not impressed by the other five candidates that were presented in the debate. The obvious lackluster choice was current New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin. A lot of people blame him for the majority of the failures in the Katrina evacuation and recovery efforts. I don’t really know a lot about this Ray Nagin, but if he chose to not use his magical hurricane busting powers, instead preferring to hang out with hookers, that would be one thing. Ray Nagin (or any other singular person) versus a Category Five hurricane? I’m going to bet on the hurricane. Unfortunately, he could have gone a long way toward redeeming himself if he didn’t make odd vaguely-Jesse Helms-sounding race-baiting statements about New Orleans being a “chocolate city again”. Sorry, Ray, but you’re obviously a typical pandering politician. In this case, however, you were great at pandering, but poor in the political execution of your pandering.
And as for the rest of the pack: Another candidate getting a lot of buzz was Mitch Landrieu. He’s the current Lieutenant Governor and comes from a political family. While he can cite loads of experience, he’s in too deep. My dad always tended to vote against incumbents and career politicians. This influence has rubbed off on me, for better or worse. Peggy Wilson is a candidate that I would have liked to hear more from. Whenever a break in the action would could, she would shout out “Tax Free City”. This is an intriguing idea, considering my strong opposition to taxes, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a clear picture of what this idea really was about. A candidate that I really liked personality-wise was Tom Watson. Of course, liking someone’s personality is completely different than liking their politics. He brought up some fairly plausible concerns about civil rights and disenfranchisement of voters, which set well with me. It got a bit extreme at some points during the debate though, what he was trying to link to civil rights. I half-expected him to say that his civil rights were being violated for Ray Nagin and himself for being seated at the same end of the table. The one bad point is that too many civil rights and civil liberties focused people miss the mark by advocating socialist economic solutions, which is just a different form of slavery. Then there was Ron Forman and Virginia Boulet. Ron Forman was completely uninteresting. I almost turned the channel every time he started to talk. Virginia Boulet was kind of interesting. She appeared to have a pretty big-time business resume, so I would have been inclined to have voted for her, but other than being the hottest woman in the debate, I really couldn’t find anything that made her stand out in my mind.
Anyway, there were a number of candidates, like usual, that were running but failed to have enough political clout to make the debates. I’m not going to go into all of them, although they all probably have their merits. Some of them may even be superior to the goobers that showed for the event. One that did strike me was James Arey, who apparently is running on a support for the arts program. Maybe he’ll use the rubble of homes for art projects, as artsy types are wont to do. His website sports a picture of him standing in front of a US flag with only forty-eight stars, which begs the question, which two states does he not want to be part of the US? Hmmm, we could have some sort of separtist or radical revisionist on our hands, which only endears me to him more.
My prediction for the mayoral race: Landrieu and Nagin in a run-off. Landrieu takes it in the run-off.
My prediction for New Orleans: More of the same bullshit, only piled higher and deeper.
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