This from Bellatrys

Words of Hope

Make no mistake, we are in dire straights now, as an empire.

On 9/11 we lost two skyscrapers, four jumbo jets, took a hit on the heart of our national defense headquarters, and some 3000 lives taken and thousands survivors' lives more wrecked.

This week, we lost a city.

Did you get that, "security moms"--? Did you get that, you "9/11 changed everything" voters?

New Orleans, for all intents and purposes, has just been nuked. This is worse than an ordinary bombing because the citizens cannot go back and take shelter in the rubble. It is uninhabitable, it will remain uninhabitable for months if ever, and it cannot be made safe to return to until all the unburied dead are taken out and the contaminated buildings either sterilized or torn down. The people who have survived are dispersed like Fallujans across the country, with whoever will take them in.

We haven't had a city bombed since we bombed ourselves to pieces in the War of Northern Aggression. Pearl Harbour - we talk all the time about Pearl Harbour, and what was Pearl Harbor? A minor port in the back end of nowhere that existed only for us to use as a refueling station, not one of the major metropolises of the world. "The size of Edinburgh" a British report said, to explain the magnitude - the capitol of Scotland. A major city, devastated - we are dealing with what we so casually have dealt to other countries, in Europe and Asia and Africa, and we have never ever had to face it, not since 1865.

So we really don't have a clue what we're facing, at all. Only second-hand, except for people who for whatever reason lived through the bombing and aftermath of their city, like Balkan immigrants.

We have lost a valuable strategic port, as truly as if it were taken by an enemy fleet, and more surely, for we must take it back from the Sea, not just mortal men; in the midst of a valuable, fertile region for agriculture and fishing as well as industry; we have lost a significant amount of our shipping ability and our land transportation will be impacted drastically as well; we have lost an irreplaceable thing, a national treasure, a living heritage of a time before modern America that was not an artificial construct, a restoration like Colonial Williamsburg but the raw, messy, unairbrushed real thing, jewels and warts and all.

We have lost tens of thousands of lives, in a preventable catastrophe.

So what hope is there?

I'm not going to offer typical feel-good words, because I don't know how and I wouldn't if I could. I schiz, as longtime readers know, between a sort of grimly-amused detached factuality and florid poetical rantings - I figured out, in the cold light of morning, why I free-associated a voodoo god as a key part of this, after ladyjillian spoke of making an Offering to him, - it's like I told jesurgislac, because the Army is disproportionately southern, and minority, and poor, and angry armies stuck in distant bits of the Middle East with no strategy and no leadership have in the past fragged their least effective officers and marched home on their own, and imperial armies recruited from backwoods provinces wasted and used with poor leadership and worse pay had a tradition of deposing dynasties and making one of them Emperor, and peasants turned into refugees in their own empire by the corruption and incompetence of the aristocracy leading to floods and famines in neglected exploited provinces have a history of taking up arms, and now we have the perfect revolutionary storm: an underpaid peasant army from the neglected exploited backwaters in an unplanned underequipped war with a bloodbath caused by inept leadership and corruption back home where their families are. The Army is the only thing we have with the resources to fix New Orleans now, not just because all countries use their armies to fix things because it's most efficient, because all our civilian faculties have been stripped to feed the military-industrial monster, and they're going to be the ones stuck principally seeing the horror on the ground for the months to come.

Forget 2006. Forget talk of impeachment.

If I were George Bush, I'd be having nightmares about Indira Gandhi's fate.

But that's not what I want to talk about now. I'm not a Greater Good sort, like the so-called liberals who still say things like "I think that the Iraq war will turn out to be a good thing in the long run, if it brings democracy to the Middle East." (If this is Democracy™, if this is the best that Democracy™ can do, you can keep it, frankly. More on that later.)

I can't offer cheap tinsel hope, like George Bush going down and glibly promising that it'll all be built back bigger and better than before, bright and shiny and new. We don't want that. No one who loved New Orleans wants that. I don't speak for myself or even for those who have visited New Orleans and want it to be the way they remember it, selfishly, thinking of NOLA as a priceless art treasure looted and melted down for gold. I speak principally for, and to, people like him, who can't use our sympathy and sorrow and pity and prayers, they're like US currency in a post-apocalyptic world.

What is needed is the kind of calm, practical advice such as the editors of the Biloxi Sun-Times are giving here to citizens afflicted with survivor guilt - spiritual counseling of the best.

What do I have? Cold historical facts, and oracular madness. This - not a rant, not sure what it is, has been days brewing, from the first hours it became clear that the flooding was catastrophic and irreversible and unstoppable.

What I have is Europe in my bones, the soil of the Rhine where I was born shaped me as truly as the humid air and heady memories of the Big Muddy and , and Asia and Africa and the Spanish Main in the folds of my brain, artifacts that I have seen and touched and roads I have traveled through the grammery of other travelers' words and pictures, since I first could remember my own name.

There's no way out but through. Americans despair too quickly, we do.

We talk of getting guns and holing up in our houses at the first realization that our political situation is deranged; we talk of running for other countries before they even start arresting newspaper editors for sedition and breaking up printing presses; we tend to assume that because this is new to us it's unprecedented and no one else has ever experienced anything like it.

Now too many people are talking about abandoning New Orleans, and unfortunately given the scope of the disaster and the already-existing poverty of Louisiana, that's not something that's going to be left to the citizens themselves. Lots of people - including idiots living in Florida - are saying that it's not worth restoring,

But New Orleans is not Pompei, it's not buried under meters of lava, and it wasn't a small resort town like Aspen either. New Orleans is more like Naples in some ways, like Venice in others, but I don't know the history and I'm not as personally familiar with either of those cities as I am with another - and which tens of thousands of US tourists alive all across the country are as well.

We need to look hard at Rome.

Rome has had floods that went something like 18 feet high, the watermarks are etched on to the facade of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva where St. Catherine of Sienna is buried - and into the priceless irreparable Renaissance murals inside. From a certain point down on the walls, it looks like someone took a washcloth with bleach to them, even though they've been restored. Catastrophic floods when the Tiber jumped its banks, in the unsanitary cities of the past with ox turds everywhere and no radios - yes, it could actually be worse than it is, hard as that is to believe. (Just not in a modern, developed First World [sic] country.)

But that's not the worst of it. There are canonballs embedded into the walls along some of the quaint little streets there, and scars from the pounding that they took. Rome's been under siege more times than I can count, and some of them resulted in the sacking of the city. Rape, arson, looting, melting down of art treasures for gold, rampant drunken destruction for no reason - from ancient times and their own civil wars to the disgruntled oppressed Goths to the fusion of ethnic and religious tensions, geopolitical gambles gone bad, personal antipathy and the resulting bizarre alliances that led to the Holy Roman Emperor sacking Rome with an army of mercenaries in 1527. The Renaissance was not as fun as people think it was.

(One of the more fascinating things in that article about the 1527 sack is that much of the sacking was done by Romans themselves - the city leaders - that is to say, the aristocracy, who saw it as a great opportunity to conduct internecine urban warfare against each other and try to get revenge and leverage. By the time they were done some 45k citizens were dead or refugees, and then afterwards the heads of the rival families reconciled and went back to working with each other politically. Iraqis have nothing on us Western Christans at the height of Christendom.)

The city was hit several times by the Plague - there are first hand reports, letters of people in Galileo's time trying to quarantine themselves and still go on with their lives and hoping that neither they nor their friends or family would die - and that was on top of the regular summer malaria outbreaks from the heat and swampy water; and on top of that you have the devastating "renewal program" of Mussolini and the original Great Fire, which was believed by the inhabitants to have been started by their leader, in order to put about his plan for rebuilding the city by getting rid of the slums and tenements in one fell swoop. Economic devastation has depopulated the city and left it a ghost town more than once in all its thousands of years of history.

And it's still there. Still Rome. Scars and all, full of people living their lives after all these thousands of years of tragedy and betrayal from the top down and periodic ruin. It's still a great place to go, it's still a great place to live, it's still a great place, period.

If the Romans can do it, can't we?

If the English could rebuild London twice, if the Portuguese could rebuild Lisbon after the Great Quake, if Germans could stand to rebuild Dresden and Berlin, if the French could restore Rouen and the Belgians Louvain, if the Japanese could bring themselves to repopulate Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Tokyo, don't you think that we Americans are up to the task? Are we just going to roll over and let New Orleans - New Orleans! - die forever, without even trying for a miracle?

I'm not just making a jingoistic appeal to our national pride, trying to buck us up like a football coach whose team is on a losing streak. I'm asking a serious question. We've been very loudly proud for a long time. And very loudly patronizing of other countries and how well they handle problems or don't, over the decades. But sometimes mouth-proud doesn't mean anything but a windy bully. Now we're faced with a real challenge, the worst one in most if not all of our lifetimes. Is there anything to our vaunted courage, ingenuity, and dauntless pioneer spirit? Or is that all dead in the ashes of the New Deal?

--I don't know. I can't see that far; even Delphi could only offer an If/Then to Croesus. But there is a choice before us, and it's up to us to decide if we choose defeat from the get-go.