Jello's Essay

I went to New Orleans after South By Southwest last March, 2006. I expected the worst, but was not at all prepared for what I saw. Sure, the French Quarter, the touristy areas, and respectable folks in the Garden District are doing OK, but once I got outside of there, the destruction was total, and way worse than the corporate media or even most of the alternative press is telling us. It looked like a tornado hit yesterday, or Bush had been through with the Fallujah treatment. Mile after mile after mile… after mile… The further we drove in, the worst it got. Maybe my friends driving me planned it that way. By the time we got to Chalmette in St. Bernard parish I just wanted to sit on the curb and cry. That ZZ Top song, “Jesus just left Chicago/And he’s bound for New Orleans…” played on in my head for days.

Each one of these homes was someone’s life. I’d see the floodwater line caked near the top of a dresser, photos of family and loved ones still in their frames on top. A big ball of mud on a curb was someone’s vintage record collection. That hit close to home. A house near my friend’s in Chalmette still had a fridge stuck on the roof- and this was six months later. He pointed to a still-intact levee a few hundred yards down the street, and said the water didn’t slowly ooze up from the yard. It had surged up and over the levee and slammed through the neighborhood like a tidal wave, washing back out to sea just as swiftly, as waves do; taking with it a lot of belongings and people who will never be seen again. He said the black spots covering the homes weren’t in mold, but oil from a huge ruptured storage tank that spilled its contents into the swirling of Katrina soup. As Al Sharpton thundered on the Operation Cease Fire stage at the huge 9-24-05 DC protest, “Broken levees are weapons of mass destruction!”

After a benefit show, I shot a dozen rolls of film, plus more in my friend Monkeyman’s digital camera. I’m not much of a photographer, but it’s high time I posted these; especially since the locals keep telling me not much if anything has changed or improved over a year since Katrina hit. Many agree that we’d be better off bringing in Hezbollah to rebuild New Orleans than relying on FEMA and Halliburton. They’re not joking either.

Thanks to Karen Misconish from WTUL, Brian Richards and my old friend Otto for the guidance and good times amidst all the man-made hell. There aren’t any of the death and borderline-genocide images from right after the flood, just things I found thought people should see. I added some more photos from Rob, a rescue boat operator I met up with the night after the show, plus some aerial shots from a National Guardsman on scene early on, and some of Brian’s when he first came back to try and clean out his family’s house.

More stories, facts, and details are on my new spoken word album, “In the Grip of Official Treason.” There’s been several good articles in The Nation, plus the best on-the-ground coverage I’ve found is in a newspaper out here called The Bayview. www.sfbayview.com Much of the pipeline comes from new Editor C.C. Campbell-Rock, who fled to the Bay Area with her family to escape Katrina.

Thinking back, I’m stunned by how little activity I saw from FEMA, the sate, the city, or the conies Bush hired like Halliburton, Shaw Group, Blackwater Security, etc. Some of them I didn’t see at all. The Red Cross and even Habitat For Humanity got some pretty sharp words from many people I talked to. Luckily, some of those same god-dam radicals the corporate media wishes would go away are working their asses off in the community trying to help people put their lives back together. They need a lot of our help, and will for years to come. Some of the legit grassroots organizations to check out and support are:

www.commongroundrelief.org

emergencycommunities.org

www.remarelief.net (Rainbow)