Imagine the Present

Saturday
I sit on a panel for the Imagining America conference. The location is the former funeral parlor now called the Jazz & Heritage Center. I do not know what we are here to imagine. One panelist says he is trying to imagine Jacksonville and the Carribean and a life for himself. I like that.

Today's theme is How Can We Help? I.e., how can the professors, graduate students, undergrads, and researchers help New Orleanians, either in the city or by doing for us outside of the city.

Yet at this point, a better question (at least for the academics) is How Did We Help? Many are the ways, and while I think they can continue to provide studies and volunteers, it may be time for students to refocus on what the last four years created. Because right now is ripe for some "discertating."

Uptown at the 3rd anniversary Freret Market, Jena Street is home to the New Orleans Coffee Festival. Perhaps 8 booths of vendors offering their brand of coffee, this is a small festival with great potential. In today's N.O., if it IS, it can be a festival. Regular items such as shoes, cigarettes, and roofing materials should emerge in the coming years as festival topics, complete with their champions, appointed place on the calendar, and loving audience.

At one end of Jena, there's a stage where bands rotate in and play one hour sets. The festival has two stages, the other in the parking lot near Napoleon. I sit on the steps of an elevated house with a giant for sale banner and listen to Margie Perez and her band. She's a good singer and they run through some later New Orleans standards--a sped up Fats, a welcome Here Come the Girls, and People Say.

So for the academics in town, ask--what does it mean that a 2o-year old Meters anthem about people asking "Have I got the right to live?" plays to a crowd of hungry gourmet shoppers, while the band's backdrop is Ochsner Baptist Hospital? The Baptist where the anguished staff euthanized several patients in the nightmarish days after the storm, when the hospital filled with people and swelled with evil heat and desperation.

In the year after the storm, many in New Orleans came to grips with acts such as these being a consequence of that insane time. The lead doctor did not go to jail and the hospital reopened. Then, for the 4th anniversary of Katrina, the NY Times came out with a long story of hushed tones and shadows, asserting that the doctors acted rashly, that relatively healthy, viable lives were taken. As a result, the case might be reopened, and the doctor, Anna Pou, may find herself defending again her actions during possibly the worst stretch of days any stateside doctor could imagine. In detail, the Times reporter pieced together each death, so that America and the city could again look into that dark heart of our age, Katrina, and ask, What?

And for us, what does it all mean? That we can rise again, live, forgive, and shop to our music? We are certainly back, more than ever, with a whole new configuration of history arrows to challenge, threaten, steer us. How did it happen? And What are we Now?

I sit on those steps and hear that bassline and stare at the peeling, unopened section of that hospital, that landmark to the bottom, and I try to imagine New Orleans. With all its past and bloodiness and sound. If there is ground for study in today's city, surely the connection between the hospital, the band, and coffee festival is worth a look. Right?