Wading towards home

I was reading recently an excellent article by Michael Lewis on the economic meltdown in Iceland [Think we have it bad here? U.S. debt is approximately 350% of GDP; Iceland's is 850%, and recent losses by Icelandic banks amount to $330,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country], and I was reminded of this excellent piece for the New York Times Magazine, which chronicles Lewis's upbringing in New Orleans, and his trips back in the immediate aftermath of "the Storm." A couple of short extracts below will give you the flavor, but well worth reading in its entirety.

Every Christmas, my mother's side of the family gathered for a party that confirmed for me that just about all white New Orleanians, even the horrible ones, were somehow blood relations. Before I could do long division, I knew the difference between a third cousin and a first cousin twice removed. Wherever I went, I was defined by family, living and dead. . . .

My father is a different sort, less keen on getting his hands dirty. For 40 years, from the comfort of his private library, he has, every other Saturday, watched my mother push a lawn mower back and forth across the front lawn without so much as a passing thought that he might lend a hand. He was fond of citing the Lewis family motto:

Do as little as possible
And that unwillingly
For it is better to incur a slight reprimand
Than to perform an arduous task.

. . . . Leaving Ms. Perrier, I wandered down and met my first former Israeli commandos, along with their Uptown New Orleans employers, who had come to liberate their homes. They had just landed Russian assault helicopters in Audubon Park. Not one, but two groups of Uptown New Orleanians had rented these old Soviet choppers, along with four-to-six-man Israeli commando units (platoons? squads?), and swooped down onto the soccer field beside the Audubon Zoo. . . . . The commandos went inside to "clear the house." A nice little yellow house just one block from my childhood home. Not a human being - apart from Ms. Perrier and me - for a mile in each direction. And yet they raised their guns, opened the door, entered and rattled around. A few minutes later they emerged, looking grim.

"You got some mold on the upstairs ceiling," one commando said gravely.

. . . . There wasn't a house in the Garden District, or Uptown, that could not have been easily entered; there wasn't a house in either area that didn't have food and water to keep a family of five alive for a week; and there was hardly a house in either place that had been violated in any way. And the grocery stores! I spent some time inside a Whole Foods choosing from the selection of PowerBars. The door was open, the shelves groaned with untouched bottles of water and food. Downtown, 25,000 people spent the previous four days without food and water when a few miles away - and it's a lovely stroll - entire grocery stores, doors ajar, were untouched. From the moment the crisis downtown began, there had been a clear path, requiring maybe an hour's walk, to food, water and shelter. And no one, not a single person, it seemed, took it.