We do know they need your help with whatever it is, though. The non-profit local news site's membership drive is up and running right now. Donors can choose from among a whimsical taxonomy of "membership" levels at which to participate.
Prior to seeing this list I had previously encountered the term "News-hound" which The Lens will allow you to call yourself in exchange for a $250 donation. Less familiar to me was "News-Shark" although I guess that's allowable given the image it conjures of an animal that smells news blood in the news water. In New Orleans, we're accustomed to there being plenty of water as well as blood in our news anyway.
If you like what The Lens does while it isn't eating comments and maybe have space in your home in which to cram one more goddamned coffee mug or tote bag (of course there's a fucking tote bag!) consider becoming a "News-Gulf Walrus" or "News Magic Microbe" or whatever today.
Anyway the only reason I'm sharing any of this with you is because this morning I read this Moseley column about the rather short shrift given by the city of Philadelphia to its very own late boxing icon Joe Frazier, particularly in comparison to that same city's deification of the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa who appears in a series of films you may have heard about. Here's the bit I picked out along with the comment I tried to add before the News Shark carried it away into the news depths somewhere.
Moseley writes,
Now, I don’t write this post merely to slag on Philadelphia, even though they famously mistreat quality athletes who represent their town. (Baseball star Mike Schmidt comes immediately to mind.) New Orleans can’t be haughty, though. While the Crescent City venerates our local sports heroes to an amazing degree, we often have not fully appreciated our talented sons and daughters while they’re living here. (Louis Armstrong comes immediately to mind.)
For example, statues abound in our city, yet we don’t have one for civil rights hero Homer Plessy. Similarly, millions of tourists visit the Crescent City each year, but how many of them learn that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at a meeting in our city? Practically none.
This is something I think about quite often. New Orleans is especially vulnerable to having its historical memory overwritten by more saleable tourist-friendly caricature. Case in point, a few years ago, I brought some visitors to see the St. Louis no. 1 Cemetery. The attraction for them was the supposed tomb of Marie Laveau. Of course so much of what we know about the "Voodooo Queen" is folklore as opposed to fact that the Laveau we know and sell to tourists is practically every bit the fictional character that Rocky is. After we had made our obligatory "X"es we took a walk around the cemetery during which one of our party remarked, "Holy shit, it's Homer Plessy. What would he be doing here?" We also happened upon the resting place of chess champion Paul Morphy which elicited no similar exclamation.
Spend any amount of time in the French Quarter within earshot of a "Vampire Tour" or a typically misinformative buggy driver and you'll understand this pretty well. The stories we tell ourselves and others about our city may not even be as interesting or inspiring as the factual stories we forget but, for a lazy and exploitative tourist industry they're profitable enough and thus do quite well. There may be no statue of Plessy but maybe someday someone will build a statue of this or that Treme character we can all be proud of. It's hard to compete with established branding.
The city could endeavor to affect some positive influence in such matters but a look at the ongoing budget hearings reveals inadequate support for its institutions responsible for preserving historical and cultural memory. Museums, libraries, arts programs are all underfunded. The public schools are being dubiously entrusted to a byzantine system of semi-privatized management. Even the city's idea of regulating tour guide companies seems mostly to consist of a drug testing shakedown scheme.
In fact, the most visible investment the city makes in shaping the way it is perceived by visitors involves folding BP's spin on the quality and sustainability of Gulf seafood into a series of BP funded commercials. For an administration that likes to claim it is operating with "eyes wide open" it doesn't do very much to help us and others see the city as well as we could.
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