Class Warfare

Gator Boots, with the pimped out Gucci suit
Ain't got no job, but I stay sharp
Can't pay my rent, cause all my money's spent
but thats ok, cause im still fly
got a quarter tank gas in my new E-class
But that's alright cause i'm gon' ride
got everything in my moma's name
but im hood rich da dada dada da
Big Tymers

I wonder if the national guard plans to knock down James Reiss's door and force him to evacuate any time soon.

A few blocks from Mr. O'Dwyer, in an exclusive gated community known as Audubon Place, is the home of James Reiss, descendent of an old-line Uptown family. He fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and returned soon afterward by private helicopter. Mr. Reiss became wealthy as a supplier of electronic systems to shipbuilders, and he serves in Mayor Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.

He says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin to begin mapping out a future for the city.

The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

"Burdened by a teeming underclass." Anyone else get the feeling that Mr. Reiss's ideas about building a city with "fewer poor people" has less to do with lifting people out of poverty than simply not allowing the "teeming underclass" to return to their homes?

I'm always amazed at how quickly a self-described laissez-faire capitalist will shamelessly turn to the most horrific kind of ideology-driven social engineering when given the opportunity. Here's the intolerable David Brooks (who we already know has no hope of understanding us) making a total ass of himself yesterday.

It (Katrina)has created as close to a blank slate as we get in human affairs, and given us a chance to rebuild a city that wasn't working. We need to be realistic about how much we can actually change human behavior, but it would be a double tragedy if we didn't take advantage of these unique circumstances to do something that could serve as a spur to antipoverty programs nationwide.

The first rule of the rebuilding effort should be: Nothing Like Before. Most of the ambitious and organized people abandoned the inner-city areas of New Orleans long ago, leaving neighborhoods where roughly three-quarters of the people were poor.

In those cultural zones, many people dropped out of high school, so it seemed normal to drop out of high school. Many teenage girls had babies, so it seemed normal to become a teenage mother. It was hard for men to get stable jobs, so it was not abnormal for them to commit crimes and hop from one relationship to another. Many people lacked marketable social skills, so it was hard for young people to learn these skills from parents, neighbors and peers.

If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as rundown and dysfunctional as before.

That's why the second rule of rebuilding should be: Culturally Integrate. Culturally Integrate. Culturally Integrate. The only chance we have to break the cycle of poverty is to integrate people who lack middle-class skills into neighborhoods with people who possess these skills and who insist on certain standards of behavior.

Now I could spend a little time correcting Brooks's assumptions about New Orleans's lack of "cultural integration". I'm not saying that we've ever been a utopia of socio-economic or racial harmony, but anyone who lives in New Orleans knows that we share our neighborhoods and city services (such as they are) a great deal better than most (ahem Northern) US cities. It's part of what makes life there... well, better.

But that aside, what's really under attack here is the most important aspect of life in New Orleans. The one that the plutocrats like Reiss and the yuppies like Brooks despise the most. We know how to be happy despite being poor. Reiss and Brooks don't think poor people should be happy. They want them ashamed.. joyless..subservient. New Orleans is a problem to them not because it knows so much poverty but because it knows so little shame so little deference to authority so much joy. We can't let them take this away from us.

It is for this reason that those of us who know how to be New Orleans be allowed a right of return. That is, we need to be allowed back into our home before the Reisses and the Brookses ruin it forever.

Update: Billmon handles it better than I do.