New Orleans

New Orleans. While it's not the only place affected by the enormous Katrina disaster, it's certainly the most visible. Without having sustained the apocalyptic damage of Gulf-front communities where everything is leveled, it's got the most attention for its very public human suffering, and because it's, well, New Orleans.

Ken Ringle described it in a fine article in Saturday's Post as a city of "European airs, Haitian superstition, Catholic fatalism and raw human greed." Read this one while you're at it. It's the place we like to go to walk a little on the wild side, where the bars never close and you get a roadie cup so you can drink walking down the street. There's an atmosphere of naughty pleasures, great music and the world's most unhealthily delicious cuisine. But underneath is a faint realization, shunted off to the back of the brain, that it's a dangerous place, a damp, hot place occupied by an underclass that surfaces in the street hustlers of Canal Street and the sad drunks nodding in the Quarter. It's almost like there's a thin veneer somehow keeping us visitors from slipping into some kind of ugly mess, a precarious situation that adds a little excitement to the city's charm.

That veneer broke last week. Those of us who know New Orleans only as visitors saw the familiar surround of the Convention Center and Riverwalk looking like something out of the third world, a suffering mass of people who appeared to be frozen in despair and need. Why? What happened?

And there's another, even more troubling aspect of the human disaster in New Orleans. It has to do with the city's historical strategic importance. The country goes to market through New Orleans, to an extent that I never realized until I read this thought-provoking piece from Strategic Forecasting, Inc. Our agricultural wealth flows downstream on the Mississippi; raw materials for our industries flow upstream. Oil is produced, refined, distributed. Damage to the ports can be repaired, but without people to run them - people who live in New Orleans - they are crippled, and along with them a good part of our economy.