IT IS ONLY BY THINKING of Walker Percy that I can begin to make sense of what has befallen the city by which I live, where my wife and our four children were born, and that I have come to call home. Percy, the celebrated author of six novels, lived in Covington, Louisiana, just north of Lake Pontchartrain, and set his stories in the orbit of New Orleans and its culture. He wrote of the confrontation of modernity and tradition, of the alienation of the individual, of redemption and apocalypse, of natural disaster and manmade plague. He died in 1990 and was buried with the monks of St. Joseph Abbey near his home.
Percy was a deeply Catholic author, but never alleged to have been a saint. To the Catholic mind, that means his soul was marked for purgatory before admittance to heaven, a place or time of penance or cleansing to prepare to see God. Catholics are bound to believe that purgatory exists, but the precise form of its labors, and the timetable for its completion, have been left to our imagination. Six novels in 30 years suggests an author who did not write quickly or easily, so let us suppose that Percy's purgatory was to write one last novel, a perfect novel about a perfect storm: a monster hurricane headed straight to New Orleans, diverted at the last moment ever so slightly east, weakened in force ever so marginally--no doubt by the prayers of the city's faithful to their Lady of Prompt Succor--but with full disaster doubling back nonetheless as a result of human incompetence, corruption, malice, and neglect. It is a classic Percean plot.
Now, Satan has no purchase on the souls in purgatory--they are destined for salvation--but maybe human error is still possible there, and if so, maybe Percy's novel, like Robert E. Lee's plans for the Battle of Antietam, fell into Satan's hands. Once an angel of light, he knew brilliance when he saw it, and immediately sent a message to God as he had done in the age of Job. "Let me put to the test these Americans," he wagered, "to see which of us they serve, you, as they never tire of professing, or me, as seems to much of the world more likely. Let me stir up the winds of the Atlantic, give them a taste of Florida to distract an unsuspecting nation, then send them right to the port that gathers the grain and coal and other fruits of the heartland, that refines my nectar, oil, and see whether your Americans will do my bidding." A colloquy followed. The Father nodded. And it was done.
II
"MUCH OF WHAT HAPPENED in New Orleans this week might have been avoided," Mark Fischetti wrote in the New York Times the Friday after Katrina struck. As a matter of civil engineering this is true, but as a matter of political reality, a serious catastrophe was bound to happen. That the sophisticated plan touted by Fischetti was called "Coast 2050" suggests that even those willing to prepare for the future barely expected to see the fruits of their efforts in their lifetimes. Of course all of that changed in 72 hours. New Orleanians are now scattered across America--both those who left of their own accord, and those sent away by bus after harrowing days in the Superdome or the Convention Center--but one can be sure that most of them will want to come home when they can. It's not a matter of reason; one lives for love in New Orleans, and to most New Orleanians that means for family and home. It's a sentiment that cuts across the many differences of class and race now made visible to the world like an open wound.
But rebuilding New Orleans is not just a dream of the romantic or a demand of those with nowhere else to go. As George Friedman argued in an article that circulated widely on the Internet in the days after the storm, it stands to reason as a matter of geopolitics that the United States needs to protect the port at the mouth of the major river that drains the continent. Not software for export nor much by way of consumer goods passes through the city, as they do the ports on the east and west coasts, but coal, grain, and other commodities come down the Mississippi on barges to be loaded for shipping abroad; steel arrives here for manufacturers in the United States; oil from the Gulf (ours and theirs) is refined and distributed; chemicals are produced along the river above the city, and much more. As Friedman wrote, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase "until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy." It may not have been its growing point--indeed, part of the inertia in the city and in thinking about it came from the palpable sense that it represented the past rather than the future of American commerce--but New Orleans and the ports of Louisiana and Baton Rouge upriver together handle all the physical commodities still necessary to modern life. (When gasoline prices around the country jumped a dollar or more after the city went under, all America was reminded of that stubborn geographic fact.)
