The Sunshine Empire

It is a time honored tradition in the conservative group-think crowd to talk of the hypocrisy of limousine liberals telling America how to act while they live in their ivory towers of decadence.  But I feel credit should be applied when someone walks the walk.  Before that I want to fill in a bit of the back story.  A friend of this space, Money Mike, is a native of New Orleans and I began to ask him about the unvarnished status of the city since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina two years ago.  After the catastrophe, no matter who you blame, the boy king president said in Jackson Square in a speech to the nation, “We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know: There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again.”  I asked him his evaluation after two years of how far back New Orleans was as compared to before the hurricane on a percentage scale.  His answer to me was 35%.

Now the purpose of my point is not to assign blame for this situation to anyone but American collectively itself.  No matter the “heckuva job Brownie” lines you want to quote, or the descriptions of the ineptitude of the governor or mayor, the current state of the city is an embarrassment to the nation.   Some that I speak with scoff at the reference to the “ruins” of New Orleans but Money Mike is no political ideologue, just a former resident with family on the ground there.  This leads me to my original point, and credit to Brad Pitt.  I have enjoyed few of the movies that he stars in aside from Fight Club and 12 Monkeys, but he recently moved to New Orleans and just committed $5 million to rebuilding the lower 9th ward in the part of the city that tourists go to now like ground zero Disneyland.  Pitt is not taking the normal Hollywood path of flying to Aspen, with a toy poodle in one hand, going to a swank fund raiser and then jetting home to some palatial waste of space in Bel Air.    Also, lets face it, his wife is looking less like Laura Croft and more like Skeletor every day.

Now I am welcome to debate the merits of if the city even should be rebuilt, but the fact remains that we as a nation have forgotten completely about the city.  Some might vaguely realize that a Super Bowl has not been played there in a while, but the history, traditions, and cultural impact of the city make it worth saving.  But we are too busy amusing ourselves to death to notice.