At a time in our history when we have apparently agreed to disagree on virtually everything, we’ve hit a major roadblock. It’s not far from the river, hard by the levee, down by the Quarter.
The New Orleans Saints, as you may have heard, have won a Super Bowl, and it’s just as good a story on CNN and Fox as it is on ESPN.
This is a story that everyone loves. I don’t know if it’s true that sports is the one thing that can bring a community together — it wasn’t so long ago that anti-Obama types were actually cheering when Chicago lost the Olympics — but I do know that this is a time to embrace the cliche. It’s easy. Yeah, it’s the big easy.
Tuesday’s victory parade was Mardi Gras with helmets and shoulder pads. And everyone was saying how much this game meant to a city still trying to remember that, in the pre- Katrina days, New Orleans was the town that care forgot.
We should have known it was inevitable that the Saints would win. If you know anything about narrative — or hope — a team that had never been to a Super Bowl, representing a town desperately needing to win something, would naturally win.
Maybe that’s why a record number of people tuned in. It couldn’t have been just for the Betty White-Abe Vigoda commercial. Looking back on it, a Saints victory was as clear as the writing on your hand — uh, I mean, as clear as the writing on your teleprompter. (See, we can all get along!)
On another day, I might have been tempted to note how it’s too easy to suddenly remember New Orleans now. It seems we haven’t been paying attention for a while.
Most of the politicians who were involved are gone now. And if there’s no one left to blame for the shocking poverty laid bare by the storm and no one left to blame for the scandalous response, all that’s left to do is actually continue with the hard work of rebuilding.
I love the town. I first visited when I was in college, not long after “Easy Rider” came out, drawn by the jazz and the blues and “All the King’s Men” and the sticky heat and the smell of corruption and the chance that somebody important had been murdered behind the Chateau Dupre Hotel.
I would go on to cover Super Bowls there in my sportswriting youth, and I knew New Orleans was where all Super Bowls should be held, if only to add the right amount of decadence to the wretched excess.
Where else does a sportswriter meet up with Princess Miriam at the Voodoo Spiritual Temple and Cultural Center? When I asked her for a prediction, she worried that tipping to one team might “create an imbalance in the forces of nature.”
It was nature and bad engineering that brought me and all the other reporters to New Orleans a few days after the levees had been breached. I drove down a nearly deserted St. Charles Avenue, past the sign that said, “Now you know what it means to miss New Orleans,” past the phones ringing unanswered in the ruined houses, toward downtown, where I met a man who wouldn’t leave because he couldn’t evacuate his dog. We reminisced about eating at Galatoire’s and the waiter who’d tell you the name of the turtle in your turtle soup.
New Orleans has always been irresistible to writers, and I came upon this line from the great Walker Percy, who was explaining his town:
“If you fall ill on the streets of New York, people grumble about having to step over you or around you. In New Orleans, there is still a chance, diminishing perhaps, that somebody will drag you into the neighborhood bar and pay the innkeeper for a shot of Early Times.”
I looked for the quote because I had gone to the French Quarter, where about 200 people had refused to evacuate, where going to the store meant visiting the oft-looted Walgreens. There was a group at Evelyn’s Place, where Mr. Frank, who is married to Evelyn, proudly showed me the stand-up bar. “The drunks can’t fall off their chairs,” he said. “They just sit down.”
I told Mr. Frank about the haunting phones I heard ringing as I drove in. He told me his phone rings all the time. When people ask how he’s doing, he tells them, “I’m taking the dead bodies and stacking them on the corner.”
He got his laugh, but when I went to the convention center to see those who had taken shelter there, no one was joking.
Outside, choppers were taking people to safety. I met Barbara Tammy Stanton, who had tried to ride out the storm at what she called the old folks’ home. She finally gave up, she said, because of the bodies floating by her window.
“I thought I could hold out,” she says. “But I couldn’t take that. When are they gonna pick them up?”
She was leaving town on a helicopter, with her handbag her only possession. She was afraid to go, afraid to stay, not knowing, in any case, where she would be taken.
When I asked one of the National Guardsmen, he said he didn’t know either. He said, “I tell them it’s better than where they’ve been.”
That was 4 1/2 years ago — for many who were there a lifetime ago. But for a day, at least, we all came back.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
