Saturday, September 17, 2005

Now watch this!

9/17/05

Now watch this!!

It seems the President has declared the Povertina Disaster Area a Golf Opportunity Zone. I, for one, think that’s wonderful. If there’s one thing N’Awlins needs more of, it’s golf courses. And now that it’s going to be necessary to drain & bulldoze all the low-lying areas of the city…..what could be better than to replace those soggy shotgun shacks with a series of magnificent links style courses?

The New Crescent City will be modeled after Del Monte Properties on the Monterey Peninsula, which is essentially a gated real estate development boasting a number of firstrate coastal courses, led, of course, by the world-famous Pebble Beach and jewel-like Cypress Point Country Club. Millions of tons of earth will be trucked, barged, and dozed, and dumped into the old wards and parishes so that the new courses will have challenging, elevated, terrain that is several yards above sea level. Once the city is high enough, levees won’t even be necessary.

Now I know what you’re thinking: What about all the African Americans and other poor and pigmentally augmented people who were living in the city when Katrina hit? What will become of them if the neighborhoods where they and their ancestors have lived for generations are turned into country clubs? Lots of them can stay where they are now, in Houston or Dallas or Little Rock. As Barbara Bush says with a chuckle, poor as they were, they’re better off there anyhow. The few who INSIST on returning can work as caddies or maids or cooks or parking valets in the new resorts.

Fortunately, Congress has already rammed through a Golf Course Wage Cut so the new caddies and domestics won’t be able to charge an arm and a leg for their services. And where will the returning evacuees live? FEMA can build thousands of caddy shacks on polluted, hazmat, landfill. The more desirable real estate will, of course, be reserved for the courses and the million dollar houses to be built along their fairways.

One of the wonderful things about N’Awlins, or New Profitville, as it will be rechristened, is that it is an island, more or less. Prior to Katrina, that made it easier for the sheriffs of surrounding suburban towns like Gretna to block wretched, storm-pelted, refugees at the bridges and send them back to drown in the sunken city. But after the golf resorts are built, the insular nature of NOLA will make it easier to turn the whole real estate development into a gated community. That way undesirables, the poor and foreign and Bohemian and excessively pigmented, can be prevented from even entering the city in first place. Unless, that is, they have the proper papers and a really good reason for being there: namely, to serve the rich.

Already there have been outcries that turning the city into a restricted community will ruin Mardi Gras and strip the city of its personality. Balderdash! We shall have a better Mardi Gras than ever. But instead of the unseemly dancers and musicians of the old Mardi Gras, we will have hired performers in bigheaded cartoon costumes, just as do the parades at Disneyland. And because New Profitville will have guards and sentryboxes at every access point, it will be possible to charge admission to the city, and therefore to Mardi Gras. This alone will generate enough revenue to pay for the schools needed by the wealthy residents of New Profitville. Fortunately, there won’t be a need for TOO many public schools, because many of the wealthy will be sending their children to private schools. And the wealthy don’t have that many children in the first place.

And what about the children of the workers living in the FEMA caddyshacks? They will be sent to special vocational schools where they will be trained to be garbagemen, butlers, valets, parking valets, gardeners, nightwatchmen, roughtrade, cooks, and, of course, caddies, for their betters.

As for the French Quarter, it will be allowed to remain more or less as it is. Except, of course, that it will be redubbed the Freedom Quarter and will be made the flagship district of NewOrleansland, the charming corporate theme park which will preserve the city’s proud heritage. After visitors have paid a fee to enter the restricted environs of New Profitville, they will have to pay another fee to enter NewOrleanslands itself, aka The Cajun Kingdom, aka The Slaphappiest Place on Earth. Then visitors will have to pay ANOTHER fee to gain entrance to the Freedom Quarter. This is the concept of nested ripoffs engineered so beautifully by both Disney and Universal Theme Park imagineers. Once inside, suckers, er ah, visitors, will have to pay again to ride one of the Freedom Quarter’s many delightful attractions. These will include A Streetcar Named Desire, a wacky talking ¾ scale streetcar which will spout lines like “Stelllllllla!” and “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers” and “Deliberate cruelty is the one unforgivable sin” as it wends its merry way through the streets of the Freedom Quarter. There will be park attendants dressed in large-headed Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski costumes. The Stanley Kowalski costume will seem to be nearly naked from the waist up-----dressed in little more than sweat and a few scraps of torn t-shirt. But never fear, this nakedness will be, like everything in the park, an illusion. A fundamentalist Christian virgin park attendant wearing long johns will be zipped INSIDE the costume.

There will be many other lands in NewOrleansland, of course, one of the most striking being Storeyvilleland. In Storeyvilleland, park attendants in large headed black ho and white ho costumes will strut their stuff, luring tourists families into local brothels which will include tricks for the whole family: Dad, Mom, Sis, Brother Bob, Grandma, Grandpa, and Uncle Perv. And if the ho’s get outta line, they pimps will give ‘em a whupping right there in the middle of the street! This exciting and colorful pageant will take place every day, 7 times a day, right on the hour. Miss it at your peril!

Prior to Katrina, the French Quarter was infamous for its bead-hungry, breast flipping, balconied, slatterns. The Freedom Quarter will continue a more wholesome, family oriented, version of this public exhibitionism. Youthful park attendants, all certified Christian virgins posted on the second floor balconies, will partially unzip their costumes, exposing their colorful long johns and boxer shorts and bro-sieres in return for strings of beads which will have cost the rubes, er ah, visitors, a pretty penny in our corporate giftshops. Never fear, no real flesh or truly erotic underwear will ever again be exposed anywhere in the city. All will be strictly dullsville. In fact, never again will improvised, unpredictable, shocking, surprising, spontaneous, public or private behavior be permitted within the confines of NewOrleansland. Everything will be scripted at the corporate level.

There will be JAZZ. But it won’t be black jazz and it won’t be improvised. It will be Kenny G-style jazz. Very white, very safe, very bland. Not really jazz at all. The OPPOSITE of jazz, truthtotell. More like musical Zoloft than jazz. Jazz the way Lawrence Welk would play "When the Saints Come Marching In" when he was alive. Or the way he would play it now, after being dead for 20 years. You know, the same stuff you hear on the anaesthetic channel of your hometown radio dial.

There will also be HISTORY. But this history will be homogenized, pasteurized, and deracinated within an inch of its life. By the time the boys at corporate get finished rewriting the history of New Orleans, it will be free of slaves, of prostitution, of jazz, of race-mixing, of foreign influences, of spice, of sin, of beauty, of ugliness, of anything and everything that made New Orleans human and compelling and zesty. All that will be left in New Orleansland will be a processed product, the cultural equivalent of Twinkies, Wonderbread, and Dingdongs.

And will there be anything about President Bush’s role in the great Katrina Disaster of 2005?

Of course there will! An audioanimatron of President Bush himself will tell us how he unhesitatingly and heroically dropped his biking and golfing vacation and stepped in pronto to save the city from itself, its Democratic politicians, and from Katrina, and how he and FEMA and Halliburton cleaned up the mess that was there in order to make the city safe for crony-capitalism and and corporate golf and give us the fantastically faceless cashcow---Moooooo-lah! Ooooh lah lah!--- which is Profitville today.

---FIN---