Baby, Stir That Pot!

Streetcar back to the Quarter from City Park, and I get off a stop too soon,
lured by big brass sounds.
I've been vibrating, craning my ears, for the last two blocks the music's been in earshot.
At Bourbon and Canal, a gathering crowd, and the To Be Continued Brass Band (a sousaphone, 3 trombones, 3 trumpets, 1 tenor sax, two bass toms, and a not-quite-ukelele-small acoustic guitar) makin noise, y'all.
Fuckin noise!
And there are young white girls just outta their day jobs dancin in the street with old black men,
gettin down to the pavement,
leanin in and back and shakin what they got.
I keep waitin for her top and bottom halves to come apart;
didn't think bodies were meant to jive just like that.

Suddenly occurs to me this is what the (puritan-derived) churchies get so upset about.
Like maybe they see this dancin, hear this music, and think,
(1)god didn't mean no body to move like that; it's gotta be the devvil, and
(2)(maybe way back in the backa they heads) if that's what livin really is, if that thing, that alien and unknown and (un)holy, is what god did intend, then i.
then i....

Yeah.
Then you been missin out
and fuckin up
and makin a joke and a travesty outta everything you've been given.
Ain't that a damned shame.

Right behind that sad and tiny epiphany,
I realized that that's what it is with this city,
this place,
this magicallyrealcenter that doesn't have any business existing in stodgy, uptight ol'Merica:

'Merica, specially places like New York and D.C. and other financial/political powercenters, don't seem to ever have much to say about the South that isn't pompous, patronizing:

South is racist
(like the this entire country ain't,
to the grey grey bones),
it's backward,
it's inept,
it's still hanging on solely because their northern brothers stepped in an "saved" em (again again again).
...just like we're all "savin" Iraq.

And then they come down here themselves,
these hegemonic holier-than-thous,
and they see New Orleans.
They see...New Orleans!
Merica's Bottom, baby, and all the Juicy that that implies.
Even if these monocled and moneyed don't make it outside the French Quarter,
they see that this city's a mixup,
that it's an anomaly,
that it's everything everybody ever said the South could not be.
This city that embodies what the powerful been fightin to destroy since the country's inception:
folks workin together across all kinds of manufactured barriers.
This city that just keeps coming back grinnin, sayin,
"That all you got?"

Don't that piss off power like nothin else?
Seriously.
Beat down the disadvantaged and watch em get up again.
Leave em for dead and find em later knockin on the kitchen door,
grinnin,

"That all you got?"

Comin down here and hearin this music?
This joy?
This pain and willful
prosperity in terms much more powerful than money
could ever hope to be?
Like the amber cockroaches that patrol its streets,
this city is undeniable.
It keeps on and keeps on and keeps on keepin on.
New Orleans is everything Pops embodied,
everything he preached,
every grin and growl and grimace and grandiose.
New Orleans' been beat down a thousand times in ways most people can't dream,
and still it's gettin up off the mat,
still ain't layin still.
still grinnin out one side of its head askin,
"That all you got?"

The big guys in D.C. started a false war on terrorism for what happened to a single city block in New York.
Wouldn't it be cool if they started a war on poverty and willfully ignorant, inarguably faulty engineering for what happened to the entire fucking Gulf Coast?
To an entire region of the U.S.,
as opposed to one little block of egregious financial hubris?
Wouldn't that be just?
Or at least pseudofair?
Much as this city's denizens wish the rest of the country would care for em,
would take care of New Orleans the way they did New York,
would see this place as the Heart o'Merica it surely is,
they're not layin down,
not givin up.
They know what they got.
They know what's worth carin for.
What's worth fightin and cryin and lovin for.

New Orleans is evolving, always.
Always reinventin itself along its own peculiar lines.
It is a mystery.
An anomaly.

You still breathin?
Your house and all evidence of your past is gone,
Got dead bodies in your dreams, in what usedt'be your yard, but
you still breathin?
Well, then.

Well well.
.....

New Orleans ain't typical 'Merica, y'all.
New Orleans embodies this country's very sweetest dreams of itself.
New Orleans is better than the rest of the country put together.
Period.
And maybe that's why New Orleans gets shit on and left behind so often:
they remind the rest of us how much we're not livin.
...And lord we are the jealous kind, even if,
especially if
it's our own damned fault.
New Orleans reminds us how, if we'd push aside the thin, weakass broth,
that farce of consumerism marketed as the 'Merican dream,
and get ourselves to the kitchen, where the action is,
we surely could help ourselves to the fine rich thick gumbo that the 'Merican dream maybe started out as.
Hell, New Orleans may well be the only place where the 'Merican dream still lives big and mighty,
always changing,
renewing,
recrudescing.

New Orleans, in all its metaphorical forms, still stirs the soup,
shakin its booty to the music in the kitchen.