Matt LaBash paints a dreary and depressing picture of New Orleans aprés le deluge:

New Orleans is a town that resists being fitted with an adjectival straitjacket. But if it were a Chinese-food condiment, it would be sweet ‘n’ sour. The easily pacified citizens of this country’s other cookie-cutter cities seem to require only that they have a Starbucks Mocha Macchiato in one hand, and an Olive Garden breadstick in the other. But New Orleans offers something more. Faulkner called it “that city foreign and paradoxical, with an atmosphere at once fatal and languorous.” Walker Percy wrote, less grandiosely, that if you fell ill in its streets, it’s a place where there’s still a chance “that somebody will drag you into the neighborhood bar and pay the innkeeper for a shot of Early Times.”

Despite my New Orleans fixation, I’d never been to Mardi Gras, figuring I wasn’t missing much–perhaps spring break in Daytona with a shrimp remoulade twist. But this year seemed as interesting a time as any to go. For a good month after Katrina, everyone was unanimous that the hurricane had been a buzz kill. Then for the next five months, most of the attention shifted from the dire situation on the ground so that critics could hash out who was responsible for dropping the ball–the president, the governor, the mayor (correct answer: all of the above).

I still have yet to find a single person who came name one solitary specific thing the administration did wrong about Katrina, other than some typical blame-Bush generalized and foolish mumbo-jumbo about how he just “doesn’t care” — as if “caring” were some critical and useful part of the job description; as if an ostentatious show of emotionalism would have prevented the whole disaster; as if all the Bushaters want is some good old Clinton-style lip-biting “better put some ice on that” phony concern and all would be hunky friggin’ dunky. Sure, having Mommy pet you and pretend to cry with you over a skinned knee might make the boo-boo all better when you’re a kid, but that ain’t what we have a federal government for.

(Note: Update below the fold)
And the fact is, it’s kind of unseemly to be advocating a “King George” approach in New Orleans, as plenty of folks have done with perfect 20-20 liberal hindsight, when the welkin is still ringing with the high dudgeon expressed in your latest loud rant about how our Constitutional Republic has been all but destroyed by the Chimperor and his “Imperial Presidency.” Seems to me the least the liberal Nanny-staters and BDS sufferers could do is get together, pick an illogical and irrational whine, and stick with it, for Pete’s sake. Failing that, maybe they could at least keep a running check on the records, so that each successive gripe against Bush doesn’t directly contradict the philosophy expressed in the last one. But hey, that’s BDS for ya; by their hypocrisy and internal contradictions shall ye know them, I guess.

Now, breathless reporters were anxious to tell a comeback story. Never mind that the city that loves to eat, the city from which Louis Armstrong used to sign his letters “red beans and ricely yours,” has seen only 1,000 of its 3,000 restaurants reopen. Never mind that its only growth industries at the moment are house-gutters, mental health workers, liquor store owners, and strippers (to handle all the extra business from the influx of fly-by-night contractors). Never mind that its infrastructure is in shambles, that its public school system is nearly defunct, that all but two of its hospitals are closed, that 80 percent of its residences sustained flood damage, that only 200,000 of its 480,000 citizens have been able to return, that 1,100 of its citizens are dead, and close to 1,500 are still missing. Apparently, the fact that inebriated people will come to the mostly undamaged Quarter to bare their breasts for beads is as good as a clean bill of health. New Orleans is on the mend! A phoenix rising from the ashes! Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Not hardly, as LaBash adequately makes clear. But in the end, we all know on whose shoulders the blame really rests, even if might be considered intemperate or callous to say so right out loud:

THE LAST TIME I SAW THE KINGFISH, he was stubbled and wild-eyed and heavily armed. He was also my host, his Uptown abode serving as media HQ for me and my MSNBC traveling companions after Katrina closed all the New Orleans hotels. We drank his Old Fashioneds and took baths in his pool. One of the last Uptowners with a generator and the bad sense to stay in New Orleans, Kingfish was fighting to keep his house and his businesses and his life from washing away with the rest of the city.

His family secure in Florida, he’d turned his beautiful home, which only suffered some dislodged shingles and downed trees, into an armed compound. A couple of friends signed up for guard duty. They strolled the grounds with pump-action shotguns and holsters threaded with Brooks Brothers belts, sweating through their Perlis golf shirts with the little crawfish stitching (New Orleans’s answer to the Lacoste alligator). Kingfish spent frantic weeks checking on neighbors’ houses, pulling rescue missions at the lawless Convention Center to take family friends to the hospital, and generally saving pets and dotty old ladies who didn’t know what had happened. Mostly though, he was waiting with his guns and the Perlis mercenaries, sure that “the crickets,” as the looters were called, were coming over his fence.

I christened him “Kingfish” when I heard one of his buddies use it on the ride in from Baton Rouge, and after he said he didn’t want his name in my story. He balked initially, saying of Huey Long, the original Kingfish, “what a piece of shit he was.” A native son with civic pride, he is tired of Louisiana being a national punch line. He’s tired of Orleans Parish public school officials literally stealing millions of dollars as the system fails; he’s tired of idiot-brothers-in-law littering corrupt levee boards; he’s tired of episodes such as the one currently playing out in the April mayoral race, in which a fringe candidate (and the state’s chief election official) is campaigning from her jail cell. If Long said, “The time has come for all good men to rise above principle,” then this Kingfish has no use for good men.

Then may I suggest to this Kingfish fella that he might want to do everything he can to see to it that those folks he’s so “tired of” aren’t put in charge of the city ever again. Because they didn’t just fall into position spontaneously; they were voted in, by people just like Kingfish, who are adults and presumably knew exactly what they were doing — and the sympathy the rest of us feel for the people who lost so much is predictable (and fairly, I believe) tempered by that inescapable reality somewhat. After all, you can’t really complain much about a thief looting your house if you’re the one who gave him the keys.

This is a good piece all in all, though, especially for anybody (like me) who used to love NOLA before growing impatient with the complaining from people who made their own beds a good long time ago, don’t want to lie in them now, and seem all too eager to blame anyone but themselves for the corruption and incompetence that’s been the hallmark of city and state government for far too long — and which bears the primary responsibility for NOLA’s misery still.

Update! Noel says “politics be damned”:

There will be plenty of time for politics. We’re all hopeful some attitudes will change. But there are plenty of people still hurting. People that could just as easily be you or me, standing on the side of the road, having lost it all. Here’s my bottom line:

Yes, there are some slackers. But there are plenty more good people. This is still my country and those are still my countrymen and I want to see the Gulf Coast rebuilt and my fellow citizens helped. Period.

Politics be damned.

Y’know, Dem-despising hyper-partisan sniper that I am, even I have to admit he’s right. Read it all.