richardf8 | City of New Orleans - a rework of the lyrics by Steve Johnson (<user site="livejournal.com" User="da

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City of New Orleans - a rework of the lyrics by Steve Johnson (<user site="livejournal.com" User="da

http://www.livejournal.com/community/ljdemocrats/1900681.html?style=mine#cutid1

By Arlo Guthrie
originally written by Steve Goodman
Katrina rewrite by Stephen Johnson

Living in the City of New Orleans
I'm gettin' by, but poor as poor can be
I voted for the man who'd keep me safest
By God, I knew he'd do alright by me.

All along the length of Bourbon Street friendly faces smile at me
Strolling down past cafes, pubs and bars
Passing I remember when, city full of old black men
Played saxaphones under the moon and stars.

Good mornin' America, how are you?
Don't you know me? I'm your native son!
I'm the place they call the City of New Orleans
I'll be doing fine soon as this storm is gone.

You know some say you lied to take us to war
Betting our lives, hoping no one's keeping score
Cut our funds and hoping for the best
But I hear the waves lapping at my door

You said no one could ever forsee this disaster
But that lie you tried to spread was soon revealed
Families with no cash or car, prayed to God to please stand guard
But the rising tide just would not recede

Good mornin' America, how are you?
Say don't you know me? I'm your native son!
I'm the jewel called the City of New Orleans.
I'll be under 20 feet when the day is done.

Swimming through the City of New Orleans
Wish I was in Memphis, Tennessee
Superdome, yeah we'll be there by morning'
And the federal government sure will rescue me

But all the men and women seem to drown in this bad dream
And the journalists still ain't told the truth
The president, he lies again
And asks us not to assign blame
This rain's sure made me lose my faith in you

Good night America, how are you?
Say don't you know me? I'm your native son!
I'm the lesson called the City of New Orleans.
I'll lose 50,000 lives before the nightmare's gone.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The fellow is clever. And, apparently, willfully ignorant.

"I'll be doing fine soon as this storm is gone." -- Statements of governors of Mississippi and Louisiana on August 29 -- two days before Katrina hit -- telling FEMA to stay the hell out of their states. That same day, Bush instructed both governors to order mandatory evacuations. This looked like overkill, and CNN reported it. CNN erased this information from the news after Katrina hit.

===|==============/ Level Head

What makes you think that ignorance is willful? I didn't know it.

If someone already despises Mr. Bush, the initial media reports that it was his fault fit right into that worldview. But note that the author of this song is portraying the singer as a Republican. And that many days have passed since the original "it's all Bush's fault" media blitz; other information has come out about the real sequence of events.

To ignore this, to pretend that things are as the media was trying to portray, is "willfully ignorant" in my opinion.

There's are two more aspects of this. I, personally, was a disaster victim seeking assistance from FEMA, which was an utter screw-up from one end to the other. It took 721 phone calls to FEMA (this took about 36 hours of non-stop dialing; we did it in "shifts") to get a control number to get assistance. With control number in hand, you then had to wait in line -- literally, for days.

And all of this for a tiny amount of assistance indeed; we gave up hearing what was being offered and went back to trying to reconstruct our lives as best we could.

In the intervening 11 years, I think it's not gotten any worse -- except that I was in a reasonable nice area. Reports from the front lines -- I have family whose home was destroyed by Katrina, and who were part of the initial mandatory evacuation -- tell me that they help the poor and those on welfare first. If you actually lost property or possessions, wee, it's just too bad, you'll have to wait. If you are white, you're on your own.

We didn't have that problem in 1994; blacks, Latinos and whites were equally mistreated by FEMA.

===|==============/ Level Head

"But note that the author of this song is portraying the singer as a Republican."

Where in the text does it explicitly say that they voted for Bush?

You're reading your personal bias into the song, which is normal and expected.

You should not assume that being God-fearing and voting "for the man who'd keep me safest" means that he's a Republican.

For you, he is a Republican, but not because I portrayed him as such - but because you were incapable of seeing him as anything else.

Where in the text does it explicitly say that they voted for Bush?

It does not, certainly. The lines

I voted for the man who'd keep me safest
By God, I knew he'd do alright by me.

are suggestive of a vote for Bush, but not conclusive. I should have used the term "probably Republican". Also, as a writer of creative pieces myself, I saw this as a potential "hook" or "twist" in the song. Of course, the majority of both parties are Christian.

The "probably Republican" is based on exit polls from the election. According to this article from the American Prospect (http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=9214) -- sympathetic to the Democrats -- a substantial majority of those concerned about national security voted for Bush. They don't think this is fair, of course, but that's how it came out. Kerry did well in other areas; obviously, the race was close. I was not assuming that, merely because the person lived in New Orleans, that he would automatically be a Democrat.

This phrase was suggestive to me: "some say you lied" -- that seemed to me something that a Republican might say. A Democrat would more likely say simply "you lied" -- as this narrator does himself after the events of Katrina.

You start out in the piece talking about the Presidential election, and then references to "you" are angry; I got the impression of "betrayal" in the piece.

I perceived that you were establishing irony in the piece by setting it up this way. It was incorrect of me to portray this as a certainty; for this I apologize.

Interestingly, you still haven't said which way. Though, technically, finding out later (even if my statement was later shown to be correct) still doesn't excuse it being described as a certainty. ];-)

Nevertheless, I was critical of the portrayal -- not that aspect, but the blame that the song seems to assign exclusively to the federal government.

The narrator -- a New Orleans resident or long time visitor, it seems -- appears not to know of the local and state officials' corruption and diversion of money, and the officials arrested last year for these actions and now awaiting trial. And the incompetence and inadvertent misfires at the local and state levels as well -- and have a history going back many decades. It's far more complex than this song shows, and simplistic approaches are not good ones for solving the underlying problems, in my opinion.

I do not suggest that Bush is blameless. There are a whole lot of things that went wrong at all levels, and I was critical of the song (while commending your cleverness) for seeming to be willfully ignorant of every role in this process except that of Bush. The "it's all Bush's fault" mantra is tedious when you look at the details, and certainly inaccurate.

===|==============/ Level Head

You are absolutely correct that the song does not focus on local corruption, nor does it focus on state-level issues. I could have chosen to remove much of the character-oriented portions of the piece and just railed against all levels of government, but instead I felt it would be a better work if I focused on one target. Also, that target stands for so much evil in the eyes of so many Americans that my own partisan bias made it an easy choice to make.

For you, a focus on Bush's culpability for leading a government that has cut so much needed funding, for funnelling so much money from the poor to the rich, for causing so many lives to be lost unneccessarily - both in Iraq and here, and for lying to us with such reckless abandon, it might seem tedious and inaccurate. For much of America, it is not.

I trust you can understand why in such a short piece I had to cut corners, even if you might not have cut them in the same places.

As they say. Agree to disagree.

I should note that the reports from affect family members are very much in the category of anecdotal evidence. I do not know how pervasive the effect is.

===|==============/ Level Head

I want to caution you against relying on

level_head as a source; this is the same

level_head who once confidently told me that I currently enjoyed the right to have reasonably priced health care, marry who I choose, and smoke what I choose in the United States, and later asserted just as confidently (a friend tells me) that Strom Thurmond left the Democratic party because he thought the Democrats were racists.

If he can provide a credible source, that might be another matter and something to consider. But I'm skeptical.

There are a lot of Katrina timelines around. Josh Marshall's, here (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/katrina-timeline.php), is pretty thorough. And among other things, it provides a link to Louisiana Gov. Blanco's letter, on August 28, requesting various forms of federal assistance.

If she then sent a letter on the 29th demanding that FEMA stay out, the woman should really have her head examined.

Thank you for putting a decent timeline on Katrina in my comments. I was going to do some digging around, so you've saved me the work.

Thanks for reminding me. I sometimes forget the strong presence he used to have in your journal.

Not that I dislike the guy. He's written some clever poetry.

He seems like a nice enough guy, for sure.

I just want to caution you against using him as a source.

In fairness, don't use me as a source, either; I'm an ideologue, too, just on the other side. Trust, but verify. Assume nothing.

this is the same level_head who once confidently told me that I currently enjoyed the right to have reasonably priced health care, marry who I choose, and smoke what I choose in the United States

Wait. He actually SAID those things? With a straight face? If that's correct, suddenly over a year of occasional debates with him shifts into new perspective for me. And I mean no disrespect by extension to the man's science, poetry or humanity by it, just to clarify.

From a July 2003 thread in my journal (apparently I have an extraordinarily chronoligically accurate memory for things that annoy me--somehow it seems like that can't be healthy!).

I'm editing out other irrelevant parts of the exchange, but trust me that I have not stripped it of necessary context:

L_H: Do not be confused -- the United States is an extraordinarily excellent place to live.

R_L: As for America being a great place, well, you convince it to pass laws allowing me to smoke what I want, marry who I want and not have to crawl to corporate employers just to have health insurance, and I might still be here when I hit 30.

L_H: You have two out of three now. I suspect that a convenient way to judge intoxication levels would get you three out of three soon enough.

R_L: I would say zero out of three. In the US, marriage is exclusively between a man and a woman, marijuana posession carries stiff penalties and there's no such thing as national health insurance unless you're over 65. Are we both living in the same US?

L_H: I will grant that the full regalia of legal and financial benefits associated with marriage are not available to gays yet -- this is likely to change soon. It is my understanding that about twenty of the fifty states (not counting Canada) ];-) do not have a "different gender" requirement on their books.

But on health care: take a look at your original wording. You can obtain health insurance as a self-employed person as well. Just as I do. You do not need to "crawl to an employer".

Then later, in response to someone else's asking him "which two?" he qualified that down some, by saying:

I have looked around at the gay marriage issues. It seems to me that full equality, with all of the rights and benefits, is not happening yet. So I'm prepared to call it one out of three, though it seems that this area is changing rapidly as it is in Canada.

Oh, the other was health care. The way rain_luong described it is not the only way. There are a variety of ways to obtain health insurance, including being self employed.

Moreover, people with no insurance whatsover are not refused treatment in this country. A person I know is utterly uninsured and uninsurable, and has had tens of thousands of dollars of medical intervention in the past few weeks, and more than another hundred thosand in the next few. He has no assets, but they are taking care of him much as they would me. They know they will never see a dime, but they are about to do open heart surgery yet again. He's had, total, perhaps $400k to $500k of medical work done, and I don't know that he's ever had medical insurance in his life.

Decades ago, such a person would be left to "charity wards" where only basic comforts would be addressed -- and no medical treatment of any significance. If they lived, fine. If not, there was nothing to be done.

So, basically, he asserted apparently that we had gay marriage or were about to have it (an indefensible claim he then retracted when challenged), that we were shortly to see the legalization of marijuana (an indefensible claim he never defended or backed up, but also never retracted), and that the U.S. health care system is really pretty okay (I consider that completely wrongheaded--we spend more per capita than any other western country and yet still have children dying of preventable illnesses--but there are plenty of people who feel about it the way L_H does, so it's really the most defensible claim of the three, which is surely why it's ultimately the only one he put any energy into defending).

So it's not as cut and dried as all that--he did back down, happily, from the most insane parts. :> But he did assert them to start with, so my advice is to beware of assertions he makes but doesn't back up. They are not all going to be true. I think his self-proclaimed "optimism" acts as a kind of filter.

(Edit--sorry for posting this twice. I wanted to get my italics tags right!)

Edit--sorry for posting this twice. I wanted to get my italics tags right!

Don't sweat it. I get lots worse things in my e-mail than the occasional redundant LJ Notification. For example - Queen Watusi of Nigeria wants to hook me up with her uncle's embezzled Oil Ministry fortune by converting it to Viagra and selling it for American funds to visitors to a Hot Teenage Girls website where they do remarkable things with Amazing Pasta Pots.

I assume you want in?

Reference please?

He won't provide one. Not a credible one, anyhow. It's administration propaganda. I'd say he should be too smart to fall for it, but I don't know him that well.

But I am disgusted by conservatives who seem to feel the most important thing to do here is cover Bush's ass. Some of the classier ones--Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson, Andrew Sullivan, George Will--have decided the truth is more important.

By now you've seen a variety of these in my journal.

And now I know what happened to you.

A close member of my family -- an indigent, living on the streets -- had received several hundred thousand dollars of surgery and medical care without charge. He died, anyway, during the exchange that David Simpson quotes excerpts from above.

I will not quote from the private emails he sent me subsequently.

===|==============/ Level Head

I am glad your relative found treatment in his final days, and you have my sympathies for your loss.

And now I know what happened to you.

You don't, actually, and I suppose you deserve an explanation.

A man may be charming, generous, charitable, quick-witted, interesting, a good writer, and a gracious host. But when he becomes willing to take the field in defense of certain ideas he may become party to horrors. We've discussed this before. While the very idea of government spying on religious institutions is noxious in a way that can only be somewhat mitigated by a warrant issued upon probable cause, the notion that merely being Muslim constitutes probable cause, or worse, abrogates the need for a warrant at all, is itself bald-faced religious discrimination. Especially when there are Christian organizations that are every bit as inciting. We've discussed even Falwell's incitements before. You pointed to Falwell's charitable work. That's all well and good, but does Hamas' humanitarian work excuse its other behaviors? Indeed, Hamas' humanitarian work is how it built popular support, even for its other behaviors. Don't imagine that strategy is uniquely Muslim.

But when I point out the double standards and the tolerance, if not veneration, for certain hatreds that they manifest, your response is to ascribe hysteria to me. And that's certainly your prerogative.

My prerogative, however, is to not watch you as you become increasingly complicit in our society's devolution into fascism, or whatever name history will assign to the nation's looming tragedy. If you want to write apologia for every step we take down this sandstone staircase, that is your privilege. Not reading them is mine.

I defended no idea in my response; I asked what ChipUni thought should be done. Oliver_Otter's response was, I thought, reasonable.

I have never suggested, and would never suggest, that "merely being a Muslim constitutes probable cause". You are ascribing notions to me from discussions with someone else; it is inappropiate indeed.

I am no fan of Falwell, and the God Hates Fags person is a complete idiot; I've never suggested otherwise. Muslims are the largest sufferers under the oppression of radical jihadists, and you have never in your life seen me suggest nor insinuate that "muslim" and "radical jihadist" are the same.

Oho! You've accused me of "point[ing] to Falwell's charitable work". I did that -- but what I also said about him to you was:

Falwell was, at one time, a very capable and well-respected leader. As he's tipped into radicalism, he has lost most of his audience, and those formerly supporting him now sadly shake their heads at his loss of reason.

Now, are you sure that describing him as having tipped into radicalism and having lost his ability to reason ... is a defense?

===|==============/ Level Head

Funny how a correction of incorrect information can seem like historical revisionism when that incorrect infoarmation supported what we wished to believe.

Here is Snopes on the matter you raise:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/katrina/nagin.asp

The Snopes article doesn't address the issues above at all.

And is it truly your opinion that posted news stories should just be edited after the fact without comment?

===|==============/ Level Head

Nope. Actually I'd rather see the kind of change history the FDA CFR Part 11 requires throughout the Pharmaceutical development process. Unfortunately this often comes into conflict with an organizational reluctance to store obsolete information.

An obscure change of subject indeed.

===|==============/ Level Head

If you don't mind, I'd like to thank you for your compliment and comment on your suggestion of ignorance.

The voice in the rewritten version of the song is meant to be a poor resident of N.O. who voted for Bush. I thought it would be reasonable to assume that as the storm approached, they would assume that they would be OK once it had passed. I expect that most residents felt that way, as they have weathered hurricanes before, and also as they (or at least our voice here) may not have been fully informed about what was about to hit them. Not everyone watches CNN, and many people who are truly, terribly poor might not even have cable...

Of course, it's all in the eye of the beholder, and you can feel free to paint me a willfully ignorant or a poor writer if that suits your purposes. I certainly don't claim to be the next Bob Dylan...

I just felt that the sentiment was a reasonable one to attach to the "voice" in the story, and was not trying to reflect or regurgitate what was on the news on August 29th.

Also, I would urge you to spend some time on Mediamatters.org if you're interested in seeing how accurate your trusted news sources really are...

The voice in the rewritten version of the song is meant to be a poor resident of N.O. who voted for Bush.

*chuckle*

I did not see this until just now, after posting the response to the previous message. Nevertheless, for reasons that I mentioned, my apology still stands. "Likely" is not "certain". ];-)

Remember that I thought, and said, that the writer was clever. I did not suggest that you were a "poor writer"!

Of course, you can portray the views of the one single person in all the world who "doesn't get it" -- or the one single person in all the world who is right. Usually it's a mix -- but political songs work best if they portray some essential truth.

I do check MediaMatters, FactCheck, and MediaResearchCenter on a regular basis -- and I listen to KPFK Radio (a local communist/socialist/progressive station) and AmericaRight fairly frequently. Indeed, I find that "trusted news sources" are very frequently incorrect, and it takes a fairly wide and diligent reading to get a better understanding of things. Each source has its own particular bias.

There is not always adequate time for such reading, but I try, and many topics are interesting to me.

I mentioned, but did not source, the arrests of officials involved in flood control: Here's some background (http://www.livejournal.com/users/level_head/202264.html).

Best wishes.

===|==============/ Level Head

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

City of New Orleans - a rework of the lyrics by Steve Johnson (<user site="livejournal.com" User="da

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Totally wailing on a dead horse.

Re: Totally wailing on a dead horse.

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