If a clod be washed away to the sea, Europe is the less.

The German newspapers, perhaps because of their distance from the situation in New Orleans, seem able describe it with a calm gravity. The Süddeutsche Zeitung has taken a three-pronged approach: besides the news itself, there is an analysis of Bush, plus a pair of articles on the Crescent City.

I. Anarchy in the USA.
Stephan Kornelius' piece calmly follows the lead of the New York Times in noting Bush's difficulties with rapid-reaction. "The shock-phase following 'Katrina' was particularly long"; the deer-in-the headlights moment was only hesitatingly overcome on the third day. At which point, the authorities were overwhelmed and lines of responsibility were rather chaotic, which is "not entirely unusual for America."

But Kornelius identifies the heart of the problem (the anarchy), which stems in part from the fact that Bush paid little attention to the victims in the early hours. He puts it in stark and no-longer- theoretical terms:

If the State is overwhelmed by this original condition and finally fails, then the anger will quickly present the danger that politics, most of all this politics with the President on top of the pyramid, will be attacked.

He predicts that if the chaos is not brought under control soon, then political Washington will make Bush pay a heavy political price "for this demonstration of governmental infirmity."

II. Sensuality, R.I.P.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung also contains a beautiful obituary for the City of New Orleans, by Voker Breidecker.

Now the city is sinking into the water, and with her the dream, that life in the Big Easy follows only its own laws, that it goes on more slowly and indolently, more heavy-blooded and yet more cheerful, lighter, and more carefree than it goes on anywhere else. And now the bodies drift in the water; nobody knows how many... among them the poorest of the poor, who possessed no vehicles.... Their simple wooden houses, that are marked with ghastly symbols like in the plague-times of the middle ages, have become for them cases of death.

(After this, the article tends to shift into the preterit tense.) The writer is well aware that New Orleans has despite its images always been a city of the poor. And of course it was known to be a doomed and sinking ship: but the inhabitants' sense of being in an impossible situation was taken in and turned into its music, songs, its lifestyle. Breidecker mourns for it as a distinctly European city: indeed, as a city that was frequently succeeding when the Europeans themselves were failing. It was "aways already 'multicultural' long before that word was discovered."

Also sinking with New Orleans is the last colony, the last dream-city of the old Europe, which here and only here, in the delta of Ol' Man River, fused with America, Africa, and the Carribbean. Even Europe's own nations--French and Germans, British and Irish, Italians and Spaniards, Poles and Russians--have already lived 'down by the riverside' in peaceful neighborliness much longer than the places, out of which they migrated. New Orleans is--in mourning we must now say: was--by far the most 'unamerican' city on its continent.

In what sense this last sentence is true, i can't quite say.

III.
Cities, in the United States, are quite different things from cities in Europe, for neither the Americans nor anyone else can pretend that they were just 'always here.' (Except in a few old Spanish towns that are remarkably small). In Europe, however--in the greater part of the inhabitited world--that is the assumption, as anyone who's been to Italy can see. Venice was once the seat of an empire, with the greatest assortment of luxury goods in all Europe. Rome built an empire by building roads. And Cordoba was the capital of a Caliphate for 300 years a millenium ago. But Americans are used to considering their cities as having just been founded. Which might be why we find it so hard to contain suburban sprawl: our cities, we think--especially if we're not on the East Coast--are really only in version 2 or 3; the really profressional development won't be going on until v.5 anyway.

So it is a shock to us to contemplate the end of a great city, even if the rust belt has gotten an awful lot of practice in the last 30 years. Or rather, it's hard to contemplate a city that has reached the possible limits of its growth, which New Orleans certainly had. Yet New Orleans was unique because it was older than the others in its neighborhood, and because it was French, sometimes Spanish, and because the architecht Jefferson bought it ready-made (so that we could reserve our efforts for building Council Bluffs). Perhaps the sense of doom that seems to have always pervaded it stems from the knowledge that we didn't create it ourselves. Perhaps it's from the fact that it is an anchorage and point of commerce with a south-north orientation, whereas the trend in American history is to lay lines of communication east-west. Perhaps it's the vampires.

Other places in America have disappeared, but that was because they were not destinations. So much of our culture comes from New Orleans, it is hardly possible to imagine America without it. No Dixieland, no Jazz Age, no Tenessee Williams, no Emeril. Can all this really have sunk forever into a lake?