Another excellent piece from Michael Sartisky, CEO of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities:

In the face of growing expressions of reluctance from some quarters  nationally to restoring New Orleans, let it be understood that as New Orleans goes, so  shall go the cultural soul of America. For just as surely as New Orleans was  overrun by a storm surge because her buffering coastal wetlands had been  allowed to erode through years of neglect, so too will American culture sink into  terminal banality and homogeneity if it abandons the root city of American  culture.

I do not assert this out of a simple parochial chauvinism, as if we are  deaf and blind to the rich cultures which abound throughout this land, but as a  challenge to the nation's character to help New Orleans make itself whole  having been so sorely wounded.

True, the bedraggled and beleaguered City of New Orleans did not always shine  with the sterling reputation of being an idiosyncratic cultural Mecca, and  early on it beckoned few. In the early eighteenth-century, prisoners in the  Bastille, offered the prospect of manumission if they consented to be colonists in  the new colony of Louisiana, rioted in refusal. After all, Louisiana boasted  a mortality rate of nearly eighty percent that beggared even that of the harsh  New England winters that decimated the Pilgrims. Though New Orleans boasted  the first opera house on the continent, Thomas Jefferson did not scheme to  relieve it from Napoleon for its cultural attributes, but because of its  centrality for commerce, situated as it was-and still is-as the North American gateway  to the Caribbean and the entrance and point of debarkation of all produce from  the American heartland flowing upon on the Mississippi River.

Supping on the Open Oyster of New Orleans

And yet, culturally speaking, today New Orleans stands virtually alone as the  most genuine, vibrant and unique of all American cities. In a Wal-Mart  nation, it is the French market, coffee shop, snowball stand, po-boy shop, Lucky-Dog  cart, mule-driven taffy wagon, and most of all, the local club and dance  hall. With our unique and unprecedented mélange of peoples of many nations,  ethnicities, religions, and hues we foreshadowed America's own polyglot evolution as  a nation: French colonists and refugees from San Domingue; Acadians cast into  diaspora by the British; Spanish administrators and soldiers; enslaved  Africans and gens de couleur libre; indigenous tribes such as the Houma, Tunica, and  Coushatta; Sephardic Jews; Sicilian and Lebanese vendors; and Irish laborers  put to digging drainage canals in pestilential swamps because they were more  expendable than slaves as they had no capital value. We were both multicultural  and culturally sophisticated,--with offerings from French opera and chamber  groups to masked balls and bordellos rocking with barrelhouse pianos and  ragtime--before most American cities were a gleam in a speculator's eye, before they  were a hamlet or a crossroads, before they had a barbershop quartet. New Orleans was, is, and will be--even more so if we perish--the shrine and  seedbed of American culture. Our patron saints are Louis Moreau Gottschalk,  Scott Joplin, Buddy Bolden, Jellyroll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Louis Prima, Fats  Domino, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, Irma Thomas, the Neville Brothers, Ellis  and Wynton Marsalis, and Kermit Ruffins. Few American writers attained any  stature who did not sup on the open oyster of New Orleans, whether Walt Whitman,  George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, O. Henry, Tennessee  Williams, Lillian Hellman, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy, Anne Rice, Richard Ford,  or William Faulkner.

But do not mistake New Orleans for some antiquarian artifact, no quaint  anachronism frozen in time. New Orleans is a seething pool of assimilation and  syncretism, of reinvention and recreation. It is a negotiation and a navigation  between grace and dysfunction. It is a Creole place where cultural intermarriage  is a badge of honor and affirmation of humanity. Situated precariously on the  edge of the American continent, New Orleans' marginalization is a special  vantage from which to see the mainstream of American culture, a certain slant of  light which sees nuance and possibility better than normality.

The Danger of Normalcy

The danger we pose to ourselves is that in our rush for normalcy we achieve  it. The adjacent suburbs and even our Central Business District--which  abandoned their historical roots in flight to modernity--should stand as fair warning  for New Orleanans' capacity for victimizing themselves. After all, the  architecture of our suburban ring and the canyons of Houstonized high-rises were not  forced upon us by people from New Jersey. New Orleans can be whole only if it  understands and respects its own historical antecedents. What New York hosts  in its plenitude and wealth and Los Angeles postures in artificiality, New  Orleans possesses in fact: the only authentic indigenous urban culture on the  continent, the promiscuous and defining soul of a nation sorely in need of one.

Michael Sartisky, PhD

CEO, The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities

Editor in Chief, Louisiana Cultural Vistas,