A Carnival Diary, Part One

It's actually too cold here today to get out and see the parades. So I drove east on I-10 to see the part of the town's devstation I haven't seen before. This is actually the area that outsiders might relate to: mile after mile of affordable apartment projects, gated the way they do in the suburbs, and abandoned malls -- ever seen a derelict Sam's Club? Spooky. What visitors will also see this time around is the start of the Mayor's race. Ron Foreman's radio commercials are already running (he's the head of the Audobon organization that runs the city's aquarium and zoo; that's right, the scenario could be "New Orleans trades head of cable system for the zoo man"), and Mayor Nagin has some peculiar billboards just up. Peculiar because his expression isn't quite a smile (one can imagine the meetings: You can't be smiling, people are still homeless), not quite a frown, and the slogan is perfect adspeak for the guy who just unloaded the Chocolate City speech on us: "Reunite the City."

But the best sight of the day was in Metairie, the largely white suburb just west of New Orleans where you have to go to buy stuff like print cartridges. Just across the street from a busy shopping center, a small pocket lot of FEMA trailers, and one of them spotted purple-and-gold Mardi Gras decorations, on the door and as skirting at the trailer's bottom.