Hobnobbing with the poor and disenfranchised
After a big walk through the park this morning with the dogs and Tin, we went to Parkway Bakery & Tavern for lunch to meet friends who wanted to see the open house on the bayou. The house turns out to be accurately described as a Gentilly house (a neighbor described it) with a new reduced price tag of $299K. It was $475K. But that’s another story, apparently the home owners paid around $300K for it, similar to what I paid for the LaLa but that was five years ago, and since then everything has been on a slippery slope to nowhere.
But I digress, I was writing about Parkway and how Obama and his family picked our humble poboy restaurant and bar to treat himself to some typical New Orleans cooking. I split a Reuben (not typical) with T and wondered just what it was that Mr. President ate for lunch. There is also something nice about this place now that it was graced by Mr. Yes We Can.
I thought about him and what is on his plate for real, and I don’t know, but it really takes my appetite away. Tea Party noodle heads, Republican wantabes, and Democrats flailing in the soup. Geez Louise. What’s a smart man to do? Maureen Dowd continues to skewer him for his reticence to roar like a lion, but that’s not his style. Meanwhile, the country is reeling from an economy I don’t truly believe is going to get back on track – instead I believe we are going to go through some major adjustments.
So nows Mayor Bloomberg is getting on the stump, because he is rich and he is kind to Wall Street that doesn’t want to digest what Obama has articulated – that Wall Street has bled the country dry of its talent pool by attracting the best and brightest and luring them to untold riches, which has turned the United States on its head – California is up in the air as New York is sinking from its weight in gold and the rest of the country is just teetering on the brink except down here in this poor and disenfranchised city of New Orleans – the city that care forgot – or the holy trinity land of Katrina, BP and the Saints.
What’s a smart man to do when he is in the midst of a complicated unraveling of everything we know to be good and solid – making more money than God and leaving the poor and disenfranchised to fend for themselves? Maybe Obama should have had lunch at the cafeteria at UNO, so he could watch the real collateral damage of our runaway freight train economy. And as our city leaders pontificate about what it takes to be a first class (read: ideal city), like my neighbor said to me today – “We don’t want to be the city they have in mind; we don’t want to be that [or in my words, we don’t want to be dat!].”