New Orleans -- the city -- is in some ways the silliest place you could ever imagine, with its bon temps fixations and its genius for evading the crucial questions of life, such as: How long can we go on this way? I have to say, in New Orleans' defense, how much nicer it is as a place than a certain city on which it now partly depends. I mean Washington, D.C., whose peculiar form of silliness involves seeing all questions as matters of life and death. And money. And power. And the power of money.
At some indeterminate point in the past -- perhaps when Bienville arrived there -- New Orleans determined to live for the moment. There is little future, you might say, in that. But the longer the moment lives, which is almost 300 years in New Orleans' case, and the more surely tradition and custom shape its character, the more you come to treasure that moment. And the longer you want it to live.
Pre-Katrina New Orleans -- gone. We all know that. But floats roll, and throats call, "Hey, Mister!" And who knows? More minds than before may take in the Christian connection to the whole thing: Shrove Tuesday as the last inebriated outcry before the solemnity of Lent.
Lent, we might usefully recall, isn't about extinction. It's about redemption, about One More Chance to Get it Right.
One More Chance: Could that be what our beloved Crescent City needs? If so, I say, "Hey, Mister -- do it!"