Still Running Off at the Keyboard

For better or worse, New Orleans has always been a sign of contradiction to the sober, sensible American way of life. Ask my disapproving father. I come from St. Francisville, a Protestant town on the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge, the seat of rural West Feliciana Parish, which figures prominently in Walker Percy’s fiction. Daddy’s prophecy about New Orleans was widely shared in the region, but I always had the feeling that he wouldn’t have thought the city’s destruction entirely undeserved. Not, I hasten to say, that he or anybody else would have wished for what has come to pass; rather, New Orleans was viewed — one winces to use the past tense, but there it is — by many rural Louisianians as many Americans look on New York City: as a corrupt and corrupting metropolis, an arrogant, violent, and high-living city that incubated maleficence.