Countdown: Two Days ‘Til Treme

I have been looking forward to this for a long while:

David L. Simon does New Orleans.  Lots of things to love here:  a cast composed of a lot of Simon regulars from both The Wire and Homicide, and as I learned on NPR the other day, including Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc, who you may remember from Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke.  She was the woman who talked about wanting to clock the woman at the airport when she and her husband finally reached it 4 or 5 days after their home flooded, after walking 4 miles through water 4 feet deep – sorry there’s no Youtube from her interview in the movie.

This is the first time that I know of that Simon has stepped out of his comfort zone – Baltimore – so I’m curious to see his vision translated to New Orleans.

One thing I’m not looking foward to is re-living the whole Katrina nightmare.  Yes, I lived it from a distance, but I’ve never gotten over it.  That was when I finally decided that this country may be over.  I didn’t sleep for days and was on the verge of driving down to start picking up people and evacuating them myself when the buses finally showed up – 5 days after the fact, and 4 days after conservatives started blaming the victims for “not getting out.”  I’ll never forget that harridan Rita Cosby interviewing the mayor of Mobile the evening after New Orleans flooded and going apoplectic over the fact that there was looting going on – this while grandmothers in New Orleans were still drowning in their attics.  (This is the same Rita Cosby who, BTW, a couple of years later got caught trying to bribe Anna Nicole Smith’s nannies into supporting a fantastic claim she had made up in her book about a gay video involving Smith paramour Howard Stern.)

The people who were blaming the victims then are the same crowd who are now teabaggers – Fox News viewers and Rush Limbaugh listeners.  Whenever you hear them screech about how they’re not racists, how all the incidents of spitting and racist slurs were “invented” by Democrats or the media, remember their concern for the people of New Orleans, which ranked somewhere way down the list from their concern for private property.

It’s still a very racist country.  It will be interesting to see how David Simon handles that aspect – he’s been masterful in depicting the perversions created by racial divide in his previous outings.