Damn Yankees

The best place to begin a short story, the adage goes, is in the middle. I think it’s safe to say that David Simon and Eric Overmyer would agree. Treme plops us down right in the messy lives of its characters, and the show expects to do our own navigation. For television, it’s a bold decision (one The Wire also made). Viewers who decide it’s not worth the effort to figure out what the hell is going on can very easily just change the channel.

It seems that one way Treme is keeping people around is by nudging and winking at its early viewers, as if to say, “You’re one of us now.” Nowhere was this clearer than with the tale of the church group volunteers from Wisconsin in Episode 2. Their naïveté is a very transparent criticism of the whole country’s reaction to Katrina – and the verbal beat down they get at the hands of the moody busker would, under normal circumstances, be enough to inspire some serious self-reflection.

Except that instead of reflecting, or sympathizing, I found myself thinking, “Fuck yeah, busker, you tell those Midwestern disaster tourists what’s what.” Bear in mind that I have been to New Orleans exactly once – and that was for Mardi Gras earlier this year. Bear in mind that I am the disaster tourist. Not in action, but in sentiment.

My impression of New Orleans before visiting was based on three things: A Confederacy of Dunces, Hurricane Katrina, and the city’s historically bad sports teams. I had never heard of the Lower Ninth Ward. Hell, I still catch myself pronouncing the show Treem. And yet watching those Madison, Wisconsin kids I felt nothing like one of them.

This could be because they are caricatures, presented as hopelessly trusting, hopelessly green, hopelessly short-sighted. Not even the busker’s sharp criticism – which would certainly have shaken me – seems to affect them much. It was easy to hate the kids from Madison – and identify with the natives — because they were almost horror movie stupid, entering the abandoned mansion where the killer so obviously awaits.

The irony of all this is that most viewers of Treme have much more in common with the kids from Madison than they do with Antoine Batiste, Janette Desautel or any of the other major characters. We are New Orleans outsiders and Hurricane Katrina horrified us. And yes, it also brought our attention to aspects of a city both positive and negative that we had previously ignored. I tend to believe that the people who went down there to rebuild homes or offer medical care or whatever else had good intentions. I also think most New Orleanians believe that. There’s no crime in wanting to help.

Which brings me to this: I think a great deal of the show will be about a city’s pride and the unpleasant process of occasionally swallowing it. It is hard for anybody to accept charity, anybody to realize they need the help of others – especially when those others come to represent the nation whose government screwed them so badly. When John Goodman’s character yells red-faced about the greatness of New Orleans, he is coping. When a busker tells off a group of well-intentioned Yankee interlopers, he is coping. New Orleans is a victim of more than itself. Now the challenge is relying on more than itself to recover.

Advertisement