The Phoenix Strategy:  Rescuing New Orleans and Iraq from Death  


  Both New Orleans and Iraq are dying.  These are the worst of times, but they can also be the best.

  For New Orleans, the positive side of the ledger is that practically everything is so bad that practically anything is possible.  Central planning consultants are busy warring against each other while the city further deteriorates.  The only hope, a limited one, now seems to be local self-help because there are no central plans.  As the old feudal city dies, reformers are moving in to fill the governmental void.
 
  On the negative side, the statistics are nothing less than catastrophic.  They suggest what might happen after an intercontinental nuclear war, when it might take centuries to recover, if ever.

  The population of New Orleans, according to the U.S. Postal Service, which should know, is now down from 460,000 to 171,000 and may shrink still further.  The population is now down to what it was in 1880, more than 125 years ago.

  The professional classes have left, and the surviving middle class is surviving only in a few neighborhoods on high ground near the river.  Half the doctors have permanently left and the exodus is continuing.  Of the 128 schools from before Katrina only 56 are opening this fall, and of these most (34) are charter schools run by the parents because the city school system has crashed.  No efforts are being made to revive the black Ninth Ward, which is completely abandoned.  The rest of the city has only intermittent services.  As in Baghdad, electricity and garbage pick-up are intermittent and erratic. 

  Perhaps the greatest catastrophe, though it might prove to be a blessing in disguise, is that city government is a no-man’s land.  This reduces or even eliminates the value of federal funding.  For example, in a few days 7,500,000,000 (billion) dollars of federal housing funds are to become available for owners to rebuild their houses, with grants of up to $150,000 per homeowner.  The problem is that in a dysfunctional city the remaining home owners may rebuild one house in an abandoned block here and two in a block there.  The money will go to dysfunctional and essentially abandoned neighborhoods without police stations and other essential city services.  This is not the way to rebuild a city.

  Neighborhood self-help citizens associations are springing up everywhere but they are hampered by concerns that the surrounding areas will die without a city-wide plan.  As always, there are some very capable individuals with both the necessary skills and leadership capabilities.  They are causing a slow revolution to demolish the existing system of patron government based on centuries-old corruption.  But, they are up against outside professional “planners” who too often have joined “City Hall,” what is left of it, in a battle to fill their own coffers, again just like in Iraq.

  This raises the question, is there a future for the revolutionary Katrina Plan, first elaborated for application in Iraq?  See http://www.cesj.org/thirdway/paradigmpapers/iraq-nationbuilding.htm and h,ttp://www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/abrahamfederation-iraq.html.  Nothing else seems to be working in the Iraqi and New Orleans meltdowns. 

  As Norm Bailey, a founder in 1985 of The Center for Economic and Social Justice, always said when he was Chief Economist and later Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan for International Economic Affairs, no change in governmental processes and policies will ever be possible unless and until failures in the governing paradigm become so dire that only a real revolution can make a difference. 

  We have a revolutionary situation now in New Orleans, which certainly is a few cuts above Iraq.  Even if Iraq is hopeless, which I am convinced it is not, New Orleans could still become a model for the future.  Relevant position papers may be found in the “library” of The Center for Economic and Social Justice, http://www.cesj.org  The .Katrina road map is available at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/katrina-bushltr.html  (co,ver letter), and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/katrinaplan050907.html  (st,rategy paper), and has been available since only a few days after “Mother Nature” gave us a chance to introduce justice into American economic and political life.  The Islamic perspective has been given in various articles in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org in a ,presentation at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, May 28-29, 2004, entitled “The Just Third Way: Basic Principles of Economic and Social Justice,” http://www.cesj.org/thirdway/paradigmpapers/csid-040528.htm and i,n “The Abraham Federation: A New Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” http://www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/abrahamfederation-nk.html  .

  Why the “phoenix” symbolism for New Orleans, as well as for Iraq?

  In all cultures of humanity, the phoenix is a bird that symbolizes rebirth from the ashes of destruction.  In China it is called Fenghuang and in Persia it was called Huma.  It is the symbol of hope in a hopeless situation.  It is fundamental to every religion known to man because it symbolizes eternal truth and the power of human beings in reliance on the divine to realize this.

  Said to live for several centuries, which is the life of most civilizations, the phoenix is a bird with beautiful gold and red plumage.  At the end of its life-cycle the phoenix builds itself a nest of twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix arises.  In ancient Egyptian mythology, the new phoenix embalms the ashes of the old phoenix in an egg made of myrhh and deposits it in Heliopolis (Greek for City of the Sun).  The bird was also said to regenerate when hurt or wounded by a foe, thus being almost immortal and invincible — a symbol of fire and divinity.

  Phoenix, also known as Garuda in Sanskrit, is the mystical firebird which is considered to be the chariot of the Hindu God Vishnu.  Its reference can be found in the Hindu epic Ramayana.  The Greeks adapted the word bennu from the Egyptians and identified it with their own word phoenix, meaning the color red.  They and the Romans subsequently pictured the bird more like an eagle, which was then carried down to become the symbol of America. 

  According to the Greeks, the phoenix lived in Arabia next to a well that watered the tree of life.  From my wanderings in the Arabian desert twenty years ago I learned that the Beduoin still associate this tree of life with divine knowledge and inspiration.

  The symbol of the phoenix pervades Western culture, though few people know its esoteric meanings.  The phoenix myth is referred to in Shakespeare’s play, “The Tempest” (III.iii.27):

Now I will believe
That there are unicorns; that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne; one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.

  In Russian folklore, the phoenix appears as the Zhar-Ptitsa (Fire-Bird), immortalized in Igor Stravinsky’s ballet of the same name.  The phoenix appears on the city flags and seals of Atlanta, which was torched in General Sherman’s “March from Atlanta to the Sea,” and in the flag of San Francisco, which revived after the earthquake and fire of 1906 thanks to the self-help by the Italian immigrants who founded a bank, now known as Bank of America.  In Maine, Portland claims ownership of the phoenix symbol, which it adopted after the city was destroyed by fire four times. 

  The University of Illinois at Chicago, which has the largest student enrollment of any university in America, chose the phoenix as its mascot to symbolize both the rebirth of Chicago from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and its own rebirth from an earlier university founded by Stephen Douglas in 1859, with the support of my great-great grandfather Edwin Clark, after whom Clark Street was named in Chicago’s Loop.

  American popular culture is pervaded with symbols of the phoenix.  The Pokemon franchise includes two Pokémon based on the Phoenix, named Moltres and Ho-oh. The latter’s name is a Romanization of the name for the Chinese Phoenix, Houou.  The Harry Potter series, which outsells all other books in America’s popular culture, even has one book dedicated to this symbol, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  In Harry Potter’s world, phoenixes can carry enormous weights, their tears have extraordinary healing powers, and their song is said to strike fear into the hearts of the un-pure and courage into those who are pure of heart.

  In the Star Trek universe, which derives most of it symbolism from classical Islamic Sufism, Phoenix is the name given to the first man-made spacecraft to travel faster than light.  It is named Phoenix because in the Star Trek timeline the Earth was still recovering from the ravages of World War Three, and represents a reborn and bright future for humanity.

  In Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” the phoenix is used as a symbol for the rise and fall of civilizations.  The pattern of an over complacent and abusive society’s destruction yielding a fresh new start is compared to the Phoenix’s mythological pattern of consumption by flame, and then resurrection out of the ashes.

  We now need a Phoenix strategy to rescue New Orleans and Iraq and the rest of the world from our current slow incineration as a perhaps necessary phase in a sudden rebirth toward peace through justice.