It took the savages less than sixty years to finish the job.

Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, (1947) — “The vandals and barbarians from the industrial word… (…) At the rate they are going, in another 100 years or so [try 60 years — in 2005! — the crazy chimp and his clique busy murdering New Orleans] there will be scarcely a trace or evidence on this continent of the only culture we have been able to produce — the rich slave culture of the South.

New Orleans worships the past, but it watches impassively as the barbarians of the future bury the past cynically and ruthlessly. When the beautiful French Quarter is no more, when every link with the past is destroyed, there will be the clean, sterile office buildings, the hideous monuments and public buildings, the oil wells, the smokestacks, the airports, the jails, the lunatic asylums, the charity hospitals, the breadlines, the gray shacks of the colored people, the bright tin lizzies, the streamlines trains, the tinned food products, the drug stores, the neon-lit shop windows to inspire the artist to paint… Or, what is more likely, persuade him to commit suicide.”