Gustav exposes celebrity pretensions
September 4, 2008 - 3:19PM
Michael Lewis
I'm in New Orleans now, and have been since Hurricane Gustav crossed over Cuba, and got itself flattered by the mayor as the mother of all storms.
My hometown just missed being destroyed all over again by a hurricane, and the aftermath is interesting. On the one hand, it snaps right back to being its old charmingly ironic self. (Local walks into a French Quarter bar, sees a photographer from the Dallas Morning News fiddling with his equipment, and asks, ``Y'all get that picture of Anderson Cooper chiseling the levees to try to get them to break?")
On the other hand, for a brief period, it tries to figure out whether it is mainly relieved or mainly irritated by the inconvenience.
A city that has narrowly missed being wiped out is like an airplane that almost crashes. Everyone on board is at first only grateful to be alive, but then they get back to the safety of the terminal and within minutes are bitching and moaning about delays.
With next to no one in town there's next to nothing to do, and so I find myself torn between becoming America's first preppy looter, ransacking up-market haberdasheries for pink Oxford button-down shirts, and watching the mayor explain for the 10th time why it's a better idea for New Orleanians to stay away than to return. (It's amazing how much easier it is to govern a city when it has no people in it.)
That's when I remember Brad Pitt's project.
After Katrina devastated the Lower Ninth Ward in 2005, Pitt created a foundation, called Make It Right, dedicated to rebuilding the neighborhood. In came the press, up went the first of what were meant to be 150 environmentally friendly houses. It was great, actually. Pitt was using his attention-getting abilities to help people who had little capacity to help themselves.
Lower Ninth
The morning after the storm I drove over to the Lower Ninth Ward to see what had become of them.
News-camera crews film from the bridge over the canal that borders the place, but down on the ground in the Lower Nine there's not a soul in sight. The place is empty, and the handful of houses put up by Pitt's foundation rise silently out of empty fields and quiet desolation.
Then I spot him. On the porch of one of the houses stands a man with all kinds of weaponry: pistols on his hips, black semi- automatic rifle across his chest, various soldier-of-fortune- style war gear dangling from various hooks on his person.
``Hey,'' I say.
``Hey,'' he says back.
``Is this Brad Pitt's house?'' I ask.
``No, this house belongs to Angelina Jolie,'' he says.
`All that's hers'
I point to the house across the street. ``Is that Brad Pitt's?''
``No, that's Angelina Jolie's, too.''
I point to the other three houses in the cluster.
``Nope,'' he says, smiling, before I can ask the question.
``All that's hers, too.''
He's sweet-natured, it turns out, even chatty. He works for a private security firm, employed by Angelina Jolie. (She, by the way, couldn't be reached for comment). He'd been sent down to New Orleans right before the storm to protect her property. To stand guard.
And here he has stood for the past 2 1/2 days. All alone. In those 2 1/2 days he's seen not a single human being. I'm the first.
The house he's camped inside -- along with the others he's been assigned to guard -- is utterly exposed to the elements. They've all been designed to be storm resistant but they're not hurricane-proof and a really big hurricane, as Gustav was meant to be, would have wiped them off the map, and him with them.
Storm preparations
On top of that there's no evidence of the preparations that every New Orleans homeowner makes -- boards over the windows, for instance.
When I ask him, he insists he wasn't even a little bit frightened -- at least not until the animals left. It happened a few hours before the storm hit. One minute there were stray dogs, cats and even chickens on the street, and birds squawking in the trees; the next, total silence.
``The animals kinda freaked me out,'' he admits.
Think about it. Three years ago an entire section of a major American city was more or less wiped off the face of the earth. A rich and famous person came into the poorest part of this section and built quite nice houses so those poor people might return.
Then another storm hits. And the rich, famous person is clearly -- and probably rightly -- less worried about what the storm of the century might do to her property than she is about what the poor people might do.
She doesn't move to protect the buildings from the elements. Instead she acts to protect the buildings from the people she seeks to help. It isn't the weather we need to be worrying about; it's us.
So, I ask, ``Where's Brad Pitt's house?''
He points me down the road to a single, totally unguarded blue shack-like structure. It's dwarfed by the virtual village apparently controlled by his wife. There's another lesson in that. And a fact: Brad Pitt is not only handsome, but shrewd.
(Michael Lewis is a Bloomberg News columnist and the author, most recently, of ``The Blind Side.'' The opinions expressed are his own.)
http://business.theage.com.au/business/gustav-exposes-celebrity-pretensions-20080904-49mm.html
