Thursday, May 12, 2011

We're being Morganza'd

Morganza...the name of a late nite UHF station (remember those?) horror movie host?
Or maybe a brand of shortening (remember that stuff?)?
Oh, yeah, Morganza, as in 'Morganza to the Gulf' hurricane protection levee for Terrebonne Parish, and as in "Morganza Spillway", a space dedicated to letting the waters have their way when the big rivers get full to save the cities, kind of like applying leeches to the face to prevent a problem in the groin...
Living in coastal Louisiana is becoming an annual exercise in irony, humility, blather, astonishment, surrealism and gamesmanship of the cruelist sort, a headlong pitch forward into the future, a lit cultural and economic fuse forever hissing toward....what? Gradual annihilation is what, but that's a whole nuther set of cyclopedias (remember those?)
back to Morganza...which has become the default term for the proposed levee system...never liked it, as it has nothing to do with south Louisiana, save being the place where the excess water may go; even suggested to the PowersThatB once they rename it "Terrebonne Levee System", which got a reaction of basically horror, because, as was explained, years have been spent pushing 'Morganza' and to rename it would be a disaster, etc;
So, we are opposites, polar, in that a Morganza is threatening to flood us from the North and West, and another Morganza is designed to protect us from storm surges from the Gulf;
Just another warm and sticky day on the inland coast...

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