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  3. Now the levee breach has been fixed. The people have been evacuated. Army Corps of Engineers magicians will pump the city dry, a

Now the levee breach has been fixed. The people have been evacuated. Army Corps of Engineers magicians will pump the city dry, a

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问题     Now the levee breach has been fixed. The people have been evacuated. Army Corps of Engineers magicians will pump the city dry, and the slow (but quicker than we think) job of rebuilding will begin. Then there will create a wall of illusion thicker than the new levees. The job of turning this national disaster into sound-bite-size commercials with somber string music will be left to TV. The story will be sanitized as America’s politicians congratulate themselves on a job well done. Americans of all stripes will demonstrate saintly concern for one another. It’s what’s done in a crisis.
    This tragedy, however, should make America take an account of itself. It should not allow the mythic significance of this moment to pass without proper consideration. Let the size of this cataclysm be assessed in cultural terms, not in dollars and cents of politics. Americans are far less successful at doing that, having never understood how the country’s core beliefs are manifest in culture—and how culture should guide political and economic realities. That’s the city of New Orleans can now teach the nation again as all are forced by circumstance to literally come closer to one another. I say teach again, because New Orleans is a true American melting pot: the soul of America. A place freer than the rest of country, where elegance met an indefinable wildness to encourage the flowering of creative intelligence. Whites, Creoles and Negroes were strained, steamed and stewed in a thick, sticky, below-sea-level bowl of musky gumbo. These people produced an original cuisine, an original architecture, vibrant communal ceremonies and an original art form: jazz.
    Their music explored irrepressibly from the forced integration of these castes to sweep the world as the definitive American art form. New Orleans, the Crescent City, the Big Easy—home of Mardi Gras, the second-line parade, the po’ boy sandwich, the shotgun house—is so many people’s favorite city. But not favorite enough to embrace the integrate superiority of its culture as a national objective. Not favorite enough to digest the gift of supersized soul internationally embodied by the great Louis Armstrong. Over time, New Orleans became known as America’s national center for frat-party-type decadence and (yeah, boy) great food. The genuine greatness of Armstrong is reduced to his good nature; his artistic triumphs are unknown to all but a handful. So it’s time to consider, as this great American city is rebuilt, exactly what this bayou metropolis symbolizes for the US.
    New Orleans has a habit of tweaking the national consciousness at pivotal times. The last foreign invasion on US, soil was repelled in the Crescent City in 1815. The Union had an important early victory over the South with the capture of the Big Easy in 1862. Homer Plessy, a black New Orleanian, fought for racial equality in 1896, although it took our Supreme Court 58 years to agree with him and, with Brown v. Board of Education, to declare segregation unequal. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formally organized in Orleans in 1957. The problem is that all Americans have a tendency to rise in that moment of need, but when that moment passes, fall back again.
    The images of a ruined city make it clear that the US needs to rebuild New Orleans. The images of people stranded, in shock, indicate that it needs to rebuild a community. The images of all sorts of Americans aiding these victims speak of the size of people’s hearts. But this time what’s needed is to look a little deeper. The US should use the resurrection of the city to reacquaint its citizens with the gift of New Orleans: a multicultural community invigorated by the arts. Forget about tolerance. What about embracing? This tragedy implores all to re-examine the soul of America. Its democracy, from the very beginning, has been challenged by the shackles of slavery. The parade of black folks across TV screens asking, as if ghosts, "Have you seen my father, mother, sister, brother?" reconnects to the still unfulfilled goals of the Reconstruction era. Americans always back away from fixing the nation’s racial problems. Not fixing the city’s levees before Katrina struck will now cost untold billions. Not resolving the nation’s issues of race and class has and will cost so much more.
Why does the author say that New Orleans is the soul of America?
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答案A true American melting pot: the soul of America. A place freer than the rest of country, where elegance met an indefinable wildness to encourage the flowering of creative intelligence. People produced an original cuisine, architecture and jazz.
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