It’s so depressing to be represented in the media by cliches. When I heard that a Metairie beauty salon owner was going to be a contestant on CBS’ Big Brother 10, I was worried. When she dressed and talked like Bunny Matthews’ Nat’ly down to the leopard-print cat-eye sunglasses, I was so bummed. Once again, we look like a city of the self-consciously eccentric – a bunch of people trying too hard.

Then this morning on NPR, mystery writer Julie Smith was profiled. During the segment, she talks in faux-conspiratorial voice about Uptown mansions as places where lots of intrigue and secrets could live, and she describes the Algiers levee as “just a divine place to dump a body. If you should need to. I hope you never need to.”  Both could well be true, but the theatrical nature of her pronouncements and Big Brother‘s Renny make us sound like a city too in to our contrived eccentricity to deal with the most basic survival questions, including holding the government accountable for leaving us to die.