The (unreasonable) argument for our existence.

• Author: Codrescu, Andrei
• Position: Sinking of New Orleans

The world's greatest cities shouldn't exist. Venice has been sinking for centuries. San Francisco straddles the San Andreas fault. New York is an irresistible multicultural target for haters of diversity and tolerance. Paris and Prague can be transformed into piles of cobblestones and barricades by revolutionary mobs. New Orleans is a bowl set amid barely contained waters in a fetid swamp.

One can make a rational argument against cities, to arrive in the end at the ultimate rational argument: cities shouldn't exist. From inadvisable geography to undesirable sociology, from the vicissitudes of nature to the ill-will of men, large concentrations of buildings and people do not make rational sense. The only sense that cities used to make was economic, but since the decentralization of economies by communication technology, even that argument no longer holds.

And yet, we love cities like Venice and New Orleans precisely for all the reasons they shouldn't exist. In fact, the more reasons we can make against their existence, the more we love them. Love diminishes in direct proportion to their reasonableness, so that perfectly unreasonable cities like New Orleans are considerably more lovable than safe cities that lie sprawling with all their strip malls showing on rock-solid plains made of dense comforts such as good schools, easy insurance, tamed rivers, and clean air. The majority of our citizens prefer to live in apparent safety in new suburbs rolled out at the end of good roads. There is nothing wrong with that, but safety isn't love. Prudence and duty are great qualities but they lack passion.

The romantic argument for New Orleans hardly needs to be made. The city speaks directly to people's unconscious desires through its appeal to the senses. Listening, hearing, tasting, seeing, daydreaming, losing control, breaking taboos, experiencing unconscionable delight and the proximity of danger, are common experiences for tourists. They love the city because it's the last party town left in an America that is increasingly efficient, puritanical, and unforgiving about any unauthorized uses of what used to be, but no longer is, "free time." Nobody in America today has any "free time": it is all being sliced thinner and thinner between the fierce competing demands of work and so-called "entertainment," which is nothing but frantic salesmanship. In a world that sucks every unstructured moment of one's day and night like a vampire, New Orleans offers to...