What Does it Mean to be Southern in 2018?

Some aspects of Southern life are nearly universal and date back to descriptions over a century old. Mark Twain briefly joined an ad hoc Confederate militia hunting for Yankees they never found, but in his description of their several-day adventure, after which Twain quit the militia, he describes the welcome and the breakfast the several members of the self-formed militia met at a farm house — a breakfast with eggs, fresh biscuits, grits, and two kinds of pig meat, butter and jam.  Big breakfasts are still a quintessential Southern experience today, and a century from now, Southerners will likely still eat big breakfasts. Southern life was and remains more about who you know than what you know in many areas of life, unlike life in New York, where personal connections open doors, but only competitive competency and some measure of luck keeps one in a job. Laws are more like rules of thumb down here, with privilege playing an unjust role in many individual circumstances, not just in matters related to race and class, but also whether your uncle Bill is still a county deputy. While that politic of relationship may change over time, I don’t expect to see it disappear during my lifetime. Other aspects of Southern life that seem perennial include a deep love for hound dogs, women who pay a great deal of attention to grooming, more than in other regions of the country, and a large gap between publicly-declared moral codes and private behavior — Southerners continue on the whole to sin on Saturday night at the honky-tonk and repent on Sunday morning in the church pew. That cognitive dissonance doesn’t seem headed out of town any time soon, though a girl can hope. The South has always worked hard but values leisure time, cherishing lazy afternoons. And I show myself as a Yankee every time I ask for “unsweet” iced tea — because iced tea without sweetener is just a Southern heresy. None of that is going away in the near future. These cultural phenomena are not universal.  Not every woman grooms for three hours before a date.  Not everyone loves a good hunting dog down here. But they are norms — and the South tends to change slowly when it changes at all.

White Southerners two years ago — how many feel this enthusiasm today?

Nobody in the land of political punditry was terribly surprised that formerly Confederate states voted for Donald Trump in the last election.  He was, after all, employing Goldwater’s “Southern Strategy” of race-baiting and xenophobia — and there are enough registered voters in the South who see brown people foreign and domestic as the reason things aren’t working out for them.  They believe their local jobs have gone to immigrants, rather than have been relocated overseas to countries where human rights are not respected.  They don’t distinguish clearly between the Islam of Malala Yousafzai, who got shot in the face by the Taliban, and the Islam of the member of the Taliban who shot her in the face, and rather than assuming that Malala’s Islam is the predominant view of the religion on matters personal and political, they assume, with a great deal of help from a fear-mongering television network, that it is the Taliban’s view that predominates (it does not). The Trump campaign message got rid of the dog-whistle in dog-whistle racism, as nothing could be clearer than declaring Mexican immigrants rapists with “some, I assume, are good people” tacked on at the end — translation: I know Mexicans are rapists, but I can only assume that this is not universal because I only see Mexicans as rapists. His calling women who opposed him “nasty” or  talking pejoratively about “blood coming out of her whatever” — that plays on old-school Southern sexism, applied by those who practice it in either smiling and condescending false chivalry toward “ladies,” and applied aggressively and menacingly toward women who have opinions that differ from their own — like the man from Alabama who called me a “cunt” recently for believing Roy Moore’s accusers.  Most men in the South seem to respect women, though they may not understand them all that well. But for a certain segment of the population of Southern states, the sexism and racism of the Trump campaign wasn’t a bug — it was a feature.  For some Southerners, some white Southerners, Trump’s call to make America great again was a call back to a social system that discounted the majority of the human race as child-like or inherently criminal. Not all Southerners ascribed to this vision of a great America, but enough did.

 

Neither was it a surprise to see a ban on transgender bathroom access emanating in the South. The South likes ladies a lot, but not ladies who used to be gentlemen. Regional fear-mongering made some fear rapists would use this as an excuse (despite a significant number of people reluctant to believe women who come forward to report rape as it is actually likely to happen. That such ideas would particularly take hold in small Southern towns is not surprising. The South was behaving predictably, showing a preference of traditional notions of gender and gender roles over any acknowledgment of changes actually taking place in their own communities. As Hannah Rosin showed in her book The End of Men, where big changes actually take place in what women do and what men do in the South at about the same rate as they do in the North, in the South, the rhetoric about gender remains largely unchanged in many communities — even if the majority of women in a Southern town work outside the home, the rhetoric about women’s roles sound like a reflection of expectations not lived for the last 50 years.

But then, as the nation polarized during and after the 2016 election, and intellectuals read Hillbilly Elegy in an attempt to understand what hit them, something shifted. Almost exactly a year ago, women all over the country, including in the South, marched in pink hats to reject the rhetoric of Trump and his political agenda for women, not just for women. When Trump signed an (unconstitutional) Muslim immigration ban, thousands of people spontaneously ran to the airport to protest, not just in places where one might expect leftist radicals, like San Francisco and New York, but at Atlanta and Kansas City airports as well. Was it Southern to reject the idea that Mexicans were rapists and Muslims? What had happened to the people who had overwhelmingly voted in Georgia, Alabama, and Missouri for the Trump agenda?

How many Southerners felt these men spoke for them?

Then, in Virginia, after a group of out-of-town Nazis arrived in Charlottesville to terrorize (and kill one of) their political opponents with the explicit approval of Donald Trump, who called them “very fine people,” it was as if a switch flipped. In that same Virginia, which had voted for Trump in 2016, the state flipped like a cosmic morality lesson.  Not only did they take the governor’s house, the lieutenant governor’s house, and the attorney general’s job, they (pending a court battle) seem to have taken the Virginia House of Delegates Republican majority away.  But it wasn’t just that the tide turned against Republicans. A man whose girlfriend had gotten shot ran against a pro-NRA candidate and won. A transgender candidate won against a man trying to ban her from certain bathrooms and won — not while talking about gender, while talking about traffic problems in the community. And multiple candidates of color won against overtly racist candidates. It was as if Virginia was as good as its slogan: it really was for lovers, not haters chanting “Jews will not replace us.”

 

And then there was Roy Moore, bless his heart.  He wore a cowboy hat inspired by Toy Story, waved a gun around at his rally, excused his predatory sexual behavior with teenagers by saying he always got a girl’s momma’s permission to date a high schooler before he did in his thirties, who got compared to Jesus (!) by pastors who saw him as a persecuted victim when (Republican) now-adult women came forward despite death threats (!) to talk about his sex crimes against them, and rode a horse he didn’t know how to ride to go vote for himself on election day.  He got beat by a guy who prosecuted the Birmingham Church KKK terrorist bombers The first Democrat to serve in the United States Senate to serve in decades just got sworn in a couple of hours ago.  Alabama’s politics have been ugly for quite some time, rife with corruption and race-baiting, much uglier than the good nature of most of the people of the state, but now, they have elected a man who is a pillar of the community and who has just hired one of the few African-American chiefs of staff on Capitol Hill.

What happened to the South? My own wonderful town, New Orleans, took down the Confederate monuments. They did this despite death threats to construction crews assigned to the work and menacing demonstrations by white supremacists from out of town — though not so far out of town as the Charlottesville protesters. KKK poster boy David Duke lives fifteen minutes away from what used to be called Lee Circle.  And New Orleans elected its first woman mayor.  Atlanta elected a black woman mayor. And when climate-denying crazy bag-lady-with-a-nice-blonde-blowout Ann Coulter asked whether having a lesbian mayor caused Hurricane Harvey to hit Houston, Texas resoundingly rejected her remarks. Yes, I’m talking about Texas, a place as Republican as a Mercury Astronaut drinking Tang astride an electric bull while Ted Nugent plays guitar!

Something happened in the South last year.  What exactly was it?

I have a theory. As a carpetbagger, I have had an outsider’s point of view as I reside below the Mason-Dixon line, and consequently, I believe I witnessed a cultural realization, however incident-specific and/or temporary it may be. As I observed earlier, the South talks a serious game of rigid cultural morality, but they don’t live out that morality as preached. In his book Everybody Lies Seth Sephens-Davidowitz confirms, for instance, that while Southerners are much more likely to say they don’t like homosexuality and don’t believe they know people who are homosexual, the South watches as much gay porn as the North does. While Southern pulpits speak passionately against heterosexual promiscuity, and pews are usually filled with people to shout “Amen,” the five states with the highest rates of STDs are all Southern. It’s as if Southerners like the abstract idea of an all-hetero-virgin-before-wedding-night community, but in life, they are not prepared to live out the moral standards they claim to espouse for themselves and want to impose upon everyone in America. Could it be that this gap between actually living out the imagined cultural standard in sexual matters and the standard itself exists in other parts of Southern thinking about social norms?

My theory is this: A lot of Southerners liked  the rhetoric of Donald Trump until somebody tried to live it out. Getting rid of Mexicans (remember — they’re rapists) might sound good until you see the picture of a child crying while his mother gets handcuffed by ICE. The idea of embracing something called “white pride” sounds appealing until you see those terrorists in khakis and Tiki torches attacking non-violent protesters in Virginia. Swaggering around calling women nasty sounds great until you realize the people calling others nasty are nastier than the accused women, and maybe you elected some. Banning transgendered people from bathrooms sounds like common sense until you meet an inoffensive customer at the big box store who isn’t allowed to use the restroom, and a mannish-looking biological woman gets arrested for using the ladies’ room, and all of a sudden what seemed like common sense seems unneighborly and unnecessary. We are more than fifty years since John Lewis crossed the bridge in Selma. A lot of Southern white people have forgotten what lived-out Southern bigotry looks like in person, and it isn’t great , it isn’t American, and seen up close, it won’t make America great again. Having seen it and confronting its real implications, many Southerners are quietly and privately revising their commitment to Trump’s stated values.

There are counterarguments to what I am saying.  The voters for Roy Moore were overwhelmingly white, and the voters for his opponent, newly-seated Senator Doug Jones were disproportionately black. Trump’s base has not eroded so much that he does command respect from about a third of Americans polled, and a lot of those people live in the South.  But a lot of people who weren’t involved, weren’t paying attention, shrugged their shoulders, talking about not trusting politicians are now paying attention, asking questions, getting organized, and going out to vote.

If making America great again means splitting up families, shaming peaceful members of the community who expose the truth of gender and sex in the South, insulting women who work and express opinions, and revering as contemporary role models people who fought to keep slavery, increasingly, Southerners are doing what Huckleberry Finn did when confronting his conscience about the runaway slave Jim. A month ago, when Steve Bannon said, “there’s a special place in hell for Republicans who don’t support Roy Moore,” Kyle Whitmire, an Alabaman journalist whose columns are picked up by multiple newspapers in the state, tweeted the famous words from Mark Twain’s great American novel out of the mouth of Huckleberry Finn in response to Bannon: “All right then.  I’ll go to Hell.”

This quotation from the novel about the moral growth of its unlikely hero suits the South in this time as perhaps never before. The South seems to be saying to itself “all right then.” Transgender people are against God’s law, and normalizing their lives is sinful? All right then.  I’ll go to Hell.  Gay couples want a wedding cake for a marriage or a respectful mortuary for a funeral, and gay marriage is unscriptural? All right then.  I’ll go to Hell. Women ought to know their place and not try to run things — after all, the Bible says, “Thou shalt not suffer a woman to teach”? All right then.  I’ll go to Hell. Treating undocumented immigrants is unpatriotic, and breaking up their families is legal? All right then. I’ll go to Hell.

The South as a whole may NOT have questioned the overarching validity of abstract stated goals of the campaign of Donald Trump, but one person by one, Southerners are walking away from the MAGA rally. Racism still exists in the South.  Sexism and homophobia still exist in the South.   An abiding belief that poor people are lazy still exists here, too. But Southerners are just not mean enough as a group to really get behind the lived-out oppressions this administration intends to enact if left unchecked. Perhaps more Southerners who voted for Trump heard “drain  the swamp” and thought the Donald had correctly diagnosed a problem, and he had conveniently blamed people that most Southern whites consider “other” for all of it. But when it comes to solutions, this administration offers few of them that Southerners seem prepared to abide.

All right then.

A Christmas Letter from Swamp Country

Dear Occupant,

I write this Christmas letter to brag to you about the various accomplishments of this year in my family in the hope of producing envy and covering up the severe dysfunction that has long-plagued my existence.

First, allow me to tell you about my perfect Southern husband.  He works at a petrochemical plant in an area with flooding, so rest assured, they used his body as a sponge to soak up all the chemicals that might have otherwise overflowed from vats. Then, speaking of sponges, he cow-boy-ed up all that pain of his work week into a beer guzzle down at the local pub that is too seedy to feel safe to women around here. At seven a.m., drinking in a bar in Louisiana is legal, so after a graveyard shift, my husband could tie one on, I tell you what. The good news is that because of the heady chemicals on his work clothes, I can never tell if that is PBR I smell or PCB. When he gets home and feels amorous, he starts singing that old Charlie Rich song, “Behind Closed Doors,” and that’s my cue to put on that lacy thing he got me out of some catalog years ago and blink my false eyelashes at him.

At my job at the library, we are pleased to report the number of death threats we got for carrying books that “make you queer” was not as high as the local television news reported. In fact, two of the people who called from burner phones who at first sounded menacing, it turned out that they just wanted to find out if there was a book where they could make somebody else queer (asking for a friend).  If they had not blocked the numbers they were calling us from, we might have introduced these two lovelorn boys to each other. The library is still the leading place in the Parish for the homeless to sleep during daylight hours, and old folks ask me to help them find the tax forms. We have children’s book clubs with a couple of kids in every grade, and we even have some adults check out books, too — mostly Stephen King novels and books on how to repair boat motors. Actually, those two category of books get checked out together often enough I wonder if somebody jammed up their motor in the lake while fighting off some kind of lost monster manatee loose and bloodthirsty in our local swampwater.

Meanwhile, my pit bull, Cruiser, just graduated with honors from LSU in developmental psychology and has been accepted as a therapy dog at Johns Hopkins, where he will take on the role of pediatric psychiatry resident, assisting clinical therapists in their important work with troubled toddlers. We just bought him a lab coat and stethoscope (see enclosed photo) in anticipation of this.  We weren’t terribly surprised by his career starting off so well.  After all, it wasn’t that long ago that when we were training him to play dead, he fetched us a copy of The Times-Picayune turned to a full-page article on the state legislature, so we knew he was gifted. We couldn’t be more proud.

We are equally pleased to report that our Daschund Oscar was acquitted of all charges in that double homicide at a liquor store on Tchoupitoulas Street. The defense attorney was able to demonstrate to the jury that without opposable thumbs, Oscar was incapable of loading and firing the shotgun found at the scene of the crime covered in his paw prints. The surveillance collar he was forced to wear has now been replaced with a flea collar. We are so proud of little Oscar, who has now sought therapy for his anger issues and very well may have inspired our other dog’s career choice. We continue to fully support his Second Amendment rights, especially in times like these.

Meanwhile, we have prepared the shack here with traditional Christmas decorations.  We fished out a log from the tide water here and have sprayed it with glitter paint from the craft shop.  We have hung nautical ornaments made with old fishing flies and a glue gun. Tante Suzie brought us her annual Christmas beignets, and we are making Uncle Pierre’s Christmas shrimp gumbo as we listen to Michael Doucet sing us “Trinquez Trinquez.”

Christmas is such a great time!  We can forget who voted for who and why.  We can forget that Congress just raised taxes on people in the Bayou to line the pockets of the Koch brothers.  We can forget lots of other things that I have already forgotten — one involved a broken bottle and a cracked head — I don’t remember whose. I’m sure I wasn’t even there that night.

So Merry Christmas.  I hope you sent out a letter with as many tall tales as this one. Make people hate you on the day we remember our Savior’s birth.

Lessons from God — American politics and regional experiences

Imagine for a moment that all Americans believed in some kind of divine, at least in Jefferson’s “nature and nature’s god” from the Declaration of Independence.  Imagine now that all of us here also really believed what we say unkindly to those in trouble: everything happens for a reason.  How might such a set of universally held beliefs affect our regional politics?

I believe that when disaster strikes, especially when that disaster defies explanation, the rational mind shuts down and looks for paranormal interventions, whether we mean it to or not.  As a Christian, I have no trouble believing in the divine, but I also know that I have an irrational side that does not square with my theology, that believes that when a tornado warning goes off and a funnel cloud appears in the distance, no mater how much I know about meteorology, that the rotating winds are there as God’s thumb to squash me like a bug. No amount of schooling, no amount of storm-tracking by satellite, can prevent me from holding this view. There is part of me that cannot reconcile my immediate anxiety to a clear-headed rational thought.

During the Middle Ages, people made no pretense of rational thought in such circumstances, however resigned they were to meeting their Maker. In Palermo, during a horrible outbreak of plague, people wrote of seeing the plague appear in the form of a large black dog dressed as a bishop, cutting people down with a broadsword.  In Sweden, the plague was sighted as  beautiful maiden who waved a deadly saffron-colored scarf into one window or another in a village, causing all inside to die. In the absence of any germ theory or immunology, people did what they could in their terror to understand the emotionally incomprehensible.

During the Middle Ages, people frightened by the plague hallucinated phenomena that could allow them to understand how one person could die while another lived.

Let’s be honest. For all our Doppler 4000 and our antibiotics, we’re no better. We respond to disaster viscerally, and because individually we are largely unable to control events larger than ourselves, we look to God.  It has often enough been said that there are no atheists in foxholes. Allow me to submit to you that in America, whatever our pretense of intellectualism or agnostic yogic meditative practices, there are no atheists in America when a disaster hits us, and consequently, we form ideas about the theodicy — the “how could God let this happen here” — of such events. As some events are more likely to happen in the North than in the South, in the East than in the West, regional concepts of the divine, not the church divine, the scriptural divine, but the irrational-brain-invented notions of god and that idolatrously constructed god’s mysterious ways, that influence how we understand commonweal and political responsibilities in the face of catastrophe.

In industrialized cities, wealthier people understood that letting the poor die of yellow fever without care endangered their own health.

In Philadelphia and in Chicago, it became clear that a system of government that could prevent and extinguish fires would be useful. It was clear that if Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked a lantern in a shed, the whole town would suffer. In New York and Boston, it became clear that some form of sanitation and public health system would be better than not having one.  While the pilgrims believed in an Abrahamic covanential sort of responsibility toward one’s neighbor, particularly towards one’s pious and hard-working neighbor who fell ill, in New York, the motives for this were different.  There, it became clear to the very wealthy that sometimes even when one leaves town during an outbreak of yellow fever, one might catch it anyway from one’s butler or one’s laundress. Hence, having health clinics for the poor might secure the health of the wealthy and powerful. Either way, in major American cities, we are all our brothers’ keepers even today. We understand that an attack from unseen forces on one of us is likely a harbinger of trouble for us. We show up to liberate people from airport jail during a fascist Muslim ban.  We dig through the rubble of the World Trade Center. We make condoms free during the AIDS epidemic. We make sure every building has a fire escape on it, and if need be, a water tank as well, so that Mrs. O’Leary’s cow can’t harm anyone but itself.

This is not what disaster teaches the irrational mind of Americans outside of sardine-packed cities, particularly not in the South, where tornadoes and hurricanes are the most common mass tragedies.

A storm hits one place and misses another — are we spared catastrophe by our innate virtue?

Take last night.  My husband and I hunkered down in New Orleans with our two dogs and more starchy food and alcohol in the house than we commonly have, cases of bottled water, and flashlights. We removed outdoor hanging plants from hooks and packed up lawn furniture. Why? Because Hurricane Nate was headed for us. Why? Because Hurricane Nate was supposed to land on us as a category two disaster. The mayor Mitch Landrieu wisely told us to stay indoors after seven pm.  He told people repeatedly not to go surfing on Lake Catherine — apparently a hurricane jackass dare. He called for a mandatory evacuation of three neighborhoods on the far-eastern side of town. We were battened-down.  We were prepared.

And then, at the last possible minute, the storm turned Eastward, away from us. We were spared from all disaster. I saw a rainbow in the sky. I knew we were fine.

Here is the insidious lesson that might be learned from the irrational-brain-god about this event, one that might serve to explain a lack of general compassion on the part of some for the problems of others, particularly those poorer than we are: We might learn that this god spared us because we are somehow better than our neighbors in his eyes.

We hear the occasional crack-pot preacher claiming Houston got flooded because it elected a lesbian mayor, that New Orleans has too much decadence in it, and that caused Katrina. I’m not really talking about those losers who say this. I think that the frightened human mind cannot quite help momentarily thinking that the disaster that narrowly missed us and hit another is a confirmation that we are just in the hands of a proactive and highly insightful deity who knew that the person whose house got clobbered by a tornado either had fantastic insurance and would get a much better house or was sinful in ways that we weren’t, and that’s why our house was spared. The lesson here is the opposite of the lesson learned in the industrial city.  In a rural community, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicks a lantern in a shed, and the shed burns down, maybe her cows get loose, and her son gets scolded for sleeping in the shed drunk with a lantern that could catch the hay on fire. The person who got sick from yellow fever whose nearest neighbor lived five miles away probably didn’t spread the disease.  They won’t even know he’s dead until he’s half decomposed. The irrational brain divine tells us to believe in ourselves, in our own virtues, in such circumstances.  While this is not scriptural — Jesus says to us that rain falls on both the wicked and the just — it is an almost inescapable human reflex, one that is destructive to our Republic.

There are cynical politicians in Washington bought up by a few wealthy and greedy megalomaniacs who are willing to demand help for Katrina and withhold it for Sandy because it won’t directly benefit their districts and will cost their patrons more in taxes. They are what we call down here common trash scalawags, and I am not worried about them because I believe (despite recent political rallies) they are few in number. I worry, though, about people who refuse to learn either from the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, or rational and secular humanism that they ARE their brothers’ keeper, that if one of us burns down, we all do, that a flood in Biloxi, is a flood in New Orleans, is a flood in Houston, is a flood in Miami, is a flood in San Juan. How many of us are willing, relieved that we were spared, to share the burdens of others at a distance?

I am sitting writing this now in my un-flooded living room, my pit bull asleep on the love seat, one of the hands typing this intermittently reaching into a bag of starchy snack food that was supposed to sustain me in the event of disaster that never arrived. I feel comfortable. Two hundred miles away, there are sixty thousand people without power. That’s where the storm hit. Even as I send disaster relief, there is a small, barely conscious part of myself that wants to congratulate me for my moral hygiene and clever foresight that I was not the victim here. I need to smash that idol — right after I eat this bag of puffy starch sticks.

Markup: Why We Need to Call our Senators Every Day This Week and Next

This is the crest of arms of my old school when I was a kindergartner in England (no, not Hogwarts).

Non Progredi est Regredi — Not to move forward is to go backwards — was the motto of my English school where I attended kindergarten and the equivalent of first grade, Danesfield Manor School in Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, about an hour outside of London. My father had a job predicting the impact of international oil production for Shell Oil in London, and in the 1970s, when I was sent to Danesfield in a blue pinafore and school blazer with a cute straw hat during the spring months, the place operated like a Dickensian panopticon (though now, it seems more progressive, diverse, and experimental than what it was). Each morning in chapel where we intoned a vague Anglican prayer after an off-key Anglican hymn I never knew, the head mistress, Miss Kate, a woman with a tight bun who truly never seemed to smile, had the older students conduct a reading of the marks.

How I dreaded hearing this recitation of the marks! Each of the three mark readers had a little red notebook from which they recited in a clear but dreary monotone, that always when a bit like this:

I used to dress like this at school — only back then Danesfield Manor School made girls wear a straw hat with a blue ribbon.

“Forgetfulness marks for the day: Jane Emerson, 1 forgetfulness mark. Simon Smith, 2 forgetfulness marks…..Bad marks for the day: “Josephine Madison, 1 bad mark. Dicken Henry, 4 bad marks.”

And when Miss Kate heard of a student who had received anything more than two bad or forgetfulness marks, she would make someone like poor Dicken, who was always getting bad marks, stand before the rest of us and the entire faculty and her own merciless gaze, stand there hands clasped in front of him like Oliver Twist bereft of his empty gruel bowl, and attempt to explain himself.

“How do you account for your four bad marks yesterday, Dicken? I understand you stole a classmate’s pencil and called him a very bad word!”

Dicken would inevitably stammer out in a fearful soprano, “I don’t know Miss!  I don’t know why I did that!”

Oh! How I felt for Dicken!  How I was horrified that I might ever have a mark read against me!  I was never in league of pencil-stealers, nor did I know any bad words yet, but I might have gotten a forgetfulness mark, as I had neglected to put away a coloring book once, and I had left my sweater outside on a bench at lunch time. Oh — to have one’s name spoken in the monotone of obloquy of chapel first thing in the day! What could be worse, I thought?

At five, I could not have imagined the shamelessness of Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader from Kentucky, who is determined to commit an act of perfidy against Americans, worse than stealing a pencil, very much worth the utterance of bad words. He has orchestrated a legislative process in the shadows to remove healthcare from over twenty million Americans in order to give the richest one percent of Americans a hefty tax break. Instead of an open debate with public hearings in the light of day about a bill that will materially change one-sixth of the American economy, he and a few nefarious co-conspirators are behind closed doors, marking up a bill that will remove coverage for birth control (though it would seem Viagra will remain covered), mental health, hospital births, and many other needed treatments.  Rather than allowing a full airing of their activities with a fulsome debate about their merits, this dirty dozen Republican senators, under McConnell’s bulging and watchful eye, will execute the bill with no meaningful debate, ripping care away from poor children, the elderly, and the working poor.

How many bad marks would Mitchell McConnell receive, Miss Kate? I would like to think you would have made your face as flint in light of his misdeeds.

Senator Dr. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), is perhaps the only doctor in America who is willing to endorse the Republican plan to leave tens of millions of Americans without health insurance.  The AMA, hospitals, AARP, nursing associations — they think his ideas are irresponsible.

Meanwhile, senators are claiming that their phones aren’t ringing about this. I find that hard to believe, as I know many people who have called Bill Cassidy, the senior senator from Louisiana, the Dr. Mengele of this healthcare, or as political commentator Jon Favreau calls it, wealthcare regression, has had his Washington office on voicemail only for days. At my other senator, John Kennedy (no, alas, not that John Kennedy, and not a worthy namesake) had a chipper intern answering calls one day recently, but yesterday, his phone went to voicemail as well.  We have been calling, and they have “forgotten” to pick up the line.  Is it because they want to “forget” to cover 23,000,000 Americans, close to half a million of whom reside in their state?

How many forgetfulness marks is that, Miss Kate?  Half a million? What kind of paddling or detention would that get the Senators from Louisiana?  Why are they not worried about the blood on their hands if this bill passes?

As Danesfield taught me so young, non progredi est regredi —  in 2010, Congress wisely established a national healthcare system as almost every single industrialized country has done, an imperfect system, but one that has at least improved upon the no-system system, where the shoe-shine guys in front of Grand Central Station could only get healthcare in the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital, where people lost their homes because they couldn’t afford cancer treatments for their mothers, where children when without needed visits to the doctor so that the family could eat. What the Republicans have been lobbied to do by the insurance industry, big pharma, and sundry billionaires with pathological greed, is to eliminate even this imperfect system so that the billionaire class pays an even lower percentage of their gains than the workers for minimum wage.

Non progredi est regredi — not to go forward with better coverage is to go backwards, fatally for many.

So what can we do? We must make them know we will hold them accountable, be the Miss Kate of their five year-old consciences, surely the last time that they felt them keenly in some cases.  Call the Senate switchboard twice today and every day for the next couple of weeks to get connected to your two senators, wherever you live in the country.  Their telephone number is (202) 224-3121.  Tell them that all Americans need healthcare and deserve full coverage from a healthcare system.  If you know somebody who may die from their schemes to enrich the already-rich, let them know all about that.  Read their bad marks aloud. Do not let them forget who they work for — you.

Non progredi est regredi — we won’t go back to a Dickensian era where the young heroine dies in the poorhouse, no doctor to help. Americans deserve better.

Louisianans Might Be Crazy — But We’re Not Stupid

The state of Louisiana is famous for its eccentrics.  Yes, New York has a glorious history of schizophrenics muttering to themselves in the ATM vestibules and in subway cars, yes. San Francisco practices freak-flag forms of politically inflected mania, but Louisiana, particularly New Orleans, is proud of its deep heritage of lunatics on the loose.

Indeed, the South as a whole does not disown its lunatics but makes room for them at the Easter Brunch table.

“Miz Johnson has her ways,” parents explain to children about the neighbor who stands on her front porch screaming about alien abductions. Boo Radley doesn’t get chased out of town in To Kill  a Mockingbird. He becomes the subject of a small town’s most graphic and gothic legends while he keeps his own crazy counsel.

Miz Johnson has her ways.

In New Orleans in particular, it becomes hard to distinguish the lunatic from the merely fabulous. The people who shout at invisible oppressors, the people who dress like Napoleon and claim his identity are all part of an ecosystem of local color. Far from fleeing the mad neighbor, the people of New Orleans embrace these people as a contribution to tourism. While many people might be diagnosable or diagnosed, the citizens of New Orleans are less interested in what is wrong with the crazy man on the street corner than they are in his ephemeral passage between the frontier of respectable reality and disreputable fantasy. New Orleans has made this transgression into an attraction.

In a red state such as Louisiana, and given all I have said above about local lunacy, it should surprise nobody that the state legislature is considering budget cuts to mental health programs that benefit most particularly the schizophrenic and bipolar. The hope of such programs is to medicate those who may be medicated out of, say, homicidal tendencies.  The state is also trying to limit its highest-in-the-country incarceration rates, so I am assuming that the wisdom of the legislature is not to criminalize the mentally incompetent but to allow them to offer more Jeremiads in Audubon Park to passers by, to take a permanent Mardi Gras vacation from the normative.  Outside the city, I suppose the hope must be that they will create new attractions in swamp country.  Nat Geo’s Swamp People can only attract so many tourists to visit the mosquitoes and alligators of the state’s wetlands, but what if a Fais-do-do — the traditional Cajun dance party popular in many parts of the state — could turn into a Fais-cray-cray? Would tourists from Michigan paddle out in a pirogue to take a look at that, buy local crawfish — for such a festival we could actually stoop perhaps to calling them CRAY fish like the Yankees call them — and support jam-jar bars in the bayou? So a few more people get shot in Baton Rouge by lunatics on the loose — will the police even notice? What could that do for the tourist industry around Louisiana State University campus?

Admittedly, it is cheaper for the state to pay for medication for the seriously mentally ill who have fallen into deep difficulty than to pay to incarcerate murderers or to investigate missing persons — unless you see this as a burgeoning cottage industry that no good capitalist would ever want to regulate with Lithium and the occasional straight jacket. After all, Laissez-faire economics, isn’t that a CAJUN term for making a buck every which way?

It is time for me to stop my “modest proposal” shtick and admit that I think cutting what meager help that exists for the mentally ill is a losing proposition.  It’s crazy. But the Louisiana State Legislature, bless its heart, seems to be willing to sing along with the Louisiana State University Tiger Marching Band’s peppy rendition of the Billy Joel tune:

You may be right. I may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for.

I for one would be willing to pay a little more in taxes to make sure the dangerously mentally ill got the help they needed, to provide family counseling in under-served communities in the state, to help those of us who do not sublimate our depression and anxiety in writing or jazz to get a therapist.  But then again, like Billy Joel, a New Yorker, I come from a place where it is expected that the mentally ill have more than “their ways,” that they have a counselor as needed. New Yorkers — what did they do after 9/11?  They got everybody who wanted one a therapist for free.  They knew we had all been through a trauma.  What does New York do when it is upset? It talks to somebody about it, seeks help. Louisiana isn’t so sure it needs help. It is willing to live with the crazy within its borders.

The people of Louisiana have been collectively traumatized in recent years by needing to escape storms in shelters like this one.

One thing, however, that Louisianans know first-hand is the need to handle large community crises.  These normally come to the people of the state in the form of weather. Katrina traumatized all of the Gulf of Mexico.  Last year’s floods displaced many people in the center of the state, people who may not yet have moved back into their homes. The people of Louisiana are possibly crazy, but they’re not stupid. They are not willing to bet against the entirety of the scientific community regarding weather patterns they themselves have just barely survived and declare that climate change just can’t be real. Governor Edwards has repeatedly put out statements about the current Federal government’s proposed cuts to programs needed to mitigate climate change issues in the coast lands of the state. Mayor Landrieu of New Orleans has pledged to meet Paris Accord climate change standards whatever Washington may say. If scientists say we cannot afford to get more than two degrees Celsius hotter on planet Earth, people in Southern Louisiana in particular understand how hot it can get, and the whole community is willing to work to prevent additional disasters being visited upon the state.

In this, I believe I see the outline of a bipartisan state legislature budgetary agreement. Perhaps we could agree that for one year the State of Louisiana could send all its mental health funding to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to treat one person in particular suffering from delusions that are actually hurting the international tourist trade.  This individual believes that the former President was from Kenya, that crowd sizes are not what the rest of us see, that the FBI director told him he wasn’t under investigation and told him this multiple times, that “covfefe” is a word, that he has the best solutions, that he alone can fix the problems of this country, that factual news is fake news, that we aren’t noticing that he is planning  to cut his own taxes at the expense of poor children and the elderly in our state, and that we were glad when he showed up in the flood zone against the governor’s request so that rescuers could continue to get help to people literally stranded on rooftops so that a billionaire could bring us a few hundred dollars’ worth of children’s games.  Some lunatics are too dangerous even for Louisiana, and Louisianans are smart enough to realize that his plans need  to be stopped so that we can continue to live our eccentric lives down here.

Taking Down Confederate Idols to Raise Up Southerners of Today

To my blog followers, it must feel like I woke up after a three-month Mardi Gras Bender, a Rip Van Winkle to a cocktail they serve down on the French Quarter called the Grenade, and now instead of a walk of bead-bespangled post-Mardi-Gras shame, I am crawling back to work trying to act nonchalant, saying, like a good Southern belle might say after a lost weekend, “I don’t remember WHAT-all happened last night!”

Indeed, I am back after a hiatus inspired less by alcohol than post-election malaise and an onslaught of other responsibilities.  I am awake, no longer beaded like a burlesque dancer on a Bourbon Street stripper pole, not that I’ve ever SEEN a stripper pole on Bourbon Street — I just can’t remember a thing from last night!  I must have fallen asleep without any shenanigans or hoo-haw — I am a lady, not so much Southern as Belle, not so much Belle as baller, not so much baller as beatified. I am back to talk more about the South through the eyes of a Yankee invading the Confederate ruins, much like my ancestor did, only instead of a gun, I bring a book, a blog, and I blow kisses. Hi again!

I am waking up a bit dazed behind Confederate Hall off of Lee Circle. I have a vague memory of Mardi Gras.

What happened to Mardi Gras, you ask? Like a good Southern Belle post-bender, I secretly remember EVERYTHING that happened last night, even though I pretend not to. Nevertheless Mardi Gras is a mirage, a Brigadoon community that emerges from the mist every year.  Here are things I remember:

• I was not twenty feet from Harry Connick, Jr., truly, who was gorgeous in a tuxedo, ageless like a Brigadoon brigand.
• I saw a woman dressed as a water lily riding her bicycle which she had papier-mache-ed into the shape of a hippo.
• I saw men dressed like harlequins carrying flambeaux.
• I saw a semi-truck transformed into a giant tsunami on which rode Poseidon and a crew of Greek oarsmen.
• I saw a mermaid sprout legs and dance to a Louis Armstrong song.
• I saw a famous chef riding a street car covered in disco balls.
• I saw trinkets flying in the air, tossed out in largesse to strangers.
• I saw men dressed as skeletons brandishing signs that said, “Make America Great Again.”
• I saw men dressed as Zulu warriors marching with spears brandished under a pedastaled statue of Robert E. Lee.

And therein lies my subject, gentle reader, as I begin again in my post-Ash-Wednesday tone. After the Brigadoon mirage of Mardi Gras receded, the Zulus turned to ordinary neighbors, mostly of color, and the Statue of Robert E. Lee remained looming above them, an enduring menace in a town where police brutality can still occur killing people of color, a symbol that says to every person of color, “know your place — it hasn’t changed since before the Yankees took back the town, even if y’all invented Jazz and whatnot.”

Sunday the White Supremacists from out of town came to tell the people of New Orleans that they had to keep a statue standing that they don’t want any more.

The people of New Orleans do NOT want to keep General Lee standing above them in a present-tense vigil.  New Orleans is entirely comfortable with a historical context for General Lee, General Beauregard, and Jefferson Davis, champions of the plantation system, willing to pour out the blood of poor white men to defend it to keep black folks legally nothing more than agricultural equipment.  They have a museum that wrestles with Confederate memories — We don’t know WHAT-all happened on the grounds of Oak Alley plantation!  We just woke up here! Such statues are welcome in an examination of that history.  But the people of New Orleans, under Mayor Mitch Landrieu, have decided to make the past the past, whatever William Faulkner said about the past. They are taking down statues that glorify these men, as today, they do not represent the values of my wonderful adopted home town.

The Take it Down NOLA movement held a parade to celebrate the taking down of these monuments two days ago, and they were met by protesters carrying white nationalist symbols who almost all came from out of town. An hour north of here, The Advocate reports, white supremacists hand out flyers in Mandeville. David Duke lives in Metairie, about as far as Newark is from NYC. Lots of KKK recruitment goes on across the Bonnet Carre Spillway in northern Louisiana parishes, but this is New Orleans, a blue dot in a red state.  Thanks to the vigilance of a very cool-headed police team, little violence took place, but a heated argument between those who treasure those dead white men and those who refuse to kiss the dust between their toes ensued.

I may be foggy-headed from the haze of a Mardi Gras honeymoon with my new home town, but don’t these battle reenacters know that the principal of any home is that you need to remove the junk of the past in order to redecorate and reorganize?

There is plenty of room in the South for a new definition of whiteness, of Southernness.  We see this embodied in people like Sally Yates of Georgia, like James Carville, like Emeril Lagasse, like Harry Connick, who really ought to reappear in this blog entry in his tux and sing a song for me — but I shake my head clear of that mist again. The new South is filled with interesting, inventive, progressive, generous white people. It’s the heavy burden of these old dead white men who were advocates for a perpetual genocide of black people that makes the South less glorious than it ought to be now.  With its many beauties, its amazing wealth of natural resources, its many musical idioms, its great writers, its gallantry, its faith — the South could actually be the richest, most wonderful part of the country if it would stop trying to hang onto an old hierarchy as if it represented anything other than a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. If the Southern Belle, awake from her bourbon bender, actually told the truth about who was with who doing what last night, the chiffarobe could get dusted out and converted into an office organizer to get new work done.

To my Southern neighbors, beloved all, I urge you to embrace your best present-tense selves.  I am a carpetbagger, still misty-eyed from Mardi Gras, but when I look at y’all, all y’all, I see a region brimming with potential, with a better nature upon which I call now.  Be the sons and daughters of a South that refuses to define itself in terms of color lines. Be the South that makes great gumbo, that grabs huge cat fish out of the swamp for dinner, that plays the best dance music in the history of the world, that knows how to sweet talk a lady and make her forget herself, that brews the best bourbon, that knows like New Orleans knows, that less is never more. More is more, and still more is still more, and more amity is more amity, more peace is more peace, more hope is more hope, and more justice is more justice.

Now that I’m awake again, or perhaps I mean woke, it’s time we take down these old men and stick them in the museum where they belong. Let’s make room for new heroes, ones whom all the South can celebrate without pain.

 

The Word of Our Testimony — Writing the World we Want into Existence

Yesterday, I attended the Writers Resist event in New Orleans. PEN organized such events all over the country, as many writers are concerned that the new administration will censor words and limit access to the press.  The alt-right has tried to characterize the writers of our media as “lugenpresse,” a Hitlerian term used to call the media that criticized the dictator “lying press.”  We declared collectively that we would sooner call them  “Wahrheitsgemäße Presse,” or truth-telling press. We came to listen to words that would tell the truth and give us the sense, as all good writing does, that our own thoughts are not held in isolation, that we have kindred spirits that transcend geography and time.

Writers Resist New Orleans, January 15, 2017. It’s remarkable how a room full of writers looks the same whether it is in New Orleans, New York, or the New Hebrides.

Forrest Farjadian, a school interpreter and assistant, sat next to me and told me he hoped to receive poetic inspiration. Indeed, the words spoken were adamant and unapologetic. Authors recited included Audre Lorde, June Jordan, first-person accounts of torture at Guantanamo, contemporary Syrian poetry, letters from elementary school students who are worried about the incoming administration’s intentions toward people of color, and even J.K. Rowling, for whom magic is a metaphor for the freedom of creativity.

Readers at Writers Resist New Orleans, January 15, 2017

Sadly no magic wand, no “Accio Hillary” could take away the spectre of Voldemort that hangs over the future, but not in New Orleans, as not even voodoo curses stick for very long in such a festive town. The Art Garage was filled with people of every ethnicity, women in head scarves, men of color with long beards, lesbians holding hands, Latinas in leather jackets, white men in hipster jeans and glasses. The readers were gender-diverse and racially mixed. The readings all pointed heterogeneously to one conclusion — the words we speak and write are testimonies to combat dark nights of the national zeitgeist. Indeed, we were the nightmare embodied of at least a few of the stadium rally-goers who wore obscene t-shirts chanting “lock her up.” We are the cultural elite that they cannot understand, smugly vegan, hemp-woven accessories, internationally minded, welcoming of difference, brainiac urbanites. How different we are from they are, and how frightened each faction defining America is from one another.

All we can promise to do is to keep thinking freely, keep writing despite pressures to the contrary, keep producing evidence that we will not be silenced.

Joan of Arc as Inkblot — What She Symbolizes Today and Where She Symbolizes It

On March 22, 1429, Joan of Arc wrote to the head of English occupying forces in the city of Orleans and told him that God was giving him exactly one chance to surrender the city to her, a fourteen year-old girl dressed in armor, the equivalent of drag king attire at the time, as women were not trained to be soldiers. “Faites raison au Roi du ciel, rendez à la Pucelle qui est envoyée ici par Dieu, le Roi du ciel, les clés de toutes les bonnes villes que vous avez prises et violées en France. Elle est ici venue de par Dieu pour réclamer le sang royal.” — Do right by the King of Heaven. Give back to the Maiden who is sent by God, the keys of all the good cities that you have taken and raped in France. She is come here by God to defend royal blood.. The English general in command laughed at the letter, though she said he would surrender Orleans peacefully to her that day or after bloodshed the next day.

The next day, to his astonishment, he surrendered Orleans to Joan.

The real Joan of Arc was a distorted fun-house mirror for the politics of the fifteenth century. She hasn’t changed a bit in that regard today.

For the people of the Late Middle Ages, Joan was either a great saint or a horrible witch, a nasty woman. Though within a generation of her execution Joan was exonerated of all charges and her inquisitor charged with heresy for ever bothering her, at the time of her death, they burned her at the stake for daring to dress like a man. The heresy charges couldn’t stick; Joan’s theology was conventional if eccentric in the extreme. The only policing that could kill her under rule of law was the fashion police. She wore armor, and the sentence for that was death.

Today, I submit to you that she remains a political figure who operates something like an ink blot. What is in the heart of the beholder reflects the interpretation, even the reenactment, of Joan’s unusual story.

For the people of New Orleans, Joan of Arc is a symbol of French heritage and the traditions of an inclusive and costume-loving city. Her arrival right after epiphany marks the beginning of carnival season.

In New Orleans, rather than old Orleans, Joan remains a powerful symbol.  As the commander of the battle of Orleans and its hero, as well as the patron saint of France, it is easy to understand her potent symbolism for a town named for the place of her victory. She is an old French symbol for what one man I met called the capitol of a nation that never came into being, a new France on the Gulf of Mexico. This past weekend was the annual Joan of Arc parade, a parade to mark the official beginning of carnival season in New Orleans (yes, it’s a whole season down here, not a day, not even a week). People disguised in medieval costumes parade through the French Quarter, where they share a vin d’honneur toast with the head of the French consul, a priest from the Saint Louis cathedral blesses the crowd’s paper machie swords, and a general party in the carnival style. This is odd, really, as Joan of Arc was not what Bakhtin called “carnevalesque.” She was anti-libidinous, a virgin who remained so in order to retain the purity of her angel voices. Then again, she got killed for being in drag, and there are a lot of people in this town who might sympathize.  She was an uppity woman of the first order, and people here like women who know their own minds and aren’t afraid of much. So while she might not have invented Mardi Gras and would never have taken her top off if someone threw her some beads, she fits right in here.

Here, Joan is a symbol of French heritage of the city but not of a fierce French nationalism. While the occasion of a blessing at the cathedral, she is nevertheless ecumenical. The people who put on this annual parade are a social club, not a religious sisterhood. The Krewe de Jeanne d’Arc claim their mission includes people of different religious and ethnic backgrounds and attempts to encourage artistry and revelry. They are interested in fun, not fundamentalism, as is in fact all of New Orleans. This is, after all, a city with pirate heritage, not just French heritage, and if a gal shows up in the Vieux Carre with a kind of butch haircut dressed as a guy, one hardly notices. As all of New Orleans revelries, the Joan of Arc parade is inclusive and frolicking. Joan symbolizes the old French ways of the city in the hands of the gender-complicated, a place of liberation from oppression not so much from the English as the Anglo-Saxon stiff upper lip.

For the National Front, the rough equivalent of Trump and the Alt-Right in France, Joan of Arc (depicted here as a gold statue behind party leader Marine le Pen) has been appropriated as a symbol of white nationalism, as Joan fought invading foreigners. Rather than chase away the English, Marine le Pen wants to chase away Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East.

There is another group this year that has embedded Joan into their mission, though they do so with far less revelry and fun, although they are known in France as “le FN.” The menacing alt-right has been growing in France, just as it has been here.  The National Front is the party of Marine Le Pen, whose mission it is with other white people to deport all the immigrants, all of them, particularly those of North African and Middle Eastern descent.In the 1980s, the party was an ugly joke, run by Jean-Marie LePen, Marine’s father, who said disgusting things to scare people like immigrants were bringing AIDS to France and that it could be spread by mosquito bites. Marine LePen is less crude and less confrontational than her father, but the party is capitalizing on France’s recent terrorist attacks to suggest that only white people should be considered French and that all others, regardless of place of birth, ought to be deported.

For the National Front, Joan is the scourge of the foreign incursion, a saint of France, a pure French girl who could be the vessel of a pure French white bloodline. She is a call to return to traditions long since considered too narrow in France by most people. The party is overtly racist, and they see Joan as a purifier of the race, giving that royal blood Joan mentioned in her letter by extension to all those whose families have been in France for centuries. She is often evoked at their rallies, and she is a call for exclusion by any means necessary.  Their Joan says surrender the city, you foreigners, today, or pay for your residency with your own blood tomorrow.

So what are we to do with Joan, a prisoner of our divergent political ideologies? Is she a saint of white nationalism, or is she the patron saint now of a town that values individual expression and racial and gender diversity? Is she a witch or a saint? A better question for us to ask is who we are. Are we a community of a liberated city celebrating its victory over hegemony, or are we a bunch of fascists who so distrust other people’s customs that we would shove them out of our midst? If we are white, is this the source of our purity, or is our purity a purity of heart, of goodwill toward all? Are our swords a costume accessory or a way of life? I submit our parade route has hit a fork in the road.  Either we dance toward a welcoming cathedral that would offer blessings, toward a balcony for a celebratory drink, or we are headed into a battle where either way, win or lose, the things that are really pure in us get burned alive. Who will we be during this carnival season? Who will you be, my reader, in this hour of occupation by those most of us have not chosen? How will you stay pure, my maidens? I say don’t put down your swords. We are going into battle. In all things, do right by the King of Heaven. We are sent by God here for this very hour. Know what is right and do it, whatever it may cost you.

 

Who Dat Dere Gonna Smash the Glass?

This party was for both for the Clinton debate and the Saints game, no need to pick just one.

Last night, I had the delightful privilege of watching Hillary Clinton shoot a fish in a barrel, one that looked remarkably like a coked-out real estate developer and aging game show host named Donald Trump.  I was not alone for this festive occasion.  I was seated in a pizza parlor in the Gentilly district of New Orleans, surrounded by people who like me, have volunteered for the campaign to elect the first woman president.

We have been making phone calls around here to get out the Democratic vote, and we have found Louisianans surprisingly receptive to our phone calls, given the reputed redness of the state.  Most of them seem to have gotten a robo-call from white supremacist David Duke, who is running for senate and who endorses Donald Trump, before we with our real voices and our real diversity call to suggest they come out and volunteer for us.  It’s like Mr. Duke rolled out the red carpet for our second call’s arrival.  No pollster predicts that Louisiana will turn blue this election, but New Orleans, birthplace of Jazz, has always liked the blues.  It is a pocket of organized Democratic Party voters in a sea of otherwise-inclined conservatives.  Yet the choice could not be more stark this election, and David Duke has yet to win an office after he served a single term as a state representative.  His endorsement makes non-Klannish white Louisianans weigh their voting choices more carefully, and we are glad to give them something to think about.

On my way to this combined Saints Game Tailgate and Orgy of Joy Because a Raging Sexist Pig was About to Get Beat by a Girl, I convinced my Uber driver to register to vote, and because I told him the details of Clinton’s energy policy, a subject close to that man’s heart, he told me he would vote for my girl HRC.  He is a laid-off oil industry worker, and the details of Clinton’s plan seemed to spell greater prosperity and greater independence from foreign oil markets to him.  He had never voted, he said, but this election seemed really important.  I couldn’t agree more.

Watching Hillary with a room full of rowdy and racially diverse Democrats was a pleasure straight out of an episode of The West Wing, if Aaron Sorkin had let Spike Lee direct that episode.  The crowd hooted and hollered when Hillary laughed at the lies falling out of the sad old man’s mouth, and when he insulted her personally, we all gasped, and the ladies of color shouted in unison, “Oh, no he didn’t!”  But her simple remark, that while he was out on the road bloviating, she had not only prepared for the debate but had prepared to be president of the United States — well, that was worth the price of pizza alone.  His return to birtherism and stopping and frisking, perhaps that played well with the withering Fox News audience, but most of America seems to think that his version of Law and Order is not so much lawful as Orwellian-sounding.  We laughed as Hillary Clinton laughed, and we hoped that America saw as we saw her competency and his ridiculous ineptness and ill-informed and misinforming bombast.

The men who were with us checked in on the Saints’ game on their phones once in a while, but we were glued to the screen.  Neither male nor female was impressed with Donald Trump’s denial of his support for the Gulf War, nor were we convinced that it was Hillary Clinton who had a temperament problem — and what, he’s an incarnation of the Dalai Lama?  Please!  His entire career has been based on being rash and quick to anger. Nobody bought it.

Trump’s bringing Gennifer Flowers to the debate with him is proof he actually knows nothing about the thinking of women.  If he were running against Bill Clinton, this might have been some sort of an effective jab, but he’s running against Clinton’s wronged spouse, who neither orchestrated nor condoned that affair. What women saw in this was an incomprehension of our individual dignity, and he looked like he was just being absurdly bitchy.  Also, we might wonder what he would expect — that she would burst into tears? Nah.  Our girl Hillary is like all of us who have had to attend a cocktail party where some woman was there who had tried to take our man.  He might as well have handed her the election with that single mean-spirited gesture. The sight of an ex-mistress isn’t devastating to a grown-up woman; it makes us taste the copper of blood rage in our mouths. By bringing Flowers to the debate, he guaranteed she would be relentless in her criticism of him.

It was truly a pleasure to watch Ms. Clinton work last night.  I got a fan handed to me by a woman running for  judge.  I got a new lawn sign and a new sticker.   The Saints lost.  But who dat?  Who dat dere gonna smash the glass ceiling? Who dat dere gonna smash the patriarchy?  We dat.

Pirate Country –my transplanted life in the north tropics

Where I live now, there are Walgreens and Walmarts, bells of tacos and kings of burgers, so it is no more and no less American on the West Bank of New Orleans than it is in Duluth or Houston. Yet there is a mysterious, mariner-gothic bent to New Orleans (see my previous post about the evocation of vampire Lestat on my morning defecation walks with dogs), and taking a momentarily ecocritical view of my life, I understand its mystery better: I am living in the northern tropics. Wouldn’t you know that’s pirate country?

Perhaps because of an early childhood visit to Disneyland, when I think of the landscape of a tropical town, I immediately think of pirates of the Caribbean.  The truth is that when pirates were more common in colonial America, they were not a strictly tropical phenomenon.  My old town, New York City, had pirates, too.  Down on Hanover Street in the financial district there is a plaque that marks the site of the house owned by the infamous pirate Redbeard, who seems to have lived in peace with legal traders of goods and whose characters were no more shocking or flamboyant than a Wolf of Wall Street or a Godon Gekko (named, I note for the first time, after a tropical lizard — interesting) who exclaims “greed is good.”  Couldn’t that selfish sentiment be turned into the refrain of a pirate shanty?  Let’s find out:

The Shanty of The Gordon Gekko, Galleon Sans Blason

Greed is good, my buccaneers! Greed is good!

Pillage is pretty like a pert blonde lass!

Rape is right as rum in a mug of wood!

Greed is good!  Spanish galleons — kiss my ass!

 

Yes, Wall Street‘s horrible motto works well in piratical rhyme and meter. The sentiment itself is piratical. So I have lived in pirate country before, but it has not felt so obvious as it does now, while Spanish moss, if not Spanish galleons, droops over me as I shuffle in sweltering weather between buildings to teach writing. In the mornings as I drive along the causeway across bayoux, I sometimes see mist lifting off of marsh water, a mist that would mask a small landing party of buccaneers rowing a pirogue.  The weather’s abundant sizzle itself suggests the lasciviousness of piratical life.  The fact that it is now fall, and most days in this season will still get up into the nineties until we get close to Halloween, well, all that sweltering heat makes me want to rip off my lacy shirt and stand on deck wearing nothing but my knickers and boots, a single earring, and a kerchief cap until we catch a stiff breeze and spot a slave ship headed for Jamaica and we board her to liberate the human cargo to ask if they would like to join our crew.  Actually, in New Orleans, we say “krewe.”

Pirate/war hero Jean Lafitte used to hang out where I hang out now in New Orleans. I am slightly covetous of his hat, but the scowl I can manage as necessary.

New Orleans has welcomed pirates of greater notoriety than Red Beard and more flamboyant than Gekko. Jean Lafitte (pictured here) fought with Andrew Jackson in the battle of New Orleans during the war of 1812, and the two of them may or may not have met in secret to discuss battle plans.

This partnership between piracy and politics seems to have continued in New Orleans.  Local senatorial candidate David Duke tried to take his white supremacist case yesterday afternoon to the people on Jackson Square, a place where Lafitte surely walked, but he was soundly rejected by the crowd. I note that pirates tended to have interracial crews  (not unlike Mardi Gras Krewes these days) and made no bones, no skull-and-cross-bones, about lovemaking between the races.  To Duke that is race-destructive miscegenation, not the satin-clad complexities of pirate romance. He prattled on about how black men were raping white women with false statistics he got out of his size-insecure nightmares, not FBI files. And yet, as he spoke, he stood on a spot where Lafitte surely stood, away from which he surely swaggered. Even without a Klan hood on, especially without a satin, embroidered weskit and without a plumed hat and scabbard, he looked and sounded pathetic in this town of transgressive swashbuckling.

I look through the heat of the day and contemplate how much more comfortable I would be with my laces unlaced, with my bodice ripped. I realize that this is pirate country even today.  The people on Jackson Square used vocabulary in revolt of Duke’s ideas that I won’t repeat here — suffice it to say it was salty and worthy of outlaw sailors. I say he had it coming. Don’t cross pirates unless you are willing to need an eye patch for the rest of your miserable land-lubbing life!

I commute along this path regularly.

Tomorrow, as I commute back and forth, I will see white cranes fly overhead, see lizards skitter down the bricks of my house, encounter perhaps another swarm of black dragonflies marauding like low-flying bombers. The northern tropics call for a cool drink, a change of clothes after a sweat-breaking day, and a willingness to fight the red coats or the white sheets like the old sea shanty legends tell.  I ride a car, not a ship deck, but I gaze across the water at a town lit yellow and know that this is the kind of town I already understand.

Don’t believe me?  My book The White Trash Pantheon is already in stock at Faulkner House Books on Pirate’s Alley. I have arrived, New Orleans.  En garde!