Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

I don”t know how Mardi Gras will end up shaking out for New Orleans this year - hopefully it”ll hit the reduced expectations and show tourism to be viable down there again - but the season ending at the six-month mark after Katrina makes it a good time to think about the city moving from “recovery” to “restoration”.

There”s a big distinction in my mind between those two concepts. Recovery gets the city back on its feet. Restoration is about truly bringing New Orleans back to its former glory. And in a city with such a rich and unique culture, a true restoration is critical. Nobody wants a shiny, bland, new New Orleans. We want old New Orleans back. The problem is that replacing the old New Orleans with a new New Orleans is the easier, cheaper route. Scrape away the flooded neighborhoods; build new homes and apartments outside of the flood plain and just chase away the part of the population that doesn”t fit the new model. With the federal government paying the tab and calling the shots, that could be the future New Orleans faces.

If the city is to avoid this fate and win true restoration, it needs a solid strategy and an unwavering focus on self-interest. I”d like to suggest an approach I call “Lie. Cheat. Steal.”:

Lie - Propaganda is the city”s best friend right now. The world needs to know Mardi Gras was great, Jazz Fest will be bigger and better than ever, hotels and restaurants are open and all the tourists are coming back now. The world also needs to know the levee failures were 100% the fault of the Corps of Engineers, the city and state are doing a great job and it”s the federal government that”s responsible for all those destroyed neighborhoods still looking like they do.

Cheat - Got a guy whose sister is your U.S. Senator? Make him the mayor. Got a guy who was your U.S. Senator for 18 years, has tons of connections in Washington and is generally regarded as a uniting force by both Democrats and Republicans? Make him your governor. Louisiana can”t afford to have an adversarial relationship with Washington, so stack the deck with these powerful insiders you have sitting around. Hell, you might even want to get your ex-governor out of prison and see what kind of cash he can raise from his Las Vegas and South Korean friends.

Steal - Louisiana doesn”t have the resources to restore New Orleans. And it”s really not the role of the federal government to cover all the city”s losses and put billions more into new flood protection systems, tax incentives and other cash infusions. But so what? This isn”t the time to worry about fiscal responsibility, fairness or precedents about federal relief spending. New Orleans should fight for every dollar it deserves and every undeserved dollar it can get. I”ll bitch about federal spending when Los Angeles falls into the ocean.

Personally, I”m putting my principles aside for the sake of New Orleans. I can”t defend this strategy on any grounds other than my selfish interest in New Orleans” future.

The fact is that Louisiana is a backwards, corrupt state that has squandered just about all of its opportunities in the past. Because of that, it really doesn”t deserve the faith of the federal government and probably won”t get much sympathy from the American public. And that makes “Lie. Cheat. Steal.” that much more important.

Well, not until Saturday morning. But there won”t be another blogging opportunity before TCL and I head out in the early a.m.

It”s not possible to overstate how big this weekend is for LSU and Louisiana. Our first crack at a national championship in 45 years, and we get that chance at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. If you”re not an LSU fan, you simply can”t understand the size of this event.

Of the schools who still contend for national championships, we”re among the teams suffering the longest without one. We share our frustrations with those of Saints fans, and that shared frustration multiplies the significance of this moment for LSU. Except for about 10,000 Tulane fans, the entire state of Louisiana pulls for LSU with an intensity as great as any in America.

The Louisiana culture is one of raucous celebration. And the epicenter of Louisiana Madness is New Orleans. The city was the wildest place in the U.S. long before MTV and Playboy turned Mardi Gras into Spring Break.

So, this weekend, the two collide. The Perfect Storm of people and place.

Within a two-hour drive of New Orleans are approximately 2.3 million LSU fans. Expect about half of them to be in New Orleans Sunday. Nevermind that the Superdome only holds 72,000 people. The biggest party of (most) years - Mardi Gras - happens on the streets of New Orleans and involves not much more than walking around and drinking. Louisianians are used to that. And they will come to New Orleans to walk around, drink, and watch the Sugar Bowl on TV.

TCL and myself will arrive in New Orleans tomorrow afternoon. We”ll walk around and we”ll drink until game time. We”re among the fortunate 72,000 to have tickets, so we”ll get to see LSU”s biggest night in 45 years live.

I”ve linked to some live Bourbon Street webcams below, so look for us this weekend. I”ll be the big guy with the beard; TCL is the one with the goatee.

Geaux Tigers!

Tricou House - Bourbon St. between St. Peter & Orleans

Corner of Bourbon & St. Peter streets

Bourbon Vieux Room - Bourbon St. at St. Louis St.

Mike Anderson”s - Bourbon St. between Iberville and Bienville

Your browser has a “Refresh” button. Use it to “refresh” these cams.

Considering the wife and I spent a total of just 41 hours in Louisiana this weekend for Cap”n Ken”s Bizarre Family Pre-Christmas Christmas celebration, it was an eventful time. The highlights:

• The adoptive mother of my niece - who my middle sister gave up for adoption 21 years ago and rediscovered a couple of years back - came to dinner. Now I know why my niece always figured she was adopted. “Mom” is a troll, and clearly shares no genes with my niece, who is a really beautiful girl (if you look past the heavy Baton Rouge makeup and trashy style).

• My oldest nephew (second child of the middle sister) was working Saturday, so he came by Friday night with his girlfriend. This - understandably in Louisiana - caused some angst for my sister, as the nephew”s girlfriend is black. Not only does “black girlfriend” hardly qualify as a scandal in my family, but I hail from the big city, sis. Tell me he”s a transvestite and his girlfriend is a one-legged bi-racial underage boy and maybe you shock me.

• My next-oldest nephew (first child of my oldest sister) brought his girlfriend along as well. They are both 18, neither finished high school, both work fast-food jobs and they live together not far from my oldest sister in Texas. I”d not met the girlfriend before, and was quite prepared to disapprove. Would you believe I came away liking and respecting her? She”s pushing the nephew back toward school and seems to give him the structure his life had lacked for a long time.

• The third-oldest nephew (second child of my oldest sister) is working on a hip-hop career, sports a new bottom-lip piercing and chain smokes with the approval of his mom. He”s 16. But he”s “off the dope” as my sister says, is making good grades and wants to be a landscape architect. The bright hope of the family.

• My youngest nephew (the third child of my middle sister) is going into 6th grade next year and just got accepted at Jimmy Swaggart”s Christian school. And this is seen as a good thing … Public eduction in Louisiana is so bad, you see, that kids are better off with a Swaggart education than an East Baton Rouge Parish Schools one.

• I found out Saturday morning that my stepfather had invited his 30-year-old adopted son (my adopted step-brother, I suppose) down from North Louisiana for our Pre-Christmas Christmas dinner. He had no where else to go, I was told, because his younger brother (biological and also adopted by my stepfather) doesn”t want him around because the older brother has recently gotten married to his (the older brother”s) first wife”s cousin. The younger brother is still friends with that first wife, and thus does not want his older brother - or the wife”s cousin, I suppose - around at Christmas. The beat-down Oldsmobuick carrying my adopted step-brother, his cousin-in-law-turned-second-wife and four little redneck kids of varying heritage pulled up right as we were walking in the house Saturday. Taking in the Redneck spectacle on a security-camera monitor (a leftover from the Baton Rouge serial killer days) - my long-lost niece asked “Does the little kid have a mullet??”

• My parents were talking about finding the Paris Hilton sex video on the Internet … but the video they described was not the Paris Hilton video. I was scared to learn more about what they were actually watching, and why.

• My crazy aunt (the wife of my mother”s oldest brother) showed up right as we were leaving Saturday night. Actually, her car appeared on the security monitor as we were beginning to leave, which greatly hastened our exit. This is the woman, you see, who two years ago crashed our close-family gift exchange and was so horrified to not have presents to give us that she excused herself (”I need to run out to the car”), snuck off to Walgreen”s, bought a few sets of cheap Christmas dinnerware and two hours later came back with makeshift gifts for all of us. No, none of us had presents for her.

• Somehow in all the excitement, I came down with Pink Eye.

I blame the kid with the mullet.

For about a year and a half, women in Baton Rouge, La., lived in desperate fear of a serial killer. Six women were plucked from their homes, raped and murdered between Sept. 2001 and March 2003.
The fear that gripped the city was unreal. My sister, who lives about a quarter-mile from the scene of one of the killings, actually bought little cans of pepper spray to hand out to my wife, my mother and my other sister when we went down to visit this past spring (the weekend the last victim was killed … so thanks, sis!).

In May, they caught the guy who they think killed the women - oddly enough here in Atlanta.

Anyway, after living through the serial killer nightmare, the female residents of Baton Rouge are, of course, much more careful about their personal security now.

Or maybe not ….

In The Advocate (the Baton Rouge daily, not the national gay newspaper) this morning was a story about a series of incidents at apartments around LSU in which female residents have been waking up to find a strange man either watching them sleep or actually “snuggling” with them in bed.

He calls himself “Steve”.

“Steve” has entered at least nine apartments near LSU in recent weeks while female students were sleeping.

“Steve” sometimes folds the girls” clothes, sometimes makes himself a snack and always either watches the girls sleep or climbs in bed with them for some cuddle time. He”s managed to not raise too much attention because he”s apologetic when the girls wake up and says he thought he was in a different apartment.

He hasn”t - at least so far - tried to rape or murder these girls.

The “Steve” incidents are made possible, apparently, because few of the female residents bother to lock their doors in these apartment complexes.

In fact, the roommate of one of the girls “Steve” snuggled with says most people in their complex have an “open door” policy - they all leave their doors unlocked so friends (and friends of friends) can come and go freely, anytime.

It was only after some of the girls started talking about “Steve” coming over that everyone began to realize this was a recurring thing.

These girls all live less than two miles from the scenes of three of the serial killings. The last of the killings happened just this past March about a mile away.

Now, of course, the girls are buying deadbolts and pepper spray.

Baton Rouge Police were raked over the coals for not catching the killer and not “keeping women safe” for months after it became obvious a serial killer was on the loose in town. So it”s easy to understand this quote from the B.R. Police Chief:

“Did we not learn a lesson from the serial killer investigation to lock the damn doors?”

Sleeping women awaken to “guest”

The phrase “it”s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn”t want to live there” was created for Louisiana. I”m an expert on this topic, having spent 46.7% of my time on this Earth living there (my native state, Georgia, has claimed 36.8% of my resident days, Alabama 13.7% and Tennessee 2.7%).

I actually love Louisiana. The culture is absolutely unique and fascinating, I”ve yet to find a sandwich in Atlanta that matches the poboys sold at gas stations in south Louisiana and I”d put the atmosphere, tradition and sheer fucking fun of LSU football up against any program in the country.

But being from (in the sense that my formative years were spent there) Louisiana is like having an otherwise cool uncle who”s a raging alcoholic and pisses down the basement stairs every time he comes over for dinner. You like him, but would really rather not be around him for long stretches of time.

So part of my daily routine is to read the News section of The Advocate (the Baton Rouge daily, not the national gay newspaper) to see what kind of shit Uncle Louie has gotten himself into now.

Today”s all-too-typical Louisiana headline was “La. leads Southeast in exodus”. That”s hardly shocking. If you”re not a chemical engineer, lawyer, doctor, bartender or construction worker, there are basically no jobs for you in Louisiana.

Today”s story was full of typical “smart young people are all leaving” quotes from demographers and depressing Census reports showing even Mississippi and Arkansas managed to grow from 1995 to 2000 while Louisiana lost 75,000 people.

I did like this demographer quote in particular: “It”s a horrible, horrible, horrible kind of mix of basic demographic trends for any state.” Not just “horrible, horrible,” mind you. It”s thrice horrible.

Anyhow, the thing that really grabbed my attention was a URL The Advocate placed at the bottom of the stories, as online papers like to do. This one was to a site created by the governor”s office to convince people that Louisiana is not, in fact, a shithole. I”ll provide the URL a bit later. You just keep reading …

On the governor”s site there”s a feature called “Louisiana Positives” and the teaser for it reads:

“Louisiana is ranked in the top of class by national ranking agencies and publications in a wide variety of fields such as education, productivity, technology, accountability and generosity. Visit the Louisiana Positives site to read the extended list of good things about the state.”

Never mind that the “site” it points to is actually a PDF file and the fact that interest groups who go out of their way to tell you how great they are (think “Proud to be Union!” or “Democrat and Proud!”) are typically very much down-and-out.

The Louisiana Positives list is 10 PDF pages long and features all sorts of dubious claims to fame for the state, its cities and companies. Among the more amusing:

• The La. National Guard”s high-school-dropout program is the best in the nation (a good thing considering about 40% of kids drop out of high school down there)

• Higher Education in Louisiana is among the most affordable in the country (and Sampos are among the most affordable TVs)

• New Orleans was ranked the 3rd best restaurant town in America (THIRD?? NOLA has the best food in the world, man. Must be the random tourist murders and puke-lined streets holding down the ranking.)

• Louisiana ranked 5th in the percentage of manufacturing establishments with Internet access. (I have no response to that)

• All 7 of Louisiana”s metro areas made the Forbes list of Best Places for Business and Careers. Houma was 33, Lafayette 70, Baton Rouge 110, Shreveport 165 and New Orleans 168 in the large metro category. (What this does not say is that the list ranked all 200 big metros in the U.S. - i.e. No. 1 is the best, No. 200 is the worst - so anything below 100 would be considered the 100 worst cities).

• Louisiana moved from its “traditional 1st or 2nd” ranking in the EPA”s Toxics Release Inventory down to 12th in 1999. (Slogan “Louisiana - now with fewer airborne toxins!”)

I give the governor credit for trying, and I think Mr. Foster has done a lot for the state. But it”s a long, long road to change the way things work in Louisiana and the perception outsiders have of the place. For every new business initiative, there”s a new batch of smart kids leaving, and a new controversy like the “choose life” license plate the state created.

It”s Louisiana, and it”ll always be that way. Unless, of course, you come up with a catchy logo:

The Advocate story: La. leads Southeast in exodus

The governor”s site: http://www.chooselouisiana.com

Downloadable logos for your promotional use