Corruption is the feng shui of bayou country
It is how public life is run; it is the contours of that most postlapsarian of all relationships, that between the ballot and the fisc. Corruption is just human nature. Those who crave power and money will always find it, one way or another.
Corruption has a bad name, but it isn't all bad. Corruption aspires to nothing great.
Democracy in Louisiana
They say that democracy was invented in ancient Athens, but I'm not so sure. I think that if we didn't outright invent it, we at least perfected it in southern Louisiana.
Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential run was defined by the pithy "the economy, stupid" pep line by James Carville.
New Orleans is known as the “Big Easy”
The politicians are corrupt, the people are reasonably Catholic, and somehow, a given city or parish gets governed.
It's not about dress-up and make-up, it’s about a high tolerance for human folly.
Soon enough it's five o'clock, and it's off to the bar to watch the ceiling fans go slowly round and round like a metaphor for this cosmic existence that doesn't make much sense, this samsara of a life where the good and the bad roughly even out in the end
Harry Lee was the sheriff of Jefferson Parish when I was a kid
Class profiling with heavy doses of racism
Won re-election six times in a row
Was it corruption to have your officers pull over young black men in jalopies if they were in Jefferson Parish at night? It was, and the citizens loved Lee for it
Then along comes David Duke, a racist who appreciates Lee's methods and thinks that discrimination is grand
Almost everyone in Metairie was appalled, but Duke flipped the thing upside-down
He wanted to take the ugly reality of southern Louisiana and turn it into something for its own sake
Corruption in New Orleans
Mayor Ray Nagin vowed to turn New Orleans into a "chocolate city" post Katrina
New Orleans is much more complicated than that
Nagin and the new race politicians used a cheap trick to pry people out of the comfortable complexity of a corrupt culture
The Big Easy became overly simplified, black against white
After Katrina, it was Plessy vs. Ferguson again
Earlier this month, news reports indicated that New Orleans was on track to be the murder capital of the United States this year
Louisiana voters want the perfect candidate
Edwin Edwards, the governor when I was a boy, later went to prison for racketeering
When he got out, he tried running for office again.
Today in New Orleans, politicians have to pretend to be messiahs and voters go along with the ruse
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-big-easy/
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