Recently in Louisiana, the Great State Category

This just in from the Great State:

LAFAYETTE, La. -- The Ville Platte company that makes "Slap Ya Mama" Cajun seasoning has slapped a lawsuit for trademark infringement on an upstart spice company marketing under the name "Punch Ya Daddy."

Walker & Sons, the family owned company that makes "Slap Ya Mama," alleges the similarity of the other brand's name and logo are an attempt to draw on their brand's good reputation.

"We think the name itself was calculated to call on the image already created by 'Slap Ya Mama,"' Walker & Sons attorney William Stagg said. "They were attempting to grab hold of the image 'Slap Ya Mama' had already developed."

How dare those varlets try to piggyback on the good reputation of people who refer to domestic violence to sell paprika! (N.B., in truth, the product name comes from a colloquial South Louisiana saying: "That tastes so good it makes you wanna slap ya mama.")

Meanwhile, this wheelie-popping, chick-impressing wild man is not related to me, and he's not a Louisianian at all, but I wisht he wuz! Excerpt:

A 61-year-old dude named Dennis LeRoy was just sentenced to 180 days in jail after cops say he got wasted at a Minnesota bar last year and tried to drive home on his suped-up piece of living room furniture .

The La-Z-booze-mobile was equipped with a cup-holder, radio, headlight and a National Hot Rod Association sticker. It was powered by a converted lawn-mower.

Cops say on August 31,2008, LeRoy pounded around 8 or 9 beers, left the bar, mounted his chair-mobile -- which is capable of speeds up to 20 MPH -- and crashed into a "real car" on the way back to his home.

LeRoy was given field sobriety tests ... but cops say he "failed everything."

Here's a great piece from the new issue of The Atlantic talking about all the experiments in green, affordable housing springing up in hurricane-devastated New Orleans. Bizarrely, the actor Brad Pitt is a huge player in this market. Sounds like he's doing a lot of good there, though I personally side with the rebuilding aesthetic and ethic pushed by Andres Duany, who doesn't go for the modernist and/or non-local-vernacular designs favored by those surrounding Pitt. Duany hits on a brilliant observation about New Orleans in this passage:

"When I originally thought of New Orleans, I was conditioned by the press to think of it as an extremely ill-governed city, full of ill-educated people, with a great deal of crime, a great deal of dirt, a great deal of poverty," said Duany, who grew up in Cuba. "And when I arrived, I did indeed find it to be all those things. Then one day I was walking down the street and I had this kind of brain thing, and I thought I was in Cuba. Weird! And then I realized at that moment that New Orleans was not an American city, it was a Caribbean city. Once you recalibrate, it becomes the best-governed, cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated city in the Caribbean. New Orleans is actually the Geneva of the Caribbean."

Duany said that many of the shotgun houses in New Orleans were built by the fathers and grandfathers of people living in them today, and few of them meet building codes. But no one worries about paying mortgages or insurance. "The situation is that the housing is essentially paid off, and it allows people to accumulate leisure," he said. "What's special about New Orleans is that it's the only place in the United States where you can have a first-rate urban life for very little money." What happened after Katrina, Duany said, was that FEMA and others came to town with detailed requirements for record-keeping and property titles, then insisted on stringent building codes that would make all the houses hurricane-proof. This might seem like common sense, he said, but it's "essentially unworkable for a Caribbean city."

So the central problem, according to Duany: "All the do-goody people attempting to preserve the culture are the same do-gooders who are raising the standards for the building of houses, and are the same do-gooders who are giving people partial mortgages and putting them in debt," he said. "They have such a profound misunderstanding of the culture of the Caribbean that they're destroying it. The heart of the tragedy is that New Orleans is not being measured by Caribbean standards. It's being measured by Minnesota standards."

I'm going to have to think about that for a while: New Orleans as a Caribbean city. More broadly, you could think of South Louisiana, even the non-Cajun parts, as essentially Mediterranean. This is especially visible in the non-Cajun parts, such as where I grew up. Most of us were Protestant, but boy, did we feel different from North Louisiana.

Anyway, this from the article is the best definition of sustainabilty I've ever seen:

Two years ago, at a conference on traditional building held at the New Orleans convention center, the architect and New Urbanist Steve Mouzon asked a crowd of contractors and architects to think about a basic point. "The very core of sustainability," he said, "can be found in a simple question: 'Can it be loved?'"

Think about that as you're driving around your town, city or suburb today. Look at the buildings around you and think about which ones can be loved, and which ones can't. The ones that can be loved are the ones likely to be there 50 years from now. Here in Dallas, we've just opened a couple of big, expensive, starchitect-designed arts buildings. I've not been to either, but neither one looks especially lovable. Cool, but not lovable.

Beth Rickey died destitute and ill in Santa Fe the other day. Who is she? The woman who saved Louisiana from David Duke. She was a Republican who was so alarmed by the rise of the KKK leader, who ran for governor in 1991, that she worked tirelessly to expose his closet Nazism. James Gill of the New Orleans Times-Picayune tells Rickey's story:

If you weren't around here at the time, you could hardly credit what a threat Duke posed, although he was best known as a former Grand Wizard in the Klan who had at various times spoken warmly of Adolf Hitler.

Duke's meteoric rise obviously signified that plenty of voters shared, or were at least prepared to overlook, his racist views. But he had been at great pains to create a more moderate persona, appearing in natty suits, and adopting the pose of a mainstream conservative politician who happened to have been a "rascal" in his long-ago youth. He was glib and, thanks to his plastic surgeon, quite photogenic.

With an electorate in a fit over welfare cheats and high taxes, there was no need, at least in polite society, for an explicit, white supremacist spiel. Duke was adept at telling white voters what a lot of them wanted to hear, and that is always the best way to come across as smart and reasonable.

Duke was elected state rep from a Metairie district in 1989, narrowly beating John Treen, the official GOP candidate. Duke also styled himself a Republican, which alarmed Rickey, a doctoral candidate at Tulane who had interrupted her studies to work in the Treen campaign. She never let Duke out of her sights after that.

You'll have to read Gill to find out how Rickey did it. The Washington Post obit gives a hint. Excerpt:

Even before Duke ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1990, he tried to co-opt the woman who dogged him. Over moo goo gai pan in a local Chinese restaurant, he told Miss Rickey that the Holocaust never happened.

"What about my father? What were all those dead bodies my father saw at Buchenwald?" asked Miss Rickey, whose father had served in an Army division that reached the Nazi death camp.

Duke, Miss Rickey told The Post, reacted to the question with a flip of the hand. "He said, 'Oh, those bodies, they died of starvation,' " she recalled. "It was an attitude of disinterest or contempt. Then he got into talking about Rudolf Hess and [Adolf] Eichmann and what a bad deal they got."

The Washington Times' Quin Hillyer wrote the best thing about this great lady. Excerpt:

It is hard to believe, unless you were there, just how effective Duke was at manipulating the media. He was telegenic and glib, with a preternatural ability to turn any hostile interview to his advantage while hitting populist hot buttons again and again. And Louisiana was a poor state, with a poor educational system. Demagoguery worked. It would take savvy planning to stop him.

And, more than anybody else, this Republican Party activist pulled it off. God bless the memory of a righteous woman.

Whipped Texas 11-4 in the deciding game of the College World Series. Much whooping and stomping around triumphantly in my house at this moment. Did I mention that Mrs. Dreher is a Texas alumna? Pray for her, the poor dear. If I wake up tomorrow morning with my throat -- or something -- cut, I garontee you that I'll deserve it. Woooooooooo Tigers!

A Baton Rouge friend e-mails today his thoughts about education and budgetary reform in Louisiana, and how our home state seems doomed to go through the same battles over and over again ... and make no progress. Depressing stuff, and all true. But what if there's a bright side to Louisiana's chronic inability to get its act together? Writing in the New York Times today, Dan Baum has a reflection on why New Orleans is a pretty decent place to ride out the recession. He talks about being in NOLA after Katrina, and reporting to a friend he met on the street that all the city's property records were destroyed by the flood. He expected the man to be devastated. In fact, the man was thrilled, because that meant property wouldn't change hands, and life could rebuilt as it was. Baum:

While the rest of us Americans scurry about with a Blackberry in one hand and a to-go cup of coffee in the other in a feverish attempt to pack more achievement into every minute, it's the New Orleans way to build one's days around friends, family, music, cooking, processions, and art. For more than two centuries New Orleanians have been guardians of tradition and masters of living in the moment -- a lost art. Their preference for having more time than money was at the heart of what made that city so much fun to visit and so hard to leave.

So when outsiders talked of making New Orleans "bigger and better," the people of the city recoiled. "Bigger and better" struck many New Orleanian ears as code for whiter. But even more, I suspect, they heard it as a recipe for a city driven -- like the rest of America -- by the dollar and the clock. Who needs that?

Joe Braun celebrating the destruction of the real estate records was a harbinger. Although the records were freeze-dried and restored, the terrible "it" Braun had feared never happened. New Orleanians rejected all the plans for a "bigger and better" city, either by hounding the planners out of town or refusing entreaties to sell their ruined houses to developers. They're putting New Orleans back together the way they like it, which is pretty much the way it was before Katrina. All the old neighborhoods are intact - even the Lower Ninth Ward, which was pronounced dead many times over. Life still revolves around second lines, the meticulous year-long building of Mardi Gras Indian suits, the boiling of crawfish and the lowing of saxophones.

Another good thing about living in New Orleans these days, according to some; it's a great refuge from the recession. The gyrations of the Dow, the collapse of General Motors, the prospect of regulating credit default swaps - even the collapse of the housing markets - mean little to most New Orleanians. The city operates at such a low level of economic activity that it never really prospers in good times or suffers in bad.

Ronald Lewis is a retired streetcar-track repairman in the Lower Ninth Ward - pretty well off, by New Orleans standards, with a $1,100-a-month pension. His disappointment in me was audible when I called recently to ask if the recession was hurting him or his neighbors. "Now Dan," he sighed. "You know we ain't never had nothing down here, so how could we be losing?" Then he went on to describe the barbecue he was holding at house that evening and wondered if I couldn't come by.

It's easy to romanticize this. I think about a journalist friend of mine in NOLA who is thinking at long last about moving out of his home city, because he's just about given up on it. The well-known quip from the journalist who moved out of the city some years back because (he said) he couldn't see raising his family in a city that valued parades more than libraries, comes to mind.

On the other hand, every time I go home to south Louisiana to see my mom and dad, I am reminded of (and comforted by) the brilliant art of just hanging out that south Louisiana folks have perfected (I always say "south" Louisiana, because it's different from north Louisiana, which strikes me as Far East Texas in many ways). The whole question of Quality of Life is paramount. What makes for high quality of life? Do Louisianians, mired in corruption and inefficiency and relative poverty, actually have a higher quality of life overall than, say, Minnesotans? Would you rather live in Oslo or Marseilles? Serious question. I don't know the answer. But I think about it all the time.

If Louisiana finally got its act together and became just like everybody else, would it still be Louisiana?