The Opposites of New Orleans

What is it about Louisiana and New Orleans in particular?

Hurricanes and oil spills enough to throw hundreds of billions down a hole with no result. Massive corruption at all levels. Government failures enough to fill volumes. Vice, poor, one of the most uneducated populaces in the nation and perhaps the most indolent by many standards. What a hole!

Mardi Gras, jazz, food and cooking out of this world, beauty, love of life, culture and party, party, party. What a place to be for fun!

Do we only get the one because of the other? Is the cost of all that makes New Orleans marvelous that which makes it backward and embarrassing?

Is there some sort of karmic balance at work here?

One of the great themes of literature and art is the relationship of light and dark, good and evil, wrong and right. How do we know what is good if we don’t know what is also bad. Can we appreciate light if we never know dark? It seems the basic opposites cannot exist without each other. There is no up if there is no down.

Opposites attract because they give meaning and value to each other. It is no less true in science and the physical laws. There is no one if there is no minus one. Positive electrical current flows to the negative. High pressure moves to low pressure. Indeed, the gas laws are mostly a description of matter interacting with vacuum, arguably the ultimate opposites.

If this existence of opposites is at work in New Orleans, then that should give us pause for apocalyptic reflection.

Consider that when one and minus one do come together, they add up to zero, nothing. When positive current makes it to the negative, the current dies. High pressure will flow to low until they equalize and there is no difference between them; the concepts of high and low have no meaning any longer.

Left alone, should we expect that eventually the opposites that are New Orleans will negate each other, and it will cease to be?

The only way to prevent high pressure from negating low, and vice versa, is to keep injecting energy into the system. Energy tips the balance to one side or the other and the concepts of high and low continue to have meaning and existence.

So aren’t we doing the same thing in New Orleans? So long as the rest of us are willing to pour energy into the place, whether that is tourist dollars, federal relief, or a pass on the rampant criminality and corruption, we keep the balance uneven. But what if we didn’t pour energy into it? Many folks after the Katrina debacle suggested we ought to let the place go back to the ocean. After all, much of the town is below sea level, and only continued energy inputs in the form of levees, dikes and pumps keep the place dry.

If we refused to inject energy into the place anymore what would happen. Would all of its opposites attract each other into balance, until finally it turned into a sort of Omaha, Louisiana?

The Road's Song

I'm in the mood for a little poetry. This is a little motorcycle poem I wrote a year or so ago. Revisting it, I find that I like it. I wasn't so sure back when I wrote it, but it's grown on me. I hope you enjoy it.


A lonely road is singing to me.
I hear it whispering in breathy air,
A song for my need, to set passion free,
Seducing, telling me to have no care
For home or for kin or all I hold dear.
Her song squirms into me, twisting my soul,
I cannot resist in spite of my fear,
She’s pulling me onto her siren’s shoal.

Abandon all! Ride to her beckoning!
Her call is like hearing a lover’s moan.
I care not the price, or the reckoning,
I ride! I take her! I make her my own!
I follow the sweep of her rounded curves,
Her lines rise and fall in sensuous ways,
The feel of her beneath me tingling nerves
To such joy! I’m soon lost, can’t count the days.

She goes on forever in front of me,
Tireless lover, a giver of bliss.
The engine and I roar in ecstasy,
The road screams right back at the tires’ long kiss.
We are entwined my lover and I,
Writhing this way and that, left and then right,
Up and down, until I think we must try
To soar above earth in climactic flight!

Even the hardest must rest from her song,
No mortal can stand the withering lust,
Can take the passion for only so long,
Not forever ride, else turn into dust.
No, I must stop and take stock of my mind,
Feed my poor body and my soul besides,
Walk on my feet; stand still until I find
Some peace from the road’s all consuming ride.

I no longer hear the road’s siren song
Where once it would not get out of my head.
Will there be a home? I was gone so long.
The way I just left, they must think me dead.
So I wake up and am sick to the bone.
Since my madness began, life’s been a blur.
The road no longer sings; I feel alone.
I turn my bike home in hope of a cure.

The ride home is slow, but as I draw near,
I sense a sweet song just tickling my ear.

Down and Out

I’ve been down and out the last couple of weeks with a vicious cold. My wife says I’m a big baby, and maybe so. It’s a nasty disease that I just can’t shake. You know the kind. It starts with sneezing, watery eyes, aches and then fever followed by chills and then fever again. Walking up the stairs to bed wears me out. As the sniffles and sneezes receded, it moved into the lungs. I find myself wheezing so loudly it wakes me up and then I cough like a 3-pack a day smoker.

It all started with a quick turnaround trip to LA three weeks ago. Fly on Tuesday morning, meeting all day Wednesday, fly back Thursday. Whenever I make this trip, I get sick within a few days of coming back. I have always suspected that it’s all that time I spend on the airplane, 6 hours or more each way, cooped up with people breathing their germs into the recirculating air. As it turns out, my suspicion is half-right.

I also suffer from a condition in my eyes called blephiritis. My eyelids dry out and, because I blink funny and have a low amount of tears, infection gets into the lids and dead cells pile up in the lower part of my eye. Then the eyes go into tear overdrive, and it looks like I’m constantly weeping. Worse, if feels like I have sand in my eyes all the time. Along with my cold, the blephiritis kicked in, and so I’m suffering from a double whammy.

I went to my OD yesterday, and when he saw me coming in, tears running down my face and red swollen eyelids, he just shook his head and started filling out prescriptions. Would you believe a 5ml bottle of drops cost $97? True. And it is worth every nickel.

I told him my theory of why I get a cold after every trip to LA. He confirmed it, but said the real cause was the low humidity in the air on the plane. He said that the humidity is around 0%, and the air is constantly moving and this has the effect of super drying my eyes, as well as the mucus membranes in the nose and sinuses. He said this mucus is what catches most germs and prevents them from entering the body itself. When the mucus dries up, the germs get in. That’s why I got a cold every time I fly to LA. It’s also what kick started my blephiritis.

There’s a bit of pun in the title of this rant. Orwell wrote a novel called Down and Out in Paris and London. It was something of a fictionalized autobiography about his time as a homeless and destitute young man in those two cities. From it, we have adapted the phrase “down and out” to describe a situation when a person has fallen on hard times or is out of luck. Often you will hear it said that a person is down and out in LA, or down and out in Las Vegas. I guess I am down and out because of LA. Poor pitiable me.

In any event, we might all be down and out in America.

I read an on-line news report the other day about the nine alleged militia members in Michigan. The story was about their bail hearings. This is not their trial, but just their attempt to be released on bail pending a trial, something they give to many people charged with violent crimes all the time. Interestingly, the FBI official who testified was reported in the AP story to have been less than persuasive, not in command of many facts and unable to answer many questions. In fact, U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts, who was hearing the arguments, said of the FBI official, "I share the frustrations of the defense team ... that she doesn't know anything."

The government has made an accusation that these nine were plotting to kill police officers and government officials. They had not actually hurt anyone; they just talked about it. Apparently, they did this talking in the hearing of an FBI Informant. We all know just how honest, forthright, and reliable FBI informants tend to be, too, don’t we? The government certainly has not proved the charges, let alone even tried them. As we have seen, so far the only official testimony given by the government appears to have been less than convincing.

Because it was an AP web story, readers can post their comments in a blog like section of the story. I must say that nearly all the comments disturbed me greatly. Almost every commentator assumes the nine are guilty. Many sound willing to immediately punish them—you know, let’s just hang them from the first tall tree and save all the trouble of a trial. Repeatedly in the posts were statements like, “lock them up and throw away the key”, “shoot them like the terrorists they are”, “try them then fry them”, and so on. Readers accused them of being everything from racists to conservative Christians to in-bred hillbillies as though calling them names leads to a foregone conclusion about their guilt. It brought to mind the peasant mob with torches and pitchforks on their way to kill Frankenstein’s monster, or the drunken mob of cowboys getting ready to storm the jail to lynch a prisoner inside.

I will bet my next paycheck that nearly every one of these commentators, the ones who are already convinced these nine are guilty and who are making the most provocative negative statements and name calling, are liberals and democrats. Anybody want to take the bet?

Here comes the irony and why we are down an out.

So, we have a bunch of liberals and democrats demanding the heads of nine white militia guys in Michigan on the accusation of some undercover FBI informant that they were plotting to do bad things. Yet, our President is friends with William Ayers, a man who not only plotted to do the exact same things, but also actually did them. Where is the outcry for justice from the same people?

It is not my intent to go off on an anti-left, anti-Obama rant. Others are doing that quite often and vociferously enough. Rather, the sheer magnitude of the hypocrisy is what strikes me so hard. Many on the left are calling these nine Michigan men “terrorists” and demanding they be treated as such. These same folks on the left are adamantly opposed to most of the things that we should be doing against the real terrorists from the Middle East. Apparently it is okay to do these things if the terrorist is a member of some sort of American militia but not if they are a Muslim?

I’m going to stop now before I get too wound up and go back to feeling sorry for myself with my miserable cold.