Well Bottom Blues

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Shin Féin

Shin Féin, literally We Ourselves or Ourselves Alone, was raised as a cry and slogan my friend Ashley Morris on his blog after Katrina/The Federal Flood. He was the man who first said Fuck You You Fucking Fucks. John Goodman’s character in the HBO show Treme was based in part on Ashley.

It was clear to New Orleans soon after the Federal Flood resulting from the failure of the Corps of Engineers’ levees (Hurricane Katrina came ashore in Mississippi) that no one was coming to save us. It was up to us. We Ourselves. Ourselves Alone. Sinn Féin.

It is high time we realize no one is coming to save the United States. No one is coming to topple this regime or liberate the new concentration camps. There will be no brave landings on the coast, and thankfully no sustained campaign of terror bombing civilians to break the MAGA spirit as the Allies did in WWII.

It’s just us.  We Ourselves. Sinn Féin.

•••

Although the government together with Catholic education managed to nearly eradicate French speakers in Louisiana, New Orleans has a vestigial attachment to Bastille Day.  And every July I asked how to say in French “we will armor our levees with the bones of the Corps of Engineers” to write our own Marsellaise, but here in New Orleans it’s mostly just an excuse to drink wine and watch waiters race down the street balancing trays.

How many people in New Orleans remember that the Bastille was a notorious prison; that the French stormed the Bastille to free all of the King’s prisoners? It’s a long march to Jena and Alligator Auschwitz.  I dispare of how we will drive the ICE Gestapo off our streets without blood. But we need to start somewhere. No one is coming like the Allies in WWII to crush the MAGA.

We Ourselves. Ourselves Alone. Sinn Féin.



One response to “Shin Féin”

  1. zombiewondrousace429cc56 Avatar
    zombiewondrousace429cc56

    lamentation and instruction after hurricane katrina (Humbly in a different mode after William Butler Yeats)

    I

    How did I ignore, How did we ignore the portent of the crows? How they multiplied, All my years since boyhood, Ranting against the cool morning coos of the doves, Haggling down the bazaar indignation of the jays, Challenging in militant can’t the warblers’ blithe canticles, mustering in their murderous rasping moots and migrations, to and from the triees of the cemeteries, Waiting, eyeing us blackly in their patient flyovers, Waiting above the banks of the drainage canals, waiting on the cross-arms of the telephone crosses (did they listen to our oblivious telephonic murmurs? our quotidian detailing verbiage and ephemeral tales of living lives and shuteye sleepy lies?( waiting above the grey and waiting tombs Of our slumbrous placid city Slumped below the meaning of the sea

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About Me

Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis,  What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).

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