Well Bottom Blues

Yesterday I posted here a poem titled Moloch which was basically me riffing on part two of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl out of my own and more contemporary experiences.

Shortly after I took it down and replaced it with Quiet Fireworks.

I then posted a video on the socials of a small upside down American flag burning over Jefferson Airplanes’ Volunteers.

If this seems confusing, yesterday was a confusing day, and the progress above maps the emotional rollercoaster of a US 4th of July for myself. My relationship to the United States has been conflicted and increasingly hostile since the Federal Flood that followed Hurricane Katrina, and the textbook disaster capitalism exercise that followed called the “recovery.”

The so-called  recovery included the deliberate displacement of a large part of the Black population of New Orleans. It was a clear episode of ethnic cleansing. A prominent New Orleanian, Jimmy Reese, was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal while standing on the lawn of his mansion on elite and private Audubon Street behind Blackwater security with automatic weapons at the ready, and said there would be a different New Orleans in the aftermath, including “a new demographic.”

They broke the teachers union in an attempt to break the back of the Black middle class in New Orleans and privatized the schools, which since desegregations served a largely black population, ending public education as it is known in the rest of the US. They demolished all the sturdy, craftsman built brick and tile roof public housing,and ultimately replaced less than half of it with hasty stick and Tyvek construction years later. Black families who would often pass homes they had sometimes built themselves down through the generations by mutual agreement were denied any assistance for lack of proper clear title.

I know a great deal about all these things because I wrote extensively about it on my blog Wet Bank Guide in the years that followed, which became a book and from which several pieces were anthologized. I watched the above unfold in real time, carefully documenting it as a trained and experienced former journalist. And I spite of Gen. Russell Honore’s famous moment when he told the frightened National Guard, who were essentially guarding the Convention Center from the thousands of dehydrated and starving refugees who had gathered there on The high ground by the river, to put down their guns and help, My ultimate take is this:

The American experiment is over and the results are in. It failed.

I have seen nothing in the intervening years in public life in this country to dissuade me from that opinion.

My complicated relationship to the United States runs deep. My people arrived here before the Acadians over 300 years ago. They were sold to the U.S. almost 100 years after they arrived, unconsulted, along with the slaves in the fields. My German Acadian grandmother moved the family to New Orleans in the 1930s, where in Catholic school the nuns would beat children who spoke that ignorant country French instead of proper Continental.

I grew up in a city that was culturally isolated by choice from the rest of the United States, still in many ways a colonial outpost that evolved to serve as the port city for the enslaved cotton South. The only thing Anglo-Saxon about the place was that we spoke English, with borrowings from French to rival the Normans. It was the only successful melting pot in the entire North American continent. Everyone was Creolized into the culture that is the last leg on our economic stool. The cuisine was the product of black slave cooks trying to prepare Parisian recipes with local ingredients and smuggled in African adoptions. The music was born by slaves taking up abandoned Confederate army instruments and learning to play.  Carnival was brought from Paris by the sons of free Black Creoles who were sent there to be educated.

It was a place apart, and after 2005 the rest of the United States began to try to take it apart, led by  locals whose sympathies lay entirely with Wall Street.  That cultural uniqueness was already beginning to dissolve under the influence of television and easy travel. The wealthy white leadership’s “recovery” after the disaster was a deliberate attempt to put that culture under lock and key, expelling the people who created it, and trying to build a New Orleans Epcot on the ruins of New Orleans

I spent 20 years in what I jokingly came to call “America del Norte,” including a stint as a professional propagandist  on Capital Hill in D.C., and later in a small town in Northwest Minnesota and ultimately Fargo, North Dakota, deep in Wonder Bread “America.”  We moved there to be closer to one of our families after my daughter was born, and my ex-wife is from North Dakota. The people in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota were graciously accepting, although it was very much a grandparent in the graveyard town. I stood in the back of a Catholic Church holding my fidgety son and listened to two old women describe a friend, who had moved there from the Iron Range in northern Minnesota and been there over a decade, as new in town. Thirty minutes south of an Ojibwe reservation, I recognized from New Orleans that peculiar intonation people used when they said “the Rez,” the same white New Orleanians used to say “the Projects.”

The Federal Flood ended that mortgage, two cars, two kids idyll and I brought my family to New Orleans as quickly as I could.  My daughter, who only knew the city as a tourist, was driven to high school daily through ruined Gentilly where scavenged boats still lie in the neutral ground (what we call the median) and the brick-on-slab ranch houses were still marked on the roof by the rescuers with the famous symbol, because those homes were still flooded to the eves as the rescue proceeded.

I have already described what happened to New Orleans. Let me tell you a bit about what happened to the places I lived in the North. When I was a minor Democratic Party official in Fargo, North Dakota still had two Democratic  United States senators. There was a State Bank and a State grain elevator, markers of the area’s historic antipathy toward Eastern banks and the railroads. My then wife’s paternal grandfather still had a Share the Wealth pin from the year Roosevelt sent Huey Long to the upper Midwest to get rid of him for a while during the elections and where Long found a receptive audience. Leon Trotsky wrote while in Minnesota that he thought the American Marxist revolution would begin in that part of the upper Midwest because of its long-standing feud with Eastern capital.

Today outstate Minnesota and North Dakota are deep Trumplican red. The entire nation has been turned inside out and upside down and is being violently shook to dislodge anything union, moderately prosperous middle class and New Deal out of its pockets. They are undoing every bit of racial progress achieved since the 1960s. I suspect that the demonization of the immigrants who have fed this nation since the early 20th century is part of a plan to round them all up as “illegal” immigrants, put them in the extensive network of camps being built, and literally reinstitute slavery as allowed for prisoners. The United States is a thoroughly fucked up country, the only one claiming the title Developed where one serious illness can bankrupt a family, leaving them to the tender mercies of the humiliating public charity of internet fundraising sites.

I’m old enough to remember the Bicentennial, that universal and apolitical celebration that occurred about the time I came of majority and was allowed to vote. I look at the Caligula spectacle in Washington DC today and, suddenly, at 1,200 words into this, words fail me.  I think Caligula spectacle suffices. My only association with yesterday’s holiday is that I plan to go to the fireworks stands before they close and load up to celebrate the Big Man’s death death as a big, buttery fuck you here smack in the middle of the McMansion Reagan pirate neighborhood that I live at the edge of.

The New Orleans I live in today is the nominal cultural capital of what has become an extractive colony of the north as much as any nation in colonial era Africa, governed by what I have come to call the godsons of cotton. I say that with knowledge of the network of prison camps Homeland Security is building, likely to house the newly enslaved, that something like the Belgian Congo could remain in store. Ripping the children of immigrants out of the arms of their parents differs in degree and not kind from lopping off the limbs of the children of those who didn’t work hard enough as they did in Leopold’s Congo.  The leadership of this country has adopted the language of othering those they think beneath them in the same way it was used in Nazi Germany. And Homeland Security is building a network of camps.

So don’t @ me for burning that dime store flag and my general lack of allegiance and gratefulness to this country. My admittedly colonist ancestors arrived on this continent before the United States was created and were sold to it in an expansionist transaction with a European nation bankrupted by the endless European wars, opening the West to the Great American genocide.  Everything I loved about this country was really love of New Orleans because that’s where the city and I were located, and I watched for 20 years as the US tried to commoditize everything that made New Orleans unique in this country. So miss me when I don’t stand for the pledge of allegiance I recited every day for 16 years in a largely segregated, Catholic school, or for the school fight song that we call an anthem. This country has tried to destroy everything I love and to undo every attempt the nation ever made to better itself.

I have nothing to celebrate on the 4th of July. All I have to say to the rest of the country, and to my neighbors who have bought into the isolated, privatized Reagan prosperity Americanization and ethnic cleansing brought, is to quote my good friend Ashley Morris:

Fuck You You Fucking Fucks.