Super Fat Tuesday
Today is both Mardi Gras, literally “fat Tuesday” marking a time of feast before lent, and Super Tuesday, the day when 20 plus states hold primaries and the 2008 presidential election begins to take shape. It seems to me only fitting that these two significant cultural events line up to mark the beginning of the end of President Bush’s term in office. (If you’d like, pause here to bask in the beauty of the phrase “the end of President Bush’s term in office.”)
For a long time, when we thought of New Orleans we thought of drunkenness, revelry, voodoo, and jazz. Thanks to Jelly Roll, Louis Armstrong, Mickey Rourke, Harry Connick Jr., and Anne Rice, our collective idea of the Big Easy was that it was a place to go to be a little bad, a little dark, a lot drunk, and a lot soulful.
And indeed, I was all of these during my one and only trip to New Orleans when I was 18. I bought many, many hurricanes (the New Orleans slushy drink that contains something like seven different kinds of alcohol) from little sidewalk carts and strolled through the French Quarter checking out the voodoo shops and the jazz clubs. A cute artist penciled a sketch of me that made me look more beautiful than I’d ever felt. I saw a pick-pocket in action. I learned to tie a cherry stem in a knot in my mouth. Someone stole the “help your local police, beat yourself up” button off my jean jacket. A street guitarist played “Wish You Were Here.” I saw my first drag queen.
For most of my adult life, these were my images of New Orleans. Every Mardi Gras I’d ache to get back to the city, but the time was never right (or the money was never enough). Still, when I thought of N’awlins, I saw that smiling girl in the sketch and felt the steady rhythmic jazz thumpings bouncing from the clubs out into the streets.
We all know, of course, when our collective images of New Orleans peeled away to reveal an ugly, ugly reality. Hurricane Katrina, and New Orleans itself, came to represent the moment when all or most of America fully realized that President Bush simply wasn’t ever qualified for his position. Even those who had supported his decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq were having a hard time justifying this one. Katrina brought us the stark and disturbing images of starving babies and people wading through human and chemical filth begging for help from our government. I fell in love with Anderson Cooper and Kanye West for foregoing the safe dialogue of news reports and benefit concerts and speaking raw truths about politicians and institutionalized racism. I also fell a little in love with Sean Penn in his rowboat.
The safe distance of the television screen filtered, mercifully, some of the jarring reality many of us. But still, I asked “Is this my country? Is this really happening in America?” And I know I wasn’t alone. So to me, it seems fitting that on Mardi Gras we start, for many of us, the long-awaited process of voting the president out of office. It’s important that we begin this process, that we all are poised to take action now to truly begin to rebuild the image of America, which has become more than a little tattered, hurricane battered, and war torn over the past eight years. It’s not necessarily a happy Super Fat Tuesday, but it is a day, thankfully, of a growing national resolve to live a little better.
Oh, Lucy. You said it.
“If you’d like, pause here to bask in the beauty of the phrase ‘the end of President Bush’s term in office.’”
Oh, honey. I be baskin’. I be rollin’ this way and that, soakin’ in the goodness of the thought. When I voted yesterday, it was with the glee of knowing that for George W. Bush, my vote was the beginning of his bad old end. I know he can still do a lot of damage and he’s doing it as fast as he can, but his time is just about up. And he’ll go down in history as the biggest, most malevolent failure ever to mar the face of the Earth. He’ll join such greats as Stalin, Hitler, Amin and Pinochet. How proud his daddy must be. Heh.
Yesterday started the last chapter in our national nightmare. Thanks for an excellent post.
Oh boy, you’re going to get some comments on this one!
I like the style of your writing, however, I do not agree with your opinions.