People are blaming the Hurricane Katrina mess on Louisiana’s notorious political corruption. But it’s quite the opposite.
You can clean up corruption, and bully for you. But it’s best to then put something back in its place. Because, as we’ve all seen, nature abhors a vacuum.
And water will rise to fill it.
The US federal government’s been cleaning up Louisiana for quite some time now. Almost all our local judges are under some kind of suspicion, not to mention many of our politicians.
Some are currently in jail.
It’s part of the clean-up.
How did the good-old-boy Louisiana patronage system work? Like this: Local politicians would appoint relatives and close friends to the New Orleans Levee Board. This board had its own police, its own contractors, its own engineers.
How did the board work?
Something like this:
Joseph Boudreaux (a fictitious name) would get appointed to the Levee Board. Boudreaux gave his son P’ti Joe a job as a Levee Board patrol officer. P’ti Joe would drive his nice new squad car up and down the levees, checking the water level and soil condition, reporting anything that needed fixing. Because things always need fixing, Boudreaux’s mother’s brother had a nice piece of land by the spillway with “real good dirt,” and Boudreaux gave his Uncle Ronnie Robichaux a “lifetime contract” to supply dirt “real regular” wherever needed.
Uncle Ronnie’s son Frank owned a truck and machine-leasing company, and Frank’s trucks and machines were used to move the dirt around; Uncle Ronnie’s nephew Grady owned the insurance company that insured all Frankie’s dirt-moving trucks and machinery, and also had all the insurance contracts on P’ti Joe’s “official” cars; and Grady’s uncle Marty owned a little plant nursery where Joseph could get a good deal on the St. Augustine and other sods used to hold the levee dirt together, so it didn’t erode.
Marty made other decisions-whether to plant the grove of pines and cypress, the alleys of young live oaks, and what color oleander bushes should we put in between all that?
The levees were sometimes topped with long cement caps where you could sit, fish, and watch the water levels rise and fall.
Marty had a cousin Edwin in the cement business who could put the whole thing together real cheap.
And Edwin had flooded ten acres on his farm near Abbeville so that the ducks and geese were landing there in season, and every Boudreaux and Robichaux and everyone in between could all go hunting and fishing for free at the camp.
During these hunting and fishing trips, everyone got to know each other rather well. They traded social invitations, the wives got together and played bridge and talked about their children, who met each other, and sometimes fell in love and married.
What was the point of public service, folks sometimes wondered, if you couldn’t take care of all your friends and relatives?
This is how things worked.
I’m not defending it, just telling you how things were. And frankly, things worked rather well for a long time.
That’s just a fact. Why this was such a shock to the Bush administration...that passed the presidency from father to son, and may pass it from brother to brother soon enough...is beyond me.
But Louisiana is a rough state, and New Orleans is a tough city.
We needed someone to make the trains run on time. So we had “strong men.” We had Huey Long who said, “A chicken in every pot,” and gave every Louisiana school child free textbooks at a time when education was only for the rich.
Governor Huey might have actually become President Huey had he not been assassinated. And we had Edwin Edwards who survived a long time against very long odds to be the most popular governor Louisiana has ever known. And we had a quixotic assortment of mayors.
I remember best Mayor Victor Schiro, who once admonished the populace, “Don’t believe any of these scurrilous rumors unless they come directly from me.”
For the past two decades, New Orleans and Louisiana have been in the throes of being “cleaned up.”
It’s been confusing at best.
One wonders whether one might find one’s self-indicted for taking that hunting or fishing trip with the Boudreaux boys.
Considerations apparently don’t apply to American vice presidents and Supreme Court justices.
While our local politicians cool their heels in jail for accepting hunting and fishing trips with Joseph Boudreaux and his family members, federal government officials feel very free to accept the same kinds of largess, from wealthy corporate shareholders and officers.
Ducks are ducks, and if shooting them is wrong for the Boudreauxs and their kin, how come it’s not wrong for the folks from Washington, D.C.?
At least with Joseph Boudreaux and his band of merry men, we got our levees built up. The hurricanes came, and the levees held. And if the Boudreauxs had worked the train, it’d run on time.
Betcha.
Want to investigate? Find out who started replacing the dirt and cement with flimsy metal interlocking curtains that bent and broke. Betcha their name’s not Boudreaux or Robichaux.
Those folks know how to build a levee.
