Louisiana, help thou mine unbelief

My friend Rod Dreher has written an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal about Louisiana's latest flirtation with reform. There is sweetness and light and new hope down on the bayou; the wunderkind Bobby Jindal will be governor, having won in a primary-election landslide.

Well, you know what I think about this. If you don't, it's here.

At any rate, Rod is "proud and hopeful" that the folks back home apparently did The Right Thing. I am, too. Kind of.

Reading Rod's piece, I delight in how well he channels the deepest emotions of all us Louisiana expatriates. And I want to believe. I want to believe in hope, because my home state . . . it do get into your blood and you can't get it out:

You notice something, though, when Louisianians meet in exile. Everybody misses home and will take any opportunity to talk about it. Our friends--Yankees, mostly--get the biggest kick out of our honest-to-God tales of Bayou State life (political and otherwise). My wife, a native Texan, confessed that when we first started dating, she thought my stories about my homeland revealed me to be a pathological liar--until I took her there to see for herself. She visited my Uncle Murphy's grave and saw the headstone he'd won playing bourré (a Cajun card game) with an undertaker. He had it inscribed with the epitaph: "This ain't bad, once you get used to it."

Louisiana makes a lot more sense if you read the beloved picaresque "A Confederacy of Dunces" as an exercise in literary naturalism. There's simply no place like Louisiana. You will not find more generous and life-loving people anywhere, and Lord knows, you won't eat or drink better. It's hard to get over that. But you do, mostly. Last Sunday, I ran into a couple I know at a Krispy Kreme shop here in Dallas. We got to talking about the Jindal victory, and the wife, a non-native who had fallen in love with Louisiana as a Tulane student, said warmly that she'd love to move back. The husband gave her a look that telegraphed, "Yes, we all would, dear, but come on."

Despite all the sentimental longing for LSU Tigers tailgating and the scent of Zatarain's crawfish boil on your fingers, moving home rarely crosses the minds of us expatriates. Louisiana is a great place to be from, but the sense of fatalism that pervades life there casts doubt on whether it will some day be great place to be. In Louisiana, to be educated is to love the state and hate the state--and, for many, to leave it.

I WANT TO BELIEVE. I do.

I want to believe, despite my memories of voting for the reformer Buddy Roemer in 1987. Despite my memories -- following the news in subsequent years from my new home in Nebraska -- of how Roemer got chewed up and spit out by the unholy trinity of Dat's How We Do Things in Loosiana, Dat's Loosiana for You and, the grafters' favorite, How You Gonna Hep Me Out Here? (wink wink).

I want to believe in the power of one man -- this Brown- and Oxford-educated son of immigrants who came home instead of doing the sensible thing -- to right in a term or two what the natives took 300 years to f*** up this badly.

Dammit to hell, I want to believe. I want to believe. But then I remember this:


And I remember this:

I HAD LEFT LOUISIANA by the time David Duke beat out the incumbent Roemer in the 1991 gubernatorial primary. The onetime Klan leader and Nazi foot soldier damn near became governor of Louisiana, losing to the crook Edwin Edwards but nevertheless winning a majority of the white vote.

Did I mention that, before running for governor, he served in the state House, representing Metairie, a mostly-white suburb of New Orleans?

When Duke made the governor's runoff, I threatened to never set foot in the state again if the little Nazi won. And I was dead serious. I was prepared to boycott everything about Louisiana, cutting off my pittance to the LSU Alumni Association and even giving up my beloved Community Coffee.

I told my parents this . . . my parents, the ardent Duke supporters. And on Election Day, they cast their votes.

For David Duke. I guess that tells you everything you need to know.

HOPE REQUIRES that I believe that the citizenry of my home state wants reform. Wants change. Wants better than what they have now.

I am to believe this of the self-same Louisiana citizenry that tolerates sending their children -- or somebody's children -- to unsafe, crumbling public schools . . . the same Louisiana citizenry that has embraced the likes of David Duke as a mainstream candidate for high office . . . the same Louisiana citizenry that is OK with maintaining a Third World enclave in the richest country in the world.

Compared to that leap of faith, it's kid stuff to believe Jesus Christ makes Himself present flesh and blood, soul and divinity in a wafer of unleavened bread and a chalice of wine. As a Catholic, I most certainly believe the transubstantiation thing.

As a native Louisianian, when it comes to the reality of true reform back home . . . not so much.

This I do know: You can't turn a supertanker heading full-steam for Hades on a dime. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of time. And if it's the SS Louisiana, a lot of dumb luck, too.

Oh, Louisiana, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.