Too little, too late to save my home state?

There's a new public-interest group that's grown out of the business community in my home state, Louisiana, and it's setting out on what -- to these jaded eyes -- looks like a Sisyphean quest, pressuring "statewide and legislative candidates to endorse sweeping policy changes in ethics, education and road funding to try to remake Louisiana."

As the article in The (Baton Rouge) Advocate put it:

Officials of the group, called Blueprint Louisiana, also said they are prepared to spend $1 million this year for television advertising and other expenses to convince political contenders to get behind the push.

“We are capable of so much more as a state,” said Maura Donahue, vice-president of a Mandeville firm and a member of the organization’s steering committee.

WELL, YEAH . . . so what? Louisiana has been capable of so much more as a state since, oh, 1812. The problem has been in 300 years of underachievement, lack of initiative and low expectations since Iberville and Bienville established a French colony there.

Most states -- indeed, most countries -- would give anything to have the natural resources and mild climate found in the Gret Stet. Most states -- indeed, most countries -- would settle for a crappy climate if they could just tap into the oil and natural-gas reserves sitting under Louisiana and off its coast.

On the most basic level there is, no one should ever go hungry in a state where the climate lets you plant both spring and fall vegetable gardens. But we know that's not the case. We know too well that Louisiana has one of the nation's highest poverty rates, including 23 percent of children under 18 . . . of which 13 percent live in "extreme poverty."

We also know that the state has an abysmal high-school dropout rate and ranks 44th in its graduation rate. Overall, 21 percent of Louisianians have less than a high-school diploma or its equivalent, including almost one-third of African-Americans.

And in 2000, only 22 percent of adult Louisianians had college degrees.

I REALIZE you have to start somewhere, and I'm not saying Blueprint Louisiana's efforts aren't desperately needed or will be futile. But the chronic nature of the state's disastrous poverty and educational-attainment statistics point to problems that lobbying some politicians can't touch.

The underlying problems in Louisiana are cultural ones, and they go back a long, long way. And unless Blueprint Louisiana can wave a magic wand and make Louisiana into an authoritarian state governed by enlightened and generous despots with the power to interrupt the deviant cycle of stupid does as stupid is -- and then force the unknowing and unwilling to educate themselves whether they want to or not -- I fear the groups' leaders have a long and frustrating row to hoe.

To be really blunt about it, a deviant (in sociological terms) population, given free will and universal emancipation, is apt to install a pretty damned deviant government (in political terms). I think Louisiana has borne that out for generation upon generation -- giving its citizens a genuinely biracial kleptocracy that, in 1991, almost ended up being headed by an ex-Klan-wizard, ex-neo-Nazi governor.

Pardon my French but, ladies and gentlemen, that's one seriously f***ed up political system.

Like I said, long row to hoe. Extremely frustrating.

SO, SHORT OF "Shape up or we'll shoot you," how do the Blueprint Louisiana folks aim to change the underlying civic culture that tolerates extreme poverty, extreme corruption, extreme racism (in both directions, I might add) and extreme disinterest in educational attainment? That's the linchpin to defeating the Dumbass Insurgency, and it's a quagmire not unlike the one we face in trying to "stabilize" Iraq.

At least we can thank God that insurgent Cajuns aren't setting off fresh-shrimp-truck bombs next to busy thoroughfares.

I'm asking here, because I don't know whether I have any good answers. I hope the Blueprint Louisiana leaders and other long-suffering good-government types do.

I TAKE THE LIBERTY of saying what I do, as bluntly as I do, because -- as I said -- I was born and raised in Baton Rouge, coming from an exceedingly working-class background and the beneficiary of a dirt-cheap, reasonably thorough college education from Louisiana State University. I was fortunate to go to college when $400 a semester would cover my tuition and fees, and I reckon I have to give thanks for at least that portion of the Long dynasty's populist legacy, one that gave generations of Louisianians so much that was so good . . . and so much that was soooooooooo bad.

As anyone who regularly reads Revolution 21's Blog for the People knows, I write a lot about my home state in Katrina's wake. And I mean a lot.

Odd, I suppose, being that I've lived in Nebraska the last 19 years. My wife and I left searching for greener, less dysfunctional pastures in 1988, and we ended up in Omaha, her hometown.

And here, as I'm wont to say, people generally care and government generally works. Schools are good, crime is relatively low and the city doesn't look like a Third World backwater. Yes, property taxes are pretty high, but then again, schools are good, crime is relatively low and the city doesn't look like a Third World backwater.

Generally, you get what you pay for.

Likewise, I'm fairly sure that many -- hell, probably most -- Louisianians would be horrified by our local property-tax rates. I'm also sure they'd be horrified by our gasoline tax and by the property- and wheel taxes we pay every year to get our cars licensed. Then again, Nebraska has very little oil revenue and our highway system isn't the worst in the nation, like some other state.

No, there's no oil in Omaha . . . but there are four Fortune 500 companies here. And there is a downtown that has been utterly transformed in the time we've lived here, as well as a citywide design and development plan that stands to transform whole swaths of this old market- and cow town on the Missouri River.

What is happening in Omaha today is what is possible when you have good schools, business involvement and a strong civic culture. We're harvesting the bounty of a Midwestern work ethic coupled with a generally progressive political culture and enough civic insecurity to push people to look at bigger cities and cultural centers and ask, "How come we can't be like that?"

LOOKING FROM UP HERE back toward Down There, I find I have developed the perspective of someone with a foot in each world . . . and Nebraska and Louisiana are different worlds. And I see that the tragedy of Louisiana -- the reason the good people of outfits like Blueprint Louisiana have their work more than cut out for them -- is that Uncle Earl (former Louisiana Gov. Earl Long) knew his state and was, oh, so right when he said "Someday Louisiana is going to get good government. And they ain't gonna like it."

Good government. Stuff like this, as reported in the Advocate piece:

Organizers said they will ask statewide and legislative candidates to sign pledges to support legislation in 2008 that would:

-- Enact the nation’s best ethics law, including detailed personal financial disclosure on employment, investments, property and liabilities for legislators, statewide elected officials, candidates for those offices and their spouses.

-- Allow every 4-year-old in the state to attend public school classes, up from about 60 percent who do so now.

-- Increase annual state aid for roads and bridges by nearly $570 million per year, mostly by moving money that now finances a wide range of state services to one that pays for roads only.

-- Reshuffle nearly $1 billion in state health-care spending so that the money follows patients rather than state-run hospitals

-- Make community and technical schools the center of efforts to improve Louisiana’s work force.

Employers often complain that they cannot find trained workers for top-paying jobs, many of which require two-year degrees.

Sean Reilly of Baton Rouge, vice chairman of Blueprint Louisiana, insisted that the plan is no pie-in-the-sky quest.

“If the citizens lead, then legislators will follow,” Reilly said. “You can adopt this agenda and win.”

BLUEPRINT LOUISIANA wants to bring the state good government. Louisianians ain't gonna like it. I mean, since when have voters there ever led -- at least led legislators toward any long-term commitment to good government?

That's the problem. What to do?

As I said earlier, I have found myself writing a lot about Louisiana here. Why?

Obviously, because I still love the place -- perhaps in a warped love-hate relationship at times, but love nonetheless. Louisiana has defined who I am and how I interact with the world, both good and bad. It is home, and I can't change that.

And no matter how fine a place Omaha is (which it is), and no matter how much I like it (which I do), and no matter how proud I am of what it has become (which I am), it isn't home. To some degree, I am and will always be an outsider here.

To some degree, I will always feel like a fish out of water here on the edge of the Middle West and the cusp of the Great Plains. Maybe it's just me, but when you're a Louisianian in a land of practical, understated Midwesterners, you sometimes get this feeling that people are sizing you up and deciding that you're Borat with a drawl.

Or that if your drawl isn't thick enough for what someone thinks a Louisiana native's ought to be, you're causing a disruption in the Region-Stereotype Continuum.

All this is to say I miss home. Despite all home's dysfunction and crookedness and poverty and crippling fatalism -- and may the phrase "Well, dat's Louisiana for you" be forever banished, amen -- I often feel that, not being home, I'm not quite right.

ON MANY LEVELS, particularly since The Thing (otherwise known as Katrina), I want to go home. I want to live out my days (pray God, many more) at home. I want to die and be buried back home.

But I look at what remains "The Poor Man of America" -- and in some ways is even more so -- and I think twice. I think hard.

I look at the seeming futility of changing a culture warped by long history and bad governance, and at the parochialism and insularity of Louisiana. I look at the distrust of "outsiders," and I wonder whether now I have become one.

I look at all this and wonder whether Thomas Wolfe was right, that, indeed, "You can't go home again." I wonder whether you don't just suck up your ennui and not even try.

I speak on the phone with my 84-year-old mother, a product -- actually, more a victim -- of all the screwed up crap that's gotten Louisiana, over generations, into the damn fix it's in now, and I feel like an able-bodied man who jumped off the Titanic and into a lifeboat, leaving the women and children behind. I am living up here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska, where people generally care and government generally works, while my functionally illiterate, widowed mother lives in Dystopialand, in her home in a declining Baton Rouge neighborhood, dependent on the kindness of my cousins.

And I know that after 84 years of knowing nothing but South Louisiana, and being as insulated as insular gets, moving her up here would be a cultural shock that just might kill her. Assuming that I ever could get her to leave Louisiana.

Likewise, I know that Louisiana isn't exactly a dream destination for people like my wife, born and raised in the Midwest and unconvinced that the cultural richness of the Bayou State outweighs the damn tough slog that living there (and knowing better) can be.

I AM COLLEGE EDUCATED. I'm also a creative person; I know what good government and a decent civic infrastructure look like, and I'm not over the hill yet. From what I've heard and read, I know that folks like those who created Blueprint Louisiana are desperate for folks like me to move -- or move back -- to the Gret Stet.

My heart tells me to go home. That's the only thing that does, because there's no rational reason -- generally speaking -- for me or anyone else to move to Louisiana.

We're not all burgeoning Rhett Butlers -- blockade runners and riverboat gamblers who've "always had a weakness for lost causes once they're really lost." And the confluence of history, recent events and never-changing statistics do little to convince Americans, or even natives like me -- particularly jaded natives like myself -- that Louisiana is anything but a lost cause.

What do Louisiana boosters say to people like me, folks whose hearts ache but, alas, do not have the last say?

What do Blueprint Louisiana types say to sympathetic folks with no Louisiana roots, those who have sympathy for your plight and might be open to a challenge but who must be practical as well?

What can the best-intentioned Louisianians do to change a civic culture that does not work up to First World standards, by and large, and hasn't for a long, long time . . . if it ever did?

How do you fix a failed state? How do you interrupt a death spiral? How do you cajole the smart and talented not to flee, and how do you convince the industrious and productive to move in?

The Blueprint Louisiana agenda is a start. And even if it's enacted, defying the long odds against it, are you ready for what lies beyond those first few steps of a thousand-mile journey?

I want to go home. I don't know whether I dare try.