Why I rage against the machine

There's a reason why I rant and I rave and I rage against the daily stupidities, large and small, of Louisiana -- my home state, where I have not lived for almost 20 years.

Part of that reason is -- whether I like it or not . . . and I don't, really, because apathy and indifference is always the easier course -- I still care. I still love the place because it's still home.

I can't always stand the place, but you know how that is.

THE OTHER PART of why I rant and I rave and I rage against Louisiana's proclivity for being "stuck on stupid" is the place can't afford that anymore. As if it ever could.

But especially not now, because it's sinn fein, baby. Ourselves alone . . . or, rather, themselves (or yourselves, as the case might be) alone.

Alone.

The feds ain't gonna be the cavalry riding to the rescue. If the grudging "help" offered by the Bush Administration is any guide, the feds may well turn out to be the Indians, who've come to take you out, Louisiana. Because, to them, you're nothing but a pain in the ass that somebody who rides horses for a living is well rid of.

Of course, they're not going to be honest enough to tell Louisianians that, because it's so much less unpleasant to promise help to the dying while making sure it doesn't get delivered until. . . .

And, besides, you're a pain in the ass.

Anyway, I see this story, courtesy of The Associated Press, as one of those little stories that tell the Big Story in a way you can get your brain around:

In what some see as another bureaucratic absurdity after Hurricane Katrina, FEMA is refusing to pick up the cost of restocking New Orleans' aquarium because of how the new fish were obtained: straight from the sea.

FEMA would have been willing to pay more than $600,000 for the fish if they had been bought from commercial suppliers. But the agency is balking because the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas went out and replaced the dead fish the old fashioned way, with hooks and nets. That expedition saved the taxpayers a half-million dollars but did not comply with FEMA regulations.

"You get to the point where the red tape has so overwhelmed the process that there's not a lot you can do to actually be effective," Warren Eller, associate director of the Stephenson Disaster Management Institute at Louisiana State University, said of FEMA's actions.

Katrina knocked out power to the tourist attraction at the edge of the French Quarter in August 2005, and the staff returned days four days later to find sharks, tropical fish, jellyfish and thousands of other creatures dead in their tanks.

Aquarium officials wanted to reopen the place quickly. So even before the $616,000 commitment from the Federal Emergency Management Agency came through, they sent a team on an expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Keys and Bahamas, where they caught 1,681 fish for $99,766.

Despite the clear savings, the dispute has dragged on for 17 months.

"FEMA does not consider it reasonable when an applicant takes excursions to collect specimens," FEMA quality control manager Barb Schweda wrote in a 2006 e-mail. "They must be obtained through reputable sources where, again, the item is commercially available."

FEMA's refusal to reimburse the aquarium is grounded in the Stafford Act, the federal law governing disaster aid that has been criticized as inadequate for Katrina recovery. The Stafford Act says facilities can only be returned to their pre-disaster condition, not improved. Under those rules, the aquarium would have to buy fish of the approximate age and size of the lost specimens.

State experts and others counter that acquiring thousands of duplicates in the marketplace is nearly impossible, and a waste of public money.

IF THERE WERE any political percentage in undoing the Catch 22, I suspect the Bush Administration would set about that with the same zeal it had for getting us into Iraq and then keeping us there, no matter the cost in lives and dollars. But there isn't any such percentage.

Americans might be mad that Bush screwed up the immediate Katrina aftermath, but it's not like they want him to make it right at this late date or anything.

Sinn fein.

Alone.

Root, hog, or die.

WHICH BRINGS ME -- and you knew that it would -- to Baton Rouge Magnet High School. The sad saga of Baton Rouge High, my alma mater, is another of those sad little stories that help tell the Big Sad Story.

In a sinn fein world, the few first-rate high schools Louisiana has make up a precious resource, one more important than crawfish or oil and gas. The oil and gas are going to run out. Not everybody likes crawfish. And when the fossil-fuel deposits are gone from Louisiana, only the most crustacean-crazed Americans are going to give a mudbug's chimney about the Gret Stet.

Louisiana, absent some radical attitude adjustment, then will be seen as offering no return on a hefty pain-in-the-ass investment.

ON THE OTHER HAND, young minds, and the ideas and big dreams inside them, are a renewable resource. Unfortunately, Louisiana has been maltreating and squandering its most precious resource -- its children and their dreams -- forever.

Baton Rouge High is a dump now. Baton Rougeans seem to be OK with sending their precious children to a dump to be educated . . . however much of that can occur in a crumbling hovel.

And Baton Rouge High is not the only crumbling dump Louisianians send their children off to for 13 years of whatever -- in too many of those hovels -- passes for "education." Far from it.

The faculty, staff and students of Baton Rouge Magnet High are heroic. From every measurement, it would appear that amazing things still happen there educationally, just as in my day during the late 1970s. But heroes are singled out for a reason -- there aren't that many of them, as a rule.

But every child, I think, knows when society has screwed him over. Louisiana, one of this country's least-educated states, nevertheless has earned a Ph.D in screwing over its children.

IT IS REAPING what it has sown forever, though the harvest comes in in various forms. Some kids just grow up undereducated, unmotivated and unproductive. Some turn to crime . . . born innocent only to end up rotting in Angola prison.

Others just fall short of their full potential, meaning Louisiana does as well.

Many of the best and brightest -- who, for the most part, got that way with little help from Louisiana, thankyouverymuch -- take their revenge via U-Haul. And Ryder.

After all, what in the world could a state that cared so little about them then offer them now?

AFTER SEEING WHAT I SAW over several hours one late-September day at Baton Rouge High, after seeing what was allowed to become of my old school . . . on behalf of myself and on behalf of the kids who go to BRMHS now, I walked out of there feeling absolutely violated.

A civilized people does not do this to anybody's children.

I was born and raised in Baton Rouge and, knowing what I know, I have to admit that I swing back and forth between thinking Louisiana has a slim-but-real chance at long-term survival and succumbing to utter despair for the place.

Again, I am someone whose Louisiana roots go back to the 1780s.

So if I feel that way, what the hell do you think the feds and the rest of the U.S. think? They think Louisiana not only is hopeless, but probably that it ought to be more-or-less politically and civically euthanized.

Because we're that kind of country now.

THAT'S WHY Baton Rouge High matters. Places like Baton Rouge High are Louisiana's only hope, because it IS sinn fein, baby.

And look what the hell Louisiana has done -- is doing -- to its last best hope.

God help them.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that I first saw the "sinn fein, baby" riff in print on Ashley Morris: the blog out of New Orleans last year. I recall having pretty much the same thought around the same time, but I don't remember using it in print. Ashley did, and it was bugging me that I had overlooked giving credit where credit is due for a hell of a good line.