A question for my hometown

What the hell is the matter with Baton Rouge?

Really, my hometown resembles some ramshackle Caribbean refuge for exiled Latin American dictators and fugitive American money launderers. It's gotten so that the wife and I have coined a term for the creeping shabbiness we note with each successive visit -- "Port-au-Princification."

OH, SURE, downtown is looking better. And so are all the areas where the rich have fled . . . away from all the areas that I knew as a child and young adult. Some day, we'll come back to town to see my mother, and we won't be shocked at all to see Toyota pickup trucks full of hired guns patrolling the "nice areas" to keep the riffraff out.

And everywhere else will look like . . . Haiti.

Baton Rouge is well on the way to becoming the world's only ghost-town capital city. If Colleen Kane, keeper of the Abandoned Baton Rouge blog, so chose, I'll bet she could make a lifelong career of documenting Red Stick's civic dishabille.

Why am I pretty certain she won't?

MISS KANE'S BLOG is a public service, week by week making it impossible for a city to ignore how others see it. Although I'll bet most Baton Rougeans who surf in haven't thought enough to get past viewing Abandoned Baton Rouge as the architectural version of a carnival sideshow.

They don't get that they're the freaks.

Holy crap.