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.

The Unifying Theory of Louisiana

The truth pops up in the damnedest places sometimes.

Like in the mouth of a Louisiana legislator.

IN THIS CASE, it was state Rep. Austin Badon Jr., D-New Orleans, who accidentally stumbled upon the Unifying Theory of Louisiana. That's the theory, heretofore little discussed in the Gret Stet, that explains why things are so bad there . . . and getting worse.

Let's see if you can spot where the Unifying Theory of Louisiana pops up in this excerpt from a Baton Rouge Advocate story about high-school graduation standards:

Roughly four in 10 ninth-graders fail to earn a high school diploma in four years in Louisiana. About 190,000 students attend public high schools.

Fannin said traditional math, English and science classes have failed to keep many students in school.

But Badon said students with no plans to attend college already have high school options.

Most students enroll in a college-prep curriculum.

However, those who finish the 10th grade, with the permission of parents or guardians, can opt to follow a different curriculum that helps train them for careers.

Badon said there are other ways to tackle the high school dropout problem without making major changes for a “select few.”

“One of the main things that we need to do is to educate parents that it is not acceptable for your children to drop out,” he said.

IF YOU PICKED Badon's uttering “One of the main things that we need to do is to educate parents that it is not acceptable for your children to drop out,” you win a 35-year-old can of Pop Rouge. I don't know if Badon realizes what he said, but the important thing is that he said it.

That's the problem of Louisiana -- it's a state where legislators find a pressing need to convince parents their kids really ought to stay in school.

Everything boils down to culture, not politics. Culture precedes politics . . . precedes all issues of governance. If you have a culture where you really have to work hard to convince Mama and Daddy it's really best that Junior not go through life uneducated, you start out behind the eight ball.

It's a vicious cycle. Because Louisianians never have found it that important for Tee Dummy to know his ass from his elbow -- academically, at least -- they never, for 300 years, have realized they're behind the eight ball because they don't consider education important.

Sometimes, the definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results this time) intersects with the definition of stupidity.

IT'S THE CULTURE, STUPID. But because the culture is stupid, the culture doesn't recognize its stupidity, which keeps the culture stupid, which means the culture never recognizes its stupidity, which keeps the culture stupid, which means. . . .

Rinse, repeat, and get the hell out of Louisiana while you still can.

From the 'Sent Mail': Get back to class!

From: The Mighty Favog
To: **** ******
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2005 01:19
Subject: Here's why classes need to resume

Prior to Chancellor O’Keefe’s town hall meeting on Friday, I had serious doubts that LSU would be ready to resume classes on Tuesday. I’m now convinced the university will attempt to start again, but now I’m unsure of the wisdom of that idea.

There remains a massive triage operation and special needs shelter on LSU’s campus. Helicopters, buses and wailing ambulances bearing evacuees are still coming in frequently. This operation will be going on for weeks at the very least.

Dear ****,


Here's why classes need to resume this week at LSU: The future of Louisiana. Hurricane Katrina wasn't a catastrophe for just New Orleans; it will have untold effects on all of Louisiana and, indeed, the nation. That's not even looking at the unfathomable human suffering, which isn't my point in this E-mail.

The point of this E-mail is what will happen in terms of "How will we live out our economic and civic lives, then?" In those terms, Louisiana will suffer grievously. Consider: A tremendous blow has been dealt to Louisiana's economy at a time of ongoing budgetary hardship. Really, you don't want to even think of the budgetary hit the state began to take, starting last Sunday, when New Orleans became an economic non-factor.

Louisiana lives by the sales tax, and it is about to die by the sales tax. The tourism industry just shrank to a dim shadow of its former self. No longer can the Gret Stet make a even a hard-scrabble living while remaining one of the most pathetically uneducated and unindustrious of these United States.

A population that remains inordinately poor and ignorant -- and I am not referring to just poor African-Americans in New Orleans, there are far too many white Louisianians who possess far more educational and economic opportunities yet possess even less interest in exploiting them -- just ain't that charming absent a good drenching of Old World charm in dishabille and Jack Daniels. Excitement-starved Ohioans will pay thousands to vomit in a Bourbon Street gutter because it is colorful and exotic spewing.

Throwing up on Chimes Street is just throwing up on Chimes Street. (God, how I miss The Bayou. Don't miss the throwing up or making an ass of myself, though.)

Someone leaving a handbill reading "Good jazz too-nite. Sho start at Elevn O-clok" posted at Tipitina's will leave color-starved tourists with the warm fuzzies about the "local flavor." A similar sign at Val's Marina in Head of Island just makes Yankees think "Deliverance" and "Squeeeeeeal like a pig, boy!"

See?

I think Jonathan Alter put it exceptionally well in the latest issue of Newsweek online:

I haven't seen them yet on TV, but vultures may have already descended on the carcass of New Orleans. We know that human vultures are swooping in. And the hangman prepared his noose this year, when the Bush budgeteers cut the Army Corps of Engineers' request for fixing the levees by two thirds. For the antitax conservatives who rule so much of the Gulf Coast and Washington, this is a comeuppance. Remember Mumford's history: Government matters. Not entertainment.

To survive, New Orleans must rewire its insouciance into seriousness. The city is at once enchanting and exasperating, romantic and fatalistic. Will the Big Easy learn to work hard enough to resurrect itself? Or is it, for all practical purposes, gone—a place on the map and not much more? History can make the argument either way.

The first week augurs ill. If House Speaker Dennis Hastert is saying now—with sympathy at its peak—that pumping billions of federal dollars into restoring a city below sea level "doesn't make sense," then aid from Washington will plummet in a few months when attention turns elsewhere. Some wealthier refugees are saying privately that they've all but given up on the place. The pictures of looting seemed to burst a psychic dam inside them. Invest in this? Pay more taxes for them? That's a recipe for white flight—overnight. On the other side are blacks—well over half the city's population—who are fed up with a power structure that could not keep them alive, much less house and educate them. Whites and blacks in New Orleans were swimming in a fetid swamp of racial tensions long before Katrina showed up.

The "before" is critical. Experts in urban recovery say that the most important factor in how a city fares is not the extent of the damage but the pre-existing trend lines. Chicago was mostly destroyed by fire in 1871 and San Francisco by earthquake and fire in 1906. But both cities had been on the way up beforehand. So while the rubble still smoldered, entrepreneurs were already getting loans to rebuild. Almost overnight, San Francisco constructed 8,000 barrackslike "refugee houses," with six to eight families in each. Within seven years it had recovered enough to host a world's fair.

The same dynamic applies to more recent disasters. Los Angeles, built on a fault line, is as geographically nonsensical as New Orleans. But it bounced back from an earthquake and riots in the early 1990s. The difference this time is that New Orleans has been in decline for decades. The headquarters of almost every energy company in town has moved away, usually to Houston. Its business establishment lacks the entrepreneurial dynamism of other Southern cities. Its work force is largely poor and uneducated.

The good news is that Mumford's litany of doomed cities is less relevant in modern times. "In the last 200 years, city rebuilding has been almost ubiquitous," says Lawrence Vale, professor of urban studies at MIT. "There's a deeply rooted necessity to turn disaster into opportunity." Vale says it was only a few days after 9/11 that he first saw that word — "opportunity" — in The New York Times.

I was amazed to read this today. The man nailed it. My wife and I, as well as old Baton Rouge friends (none living in Louisiana any longer) have spoken of JUST THIS many times. And not only in relation to New Orleans -- the unfortunate phenomenon isn't confined to what was the Big Easy. It's also a large part of why my wife (an Omaha native) and I no longer live in Baton Rouge.

Compared with the Gret Stet, life in Omaha lacks a degree of color. But it possesses more quality. That requires a certain degree of seriousness, and it damned well requires a level of taxation that Louisianians never have been willing to endure. Good schools and a functional infrastructure cost money.

Sacrifice is a virtue, not just a bummer.

We were in Baton Rouge for a week a little more than a month ago. The positive changes downtown impressed us. The remodeled J-school building amazed us. The growth of Tiger Stadium awed us.

But after spending a week of near strokes every time my mother uttered the words "damn niggers" (all the while sweetly patronizing an African-American professional who had been extraordinarily kind to her . . . and possessed 475 times more education, by the way), after a week of driving past bombed-out looking storefronts on Florida Boulevard, after a week of reading about the troubled state of the East Baton Rouge Parish public schools (primarily because well-off and middle-class whites hauled ass starting in '81), well. . . .

Let me put it this way: As my wife and I sat, and sat, and sat in traffic on Bluebonnet Road, I finally turned to Betsie and asked "Why in the HELL would anyone want to live here?" A month ago, Baton Rouge was a little more than half the size of Omaha but had twice the traffic problems.

Now it's bigger than Omaha. Uh-oh.

What capital does the state of Louisiana have to deal with the challenges the future brings -- a future indefinitely without a New Orleans? Great infrastructure that will make growth easier? A diversified economic base, one with many well-paying jobs? A well-educated population that values intellectual pursuits? A public and a government which will spare no expense or bypass any opportunity to build up and educate its most disadvantaged and vulnerable citizens?

No, no, no and no. Absent an influx of federal aid unparalleled in American history, y'all in big trouble.

Bottom line: The culture matters. It matters on, oh, so many fronts.

It matters if New Orleans is to be reborn. It matters if Louisiana is to survive this catastrophic blow to its economy and its spirit.

The key to Louisiana's surviving and prospering in the future is finding a way to preserve what is charming, enlivening and beautiful in its civic culture while changing what has been shackling and destructive. The job of your generation of Louisianians is to do just that.

Day One of your job is Tuesday. Tuesday is the first day of rebuilding New Orleans and saving Louisiana. Your job lies in the classrooms of Louisiana State University.

The best thing LSU students can do for New Orleans and Louisiana is to get back to work. Don't let the dead of Katrina have perished in vain.


-- Favog

Share Our Suck

 

Are you better off now than you were 83 years ago?

The editors of Politico Magazine asked that question recently, wading through the fever swamps of demographics to rank these more-or-less United States from best to worst, with a nod to a similar 1931 effort by H.L. Mencken and Charles Angoff in the American Mercury.

New Hampshire is tops. Guess which states are at the bottom.

For the last-place state (No. 51 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia), it's the same as it ever was -- Mississippi was the hellhole of the nation way back when, too. And for the first runner-up of national suck, things have changed for the worst since Huey P. Long was governor, free textbooks were a new innovation for Louisiana public schools and there were still more dirt roads than paved ones.

EIGHT SPOTS worth of worst, actually. Louisiana was No. 42 in 1931 -- "Bobby, you're doing a heck of a job!" If the Gret Stet's unrelentingly ambitious Gov. Jindal still wants to do for (to?) America what he did to my home state, I have two words on the campaign manager front: Michael Brown.

One thing in the Gret Stet does remain ever constant, though.  That would be the age-old Louisiana mantra of "Thank God for Mississippi!"

In a three-part series the magazine called “The Worst American State,” the pair compiled dozens of rankings of population data, largely from the 1930 census, determined to anoint the best and worst of the 48 states (and the District of Columbia), according to various measures of wealth, culture, health and public safety. In the end, Mencken and Angoff declared Connecticut and Massachusetts “the most fortunate American States,” and they deemed Mississippi “without a serious rival to the lamentable preëminence of the Worst American State” (diaeresis credit to Mencken, who, it should be noted, was from Maryland, No. 28 on his list). “The results will probably surprise no one,” they wrote. “Most Americans, asked to name the most generally civilized American State, would probably name Massachusetts at once, and nine out of ten would probably nominate Mississippi as the most backward.”

The methodology behind their exercise might not have been airtight, and the presumed definition of what is a “good” and “bad” state was clearly swayed by the writers’ prejudices and the time period; aside from the fact that many of their rankings had only partial data, consider that representation in the “American Men of Science” directory was factored into each state’s rank for culture, and lynchings for public safety. But the pair was onto something when they wrote that there are some aspects of daily life that most Americans can agree on: Education and health are good things, crime is a bad thing and “any civilization which sees an increase in the general wealth is a civilization going up grade, not down.”

 BOBBY JINDAL always did think H.L. Mencken was a commerniss.

But professor, you just don't understand

Some Louisiana State faculty and staff are upset that only about 1 percent of students at the Ole War Skule bother to study abroad. Well, then.

The Advocate in Baton Rouge, home of the world's best meeting coverers, has the story:

Only about 1 percent of students in Baton Rouge colleges study abroad — a statistic that is troubling to administrators, faculty and students alike.

The problem is particularly concerning for LSU because its regional and national peers are moving much further ahead, LSU officials said. The issue reached the point that the LSU Faculty Senate unanimously approved a resolution this week to strongly push for more “internationalization.”

Patricia O’Neill, an LSU music professor who has traveled the world in operas, co-authored the resolution and placed most of the blame on the college.

“We’re really, really behind our peers whom we claim we want to be on the same level with,” O’Neill said, faulting the lack of organization at LSU. “The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.”

Faculty Senate President Kevin Cope agreed: “It’s an unworkable, unmanageable impenetrable system” with no clear leadership.

Harald Leder, interim director of LSU academic programs abroad, said his department is lacking in resources — with a small, self-generated budget and a five-person staff — to serve nearly 27,000 students.

But much of the reason only about 450 students participate annually is the attitude of Louisiana students, Leder said.

“I think it’s Louisiana culture,” said Leder, who was once an international student from Germany. “They feel right at home here and don’t feel a reason to go away.”

O’Neill agreed, arguing that international experience is becoming imperative in the shrinking global world.

“Some of the attitudes of our finest students are really quite provincial,” she said.

Leder said money is another obvious factor because the average study abroad trip costs about $7,000. Simply put, many students cannot afford it, he said, especially with the weak dollar in Europe.

Still, LSU does offer study abroad in a number of locations, such as China, Argentina, Tanzania, Mexico, India, England, Italy, France and, the most popular, Ireland.

Schools such as the University of Arkansas have goals for 25 percent of their students to study abroad, Leder said, but Arkansas has a lot of money from Wal-Mart and the Walton family that LSU does not have.

“We are at about 1 percent, so that’s a pretty big gap,” Leder said.

Adam Hensgens, an LSU senior from Crowley majoring in international studies, said he wanted to participate in a new study abroad program to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to better learn Arabic.

The program was advertised to those in his major, but the study abroad office was not familiar with it, he said.

“The interest from students I think is picking up,” Hensgens said. “But it’s the institution’s inability to handle it.”

APART FROM NEEDING to come up with thousands and thousands of bucks to study in Europe or wherever -- and we all know that most college students, and their parents, are just rolling in that kind of dough -- there's another factor peculiar to the Gret Stet that the LSU faculty doesn't take into account.

Louisiana, by contemporary American standards, IS abroad. Likewise, America -- by contemporary and historical Louisiana standards -- can't get much more foreign.

Why go to South America if you're an LSU student? You're already there. And you can drink the water.

Why go to France when you can go to Breaux Bridge, dance quaint folk dances, buvez du bier et du vin, et riez des touristes américain?

I REMEMBER well my days as an LSU undergrad. When we wanted to go abroad, we went to places like Miami, where we ordered supper at HoJo's from our Spanish-speaking Cuban waiter by pointing at the pictures on the menu.

We also experienced the exotic culture of the United States by journeying to the land of les américains -- to places like Knoxville, Chicago and Milwaukee. And believe me, Milwaukee was utterly foreign to a Louisiana boy on his first trip north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

On the other hand, I gained a deep appreciation of Polish sausage, sauerkraut and Old Style beer. Now, that was good eatin'. And drinkin'.

And I also learned that when college kids from Eau Claire do send-ups of Doug and Bob Mackenzie's The Great White North, they're NOT acting.

Did I mention the joys of Old Style, which we couldn't get in Baton Rouge back then?

I found my experiences abroad served me well when I took a break from college to do a self-directed work study at the North Platte, Neb., Telegraph in early 1983. This extended stay abroad ended in August 1983 when I married the newspaper's American wire editor and returned to LSU with my foreign bride to complete my last 27 credit hours.

And I credit my wholly informal study abroad while an LSU student for my ability to adjust, since 1988, to living abroad here in Omaha, Neb., USA. I am able to converse with the locals in their language, as well as appreciate the local cuisine and understand their democratic form of government.

IN SHORT, I just don't understand why the LSU Faculty Senate has its knickers in a twist. There are plenty of opportunities there for students to experience exotic cultures abroad. All they need do is drive a day or so in any direction.

The trips are easily made, usually not overly expensive and -- if one observes the locals and their folkways carefully -- one can be fairly well prepared to integrate successfully should one choose to emigrate to the United States.

Louisiana jumps the shark

The Times-Picayune's J.R. Ball wants to know why Louisiana is so in love with Edwin W. Edwards, the ex-con ex-governor who, in his long public life, hasn't exactly covered the state in glory.

No doubt, that streak of ignominy -- more like a skid mark, actually -- won't be broken by his and his grandchild bride's new A&E "reality" show, The Governor's Wife. But the man's popularity persisted through thick and the federal pen, and no doubt it will continue to go up as he continues to drag the state's reputation down.

This mystifies the New Orleans paper's Baton Rouge editor and columnist. I don't know why, but it does:

Between pops of an adult beverage, my newfound friend informed me that Edwards, with a personality second-to-none, was the greatest governor to ever grace this state. My mention of Edwards' decade-long stay at a federal penitentiary brought, without hesitation, the explanation that "the governor" was simply robbing from those who could afford to be fleeced to help fulfill his larger, nobler quest to help the "little man" in Louisiana.

This bit of information prompted an epiphany: I need some new friends.

Before going our separate ways, my soon-to-be, newfound ex-friend dropped this nugget of wisdom: "Edwin Edwards would easily beat Bobby Jindal if he could run against him. Hell, there's not a politician in the state right now who could beat Edwards."

This was hardly my first exposure to this state's perverse love affair with Edwards. Most times, I adopt the learned Deep South behavior of smiling politely and simply walking away, silently stunned by the ignorance of such misguided opinions. As usual, I walked away without confrontation, but this time there was no incredulous internal laughter. Maybe it was latent hostility from having my television hijacked earlier that morning by a steady stream of commercials for "The Governor's Wife," a new reality show devoted to Edwards' ginormous ego. Maybe it was the ego of Edwards' attention-seeking trophy wife, using the show to introduce herself to a national cable audience. But this time I was angry. Or maybe it was just the increasing tempo of the "mist."

Regardless, can someone please explain this state's ongoing -- and seemingly never-ending -- fascination with one Edwin Washington Edwards?

SOMEONE doesn't need to explain it. I think Ball already knows; he's been around the Louisiana block more than a few times during his decades in the Gret Stet. As a journalist there, he's written about more stupidity, skullduggery, sleaze and stealing by those who run the state on citizens' behalf than most journalists from most other states would in three lifetimes.

You know and I know that in his heart of hearts, J.R. Ball knows.

The hard part is the admitting. And the accepting. And then acting upon what one has admitted and accepted. Yeah, that's the hard part. The longer one can prolong the "mystery," alas, the longer one delays some painful admissions and tough decisions.

In my opinion -- as someone born and raised in Louisiana, and as someone who lived there through more than half of Edwards' four terms as governor -- there are a few reasons you could be fascinated by the Silver Zipper. (Guess how Edwin got that nickname.)

One is that he's so foreign to you and your experience, you are fascinated by how exotic he is. That one's a non-starter in Louisiana. It just is.

Another is the Jerry Springer syndrome, otherwise known as "Look at the freaks!" and "Golly, I'm not as f***ed up as I thought!" But you don't elect your average Springero Erectus governor four times.

OR, IT JUST might be that you think, on some level, that Edwin Washington Edwards is just like you -- or perhaps a better, smarter and more powerful you. Massive corruption is OK, just as long as I can get some crumbs from his larcenous feast at the public's table.

J.R.'s game-day pal said as much.

Generally, states, like individuals, get what they tolerate, and they tolerate what they find tolerable. There lies the key to the riddle of Louisiana and its taste for crooks in high places.

To paraphrase what one colorful son of south Louisiana once famously proclaimed, "It's the culture, stupid!" Which just might be why "reformers" there spend all their time spinning their wheels, yet getting nowhere.

What was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Pistol envy as public policy

People in Louisiana always have been a little bit nuts.

Sometimes, that's a good thing. When you enter the realm of public policy and self-governance, usually not.

Chalk up this latest news of Louisiana Whack, as reported by The Associated Press, as a definite "not, no, nuh uh":

Former Gov. Mike Foster is featured in an NRA radio ad supporting a constitutional amendment on the Nov. 6 ballot that would set a tougher standard for restricting weapons use and remove a provision that spells out legislative authority to limit concealed handguns. 

Supporters of Amendment No. 2 say the change would guard against possible future Supreme Court rulings that might affect the Second Amendment. 

In the ad, paid for by the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association, Foster says he's voting for the amendment to "guarantee our rights to own a gun in Louisiana no matter what happens in Washington."

BEHOLD, the breakdown of civil society in Louisiana -- what there ever was of it -- continues apace. This kind of bat-sh*t crazy constitutional amendment is not the sign of a healthy society or culture.

It is the sign of people who believe that civil society is either a) not possible any longer, or b) undesirable. If you were to gauge what there is of the "Louisiana mind" today, you'd probably find that it's a little of both.

That the Legislature sent to voters a measure making it difficult for the state to regulate firearms at all and seemingly all-but-erasing authority for government to regulate the carrying of concealed weapons is a profound loss of faith in, if not the rule of law itself, the ability of the state to maintain order.

Or at least enough order that it wouldn't be considered normal to pack heat -- hidden heat, no less. No, ascendant is the idea of concealed firearms as so crucial to individual freedom and well-being that the state has precious little right to interfere or regulate. Welcome back to the Wild West. And good luck prosecuting gangbangers on gun charges before they actually pull the trigger and cap somebody's ass.

NEVERTHELESS, I bet it passes. Crazy does as crazy is, and if you look at the numbers and the newspapers, you realize that only a bunch of flat-out lunatics could create the monument to dysfunction and delusion that is the Gret Stet.

Louisiana never has been big on the rule of law. Now, however, it threatens to go "all in" on the rule of force. Yeah, that should work out well in America's largest insane asylum.

And he could there do no mighty work. . . .

Is Louisiana fixed yet?

After all, it has been the better part of a week since the Messiah took office. Robert Kennon Buddy Roemer Bobby Jindal, by his mere presence and tough talk on ethics, was to instantaneously transform a state that's been mired in varying degrees of dysfunction since the dawn of the 18th century.

SO, WE FIND that, thus far, the status quo is hanging tough in the Gret Stet. The business community and LSU are fighting over the resignation of Chancellor Sean O'Keefe, forced out amid political machinations by the school's new president and its board of supervisors.

Also in Baton Rouge, existing downtown casinos, through front organizations, are airing anti-casino TV ads to keep a competitor from opening and sucking gamblers to a new "resort" in the southern part of town, where -- on a different matter -- some residents are fighting tooth-and-nail to stop the kind of mixed-use, commercial/residential development that most American cities lust after.

Meanwhile, murder rates are soaring in both New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and the mayor of the Crescent City is still a preening doofus.

And my alma mater, Baton Rouge Magnet High School, is still a dump. Despite having one of its own in the governor's mansion.

Any moment now, I expect that disillusioned Louisianians will begin denouncing Jindal, asking what use have they for a messiah who can't turn water into wine, much less a Third World entity into something resembling a functioning civic society. And do it instantly.

Remember, you read here first that -- even under the most miraculous permutations of great good fortune -- the best Bobby Jindal can do is futz around the edges of Louisiana's pathology, perhaps fixing a doodad here and a thingamabob there. Maybe a couple of thingamabobs, which probably would earn him a vice-presidential slot on the 2012 GOP presidential ticket.

That's about it, though . . . fixing some doomaflatchies and whatsits. Because Jindal can't legally do anything about the real problem with Louisiana -- the people who live there.

It takes people to make a culture, and it takes people to generally care so that government might generally work. Your score in the Louisiana Bowl, after 300 years of play, is Violent Dumbasses 76, Prosperous Functioning Society 14.

The coach, alas, is only as good as his players.

LET'S LOOK, in a metaphorical vein, at the governor's old school and mine -- Baton Rouge Magnet High.

Over the past generation or so, it has been allowed to fall into an extreme state of disrepair. Quite literally, it has been falling apart around students, teachers and administrators . . . which is not exactly the way a state tells its best and brightest young people "I love you. Please stay."

Football programs quickly learn they can't recruit good players when Whatsamatta U's athletic facilities are falling apart. Louisianians never learn, however, and demographic data has shown for some time that the state pays the price.

When I was a child, Baton Rouge's public schools were pretty dumpy, and the school system pretty much sucked. Except for one school -- Baton Rouge Magnet High.

Now, as reported by the Baton Rouge Business Report (and everyone else), the school system still pretty much sucks and the facilities have nosedived well into "Good God ALMIGHTY!" territory:

About a year ago, workers employed by the East Baton Rouge Parish School System were looking to perform some fairly routine repairs to Baton Rouge Magnet High School. But the more they looked, the more problems they found. For starters, the brick and mortar of the venerable main building were no longer even connected to the exterior walls.

The findings were no surprise to Dot Dickinson, who watched a tile fall from the ceiling before a performance of the school’s orchestra, which included her son, in the mid-1990s. Luckily, the wayward tile landed on empty seats.

“Seems someone would have noticed the need for maintenance at that time,” she says.

Most likely someone did. But at the time, every public school in the parish needed work, and there was virtually no money to pay for it, school officials say. The system isn’t in the crisis mode it was in 10 years ago, but there are still a number of school buildings that are drafty, leaky, moldy or otherwise disheveled.

The School Board was scheduled to discuss—and most likely finalize and vote on—the system’s facility plan on Jan. 10. The futures of Baton Rouge Magnet High, which is in line for a $62 million renovation, and Lee High School, which the system had considered closing before Superintendent Charlotte Placide proposed building a new Lee High on the same site, have elicited the strongest emotions.

(snip)

Revenues over the next 10 years, including a $20 million surplus, are expected to be more than $489 million, assuming the renewal of a one cent sales tax. That covers what the system believes are the most pressing needs.

But making all the needed repairs could cost about $800 million if everything is fixed by 2011, system spokesman Chris Trahan says. Meanwhile, the parish’s older schools will continue to deteriorate. Placide says the system needs more money to catch up, but will parish voters pony up, especially since so many abandoned the public school system years ago?

For more than three decades, the system didn’t build a single new school. From 1964-98, parish voters approved enough tax renewals to keep the system operating, but not nearly enough to make any significant capital improvements, Trahan says. There were no bond issues, and no dedicated stream of revenue for infrastructure. The system didn’t even have a building maintenance fund like most districts.

Placide says there are “various reasons” why voters wouldn’t approve significant fees for capital improvement, which she didn’t attempt to list, but allowed that the problem was “related to the desegregation issues the community struggled with for some time.” The parish settled its 47-year-old desegregation case with the federal government in 2003.

IN OTHER WORDS, since 1981 -- the beginning of "forced busing" as a desegregation tool in Baton Rouge -- white residents steadily and relentlessly removed their children and their financial support from the public schools. The numbers don't lie.

Sheer racism may or may not have played a major role in the ethnic and financial "cleansing" of the local schools. For the first wave fleeing the East Baton Rouge public schools for brand-new private schools (and to neighboring parishes), race played a big role. Or at least I suspect it did.

For later waves of refugees, that abandonment probably was due to being sick and tired. Sick of fighting against growing urban decay and the resulting educational dysfunction, and bone tired from the fight.

Nevertheless, the result was the New Orleanization of the capital city's public schools, and civic support for public education cratered. Again, from the Business Report article:

In 1997, the system put together a comprehensive facilities plan that identified millions in needed work. Perhaps hoping to take advantage of goodwill engendered by the end of forced crosstown busing the previous year, school officials put together an ambitious proposal, asking voters to approve a 25-year, $475 million bond issue and a 35-year 1% sales tax for constructing and maintaining new school buildings. Both propositions were soundly defeated at the polls.

Thus chastened, school officials came back the next year with a proposition that had been drastically scaled back: a penny sales tax, levied over five years, about half of which was earmarked for a pay-as-you-go repair and construction fund. The tax passed and was renewed for another five years in 2003, and the system built seven new schools with that money.

(snip)

“The school system is one of the greatest detriments to economic growth that we have here,” says Fred Dent, chairman of a Baton Rouge financial consulting firm and spokesman and founding member of TaxBusters, which works for lower taxes and streamlined government. “When we keep getting headlines about the lack of performance of schools, it does not engender a lot of trust for any school board that has that problem. … It’s not about the money, it’s about performance.”

(snip)

Thirty percent of children in East Baton Rouge Parish do not attend public schools, nearly double the state average of 16%, which the Louisiana Department of Education says is the highest rate in the nation. The private schools can pick and choose whom they want to let in, while public schools take all comers. Public schools tend to have nearly all of the special education and special-needs students, while private schools grab many of the high-achievers.

For middle- and upper-class children, private schools are the rule, not the exception. Nearly 77% of the students left in East Baton Rouge public schools are poor, as measured by how many qualify for free or reduced lunch. Often, poor children come from unstable homes or dangerous neighborhoods, and they bring those problems with them to school. Parental involvement in a child’s education, a key factor in academic success, is often lacking in poorer homes.

EVERY STATISTIC in this story is staggering. And very few of them can be ameliorated by even as great and talented a political messiah as Bobby Jindal.

In Baton Rouge -- and in New Orleans . . . and all across the Gret Stet -- the problem with public education lies in the people. The people have the freedom to elect good stewards of the public trust . . . or lousy ones.

The people can commit themselves to strong public education for the good of society . . . or not. They can give public education -- and desegregation -- a chance . . . or not. They can vote for taxation sufficient to support good public schools and then hold officials accountable . . . or not.

The people of Baton Rouge, and Louisiana, can be OK with the sorry state of one of the state's best schools . . . or not.

So far, the people's job performance hasn't been exactly inspiring.

And the Business Report article makes it sound like passing the tax renewal won't exactly be a slam-dunk. Even in the face of damning evidence that Baton Rougeans have fallen down on their job -- the job of creating a functioning civic society that offers all its citizens equal access to the necessities of modern life.

Like a decent education.

IN STATES not Louisiana, public education has a history dating to 1635, with the establishment of the Boston Latin School. Universal education as a function of the state had one of its early champions in Thomas Jefferson, and the idea took off in the mid-19th century.

As it has been understood in the United States, free public education is a basic service civic society -- through local government -- provides to all its citizens without regard to status, creed, nationality or race. As it has played out in Baton Rouge, among other unfortunate examples, free public education is what you get when you are unable or unwilling to pay for private or parochial school.

And like the segregated education African-American children routinely received in the South of my childhood, public education in my hometown once again is separate and unequal. Some 83 percent of those children on the public side of Baton Rouge's resegregated educational realm -- many of whom are doomed to attend classes in substandard, crumbling facilities -- just happen to be black.

Separate. Unequal. Still.

Faced with the picture of children -- if not theirs, somebody's -- trying to learn in squalid classrooms such as those at my alma mater, Baton Rouge High, "activists" like Fred Dent balk at setting tax rates adequate to erase the shame of a city.

"It’s not about the money, it’s about performance.” That's what the man says.

Really? Couldn't it be just a little bit about, "I got mine. Screw the ghetto dwellers"?

Or does Dent really think the rational response to a crumbling, failing school system is to cut off the money and kill the sucker dead? And he and his ilk are working to replace the unacceptable entity with . . . what, exactly?

MEANWHILE, it'll probably take a brutal fight to pass enough of a tax renewal to assure repairs to Baton Rouge High, Lee High and all the other dung heaps where Baton Rougeans are content to warehouse their children. If it even passes at all -- despite all the shocking pictures, despite all the gallons of ink used to print the story of a city's shame.

"America's Next Great City," as its mayor laughably calls it.

Louisianians wait with bated breath for one of their occasional political messiahs to pull off a miracle well beyond the pale of mortal man. And soon enough, they'll crucify him because cheap grace was something that would not materialize out of his insufficient incantations.

A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. And he could there do no mighty work. . . . And he marvelled because of their unbelief.

They could have watched Leno for free

The new graduates of Our Lady of Holy Cross College in New Orleans paid thousands of dollars a year for four years to get their degrees and sit through commencement . . . just to get a rerun of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's performance on the Tonight Show when it came time for their Big Moment.

FOR THAT MATTER, people paid 50 cents to buy a copy of The Times-Picayune to read about what they could have watched on YouTube for free:

Gov. Bobby Jindal told a group of college graduates on Sunday they didn't have to leave Louisiana to find opportunity.

"Dorothy from 'The Wizard of Oz' was right: 'There's no place like home,' " he said. "You can dream big right here at home."

AH, BUT THAT'S THE RUB. Lots of people dream big in Louisiana. Then they go somewhere else to make them come true. Somewhere where mediocrity is not a height that's seldom achieved.

Over the years, Jindal said Louisiana has exported gas, oil, culture and its sons and daughters "who felt they had to leave home to pursue their dreams."

Jindal said that he'd called his mother that morning to wish her a happy Mother's Day, and that she had told him she was proud of him, but for her, his greatest achievement was her grandchildren.

So, Jindal told the graduates, before looking for an out-of-state job, consider the parents in the audience.

"They're looking forward to the day when you fulfill your real purpose by giving them grandchildren," he said. "And they're not letting you take those grandchildren out of this state."

THEY HAVE for decades now.

The trouble with Louisiana -- and with the kind of governor Bobby Jindal is shaping up to be -- is that talk and dreams are plentiful and cheap in the Gret Stet. Success is rare and difficult.

Yes, Dorothy was right in The Wizard of Oz. There is no place like home.

And the wizard's balloon says "State Fair Omaha."

UPDATE: Who knew that the gub'na's speechwriter gets a salary and not paid by the speech? Three commencement addresses, one speech.

Why try harder, eh, Cap?

Grateful in a strange land

I have lived in Omaha, by God, Nebraska for 22 years now and -- still -- there are times when I feel like a stranger in a strange land.

Saturday was another one of those times.

That was the day Central High School opened its doors to the community to celebrate its 150th-anniversary school year -- it was founded in 1859 as Omaha High School, just four years after the city's incorporation and eight years before Nebraska would win statehood. Its present building, the "new" Omaha Central, went up between 1900 and 1912.

You see what a beautiful structure it is.

ALMOST half a lifetime ago, I immigrated to Omaha from a foreign land . . . so to speak. Specifically, an exotic and strange Caribbean outpost by the name of "Louisiana."

It has been rumored that "Louisiana" is not a foreign land at all, but instead one of these United States. Technically, that may be true.

Technically, the cop running the small-town speed trap doesn't have a quota to make, either.

Anyway, I grew up in Baton Rouge, where I graduated from the oldest school in the city. Baton Rouge High came into being sometime around 1880 -- this in a city settled in 1699 and incorporated in 1817, five years after Louisiana became a state.

Its present building, the "new" Baton Rouge High, went into use in 1927.

You see, in this 2007 photo, what a dilapidated structure it is.

Having done no meaningful maintenance -- obviously -- on Baton Rouge High since I graduated in 1979, the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board managed to get a sales tax and millage renewed so it would have the money to fix the school facilities.

This after toying with the idea of tearing down the building after years of never toying with the idea of keeping it in good repair.

OF COURSE, "fixing" Baton Rouge High now requires tearing down the entire campus, save the historical main building. And the fate of the original building will involve more "renovation" than "restoration" -- there's not enough money for a full restoration.

All this will require relocating the entire student body for two years as the campus is renovated and rebuilt.


AT OMAHA CENTRAL, meanwhile, keeping up with the times -- and technology -- hasn't meant destroying the charms of a bygone age, save some false ceilings in classrooms here and there. Above is Central's courtyard, created when the "new" school was built around the old, which left what you see here upon its demolition.

Some years back, covering the courtyard with a clear roof created an atrium, now used as a gathering space and food court.


WHEN A NEW gynmasium opened at Omaha Central, workers renovated the old gym (above) into a second cafeteria and multipurpose space. Another view is below.


WHILE WE'RE speaking of gyms, I guess you might want to see Central's new one:


AND WHILE I'M showing you Omaha Central's new gym, I suppose you might like to see Baton Rouge High's gymnasium:


IN CASE it isn't obvious, there are no potholes in the floor of the Omaha Central gym. There are large ones in the floor of the Baton Rouge High gym.

And, yes, the locker rooms at my alma mater are as nasty as they look. Tetanus may be a concern, I don't know.

It is difficult to explain things like this to Omahans, who support inner-city public schools like Central -- that of the beautiful old building, and of the brand-new gymnasium and football stadium.

In fact, about two-and-a-half years ago, when I got some of my Baton Rouge High pictures developed at an Omaha photo lab, the proprietor asked my wife about them. He wanted to know whether the photos were of a school destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

In other words, what people in my hometown had come to accept as normative, people in Omaha assumed was a victim of a catastrophe.

I come from a foreign land. Things are different here in the United States.

Potholes are what you try to avoid on city streets after a rough winter. Potholes are not what you worry about breaking your ankle in during phys ed.

At dear old Baton Rouge High, the old gym will not be renovated into cafeteria space. It will be bulldozed.


THE NEED for bulldozing speaks volumes about the esteem in which public education is held in my old Louisiana home.

Above is a common sight in the 1927 main building at Baton Rouge High. Moisture intrusion is causing plaster to fall off the walls in chunks. Has been for years, apparently.


MEANTIME, IN OMAHA, this is what it looks like in the hallways of Central High. Remember, this building is a couple of decades older than Baton Rouge High. Here's another view:

What it comes down to -- as I've said over and over, ad infinitum -- is culture. The South, and particularly Louisiana, never has been inclined toward public education.

Likewise, the South -- and particularly Louisiana -- never has been inclined toward a strong civic culture . . . or functional egalitarianism.

Recall that my alma mater, Baton Rouge High, did not exist until around 1880. Baton Rouge incorporated, remember, in 1817.

In 1859, the year Omaha Central came into being, there were public schools in Louisiana -- and at least one in East Baton Rouge Parish, I gather, but they were few in number and less than rooted in their communities.

That is because the South was -- and is, to a substantial degree -- a society based on class, and the privileges thereof. If your station in life allowed you the luxury of an education, that could be purchased.

If one was of mean estate, that's how one was apt to live out one's days -- poor. And ill-educated.

And for the vast majority of Southern blacks in 1859. . . .


A CENTURY AND A HALF later in Baton Rouge, those who have the means can purchase a fine, private education -- and that's where you'll find most white kids today. In private schools. Where they fled, starting in 1981, when "forced busing" came to town in the name of racial integration.

Meanwhile, the most prestigious public school in town looks like a casualty of Katrina. More than 30 years ago, when I was a student there, Baton Rouge High was notable for being the least decrepit school I'd attended.

To hell with all that.

To hell with a system where, yes, a school board can erect a nice, new facility where one once lay in ruins -- laid waste by official malfeasance and profound civic indifference -- but where one also has little confidence that what soon will be state of the art won't, in a decade or three, be in just as sad a state as the ruins it replaced.

To hell with it.


Children are a society's treasure, and if what befell Baton Rouge High is any indication -- and it is -- my hometown for decades, if not forever, has been casting swine before pearls. Children also are not stupid, and also for a couple of decades or so upon reaching adulthood, they've been voting in a referendum on the Gret Stet of Loosiana.

With their feet.


THEN THEY BECOME -- like so many of my generation of native Louisianians -- transplants in a strange land, one day walking into a public school and finding they have no frame of reference for the relative wonder they behold.

Like refugees stepping off a plane just arrived from some Third World enclave, they find themselves strangers in a strange land.

And "strange" is good.