The following was meant for Oyster's comments section but unsurprisingly I went on and on a bit much for Haloscan's liking. If you live in New Orleans you really ought to include RHT in your daily reading list. Oh, wait, you already do. Here is the relevant post. Here is the comment to which I refer.
Also.. yep pretty drunk so.. you know.. whatever.
I have to agree with the previous comment. I am highly suspicious of the degree to which the rest of the country, and particularly Hollywood, "gets" Louisiana and its peculiar half-tragic uniqueness. The two books which come closest to capturing it for me are (nonfiction) A.J. Leibling's Earl of Louisiana and (the excellent novel) A Confederacy of Dunces by, I'm sure all of your readers know, John Kennedy Toole. "All the King's Men" is, for my taste, not representative of what Huey Long really meant for the poorest denizens in the poorest of the states during the most desperate of times. Long wrested Louisiana from the grips of the recently "redeemed" planter class and singlehandedly lifted it out of the mud. His extreme methods and the arguably less than democratic system they left in place paved the way for the corrupt abuses of his successors, but Long himself was a necessary and to this day misunderstood antidote to the miserable patriarchy which preceeded him. I recommend, unsurprisingly, T. Harry Williams's biography of Huey for a comprehensive look at Long's career and the Louisiana of his time. I certainly do not trust the filmakers to be sympathetic to our uniquely progressive heritage.. although we seem to be in the throes of a collective amnesia ourselves these days.
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