Chris Rose is a Douchebag

Only in this city would we put up with this kind of hackery. A smarmy middle-aged gossip columnist who happened to live in New Orleans during Katrina and decided to shift his career strategy from following Lindsay Lohan around the bar scene to shamelessly capitalizing on a tragedy by attempting to pass himself off as a culturally aware uber-wit except with no talent. I still can't decide if Rose is just that creepy uncle who always wants to smoke pot with your friends or if he's more like that one frat boy who feels entitled to his smug assholery due to the fact that he may actually have read a book once. Either way it needs to end. Let's just hope that now that his book is doing well he's through milking it. I give it another six months before we get the "It's the best thing for my family" farewell column. I've tried to keep quiet about my white hot hatred of Chris Rose but this morning when I saw his stupid smirking face looking at me from this column I knew I could hold back no longer. For those of you who don't speak Rose's grating brand of yuppie, follow along as I attempt to translate.

Rose says:

Back in the late '80s and mid-'90s, I was all over the map. My Saturday nights would be spread from the rough-and-tumble biker joints of Fourth Street in Marrero to the Vietnamese billiards halls in the East to the Latin dance clubs in Kenner to evangelical tent revivals in Bridge City to the Cajun roadhouse scene down in Crown Point.

I've always had a fascination with hanging out in places with large crowds of people who are nothing like me. A culture vulture? Yeah, I suppose.

Rose means: Behold my coolness! I once played pool with an Asian person! I demand praise for the staggering breadth of my experience!

Rose says:

I remember Dorothy's Medallion on Orleans Avenue, watching Walter "Wolfman" Washington back up Johnny Adams while he warbled love songs that could change the world.

This, I used to think. I like this.

Rose means: I am a terrific douchebag for writing the phrase "love songs that could change the world". I also am not above the using pretentious constructions like that of the last sentence there in order to bring about a dramatic pause. My column is poetry, dammit!

Rose says:

This was about 12 years ago, right after I met the woman who would become my wife. In fact, much of our early courtship took place on the parade grounds of this city. Kelly and I would bounce along the streets to the blockbuster vibes of the city's brass lions on Sunday afternoons and duck into dark corner bars to check out the score of the Saints game and we'd nod and shuffle in the way that white people who are dressed all wrong do when they're hanging out with a bunch of black folks who are truly tripping the light fantastic.

We danced, we got drunk and we were long, long gone into the unbearable lightness of being in New Orleans. We became part of the scene, made friends, shed our self-consciousness and just blended in.

Rose means: Pay attention to the fact that I have a wife. That is important. Also observe how I am unafraid to go native with the darkies as they "trip the light fantastic". This greatly enhances my coolness quotient and in no sense makes me a yuppie poseur despite the fact that I just wrote about shedding my self-consciousness whatever the fuck that means.

Rose says:

But we never felt personally threatened. Ever. We'd introduce friends to the scene, telling them: You gotta check this out. But mostly, we realized that big chunks of our social circle had no particular interest in joining this ritual of ours.

Then one afternoon, about 10 years ago, Kelly and I broke a run of many, many weeks of consecutive second-lining to do something else on a Sunday afternoon; I don't know what, but it must have been important for us to skip out on our favorite pastime.

Rose Means: We felt a little threatened. Not to mention awkwardly pressured by many of our real friends to stop all this pretentious slumming that we once thought made us so interesting. And then one day, the wife finally talked me into going antiquing or doing something else gay and expensive.

Rose says:

At this point, we felt personally threatened. As weeks and months passed -- or am I embellishing this out of frustration? -- it seems the Monday morning paper would too often carry a story about a shooting or a stabbing on or very near a second-line route the day before.

These clippings litter the files of The Times-Picayune, leaving a bad smell.

We had kids now, Kelly and me. A part of this city's culture that I desperately wanted them to know and understand and embrace was out of our reach. It was not an option. I wasn't going to lead my kids into danger simply because daddy thinks they need to be dialed into the fundamental currents of my city.

With the exception of a few high-profile events -- Ernie K-Doe's funeral, the Mardi Gras Indians on Fat Tuesday or Super Sunday -- the second-line scene was dead to me.

Rose means: For some reason we suddenly noticed that New Orleans had an urban crime problem... we had no idea about this before.. why was it suddenly so important? Oh that's right, I decided it was time to fulfill my duty to mankind and pass my genes forward. And of course, to me, being a father means sheltering my precious offspring from all sorts of "danger" like going outside and seeing parades.

Rose says:

Well, you know how that second-line ended. Gunfire. Blood. Sirens. A thousand people there and no witnesses to the crime, police would later report.

It was a day of profound disgrace for this city and one that probably would have had greater impact and provoked very heated and very uncomfortable public discourse had not our mayor given a famous speech the next day that completely distracted the citizenry from the violence at hand.

We focused on the Chocolate City instead of the Killing Fields.

No matter. My wife and I decided not to go back to the second-line parades again. It's not for us, I thought. There is such a disconnect between my value system and the culture of guns that permeates our streets that I don't even have the words to make sense of it.

My kids don't know what happened at the end of that parade and I'm not going to tell them. We do other things on Sunday afternoons because the odds of their getting capped at the zoo are pretty slim.

Rose Means: Certainly none of my columns dwelled on the cheap "chocolate city" laughs while there were "killing fields" on which to report. Nothing like that would ever happen. Also my wife and I decided suddenly that this culture we had in our youth (a whole 10 years ago) surrendered our self-consciousness to was actually too alien and foriegn to us to associate ourselves with. Oh and I continue to believe in keeping my kids in the dark about reality so that maybe someday they can make naive choices too.

Rose says:

And then there was this weekend. Hundreds of folks in from Texas and Mississippi, trying to regain their footing and traction here, trying to get back into the New Orleans life cycle, and here comes a gang-banger bent on revenge and willing to put his entire community at risk to prove he is a man worthy of respect.

Nobody of reason wants this. Black, white, no one. And in the same news cycle a guy walking in the Frenchmen Street music district takes a bullet in the chest -- after surrendering his wallet to a thug.

Rose means: Today's column has been an opportunity for me to exploit two more recent tragic events in order to ramble stupidly about my middle-aged-white-guy hipness and hope that enough of you accept that as a subsitute for insight or talent to keep paying attention to me before the folks who hand out the journalism awards stop paying attention to New Orleans.