Mardi Gras Guide Vol 1: State of Unreadiness

Temporary netting protects freshly painted trees along the recently landscaped Napoleon Avenue neutral ground ahead of this weekend's parades

I'm not ready. I mean, I am basically prepared in that I've been going through usual motions of getting things in order around here. I've done some mild house cleaning. Sunday we did what we figure will be the last big laundry load until Ash Wednesday. We've taken household inventory and made trips to Wal-Mart and Rouses to stock up on the basics. We've made sure there are enough paper plates, towels and cleaning supplies. Then there are the staple coping drugs like coffee, aspirin, and pepto... fresh eggs to scramble on particularly hung over mornings. I think we've got what we need there. That much of the punch list is complete today but I'm still not ready.

Carnival is moving into high gear this weekend but many of us are having a hard time catching the spirit. Tripping the light fantastic and such is no easy trick when there is so much dark energy out there to contend with. The city is in a rotten mood.  There are several reasons for this.  Anxiety bleeds into our day to day from the Presidential election, of course, but that's likely the case everywhere that Tuesday is just Tuesday.  It doesn't help matters here but it's nothing we couldn't handle on its own.  If all politics really is local, anyway, then you should be able to say the same thing for angst. So what is it that's clouding the mood?  Let's consider a few items.

On the first day of Carnival 2020, the Advocate ran this attention-getting feature on the growing anxiety of Lakeview residents over what they claim is a sharp rise in vehicle burglaries in recent years. The headlining number is a 57% increase in reported car break-ins from 2018 to 2019.  I think those statistics could use further scrutiny, though. I'm sure we've talked about this many times on this here Yellow Blog, but crime statistics are often as much a reflection of public perception and police recording techniques as they are an actual gauge on the rate of incidents.  Police simply deciding to focus on a particular type of crime can increase the number of recorded incidents. They may also take steps to promote public awareness of certain kinds of crimes thus encouraging people to report more frequently.  If the public, for whatever reason, be it police activity, or media emphasis, just gets the feeling that it's a little more crimey out there, it can generate a feedback loop. Heightened fear of crime leads to more "awareness" leads to more police reports, leads to higher stats, leads to heightened fear of crime.  Here is a very good recent Citations Needed podcast describing the ways new technological trends in surveillance like Amazon's Ring doorbell camera and so-called "snitch" apps like Nextdoor work to supercharge the feedback loop even further.

All of these may be factors in the recent Lakeview hysteria. That came to a head just a few days after the Advocate feature on the "jump in break-ins" ran when NOPD responded to a report of teenagers pulling on car door handles by sending out a SWAT team in full tactical gear. In the resulting confrontation one cop even ended up firing his gun at the unarmed teens. The incident then led to a further crackdown at Juvenile Court where a new policy holds children arrested more than once in jail until they see a judge. The judges announced the policy change with a chilling statement saying their aim is to "rid the community of youth who pose a danger.” The Advocate's newest worst columnist, Will Sutton, capped the week off by publicly thanking the trigger happy police and the paranoid residents who called them.

Since then, matters have only gotten worse. Councilmembers have pledged to apply more "data-driven" policing. The DA is charging one of the teens as an adult. Lakeview residents gathered to yell at everyone and demand even more police and more aggressive tactics. The politics of this is only likely to get worse. I'm half-expecting a future mayoral candidate to promise a border wall at City Park Avenue. Meanwhile, researchers tell us, in order to effectively reduce violence, we would be better served to spend our time addressing our city's intolerable inequalities. But just seeing that situation described reminds us of yet another source of the general anxiety.

Sonita Singh, an associate professor of behavioral and community health at LSU School of Public Health, described New Orleans as “a landscape of inequalities,” which stem from historical and institutional practices and policies that have segregated the city by race and economics. The geography of those inequalities mirror maps showing the concentration of murders.

Transportation, education and access to jobs and training are less accessible in neighborhoods that see the most violent crime, Singh said. Employed people surviving on an inadequate wage, what Singh called “hamster wheeling,” is also common in places like the 9th Ward, 7th Ward and parts of New Orleans East.

New Orleans’ citywide average household income was $67,224 as of 2017, according to The Data Center, a local research nonprofit. In Little Woods, a neighborhood in New Orleans East that saw a large share of murders last year, the average household income was about $40,800. Nearby Plum Orchard’s average household income was $32,900. In the 7th Ward, a neighborhood that perhaps had highest concentration of murders in 2019, the average household income was $33,205.

“In New Orleans, people can work themselves to the bone and still not be outside the poverty rate,” Singh said.

Like I said, the city is in a rotten mood.  It has good reason to be. 

That extends to the city's firefighters who enter this parade season in a fight with the mayor over a whole host of labor issues but mostly centered on the hardships imposed on them by understaffing and forced overtime. The city has pushed back by cancelling vacation time and, this week, pulling fire trucks from this season's Carnival parades which seems unsafe. Also it seems self-defeating since it comes just a few days after Mayor Cantrell promised that the dispute would have no effect on Mardi Gras at all.  Earlier in the week, the mayor's communications staff released a video of her saying that Mardi Gras would be covered and the cancelled vacations and overtime would amount to a "win win" for the city. Is this what she meant? Also how does she figure?

Perhaps for these reasons, or perhaps just for the sake of growing the police state in general, the feds have designated this year's Carnival a "Level 2 Special Event."  According to this DHS document that means we can expect "some level federal interagency support," on the streets during the season. This is different from a Level 1 Special Event where we would be getting "extensive" federal interagency support. What does that means in practice?   Heck if I know. Just be careful who you sell your huckabucks to if you have an unlicensed cart this year. You never know who is watching.


The "Trashformers" collecting recyclable items from parade goers during Krewe Delusion 

For that matter, you might also want to watch where you put your plastic bags out there.

The “prohibited throws” section was updated to prohibit parade riders from thowing: “single use plastic bags meant for throw packaging or paper streamers, or paper products that do not biodegrade when wet, or empty single-use plastic bags. Any package containing bulk throws, including but not limited to doubloons, beads, cups, trinkets, or toys shall be handed to parade attendees and shall not be thrown or tossed. Bulk throws shall be removed from any plastic packaging before being thrown or tossed.” This was proposed to help battle litter along the route, as well as alleviate the possibility of parade participants slipping on the plastic.

This is... kind of stupid.  If we want to be charitable, we can say that it comes from good intentions. It's probably a good thing on balance that people have become more conscientious about the environmental impact of "single use plastic" and the like. And it's only natural that they might examine their own perceived influence on its proliferation.  In truth, though, this is not a problem that can be fixed by subjecting individual consumption habits to strict law enforcement. If the city was really interested in limiting single use plastics, they wouldn't be handing out half a million dollars in tax exemptions to a plastic bag factory. But why worry about that when you can just performatively punish individuals behaviors?  It might not solve anything but it gets you far more "credit" from a PR perspective. And that's what this is all about anyway. That and just general antipathy.  At her pre-Mardi Gras press conference the mayor said the plastic bag policy was about "showing love," which is what she always says when she is ready to hit someone with a hammer.

On the bright side, the new ordinances appear to be more serious than ever about discouraging people from crowding the neutral ground with ladders and tents and couches and such. We'll report back later on how that goes over the first weekend's parades.  I know this website has been home to the annual ladder harangue for well over a decade now. But I've also long contended that there would be far less call for official hardassery if the city would allow the parades to spread back out across the various neighborhoods and take some of the pressure off of Uptown. Which is why we were pleased last weekend to see that the new Krewe of Nefertiti parade was such a success.

West, who graduated from nearby Abramson High School, said the parade was a sort of reunion.

“This is wonderful,” he said. “We’re seeing everybody we grew up with ... and their kids. We’re still here.”

Referring to the displacement of much of the East's population after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he said, “You think everybody moved to Houston, but they’re here.

People in East New Orleans went outside and talked to their neighbors out in the street. That's what this is supposed to be all about. Good for them.  Let's keep that going.

I still don't feel like I'm ready.  We tried to get into the spirit early this year by making the trek across to town to see Chewbacchus for the first time in almost a decade.



Mainly the reason we did this was because, for the first time in a while, we could. A shuffle in the schedule moved Chewbacchus two weeks ahead in the calendar so that it no longer runs opposite any Uptown parades. The last one of these we saw was way back in 2012 when it was still an Uptown parade itself. After it moved across town we didn't see the point.  Anyway, during its time as a Bywater event, Chewbacchus has grown immensely in popularity but also in controversy. Often it has been seen as a symbol of the rapid gentrification and bland commercialized hip aesthetic associated with that neighborhood in the 2010s. (Please see Jules Bentley's "Farewell to the Flesh: Notes on a Cybernetic Carnival" for the definitive explication of this take.) I have to say, though, upon examining this phenomenon in person, it is nothing quite as interesting as that. For the most part it was just fans of various "nerd culture" type intellectual properties out doing cosplay with their children.



I suppose some people really enjoy that. And I guess I can see why some people never will. But the experience is nowhere near as impressive as its gushing fans would have you believe nor as sinister as its detractors would argue. It's really just a little nerd parade. Fine, if you like that sort of thing.  But I had gone to Chewbacchus hoping to see something really cool or something that might make me really mad. Instead I came away not feeling much of anything.  Maybe I just wasn't ready.

Meanwhile literally looming over everything is the sarcophagus of a collapsed Hard Rock hotel building that sits right in the middle of downtown. Originally the project's owners were hoping to have the hotel completed and open in time for Mardi Gras. Now the plan is to implode the structure sometime before Jazzfest. More than anything else, the air of hostility and mistrust between the city, the mayor, and the contractors responsible for the disaster is the main factor the city's rotten mood this Carnival season. Its physical presence can't be ignored as several parades have had to bend their routes in order to avoid it. It has a spiritual gravity as well so strong that it resists even the carnivalesque parody and gallows humor that might otherwise seem a perfect fit for the situation. It's a rare occasion where our own sarcasm seems to have failed us.

Krewe du Vieux gave that their best shot last week when the sub-krewe Comatose put together this impressive-looking "Soft Rock" hotel float.



From all appearances, their hearts were in the right place. But also it is hard not to cringe at this, "Rest In Peace, Amigo" message on the back. Racial problematics aside, just the tone of the thing is off.  If you are going to satirize something as serious as this, you have to lean in harder than this.  There is a way to be funny but it also has to be a little bit angry. A joke about a tragedy needs to achieve catharsis or else it will fail horribly.  This reads more as, "Sorry you died, LOL" and it just feels uncomfortable.



There was a rumor circulating last weekend that mayor tried to have the float removed or at least mellowed in some way. The city ended up forcing KDV to move its ball out of Studio Be at the last minute due to potential safety violations.  This has some people whispering that the mayor was retaliating.  It's hard to know what to believe about that. KDV members often paint themselves as politically motivated victims with little or no evidence. On the other hand, this mayor does have a habit of taking every single thing that happens as a personal affront of some kind so anything is possible. MacCash tells us here that the more mundane explanation is far more likely.  That sounds right to me but who knows.  Anyway the problem with this float is that it is already too mellow which is what makes it seem more insensitive than its intention.

Krewe Delusion was a little better with this "Hard Rock The Boat" theme.



It invokes the idea of righteous anger and there's a little pun in there. It's not overwhelmingly clever, though.  And it still doesn't feel like we're saying what needs to be said. Not that I know what that is, exactly.  But I do hope I will know it when I see it this year.  I hope I'm ready to know.