I grew up just outside of Memphis, Tennessee, a city with a history not quite as colorful as that of New Orleans, but with its share of eccentrics, absurdities, oddities, tragedies, war stories, smoke-filled rooms, mysterious fires, convenient deaths, and power-politics.

There is something about the air in the South, which in August can feel like you are trying to inhale molasses. On occasion, there are the haunting memories of the dust hanging in the air, eerie in the pale moonlight, arising from the passage of a rattling, ancient car down a country road while sitting on the front porch of a farm-house, a Johnny Cash record playing on the ancient player, the adults sitting on the porch swing, talking quietly while I as a child sat on the steps, refusing to fall asleep and trying to understand the conversation.

The appellation “Southern Gothic” has an entirely different, deeper meaning if you lived it.

I have memories of New Orleans stretching back 20 years, and in all of those memories, the ghosts of New Orleans are prominent.

It is impossible to spend a night in that city without sensing there is more than the recently Disneyfied sections, more than the drinks inaptly named “hurricanes” and beers spilled on Bourbon Street, more than the breasts exposed by drunken women at the exhortation of drunken men.

More, even, than the music from the Preservation Hall.

The music, however, especially the Blues, can summon the ghosts of New Orleans, the specters haunting the city, spirits that exist in every old Southern city, but ones that have a peculiar potency in New Orleans.

The ghosts of of the South, of New Orleans, are not visible, not even as much as the dust from the dirt road in the pale moonlight, but they make their presence known nevertheless.

They are not cold, but neither are they warm. They do not hate, but neither do they love.

They haunt with a mournfulness whose origin has been forgotten and whose depth cannot be fathomed.

The South has a history peculiar to and in the United States, one that is not understood fully by outsiders.

This history, although not as old as that of Europe, hearkens back to older times, but with few victories to redeem the defeats, no poultices that salve the spirits of times past in ancient lands such as Tuscany which allow the sun to be recalled even in the darkest night.

In the South, in the dark of the night, the sun is forgotten despite the oppressive heat because of the darkness of spirit weighted in the air.

Somehow, the ghosts of New Orleans embody the lost souls in all of the South, of Memphis, of Charleston, of Atlanta, of the cities burned 140 years ago and built anew, of the injustices that preceded and prompted the redemption of fire, of the divisions and hatreds since; the ghosts remind those who sense them of the burden of guilt, of the debt to our ancestors.

The music and the alcohol are merely tools, shields to keep the shades at bay, to prevent the overwhelming of the mind and the soul.

The ghosts still walk the streets of New Orleans today, their numbers augmented, their mournfulness deepened, their presence felt beyond the city.

And now, everywhere, though it is the dark of the moon, the dust kicked up from the dirt road can still be seen, hanging in the thick, heavy air, a haunting in the night.

Technorati Tags: general, New Orleans, South, Southern Gothic

Tonight (my time), I had planned to elaborate on a theme I have introduced in the past few days, that of who is responsible for setting priorities of our government, and who can make changes.

If you haven’t been reading, the answer to the question, “Who?” is simple yet unrecognized: We, the people.

This evening, after reading the bile, losing my footing from all the shifting of responsibility, and getting dizzy with all the spin in the wake of the catastrophe in New Orleans and the devastation of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama (not to minimize the other regions, such as parts of western Florida, that were also affected), I cannot write with coherence or detail because I am so disgusted with the partisans on both left and right.

The chanting from the left of “Blame Bush!” is matched in vileness only by the cheerleading from the right of “Blame everyone BUT Bush!”

In the end, both sides are unworthy of even attention, much less anything more serious.

The control required in fighting my urge to lash out in a pointless and possibly destructive rage fueled by both the frustration I felt in the past week at my inability to really help those I see in desperate, dire need along with the loathing I have for the feeble-minded, narrow outlooks of the partisans, politicians, and operatives on both sides has sapped so much of my energy I cannot write what I had intended in the way it deserves to be written: with consideration, with intellectual rigor, and well.

In the interim, I will recommend two posts:

“What little I have to say about Katrina” by Chris Lawrence at

Signifying Nothing“On Criticizing the Response to Katrina” by Dr. Stephen Taylor at PoliBlog

Both state quite well many of my thoughts both in the past week and tonight; at least the non-apocalyptic thoughts, anyway.

Please read them both in full, and indulge me in my mental exhaustion. I want the post delayed to fully explain, in detail, with due consideration and intellectual rigor, exactly what I believe needs to be said.

Technorati Tags: left wing, left wing politics, left wing weblogs, left-wing, left-wing politics, left-wing weblogs, politics, recommended reading, right wing, right wing weblogs, right-wing, right-wing politics, right-wing weblogs, weblogs

The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob.
   -H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)