And I’m not exactly sure I want to.
It was simple enough for an officer of the People’s Police to come down foursquare on the side of the People on the French Quarter side of Canal, where you didn’t really have to think about which people you were supposed to serve, but on the business side which people’s interest you were supposed to protect started getting political and Luke did not find himself liking it.
But Colonel Hathaway apparently saw it strictly as a military professional. “A much larger scale operation than what we’ve done so far, but more straightforward since we’ve got the overwhelming force with which to do it.”
Luke glanced backward at the force they were leading, no more than five hundred men by now. “We do?” he said dubiously.
“At the Fairgrounds, not here,” Hathaway told him. “I’ve two thousand or so troops up there doing nothing. I divide them up into three eight-hour shifts and divide each shift into say sixty ten-man platoons or so and parade them up and down Canal Street continuously at about ten miles an hour in Hummers and trucks spaced a half block or so apart. Where looters are encountered and don’t flee immediately, blanks are fired from the vehicles at them. If that doesn’t send them fleeing up side streets, a platoon dismounts and chases them up side streets firing live ammunition over their heads until they are completely dispersed. I don’t think much more will be required, do you, Captain Martin?”
“I don’t see how…” Luke admitted glumly.
He could see how the tactic would achieve its objective easily enough, but that didn’t mean he liked it. There was something missing, and yes, damn it, something … political.
“What’s bothering you, then … Luke, if I may?”
“It’ll look too much like … a military takeover of the center of the city … Terrence…”
“Well, it rather will be.…”
“And I’m here with you to make sure it won’t look like … like…”
“Martial law?”
“The deal is your troops must be clearly seen to be under the command of the People’s Police, not an invading army.…”
“I have no problem with that,” Colonel Hathaway told him. “So you pull the police units away from stationary guard duty where they will no longer be needed, and put a police squad car in the lead of my troops and at the rear of the parade and interspersed between the vehicles, lights flashing, and sirens blaring all the while. That should do the trick, don’t you think?”
“And a good one, Terrence,” Luke said with a grin. “Turn it into a kind of armed Mardi Gras float parade.”
Hathaway laughed. “Too bad your People’s Police don’t have a brass band.”
“You know, we just might. And if we don’t, Mulligan can probably round up a volunteer band somewhere, though they’ll probably be playing moldy old Dixieland. Riots or not, this is, after all New Orleans.”
After the orders were radioed in, they led the column down Loyola to City Hall, appropriately enough as Luke was now beginning to see things, not far from the ass end of Canal, where the scene around it was all too politically clarifying and all too politically repellent.
City Hall itself was cordoned off by maybe a hundred cops even though no looters or rioters were to be seen, only three television trucks set up on the street fronting the main entrance. Duncan Plaza, across the street from it, which had been the center of the permanent giant block party in the surrounding streets, was now empty and surrounded by hundreds of cops keeping it that way. The surrounding area, lacking a lively bar scene or very many stores worth looting, was pretty much deserted.
Colonel Hathaway shook his head with a disgusted frown. “What would you call this deployment, Captain Martin … Luke…?”
“Political … Terrence…?” Luke suggested.
“A cowardly and dishonorable waste of troops I’d say.…”
“There’s a difference?”
Hathaway made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a laugh that was neither.
“What do you suggest?” Luke asked more seriously. A lot more seriously.
Hathaway nodded toward the television trucks, now turning their cameras on them and their troops. “Well, it might make an interesting point for the cameras if we replaced the police guarding the politicians cowering hiding inside City Hall with Guardsmen,” he said dryly. “Though I suppose we can’t make a show of having their weapons pointed inward instead of outward, much as we might like to, now can we?”
“I suppose not,” Luke answered in kind. “Much as I’d like to. But…”
“But?”
“But I’ll tell Mulligan we have to keep say a hundred cops in the park twenty-four seven and he’s gonna have to negotiate an expensive work rule exception with Big Joe Roody because they’re going to be the same cops camping out there for the duration. And I’m going to tell Superintendent Mulligan that he has to do it because you’re insisting on it.”
Hathaway just looked at him as if he had gone crazy. “I am…?”
“Oh yes you are, Terrence, else you will refuse to obey my order to do the same thing with a hundred of your own men. And then they’ll all be missing the fun.”
“Fun?”
“Oh yeah, camping out in Duncan Square Park’s gonna be duty we both gonna have plenty of your guys and mine fighting for.”
“I suppose if this is a joke, Luke, I’m now supposed to ask why?”
Luke laughed. “Back in Jackson Square, I remembered a line I heard from a party animal cop in a bar. The police are not here to break up a wild party, the police are here to preserve a wild party. Or in this case, start it over again.”
* * *
I’m no military man, no cop either, and neither are most of the citizens of New Orleans, but you don’t have to be a ballplayer to know a perfect game when you see one pitched and appreciate the brilliance of the performance.
Well, at least a no-hitter.
The People’s Police and the National Guard had not only quelled the rioting without anyone getting killed or hit by live ammunition, they had managed to turn a public relations disaster for the national reputation of New Orleans and therefore the tourist industry into a citywide celebration of the triumphant spirit of the Big Easy that had folks from all over wanting to come on down and join the party that seemed like it could go on forever.
Jackson Square stayed one continuous carnival of bands, street acts, drinks, doobies, strippers, hookers, doin’ it in the road, and dancing in the streets in and out of homemade costumes, a permanent little people’s Mardi Gras without the floats or parades, drawing overflow into the Quarter, and Lafitte’s Landing, and saloons like it, like the real deal did leading up to Fat Tuesday.
Down in Duncan Plaza, Captain Martin and Colonel Hathaway had put together a gypsy encampment, music festival, and retro love-in, presided over and godfathered by the National Guard and the People’s Police right under the nose of City Hall, and then allowed it or rather encouraged it, to spread out into the surrounding streets as a giant block party.
“The People’s Police are not here to poop the party, we’re here to preserve the party, y’all come on down!” as Luke Martin put it in one of his TV interviews, to the delight of the Chamber of Commerce, who picked it up as a primo advertising slogan.
But it was the continuous parade of the National Guard up and down Canal Street through the center of the city that was the capper.
It started with just troops in military vehicles and People’s Police squad cars with lights flashing and sirens blaring, but within hours there were marching jazz bands at either end, and what with New Orleans’s long tradition of spontaneous so-called secondary street parades always popping up when enough folks felt like it, there were soon more bands marching along on the sidewalks, and the police cars kept their lights flashing but turned off their sirens.
Dancers in their secondary parade glitter and feathers began weaving in and out among the Humvees and squad cars, and neither the cops nor the Guardsmen
did anything to try to stop them, not with pretty girls blowing them kisses and tossing them flowers, and folks of all races, genders, and religions handing them joints and drinks.
It didn’t take long for homemade secondary parade floats to join in, and finally a few of the major Mardi Gras krewes even joined in with their fancier floats that after all were just sitting in their warehouses doing nothing.
What with all those floats, dancers, and party animals joining the parade through the breadth of the city, Canal got pretty crowded, and some of the bands and secondary parade dancers, and their floats, spread out into the main surrounding avenues, and it all began to seem like it might never end.
And hey, why should it?
Oh yeah, it was indeed the inspiration for what I would sell to Disney and the rest of them later as the Eternal Mardi Gras.
Oh yes, I did, let J. B. Lafitte finally set that story straight!
Dick Mulligan tried to claim credit for ordering Luke Martin and Terrence Hathaway to do everything they had done, but everyone who was anyone and even most folks who weren’t, knew that was bullshit, and pathetic bullshit at that.
Martin and Hathaway went along with Mulligan at least to the point of not publically contradicting him, but when Mayor Bradford, doing his own piece of scene-stealing, presented one of those giant cardboard keys to the city in front of City Hall to Colonel Hathaway for Mission Accomplished and Now Go Home—hint, hint, hint—Hathaway handed it to Martin, not Mulligan.
Now, unlike Mulligan, I freely admit that they were the geniuses who created what evolved into the Eternal Mardi Gras, not me. But you’ve got to give J. B. Lafitte credit for being able to be inspired by the vision of what I saw happening, like Saul seeing the light on the road to Tarsus, and naming it too.
Mardi Gras all year round!
The … Eternal Mardi Gras!
All over New Orleans!
Mama Legba’s X-rated Mad Mardi Gras spring, fall, winter, maybe even early summer, every season but the Hurricane Season!
No victim, no crime!
Anything goes!
Y’all come down whenever you like, and stay at the permanent party as long as you want!
More tourist hordes flocking to New Orleans all year round than ever it in two measly weeks in the winter during the so-called real thing!
Big time corporate money financing big budget floats, and parades twenty-four seven all year long except during the Hurricane Season! X-rated casino shows! X-rated theme parks!
Paying big taxes pumping steroids into the city budget and greasing many palms with heaping handfuls of superdollars! Sopping up unemployment with thousands of full-time, almost year-round, jobs! Transforming the economy of a city sinking into the swamp into a city that could hire the Dutch to turn swampland into pay dirt!
And J. B. Lafitte putting it all together and dipping his wick into his fair share of the proceeds. Doin’ well by doin’ good and vice versa, as I see it, an’ if you don’t, why don’t you just take your tight-assed business elsewhere?
When Mayor Bradford had given the commander of the National Guard the key to the city with a municipal pat on the back and a Mission Accomplished, it had been a none-too-subtle hint to remove the troops from the city. Everyone knew it, and all that remained was for the governor to sign the order.
So why hadn’t she done it yet?
A lot of people and most of the press smart-mouths figured she was waiting for a proper triumphant farewell parade past cheering crowds out of the city to get organized, and that would have made sense to me, if I hadn’t known better.
But I did, because it wasn’t parade planning holding up the order, it was the speech to be given announcing it. I knew this because I was working on it with MaryLou Boudreau.
I had long since given up thinking of the governor as “Mama Legba” because there was no one or nothing else but MaryLou Boudreau left in the governor.
And that was the problem. MaryLou Boudreau wanted to act like a real governor but she didn’t know how.
MaryLou Boudreau was the grandchild of bayou hippies, the daughter of Quarter street buskers, and nothing more than a failing street act herself before the Supernatural Krewe made her the Voodoo Queen Governor of Louisiana, which wasn’t what you would exactly call a graduate course in the downs and dirties of Louisiana politics.
Governor Boudreau had pleaded with me to come up to Baton Rouge to help her with the speech because she had no one else to confide in. “But please don’t bring a writer; with your help, I intend to write it myself.”
Why didn’t that come up waving bad-sign red flags the moment I heard it?
She hadn’t even written anything when I arrived.
“What’s the problem, Governor Boudreau?” I told her, maybe a little pissed off at being dragged up to Huey Long’s miniature White House. “You sit here behind this desk, smile at the camera, praise the People’s Police without having to mention Mulligan, Bradford, or Martin to avoid any political problems, and praise Hathaway for a job well done because there’s no political problem with that, and then you can praise the people of New Orleans for being so cool.”
“And then what, J. B.?” MaryLou bleated, a lot more like a kid trying to squeeze pearls of rescuing wisdom out of her daddy than a governor.
“Then what?”
“What do I say?”
“What do you say…? You say, by the authority vested in me as governor of the state of Louisiana, I hereby order Colonel Terrence Hathaway, commander of the Louisiana National Guard, to withdraw his troops from the City of New Orleans by such and such a date. I don’t get it, MaryLou, you needed me to ghost-write that for you, or just hold your hand?”
“I want to say more than that, J. B. I know I’m not qualified to be governor, but here I am, and if I can’t really do the job like it should be done, at least I’d like myself a lot better when I look in the mirror if I could tell myself I did something with it.…”
“For who?”
“For the people who got conned into voting for me. For the people of Louisiana.”
“Like what?”
She shrugged. “I was hoping you could help me with that, J. B.,” she said softly and forlornly enough to touch the heart of a whoremonger who didn’t have one made of gold.
I found myself trying to imagine what I would want to do if I were in her shoes, and came up short, but I sure knew what I wanted to see done from the vantage of standing in the shoes I was actually wearing.
“Nothing any governor, president, or any politician in the United States of America could do would be more appreciated by more people than having the hovering black thundercloud of foreclosure permanently lifted from over our property and houses and farms and business premises,” I told her. “You want to do something for the people of Louisiana who voted for you, or for that matter, who didn’t, you do that!”
MaryLou Boudreau’s face lit up like one of those cartoon antique three-way bulbs had appeared over her head and been shifted from 30 watts to 150. “Yes!” she cried. “But…”
“But?”
The bulb had been turned down to about 75.
“But hasn’t that been done already, J. B.? The New Orleans People’s Police won’t evict anyone, the little upstate forces, most of them, won’t do it either, and under the rules of engagement I worked out with Colonel Hathaway, neither will the National Guard, so just about no one in Louisiana’s being evicted already—”
“Yeah, but it’s not legal,” I told her. “Nobody’s being evicted, but only because there’s no police force that will throw us out, so the Loan Lizards might as well use their foreclosure notices as toilet paper. But no one under foreclosure has legal title. We can live in our houses, work our businesses, farm our land, but we don’t own them. We can’t sell them, we can’t pass them to inheritors, and if some future governor wants to or some future legislature gets it passed, they can send in the National Guard to do the dirty work, and like Yogi Berra said, it’s déja-vu
all over again.”
“Oh…” moaned the governor. “Couldn’t I get some law passed like just giving y’all this … legal title…?”
“The legislature would just tell you to shove it up your ass!” I told her. “But…”
“But, J. B.?”
I could feel something percolating in the back of my brain, and it wasn’t Café du Monde coffee. If I had one of those three-ways above my head, it would be going up from 30 to 100.
“But you’re gonna be governor for four years, during which you can tell them to shove it up their asses if they trying it again and the people, aka the voters, would most all be with you. So for those four years the Loan Lizards sitting on all that paper won’t be making a dime off of the mortgages they’re holding! They’re not collecting interest payments, they can’t sell the properties, and no one would be crazy enough to buy the mortgages. They’re sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in useless paper.…”
And that was when the lightbulb over my head got so bright and hot it exploded.
“How far are you willing to go, Madam MaryLou Boudreau, governor of the great state of Louisiana? You willing to play a game of political hardball so down and dirty it’ll make Huey Long and Fast Eddie Edwards look like pitcher and catcher on a high-school girls’ softball team?”
“Try me,” said Governor Boudreau.
“You got one secret superpower as governor that as far as I know even the Kingfish never threatened to use during the Great Depression. It’s called the power of eminent domain.”
“What’s that?”
“The state, meaning you, can at least in theory seize private property for the public benefit, like to build a road, or a levee, or a reservoir, or something … so you could in theory use eminent domain to seize everything under foreclosure from both the people who possess it physically like me, and the banks and other species of Loan Lizards sitting on the useless mortgages.…”
“I could really do that?”
“Maybe … on the grounds that as things stand now, the state government, meaning the people, is losing millions in property and income taxes this way.…”
The People's Police Page 21