Levees Not War

This is a Carnival where you don’t have to say “Happy Mardi Gras” (tho’ we do, anyway)—it simply is a happy Mardi Gras, and everyone’s been in a crazy happy zone for weeks. People are changing their middle names to WhoDat. Maybe it’s ’cause “Breesus Saves,” and the rest of the Saints do, too. And “Hey Shockey Way.” And then too there’s a palpable relief that a popular new mayor has been elected to bring in energy and action where lethargy, passivity, absentia in officio, and lame excuses have held sway for lo these many years.

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One of our writers penned a history of Mardi Gras for a Macmillan encyclopedia a few years ago while living in Mid-City and bouncing between the parades of the Krewe du Vieux, Isis, Endymion, Bacchus, Orpheus, and the Society of Saint Anne parade through Bywater into the Quarter on Mardi Gras day . . . Here are some excerpts from that article:

Mardi Gras . . . which many assume is a one-day event, has roots deep in pagan rites of ancient Greece, and is the “climax day” of a whole season of festivities—balls, parties, parades—that begins on Twelfth Night, or Epiphany (also known as January 6). Although the festival is most commonly associated with the Crescent City, the first American Mardi Gras was celebrated in Mobile, in present-day Alabama, in the 1830s (except it was really New Year’s Eve). . . .

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Postively Flamin’

Of all New Orleans’s wonderful (and some rather sedate) Carnival krewes, Krewe du Vieux is the sassiest, fiestiest, and wittiest, and it pains us to miss even one parade. Led by the great Dr. John as King, this year’s parade’s theme was “All Fired Up” (there was a fire last summer in the krewe’s Den of Muses, quenched by the NOFD).

The krewe’s full name is Krewe du Vieux Carré, and its subkrewes include Krewe de C.R.A.P.S. (shown here), Krewe of Space Age Love, Krewe du Mishigas, Seeds of Decline, Mystic Krewe of Spermes . . . you get the picture. So, to show you what you’re missing when you miss the Krewe du Vieux parade (always three Saturdays before Mardi Gras—Feb. 16 this year), we present some pix from our friend Maitri Erwin’s Flickr photostream (also see her smart, cool VatulBlog). The theme of her subkrewe, C.R.A.P.S., was “Walk on Burning Sphincters.”

Here are some good readers’ photos posted at NOLA.com.

Oh, and did we mention the Saints are in the Super Bowl? Who Dat? Who Dat? Feelin’ “Glory Bound,” y’all.

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The Festivities and Pageants arranged for his Majesty’s reception will surpass in joyousness and splendor the most brilliant attainments of his glorious past. It is ordained that good weather shall prevail, and the City of Flowers in its Festive array promises abundant pleasure to all within her gates.

—Proclamation by the King of the Carnival, 1934

From Henri Schindler’s Mardi Gras: New Orleans. Illustration by S. von Ehrens.

To everyone in New Orleans—and wherever Carnival is celebrated—we send warm greetings and best wishes for abundant fun and pleasures on Fat Tuesday, for joyful forgetting and release from heavy cares, and hopes that you may come back to your daily life refreshed and reinvigorated, with not too grinding a hangover.

For the people of Louisiana who are jobless and need unemployment insurance relief, we hope your ambitious governor will come (or be brought) to his senses and accept the financial assistance that Washington has made available for the public good.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Today is both Mardi Gras and Super Tuesday. Sounds auspicious to us. May the best candidates win, and may the public have some good news to celebrate. Drink up. Tomorrow it’s all ashes.

From The Isle of Orleans:

The Krewe Perdu and the Skeleton Krewe were scheduled to roll in a combined parade soon after sundown. Everyone in town would be there—parents and children, the shopkeepers and gardeners, carriage drivers, vendors from the French Market, the priest and the cremator, the morbids and junk-eating vagabonds from the ragged edges of town, and all but a bare-bones staff from the restaurants and bars.

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One of the happy (re)discoveries at the Rising Tide 2 conference of Katrina bloggers this past weekend was the New Orleanians’ sheer vitality, creativity, and ingenuity-their will to survive, to renew, to make the city better than it was before. We came away reinvigorated, reassured that in at least one American city democracy and citizen activism are alive and well. (If you keep busy, it doesn’t hurt quite as bad—and anyway, struggling for your very survival has a way of concentrating the mind.) In part because some public officials are lame and passive, and others are working but overwhelmed and underfunded, gutsy determined citizens are taking into their own hands the work of rebuilding, forming civic associations, alerting fellow citizens about opportunities and dangers (potential funding, criminal activity on the streets or in City Hall), etc.

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