Tremé, Seasons 1 & 2

HBO Miniseries, created by David Simon and Eric Overmeyer

Recipe for Disaster:

Take an old, multi-cultural city situated below sea level, with a mighty river running through it and a large river-fed lake lapping at its north side; add an antiquated flood control system and incompetent political leaders;  then mix with a category 3 hurricane and you have, in the words of Creighton Bernette (of the HBO series, Tremé), “a man-made disaster of epic proportions.” 

Hurricane Katrina occurred in late August of 2005.  The National Weather Service had a fairly accurate prediction of its path as well as its potential to leave a swath of ruin as it bent toward the northeast after having travelled west across the south Florida peninsula and into the Gulf of Mexico.  There was plenty to time to stock emergency shelters with water and food, to order the evacuation of people from the most vulnerable areas, and to develop a plan for rescuing anyone who stayed behind.  Instead, New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, waited until 19 hours before the hurricane made landfall to order residents to evacuate.  Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco declined President George W. Bush’s offer to call up National Guard troops in advance of the storm to assist with the evacuation and recovery.  When it became apparent that Katrina was going to submerge large parts of New Orleans, last-minute evacuees crowded into the Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, mistakenly thinking that there would be water, food, and buses to take them away from the disaster zone.  The failure of leadership from the local governments all the way up to the White House turned the New Orleans disaster into a national disgrace.  Approximately 1,836 people died of which 1,577 were from New Orleans.  Another 135 people were never found. 

As Katrina’s flood waters ebbed, bodies surfaced to reveal the enormity of the tragedy.  A state of lawlessness descended on the ruins of New Orleans and in response, some in the New Orleans Police Department abused their power, locking up and losing track of citizens and worse.  On the evening of September 4, 2005, a team of police in a rental truck responded to a call from a fellow officer citing gunshots being fired near the Danziger Bridge.  When the backup officers arrived on the scene, they opened fire on a group of unarmed citizens who were walking to a food store.  Two of these innocent citizens died and four were wounded by the assault rifles and shotgun deployed by police.  One of the victims – a mentally disabled man – was stomped on the back by one of the police officers shortly before he died.  The gunshots heard by the first officer, it turns out, were fired by people trapped in their flooded out house who were trying to get someone to help them.

As the steamy weeks wore on, FEMA came in and bagged bodies.  President George W. Bush praised FEMA’s chief, Michael Brown, for doing a great job of handling the disaster even though the disaster got worse by the day.  While, one of America’s great cities was dying a number of influential politicians thought that writing off the flooded parts of New Orleans might solve a number of urban ills.  It turns out that the lowest lying areas were populated by some of the most disadvantaged citizens and allowing a Diaspora to exist could allow the city to reduce its footprint.  Many New Orleanais evacuated to Houston where they ended up camping in the Astrodome and various city parks, languishing with no hope of going home.  After a few weeks, Houston had expended all the hospitality it had and was quite ready to send New Orleans’ refugees packing.  Former First Lady, Barbara Bush famously said, “…so many of the people in the [Houston Astrodome], you know, were underprivileged anyway so this is working very well for them."  Indeed.

By December, those with homes on higher ground began returning to pick up the pieces of their lives, hoping that the city they loved so well could recover.  Housing projects undamaged by Katrina, meanwhile, were condemned by the federal government, meaning that many of Houston’s guests had no homes to go home to.  Tulane University, New Orleans’ largest private employer, had evacuated all students in advance of the storm and then arranged for them to attend other universities for the Fall Semester.  When the school reopened for the Spring Semester, most of the students returned to complete their education in New Orleans.  Katrina had devastated the city but at the same time had ignited a passionate drive to bring it back.  New Orleans welcomes all comers but for those who stay it becomes a life-long love affair.

My own love affair with New Orleans began in 1986 when my young husband took me there for the Jazz and Heritage Festival.  We stayed with friends, a couple of urban pioneers recently graduated from Tulane’s School of Architecture, who showed us the real New Orleans.  We biked through Audubon Park, strolled the Garden District, ate fried oysters at Casamento’s, and gave in to the “Big Easy” at Commander’s Palace where the strolling jazz musicians serenaded us as we sipped glasses of dry Champagne while enjoying several thousand calories of pure indulgence.  There was a romance to the place which seduced me but sadly it was only a weekend fling.  Twenty-five years later, when our youngest daughter decided that Tulane was the school for her, we visited the city – still recovering from Katrina – and I fell in love all over again.

The problem with passionate love affairs is that we get caught up in the romance and fail to get to know the person with whom we are smitten.  Being much older and somewhat wiser, I tried to resist New Orleans’ charms and almost succeeded until I tuned in to HBO’s miniseries, “Tremé,” which tells the story of Katrina’s aftermath by examining the lives of a cross-section of New Orleanais.  

New Orleans is most famous for Mardi Gras, the festival of overindulgence which requires 40 days of Lent to recover from.  To the uninitiated, Mardi Gras is a single day of drinking, drugging, and debauching on Bourbon Street.  To New Orleanais, however, Mardi Gras is a season during which neighborhood krewes meet to decide on parade themes and second-liners rehearse their marching bands.  In the spring of 2006, no one was sure if Mardi Gras would happen.  The vestiges of krewes who had returned built their floats and made costumes, hoping that they were not alone.  It was the second line that was most imperiled, and this is what “Tremé” illustrates so well.  

New Orleans is a city which, according to historian Lawrence Powell, came about as if by accident.  French settlers created a port city in a location which was prone to flooding, dredged a shipping channel, devised an elaborate system of canals and levees, and proceeded to trade with anyone and everyone with little regard for the King’s edicts.  Eventually, the Spanish took control of New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory, but failed to impose Spanish as the language of commerce.  In the end, it didn’t matter because the newly independent American States dominated trade in North America and English became the lingua franca.  

During colonial times, New Orleans was a major hub for the slave trade and as a result, many Africans came to reside there.  It was a fairly liberal place and an impressive number of slaves earned their freedom and were able to establish an autonomous community in an area to the north of the French Quarter.  This area came to be known as Tremé.  It was here that the fusion of African, Spanish, French, and Indian cultures produced a uniquely American form of music.  New Orleans style Jazz is joyful, lusty, and kinetic.  It demands movement on the part of musicians and listeners alike; and it is this life force in the form of music that, more than anything else, brought New Orleans back from the dead.  

New Orleans, because of its location straddling a mighty river, in the lowlands near the end of its run, has a history of rising from the ashes of destruction.  What is telling about the Katrina disaster is the degree of passivity on the part of all levels of political leaders which left the fate of thousands of the people to the whims of the storm.  Sure, some of the displaced and dead were living off welfare; but within this population were also great artists, poets, and musicians – keepers of the heart and soul of New Orleans.   Tremé takes us inside this precious, fragile, and endangered world and introduces us to the people who recognized that if New Orleans failed then America might be next.

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole, Jr.

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

–Jonathan Swift 

Ignatius J. Reilly recognized himself as one of the great minds of modern time.  A man so far above the trivial pursuits of humanity that he consumed countless notepads with his philosophies of life and morality, while reposing on his unmade bed in his filthy room; suffering the complaints and criticisms of his alcoholic mother.  To Ignatius, the material world was a place of small minds, perversion, and bad fortune; just thinking about it sent his pyloric valve into a spasm which only a junk-food binge could relieve.  As a result, Ignatius J. Reilly was a massive human specimen whose wardrobe choices served to make him as repulsive to the world as the world was to him.  When forced by circumstances beyond his control to leave the predictable solitude of his bedroom and get a job, Ignatius used his own brand of genius to right the wrongs in the world.  Never has a tail wagged a dog so hard.

As literary figures go, Ignatius J. Reilly has no peer.  Walker Percy, the southern author who saved A Confederacy of Dunces from obscurity, attempted to describe him as “a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one”.  As close as that comes, it still misses what is so essential to Ignatius, namely his extreme cognitive dissonance.  Ignatius considers himself to be worldly and sophisticated and yet has only ventured out of New Orleans, Louisiana, on a single occasion, with traumatic results.  He disdains movies, but cannot stay away from theatres out of a need to aggravate other movie-goers with his loud criticisms.  Ignatius moves about the world as if he were an oblivious, crusading king, leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in his wake, rather than a senile knight bent on slaying dragons.   He is completely irresistible.

As a scholarship student at Tulane University in New Orleans, Ignatius had distinguished himself by terrorizing one of his professors for being a fraud.  His co-terrorist, and only friend, is a young woman from New York, named Myrna Minkoff, who lives to rebel against the status quo.  The two carry on an impassioned and co-dependent competition through the mail about who is the most intellectually honest and radically socialist.  Myrna is the only one who truly appreciates and understands Ignatius but she makes him work very hard before she lets him know this.

Meanwhile, on Bourbon Street the proprietress of a sleazy strip club is up to no good and the smartest character in the book, Burma Jones – an uneducated black man who has been wrongly arrested for stealing cashews, which he hates, and then ordered to get a job or face arrest for vagrancy – decides to investigate with slapstick results.  Jones has his reasons for wanting to cause trouble which he shares in his many hilarious monologues about the abuses suffered by Black Americans under the Jim Crow laws in Louisiana.  With the unclouded vision of a child, the instincts of a spy, and the freedom of someone with nothing left to lose, Jones sees the dunces for what they are, even the ones with the power to put him in jail.

A Confederacy of Dunces is set in New Orleans during the early 1960s, a time when Communism was a growing international threat and racial unrest was beginning to boil under the surface of segregation in the south.  It is a work of comic genius and social satire which, like Ignatius J. Reilly’s treatise, was written by a young man who was not at home in the world.  John Kennedy Toole, Jr., was a precocious and talented child whose mother, Thelma, promoted constantly, some might even say shamelessly.  He was intellectually gifted and became known for his wit and comic timing which served him well as a college English professor and socialite.  For all of his popularity, however, John Kennedy Toole, Jr., was a deeply disturbed and alienated individual. 

It is quite possible that Toole struggled with his gender orientation because he reportedly never did more than kiss the few girlfriends he had in his lifetime.  While stationed in Puerto Rico during his military service Toole found himself in a barracks with an openly gay contingent and this led to ambivalent behavior on his part which created a rift between him and his fellow soldiers.  It was during this time that he began writing A Confederacy of Dunces and exhibiting the early signs of mental illness.  As he got deeper into the novel, Toole’s behavior changed in a way that suggested he increasingly identified with the self-aggrandizing, obnoxious, unrecognized genius of his own creation. 

The Army discharged Toole after two years because his parents were struggling financially due to his father’s deafness and similarly deteriorating mental health.  He moved back to his parents’ house and took a part-time teaching position at nearby Dominican College while he continued to work on his novel.  Toole enjoyed the New Orleans party and music scenes but fell into a deep depression when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.  After a few months, Toole rebounded somewhat and completed his novel.  He then sent it to Simon & Schuster in New York where it entered editorial limbo.  Robert Gottleib, the editor assigned to Toole’s manuscript, liked many things about the book, but kept asking for revisions which Toole was not able to make.  Eventually, Toole asked for his manuscript back and placed it on top of the armoire in his bedroom where it stayed until his mother convinced him to give it to newspaper publisher, Hodding Carter, Jr., who gave it a quick read and handed it back. 

This humiliating rejection took a tremendous toll on Toole who then entered a phase of mental and physical deterioration.  He drank heavily, gained a huge amount of weight, and exhibited symptoms of paranoia.  In an effort to lift himself up, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Tulane University, but the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., sent him spiraling back down into mental illness.  By the end of 1968, Dominican College had put Toole on a leave of absence because of his increasingly erratic behavior.  His once doting mother became enraged over the loss of this teaching job and Toole abruptly left home. 

An investigation following Toole’s death several weeks later revealed that he had driven to California to see William Randolph Hearst’s mansion, and then to Milledgeville, Georgia, where it is assumed he made a pilgrimage to the home of his favorite writer, Flannery O’Connor.  His final stop was Biloxi, Mississippi, where, for unknown reasons, he taped one end of a garden hose to the tailpipe of his car in order to funnel the carbon monoxide fumes emitted by the running engine into the vehicle’s interior, where he waited for oblivion.  The letter he left for his parents on the car seat next to him upset his mother so much that she destroyed it.

After two years of grief-stricken depression, Thelma Toole discovered the manuscript on top of the armoire and became determined to see A Confederacy of Dunces published.  To that end, she sent the manuscript to seven publishers, all of whom rejected it.  In 1976, the renowned author Walker Percy joined the faculty of Loyola University, adjacent to Tulane.  Thelma Toole stalked him relentlessly until Percy agreed to read the manuscript just to make her stop.  Perhaps A Confederacy of Dunces had been ahead of its time, because Percy recognized its brilliance as a work of literature and cultural artifact.  Not only was Ignatius J. Reilly a singular character, but the dunces who populated his world were as well.  Toole captured with a perfectly tuned ear the dialects spoken by white and black New Orleanais as they shared their views on Communism, racism, nuclear war, sex, and justice.  Even with Percy as champion, A Confederacy of Dunces languished for more than three years before it was published.  After an initial print run of 2,500 copies and little attention, the book suddenly caught on.  In 1981, John Kennedy Toole, Jr., received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

Madness and genius – sadly – often go hand-in-hand.  John Kennedy Toole, Jr., with his piercing intelligence and powers of observation perhaps saw too much of the foolishness of mankind and gave up in despair.   More likely, he wanted to be normal, to be loved, to be himself, but felt constrained by social norms and conventions.  If Thelma Toole had not destroyed her son’s suicide note, we might have some insight, but in all likelihood he shared his regret that he never measured up to her expectations.  Perhaps Ignatius J. Reilly was a mockery of his creator, the mama’s boy who grew up to disappoint, the golden boy who felt inauthentic, or worse:  the son who would never produce the Catholic grandchildren his mother pined for. 

In times of social change, it is the artists who capture the paradigm shifts.  The 1960s saw America change from “Father Knows Best” to Woodstock.  John Kennedy Toole, Jr., tried to straddle both worlds but fell into the abyss instead.  Had his mental illness not gone untreated it is likely that he might have understood that a single intellectually honest voice can sometimes enlighten the dunces.  Then again, he might never have written A Confederacy of Dunces because this work of genius is also the product of a tragically unquiet mind.

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved