Twice the glory of corruption.
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Yes, officer, I was in the French Quarter of New Orleans last month when those 10 young lawbreakers made their grand escape, but if I did anything to facilitate their escape, I can assure you it was entirely unintentional. In the chaos of Bourbon Street, how do you differentiate crime from light entertainment? And, indeed, how do you draw that line in other parts of this notoriously depraved city?
That’s my alibi, or at least it would be if it were necessary. I can’t say I condone what these scoundrels did, but it would be unfair to deny that I admire their creativity. They were able to rip a toilet out of a cell by punching a hole in the wall behind it and crawling through it. They used towels for protection as they scaled a barbed wire fence, ran across the interstate, and disappeared. Some of them made it as far as Vieux Carré, where I was, before they were apprehended. For seven hours, no one at the Orleans Parish Justice Center even knew they were gone. I’m also impressed by the graffiti they left at the scene: “Too Easy LOL” and “We Are Innocent.” Others, at the time of writing, remain at large; more on them later.
Law enforcement has never been New Orleans’s strong suit. This “wonderful, grand old Babylon,” as A. J. Liebling called it, was steeped in corruption, and its civic leaders were always comically incompetent. “Times are bad here. The city is burning. It has sunk under taxes, fraud, and irresponsible management, and has become an object of archaeological study.” Lafcadio Hearn wrote about this in the 1870s, adding the shocking fact that “in spite of all this corruption and incompetence, it would be better to live here in rags and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.” Even at its worst (who remembers Buzz Lukens?), the Buckeye State is no match for Louisiana.
And that’s part of the Big Easy’s charm. Some cities take themselves way too seriously. New Orleans isn’t one of them. In 2016, when a 30-foot crater opened up on Canal Street near a casino — a crater the city seemed unable to fix — hundreds of citizens came out to celebrate “Sinkhole de Mayo.”
The more time I spend in New Orleans, the more I become convinced that so-called “good government” is overrated. The integrity of elected officials and the efficiency of their hired guns are the pipe dreams of noble reformers, and I am increasingly convinced that their aspirations do more harm than good. The endless accumulation of rules and regulations, as government intervenes in more and more aspects of our lives, imposes an intolerable burden on public servants. This expansion of responsibilities and spheres of involvement certainly makes it more and more difficult to get anything done.
A good bribe, at the right time and in the right place, can eliminate a lot of stupidity. There are drawbacks, of course, but burdening government employees with endless paperwork can be problematic in its own way. I fully understand that locals who lived through Katrina and similar disasters may disagree, but inefficiency can have its own charm.
While I don't condone the actions of the daredevils who escaped from prison, I was inspired by the fact that a local tough named Don Cable
Sourse: theamericanconservative.com
