The Republicans

By Calvin Trillin Calvin Trillin began his career in 1960 as a TIME correspondent. He has written twelve books, including If You Can''t Say Something Nice, Killings and Alice, Let''s Eat.

It's been customary to write about New Orleans as a foreign city. The tropics are often mentioned, particularly if the writer has had the bad luck to arrive in August: steamy, sensuous, tempting, vaguely dangerous. Some have dwelt on New Orleans' French origins, some on its Latin flair for celebration. It has been described as Mediterranean and Levantine. In 1960, when I first started writing about New Orleans, I told a man I knew there -- a wise man, who had spent his whole life in New Orleans, taking in the show -- that some of the goings-on connected with the desegregation of the schools struck me as, to put it politely, bizarre. "What you have to remember to keep it all in perspective," he said, "is that this is not the southern United States. This is northern Costa Rica."

There are, of course, enclaves in a lot of American cities that feel foreign because one group or another clings to a way of life that originated in some other country. In New Orleans the mainstream can have foreign ways. No one who ever took a close look at Mardi Gras could come away with the impression that it's merely a straightforward American spectacle in the tradition of, say, the Indianapolis 500 or the Pasadena Tournament of Roses. In 1964 I was in New Orleans to do a piece on the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, a black burial society whose members traditionally paraded on Mardi Gras in blackface, wearing grass skirts and tossing coconuts to the crowd. A week before Mardi Gras, I watched cheerfully drunk white longshoremen boogie down the street for hours in women's clothing behind a black jazz band, in what they called a practice parade of their Carnival marching society -- as if any of that took any practice. I talked to light-complected, Catholic, French-named blacks who said that the Zulu Parade was what you might expect of the darker, Protestant blacks they still occasionally referred to then as "American Negroes." I interviewed prominent business leaders whose Carnival "krewes" -- the organizations whose floats parade through the streets during the Carnival season on the way to elaborate balls -- were at the center of their lives. If lengthy and solemn discussions about which debutante should be queen of Rex or Comus are carried out every year by the business leaders of a city -- not the wives of the business leaders, the business leaders -- could it be an American city?

New Orleans has traditionally nurtured some distinctly non-American attributes, like indolence. There have always been a good number of people who are not eager to get ahead. Even its businessmen have had a reputation for being only mildly industrious and distinctly non-entrepreneurial. New Orleans has been known as a place content to make do with its natural endowments -- a great port on the Mississippi River, and a share of the state oil money, and a reputation for wickedness and charm that drew a steady stream of tourists for decades. For most of this century, New Orleans hasn't done much more than make do. It has never made a fetish out of equipping schools or paving streets. It has always had a lot of poor people; its rich people have never been seriously rich.

New Orleans has also had a pervasive cynicism of the sort that is not identified with America. Corruption may not be any more prevalent there than in any number of other rotten boroughs around the country, for instance -- even though there are people who believe that the line at Galatoire's Restaurant, which does not take reservations from anyone, is the only aboveboard operation in all of southern Louisiana -- but the New Orleans assumption of a corrupt motive in any act can make Americans feel naive. In 1975 I asked a French Quarter character I knew what effect the Superdome would have on the city, and he said that once the land deal was done and the insurance written, "the rest is commentary."

It's possible to argue that New Orleans never completely accepted American middle-class values because it never had much of a middle class -- at least not until the expansion of the oil-company regional offices attracted hordes of white collars in the early '70s. It's possible to argue that the Protestant work ethic never caught on in New Orleans because it isn't Protestant. But it's dangerous to assume that the character of New Orleans is derived from the origins of its inhabitants. The New Orleans Mardi Gras was started by Protestant businessmen. The traditional New Orleans neighborhood guy, sometimes known as a yat -- that character who greets people with "Where y'at?" -- is likely to be of the same Irish or German descent as the Brooklyn dockworker he sometimes sounds like. The person I have known who most naturally fit into the pace of New Orleans -- a person whose normal and astonishingly effective way of keeping appointments was to stroll around the French Quarter, assuming he'd run into the appropriate person by and by -- was born and raised in Pottsville, Pa.

For whatever reason, New Orleans people tend to be more tolerant than most Americans -- particularly most Southerners -- when it comes to sins of the flesh. They not only eat different food but also give food and drink a priority unknown in the rest of the country. Years ago, the man who told me about northern Costa Rica responded to news that New Orleans had landed some new manufacturing operation -- news that would have had them dancing in the streets in Atlanta -- by expressing concern that the influx of executives could make the line for lunch at Galatoire's longer. I have a nephew who recently moved to Atlanta after several years in New Orleans, and when I asked him the difference in the two cities, he said, "That's easy. When you play - softball in a city park in Georgia, you're not allowed to drink beer. In New Orleans there are a lot of people who don't know you can play softball without drinking beer." Early on, New Orleans established an atmosphere of laissez- faire, and sometimes I think that by now there aren't enough Southern Baptists in the world to reverse that.

Sometimes, though, I'm not so sure. In the nearly 30 years I've been writing about New Orleans, part of what I've been writing about is the gradual fading of its foreignness. I suppose yats still hold practice parade the week before Mardi Gras, but in a lot of ways Mardi Gras has become a more American event. The number of people roaming the streets of the French Quarter on Mardi Gras day seems to have increased steadily and the percentage of them in costume seems to have decreased, as that part of the Carnival celebration has changed from a family costume party to another stop on the relentless tour of all- purpose American event-attenders. Mardi Gras turned a corner in 1969 when the Krewe of Bacchus was formed by restaurant and hotel operators to stage a parade tailored specifically for tourists -- a spectacle considerably more lavish than the parades of the old-line krewes. The king of the parade each year was not some anonymous banker, secure in the knowledge that anyone who counts knows who's behind the mask, but somebody like Jackie Gleason or Perry Como or Ed McMahon. Eventually, there was a second Bacchus-like krewe named Endymion. Its king last year was Spuds MacKenzie.

The absence of buildings in New Orleans done in the grand American scale was ordained partly by the sponginess of its ground. Anyone tempted to build a huge building had only to think of Charity Hospital, whose first floor had gradually become its basement. There is a theory that the person responsible for the greatest change in the city was the engineer who finally figured out how to build massive skyscrapers on river effluent. The result was a row of huge oil-company office buildings and, on the edge of the French Quarter, a gaggle of high-rise hotels -- hotels large enough to hold the sort of national conventions that could make every night in the French Quarter seem like the Saturday night of the Tulane-L.S.U. game. The French Quarter, particularly along its river edge, was slicked up for the increasing stream of visitors. As all of that began in the middle '70s. there was some grumbling about New Orleans turning into another Houston. My impression was not that New Orleans / was becoming much more like Houston but that it was becoming more like Houston's idea of what New Orleans ought to be -- a slicker, more conveniently packaged version of itself that some people called a "Creole Disneyland."

Something like that might have happened anyway, but it became inevitable when the world suddenly found itself with too much oil and even Houston wasn't like Houston any longer. The oil glut dealt New Orleans a mighty blow that went beyond the loss of oil-related jobs. After 50 years of depending on state oil revenues to help finance basic services, the city is so lacking in a normal tax base that a lot of New Orleans residents are shocked at the notion of paying any property tax. In the cushy days of OPEC prices, nobody seemed to notice that the port business was sagging. There were once something like 18,000 working longshoremen in New Orleans; there are now 7,000. New Orleans has virtually no manufacturing anymore, and it's short on the sort of assets that might attract any. A lot of people who could afford to leave town have left town. A lot of the working poor have been replaced by welfare poor. New Orleans has been poor before, of course, but this time there's an edge of desperation in the talk about the city's financial problems. I've heard New Orleans compared to the heir of a mildly dissolute family whose males have always got by on charm and a modest trust fund: the money has finally run out, and he can either get to work or head for the men's shelter. "It's still a lot of fun to live here," a friend who has lived in New Orleans all his life said recently. "It's just a shame we're in collective Chapter Eleven."

A long stretch of river, from a Rouse development on the site of the World's Fair to the refurbished Jax Brewery on the edge of the French Quarter, is now basically an upscale shopping mall of the sort that in other parts of the country has at times made me feel that I've been overexposed to exposed brick. In the way New Orleans views tourism, the spirit of Bacchus has emerged triumphant over the ways of the old-line krewes. There are now plans to fill one of the gaps on the river with an aquarium, partly because market research has shown that New Orleans is thought of as a party town but not as a place to bring the kids. The French Quarter has half as many permanent residents as it did ten years ago; New Orleans has three times as many tourists as it did ten years ago. In the '60s, there were about 7,000 hotel rooms; today there are 27,000.

Some of the preservationists find it ironic that they saved the riverfront from an expressway to turn it over to Benetton and chocolate-chip-cookie boutiques. Some people talk with dread about the city's becoming a display ("It's only a matter of time before they have us all down there parading around in period costumes"). But the grumbling is remarkably muted. Many people seem to have come to the conclusion that New Orleans has no choice but to go all out as a convention town. When I was in Atlanta recently, a friend of mine there, thinking of New Orleans' traditional cynicism and Atlanta's traditional boosterism, said, "New Orleans sees having a national political convention as a chance to take some money off the rubes. Atlanta sees having a national political convention as An Opportunity." Not exactly. New Orleans sees it as a way to get more conventions.

It is said that the current crisis has changed the way New Orleans does things. It is said that the business leaders identified with the old-line Carnival krewes have lost much of their influence. The two businessmen most often mentioned as leading efforts for tax reform and systematic economic development, Patrick Taylor and Jim Bob Moffett, are both oilmen who grew up in Texas. Moffett talks a lot about the need for structuring. Unlike Gorbachev, he doesn't talk about restructuring -- presumably on the assumption that New Orleans wasn't exactly structured in the first place. Some of New Orleans' natural endowment has been diminished, he says, but he remains optimistic: "We have to change our ways. The tooth fairy is dead. But New Orleans will pull through. Americans are at their best when their backs are to the wall. And we're Americans."