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The French Quarter

(This is an another older fiction piece from my "New Orleans Memories" collection.)

The French Quarter. It wasn't the best of times; it wasn't the worst of times. It was June, and it was hot, as it always in New Orleans in the summer, and my live-in girlfriend, Christine, and I were down in the French Quarter for a day of jazz and drink and shopping for T-shirts. If you ever need a T-shirt, you just have to come to the French Quarter. Forget about art, Cajun music, historic architecture—the T-shirt is what it's come to, but we've got the best.

We had just walked out of a shop on Bourbon Street when I spotted a small crowd down Conti, near Royal; Christine and I hurried over to see what was up. It was a transvestite conked out on the sidewalk outside a greasy bar. One of the tourists, a guy from the Iowa wearing Bermuda shorts he'd taken out of mothballs just for this trip, was the most concerned of the crowd. "Do you think she's dead?" he asked me as I shoved my way through. I looked at him, and then again, making sure he knew I was doing a double take, and said: "That's not a woman. That's a man." He didn't believe me. "If you look real close," I said, "you'll see a five o'clock shadow under that makeup." So he bends down, looks real hard, and then comes back up scratching the bald part of his head. "Now I've seen everything," he said. "How long have you been in the Quarter?" I asked. "Oh, about a day," he answered. "Then you haven't seen anything yet," I quipped. I left him in a stupefied state and called the police from the corner T-shirt shop. When I got back, the transvestite was sitting up, moaning. The bald tourist from Iowa just stood there and stared at him, like he'd never seen a man in a dress before. Christine and I headed up Royal Street for more T-shirt shopping.

About an hour later, we were at Jackson Square. It was crowded with tourists and other T-shirt shoppers and clumps of street entertainers—jazz, tap dancing, mime, acrobatics—and a guy playing music on the rims of little glasses of water. For just a minute or two I stopped and watched a redhead with long legs and a short skirt, but in that brief time Christine disappeared. I thought I caught a glimpse of her walking down St. Ann, and hurried after her, but she vanished. This was exasperating me, and it was hot, and I wanted a drink of something cool. I slipped into a nearby bar. It was dark inside. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I hopped onto a bar stool and asked the bartender for a Coke. He looked at me like I didn't belong there, but I was too thirsty to care. I paid him for the soft drink and took two long drinks. Suddenly I sensed someone directly behind me. There was a moment of heavy breathing. [ MORE ]

A Truth or Dare Commission

It is up in the air (floating like a lost party balloon) whether the Obama administration is going to sanction a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission," something proposed recently by Senator Patrick Leahy as a means toward a public dialogue on the Busheviks' illegal behavior.¹ Also floating around the airy skies is a real skepticism as to whether such a commission will lead to actual prosecutions, to a real list of their illegal deeds, or even to any meaningful dialogue about past practices of any American president's previous administration. The McClatchy Newspapers has a competent article on the several issues surrounding such a commission and its likelihood of success.²

So why not simply walk straight into the courts with evidence of war crimes (about which there is already much evidence)? We shouldn't have to rely on an International War Crimes Tribunal to do this for us. Creating a "truth commission" is like setting up a conference table outside the courthouse and having people talk about it, interviewing torture victims (or their mothers and families) and other aggrieved parties, until nobody wants to talk about it anymore, or listen to it anymore, and a Report of the Commission is published and gets put on library shelves and the whole issue gets replaced, in the short American attention span, with some other issue, such as the economy, the stock market, bailout money, automobiles, mass transit, poverty, climate change, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, South America—all of the things that effectively force us to go forward, allowing us (hey, these things are important!) to avoid having to face our own collective guilt about the crimes we therefore continue to sanction in our refusal to look backward again.

1.  "Sen Leahy proposes truth panel on Bush era abuses," AP/Breitbart, February 9, 2009.
2.  "President Obama back 'truth commission' to probe Bush practices?" McClatchy Newspapers, February 22, 2009. Also archived at Common Dreams.