Drunk Bigots Blowing Shit Up July 4, 2025
Posted by The Typist in 504ever, Corps of Engineers, cryptical envelopment, Federal Flood, Flood, fuckmook, FYYFF, hurricane, Hurricane Katrina, je me souviens, Katrina, levee, New Orleans, NOLA, postdiluvian, Sinn Fein, The Typist, Toulouse Street, voodoo, We Are Not OK, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.Tags: 4th of July, 504ever, Acadian, America, Ashley Morris, Bill Clinton, Carry Me Home, Chris Rose, Cryptic Enveloment, David Simon, Federal Flood, Federico Fellini, FEMA, Flood, Fortress of Squalitude, fuckmook, FYYFF, gentrification, Greg Peters, Gulf Coast, Gulf of Mexico, hurricane, Katrina, New Orleans, NOLA
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My German and French Acadian people, who arrived 50 years before the “American” revolution, were sold to “America” a century after they arrived here, unconsulted, along with the slaves in the fields and the “merciless Indian Savages” who showed the founders true democracy and were crushed for it. All just another colonial commodity to the U.S.
I was raised on the revised pledge of allegiance, the one with god in it, on nightly film footage of Vietnam combat and lies when lies could still bring shame, could bring down a president. You lost me entirely somewhere between August 28th 2005 and the end of that year when it became abundantly clear the fucking United States was prepared to abandon New Orleans, the anchor of the continent’s great rivers of commerce, a city perched precariously at the edge of Gulf of Mexico oil, the production of which fueled freeway “America” and destroyed the coast that protects the city. The U.S. would abandon this city because it was mostly black and brown people but the godsons of cotton Uptown crafted plans for ethnic cleansing to make it more “American” and acceptable.
I am an accidental American (North, United States of) by an unfortunate turn of history. You tried to press me like my father’s shirts into an Eisenhower/Camelot conformity, a tailored bliss. You failed. I nursed at the uprising against that in the 1960s and early ’70s, reacting to the casual racism of my Southern suburban youth and the poverty that was carefully hidden behind elevated expressways.
I was raised on rebellion and graduated into Reagan, welfare queens and Nicaragua and El Salvador and Iran (see also. missiles to). I lived through Iraq twice, 10,000 points of light (first star to the right), the cartoonishly bad Clintons, what the European press called the Coup of 2000, cheered briefly by Obama (my 7th Ward neighbors in their Sunday clothes and crowns on a Tuesday) until he started deporting and secretly bombing with drones other brown people more vigorously than Bush in his own quiet, mannered Obama way.
Drunk bigots blowing shit up. Is there any better way to describe this holiday in 2025, to describe the United States in 2025. Come the Fourth, I’ll fire up the global-and-burger warmer, pass on the noxious fumes of fluid for an old fashioned chimney and some newspaper (remember those?), eat the expected things and get drunk. I may try to get my partner drunk enough to drive as we go around and engage in the annual safety ritual of discharging the fire extinguisher wherever we see a flame or spark.
— Wet Bank Guy
Greg Peters August 3, 2013
Posted by The Typist in Bloggers, cryptical envelopment, je me souviens, New Orleans, NOLA Blogroll, Remember, Toulouse Street, We Are Not OK.Tags: Greg Peters, Suspect Device
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“Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles.”
–Homer, opening of the Illiad
No, that’s not right. Greg Peters was so much more than the wrath of Suspect Device and so much the opposite of the boastful Achilles. What I most remember was the last conversation we had. He was sitting alone at a table at Mimi’s before the Krewe du Vieux parade, and I don’t remember a word we spoke. I just remember an easy manner, a smile like a child at once guilty and proud of what mischief he had done, the smile of a bashful teenage lover, looking down a bit when he smiled lest someone catch him at it. Beneath the public exterior of satirical cartoonist and ranting blogger was the soul of a genuine Buddhist, an easy compassion and acceptance of the world that perhaps masked an acceptance of mortality. He sat that night at ease among friends and yet distant, as if he were already leaving, sitting alone at his table receiving visitors, so many not knowing it would be the last time they would speak.
No, not an acceptance of mortality. This is going all wrong. Greg had the word “indestructible” tattooed on his forearm a short while ago. Words, ink: he was only going to fall with his pen in his hand, with a samurai beauty that combined a fierce defiance and a Zen certainty of bliss beyond death. That word spoke of his love of his young sons, the companionship of a good woman and many friends, so much he was not at age 50 ready to leave behind, so much more for a lightening-fired mind yet to do.
We were all thrown together by the storm, a collection of ranting and lamenting bloggers who fell together into an indivisible friendship. We birthed an anarchist conference called Rising Tide, “A conference on the future of New Orleans” and Greg was our artist. Each poster and t-shirt topped the last, the best the rough angel rising from the waters. Rising Tide has moved onto to a 501(c)3 with paperwork and committees and most of us who were there at the beginning fell away from that but never lost each other. At the center of that group was a meeting of minds and hearts larger than the rest, Greg’s (with Ashley Morris’s) largest of all.
We knew of his heart problems from the first. After his first surgery at a distant heart clinic fellow organized a collection to get him a Macbook so he could continue to work in his convalescence. We knew that heart of steel had a fatal flaw, one that would one day break and leave him holding the haft and staring Death in the face.
A heart of steel is no guarantee except against despair. Invincible until the end. We should all go so well.
Oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā. I don’t know if Greg followed the Taras, the female Buddha, but he modeled so many of her aspects: Green Tārā, known as the Buddha of enlightened activity; Red Tārā, of fierce aspect associated with magnetizing all good things; Blue Tārā, associated with transmutation of anger. In the end White Tārā, also known for compassion, long life, healing and serenity, took him into her bosom, recognizing his compassion and serenity through so much suffering. It was enough for this one soul to advance. Oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā.
Greg left us too soon but he carved a path through the world large enough most men would happily call it a life. Tārā Mother of Liberation, teach me to walk in his footsteps.
or at these independent New Orleans bookstores:
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans 
