Rain splattered Friday afternoon in New Orleans, but wisely left town just before parade time. Two companions who'd just arrived were joining me in the unlikely project of watching the parades on Canal Street, usually so full of tourists that it's way off-limits for anyone self-described as a resident. But this year, the only problem was timing: when were the rain-delayed parades arriving? A police officer stood on a street corner with four colleagues, answering a visitor's question about where St. Charles Avenue is (we were standing across the street from it), and pointed in the opposite direction, toward the French Quarter where it becomes Royal St. "You're not from here," I said to him. He and his colleagues nodded, reinforcements from outside come to help the NOPD cope with the expected crowds that, so far, haven't crushed the barricades.
Dinner intervened, and when we returned to the street, the expected influx of tourists still hadn't materialized. Too bad, although the parade they missed, Krewe d'Etat, was so full of local jokes and sublime jabs at the local miscreants that it might have bored them. To us, it was another of the splendid ritual moments of this Carnival--where New Orleanians demonstrate that, in the face of disaster and national under-compassion, one appropriate response is creative and satirical. The theme was a parody of the Olympics, so everything that happened post-K, like refrigerator hurling, was depicted as an Olympic event. But the text, and there was plenty of reading to be done, was specific and nasty, and, as one of my companions noted, these people had done their homework. Instead of another "heckuva job" jab, Mike Brown was depicted at the back end of one float, his sleeves rolled up, his feet up, a menu propped in front of him, asking, "Anything I can tweak?"
This is so clearly becoming a Carnival for the surviving locals--bad news for the tourist business, but a rare treat for the people who have been spending six months gutting their homes and waiting for the insurance adjuster to call...What's on display here, judging by the parades I've seen so far, deserves to be called what it is: a very high order of community folk art.