Red Beans, Rice and Rotor Blades

Last night, like most Monday nights was Red Beans and Rice night at Tujagues Restaurant. A pint of Bass Ale for $5.00 accompanied by a brimming plate of creamy red beans, bright white rice, and a big baguette all for FREE. It's Monday in New Orleans, the traditional day of red beans cooking all day on stoves all over town while the wash was getting done. Red beans getting creamy, full of flavor and bursting with goodness. Monday Night Red Beans and Rice are probably the best example of New Orleans current need of comfort in any form available. It certainly works for me, but then, I have always had a thing for putting things in my mouth.

On the other side of all that comfort are the still ever present military installations. Yesterday morning I had to meet someone near the Convention Center downtown (yeah, THAT convention center downtown) and what I discovered when I got there was a formerly empty lot filled with military Humvees in their new desert beige camouflage, as well as the old green color (much more appropriate for our swamplike environment). It was a daunting site. Hundreds of machines sitting like giant bugs, waiting to descend on the city like mosquitos in July. Several times a day the helicopters still fly overhead as if searching for mysterious phantoms, or left over people. It's a strange feeling. What this city needs is some kind of take on normalcy, a logistical and governmental version of Red Beans and Rice. What we have instead is a more or less benign, yet mostly pointless and ineffective occupying force (all the National Guard folks are smiling and friendly while they stand around shouldering their M-16s). Despite the fact that I know they mean well, this occupation pisses me off. I mean, for the most part, I LIKE these folks and they, more or less, look like me, and they still bug me everytime they drive by, fly over or show up out of nowhere. I can only imagine what it must be like to be in a place like Iraq, occupied by a similar force of much greater strength and hostility in a land where they truly don't belong.

Come to think of it… They don't belong HERE!