lolspeaks.com

It’s the first time since 1981 that I am having a zero-grade carnival. Admittedly I didn’t do much about carnival when I lived in New Orleans–I lived in a non-carnival-impacted neighborhood, I only went to a parade or two per year at most, and I never went to the Quarter to see the costume contest on St. Ann Street. But carnival was always in the air. Even I couldn’t miss the beads and the king cakes and Mardi Gras Mambo on the radio. Some years I spent my carnival in the Netherlands, but south of the rivers they have carnival too, even if it is a low-key and cold affair that serves only as an excuse to lurch from kroeg to kroeg swilling down trappistenbier.

Anyhow my son and daughter-in-law went down for carnival this year. They are staying with a friend in the Marigny, partying on Frenchmen Street, ready to mask on Fat Tuesday. Last year my kid went as a wench with a pink wig. This year he and his wife are going as “fucking ninjas,” garbed in black from head to toe and swinging nunchuks (or whatever those things are called) made of dildos linked by chained nipple clamps. I can’t make up my mind if I did a lousy job of bringing my kid up–or a really great one.

Some New Orleans transplants get into carnival in a big way. I wasn’t one of them. My very first week in New Orleans, one of my students came up to me in class and said, “You are going to love living in New Orleans. We don’t let Jews participate in Mardi Gras.” Um, OK, so I inadvertently landed myself in anti-Semitism central. I learned thereafter that New Orleans Jews stereotypically leave town on Mardi Gras and go skiing in Colorado.

Never mind Bakhtin’s view of the carnivalesque. The Rabelaisian carnival of the Renaissance may have undercut the established hierarchy and turned the world up-so-down as Chaucer would have put it, but in New Orleans, despite the drinking and ribaldry and casting off of the restraints of ordinary life (including, in some Quarters, clothes), not to mention the occasional physical danger, that Rabelais would have recognized, Carnival serves to reinforce hierarchy, as the wonderful carnival anthem, “Ain’t No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day” makes perfectly clear: “Rich folks get to pee on Mardi Gras Day. They get annoyed if they can’t void on Mardi Gras Day. They up there on their balconies, they pee all over you and me. Rich folks get to pee on Mardi Gras Day.”* Mardi Gras may be, as it bills itself, the world’s greatest free show, but it is only free for those who stand in the streets stepping on little children’s fingers to collect worthless junk thrown by the carnival elite, the soi-disant kings and queens, nay, gods and goddesses. At least the largesse thrown to the masses by the real kings and queens of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was edible and spendable, unlike the aluminum doubloons and plastic jewels that litter the streets of New Orleans. If carnival is free for those who stand in the streets, for those who ride on the gaudy floats, it’s mighty expensive. And while mere money can get you into one of the downmarket carnival Krewes, you/ve got to have the right ancestors to join the ones at the top of the heap.

True, there is satire and parody of the powerful here and there, but don’t expect the hereditary aristocracy of New Orleans, who so need mocking, to mock themselves. That was once the function of Zulu, although one might be forgiven for considering the sight of (not very) black men in black(er) face to be a form of self-mockery. If New Orleans carnival reinforces the socioeconomic hierarchy, it also reinforces the racial divides of the community. That is to say, it makes clear that New Orleans is still a city socially segregated into communities of black, white and creoles of color. Of course, people of every race and background can be found reveling on the streets, but despite the efforts of the late Dorothy Mae Taylor, the scourge of the uptown carnival set, Rex, Comus, Momus, and Proteus, the krewes of the local elites, are still essentially white. Of course, in order to keep their parades on the streets, Rex and (very recently) Proteus capitulated and admitted a token African-American or two, but Comus, the oldest and most elite of all, remains as white as the lilies of France which are the ubiquitous symbols of Nouvelle Orleans. The aristocracy of the creoles of color, who make the brahmins of Boston look like egalitaritarians, have their own parallel carnival universe: The Young Men’s Illinois Club and the ORIGINAL Young Men’s Illinois Club, and which of these is the real in-crowd I do not really know. I do know that these are sincere imitations of white carnival high society, complete with a debutante coterie, not a tongue-in-cheel parody. And then there are the carnival manifestations of the working class black population, the most notable of which are the Mardi Gras Indians with their incredible beaded and plumed costumes (very similar to those of the working class Philadelphia Mummers), their call and response chants, and their history of murderous rivalries between the uptown and the downtown tribes, rivalries now sublimated into shows of plumage as competitive as those of any flock of peacocks.

As for The Quarter and Bourbon Street, that’s the carnival of the tourists and the gay community and the artists and bohemians–and the religious zealots who think that drag queens and leather lords and “fucking ninjas” do not represent “family values.” (Hey, that’s my family down there twirling dildos!)

Well, wherever you are, have a nice Mardi Gras.

May sheepsheads grow on apple trees,
May the moon be turned to green cream cheese,
If ever I cease to love………

*”Ain’t No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day” by Bennie Grunch and the Bunch can be heard, along with other carnival music, at http://www.walkerpub.com/jukebox_songs.html. (Scroll down until you see the Mardi Gras heading). Pro bono publico!