The morning after the election, I woke up with head pounding from beer and champagne, and stomach churning from pizza and chocolate. When I stepped outside into an unseasonably balmy, misty morning, it struck me that this felt exactly like Mardi Gras day: damp, swampy air mingling with a sickeningly sugary hangover, a slate-gray sky that eliminated the horizon and merged invisibly with the slate-gray city, and the people walking the streets all looking especially haggard but illuminated from within by some secret energy. What was most similar was that it felt like the culmination of a frenetic, stressful, and ultimately drunken few days, and that the final and official holy day to which all those minor precursors were leading seemed too ghostly and surreal by comparison.
Like any good Mardi Gras, scenes from the previous night kept flashing through my mind in detached fragments. Me watching Fox News all afternoon, while the presentation I needed to be typing languished on a dimmed laptop screen. A bug-eyed woman screaming something about Black Panthers and race riots into the smug face of Shepherd Smith. Then, suddenly, sitting in a roomful of lawyers and one Sarah Palin cardboard cut-out, festooned with the Mardi Gras beads I'd brought to liven her up and baring waxy, laminated teeth at us from the corner. States being called, and the collective cheer when Katie Couric dubbed Massachusetts "the bluest state." The jaw-dropping moment that was Pennsylvania. Flipping to Comedy Central and hearing it first not from CNN holograms or MSNBC ticker, but Jon Stewart that Barack Obama is president of the United States of America. Champagne toasts and muffled sobs.
It didn't seem real that morning, and it still doesn't. In New Orleans, the weeks leading up to Mardi Gras are about suspending your everyday reality and replacing it with something ecstatic, surreal, and fundamentally unsustainable, so that by the time you get to Mardi Gras day, you've wallowed for so long in the anarchic whims of the flesh that you've finally succumbed to them. By sheer inertia, I've dragged myself out of bed on that perpetually misty Tuesday for four years in a row and hauled my tired, protesting body to the last parades, Zulu and Rex. Except I've never made it to Rex -- that's the big one you can always catch on TV and looks just like the glossy postcards sold in every souvenir shop in the French Quarter: all fancy feathers, sumptuous masks, and the snowy white King of Mardi Gras presiding amid his KKK-esque horse guards, hoods and all.
Zulu for me has always been the real grand finale, the black travesty of the official white carnival. It comes off badly in frozen stills, which only capture the burnt cork blackface and grass skirts like a flat caricature, some kitschy parade of Little Black Sambos. In reality, it feels much more menacing, especially when venturing too far into the territory of the Magnolia projects to find parking and a good spot to stand. Every year, there's a moment when you can look around and spot small coteries of hipsters, progressive college professors, and students from Tulane and Loyola sticking out like awkward blemishes on all-black family barbecues and raucous sidewalk celebrations. Every year, it was a reminder of how white and non-Southern I am, despite all the years I'd spent living in this culture and thinking of myself as hip and with it. And now that I'm back up North in "the bluest state," I can't help both liking and resenting those American Apparel-clad kids who biked through the streets of Boston with Obama emblazoned in red, white and blue on their backpacks; or even the waspy lawyers who teared up when he was giving his acceptance speech. It feels like they can never get the significance of what happened on November 4th if they've never set foot below the Mason-Dixie line, never stood at a Zulu parade, or never even been in a crowd like the one in Hyde Park unless it was a Janet Jackson concert.
But that's just the elitist in me, the part that uses the "foreigner" label to clamor for a special, objective understanding of this country. The sharp self-righteousness has been gradually sloughed off of me every time I realize that most of the people I meet have an equally valid claim to outsider status, and that this willingness to see oneself in opposition to, rather than the essentialist product of a society is something uniquely American and undeniably appealing. It started with the Puritans and continues to this day in fundamentalist Christianity, animal rights activism, environmentalism, radical feminism, LGBT, and BDSM. They're all working off one model: if it's broke, we can fix it, even if it means redefining the definition of "it." Or, as it was perhaps a bit more eloquently put: we'll never stop trying to make a more perfect union. And, to wit, those skinny white kids in DNC swag have just put Barack Hussein Obama into the highest office of the great U.S. of A.
I wasn't thinking all of this on the morning after election day. I was leaning against a cold concrete wall to stifle some queasy hangover shakes, waiting for my bus and barely noticing when it pulled up to the stop. Hurriedly, I scrambled to pull out my wallet, but when I reached into the front pocket of my backpack, what I pulled out was a handful of Mardi Gras beads. Laissez les bon temps roulez.
