After a recent visit, I've concluded that New Orleans has absolutely no purpose but to serve as the rectal sphincter of America, an ill-conceived city at best.
And what is its crowning achievement after more than 400 years? To almost, but not quite, be able to stop the stop the cesspool of the fetid, stinking Mississippi River Delta from mixing with the cesspool of the fetid, stinking Louisiana swampland.
Except when there's a really big hurricane, and we're all expected to feel sorry for NOLA's plight!
But no one is saying what we're all thinking: Um, shouldn't you have thought of that before you built the city below sea level?
But what about New Orleans' rich cultural history, one might ask?
Sure, this city that never should have been embraces a colorful mix.
Guess what? None of them are particularly appealing, either. Add Jazz, Haitian voodoo, Cajun rednecks and French poofery to Bourbon Street's nightly alco-hell, and the sewage runs thick with regurgitated praline (pronounced praw-een) cookies, crawdads and oysters from all the retching revelers.
And then there's the endless guided tour industry.
Anything can be toured in NOLA it seems. Plantations, battlefields, swamps, cemeteries - and most notably the streets - are full of hundreds of tour guides showing thousands of tourists the sights.
Statistics show, in fact, that at this rate of growth, nearly half of all residents will be tour guides by the year 2025.
Of course I am making that up, but what I am not making up is the nightly parade of ghost, vampire and murder tours that literally litter the streets of the French Quarter.
So many have died so horribly in the Big Easy over the years, it's not at all uncommon for huge groups of tourists to pass within a few feet of each other all while gawking at the exact same sites where the deadly deeds were done. So many, in fact, that guides yell at one another if an unwritten "50-foot rule" is violated.
I'm surprised there's no "Ghosts of tour guides past" tours yet!
And just in case you're not turned off of New Orleans yet, when the citizenry isn't being drowned or poisoned or stabbed, just for kicks, it's stinking hot and horribly humid. Oh! And there's cockroaches!
I'll admit all the above-ground cemeteries are kind of interesting, but aren't enough of a reason to invest any serious time.
So what draws you to visit New Orleans or even Southern Lousiana? Its rich history as one of America's former hotbeds of slavery? The homeless and the stench?
I'm not sure, but I don't think I'll be going back any time soon.
I say go online, buy a package of beignet mix from Cafe du Monde's, maybe watch a Saints' game, and be done with NOLA once and for all, y'all.
