A Great Place To Be From
Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher, a native of Louisiana, writes about his home state and the pride and hope that Bobby Jindal's victory brings to expatriates like him. Unlike most people who leave Louisiana, Bobby Jindal went back.
Louisiana has been at or near the bottom of "quality of life" lists for so long that you start to believe that there's something genetically wrong with its residents. For 15 out of the past 17 years, Louisiana has been either America's Least Livable State or runner-up in the annual Morgan Quitno research firm's comprehensive rankings, which combine educational, economic, health, environmental and crime statistics. No wonder Louisiana has for at least two decades experienced a steady out-migration of young professionals.
You notice something, though, when Louisianians meet in exile. Everybody misses home and will take any opportunity to talk about it. Our friends–Yankees, mostly–get the biggest kick out of our honest-to-God tales of Bayou State life (political and otherwise). My wife, a native Texan, confessed that when we first started dating, she thought my stories about my homeland revealed me to be a pathological liar–until I took her there to see for herself. She visited my Uncle Murphy's grave and saw the headstone he'd won playing bourré (a Cajun card game) with an undertaker. He had it inscribed with the epitaph: "This ain't bad, once you get used to it."
Louisiana makes a lot more sense if you read the beloved picaresque "A Confederacy of Dunces" as an exercise in literary naturalism. There's simply no place like Louisiana. You will not find more generous and life-loving people anywhere, and Lord knows, you won't eat or drink better. It's hard to get over that. But you do, mostly. Last Sunday, I ran into a couple I know at a Krispy Kreme shop here in Dallas. We got to talking about the Jindal victory, and the wife, a non-native who had fallen in love with Louisiana as a Tulane student, said warmly that she'd love to move back. The husband gave her a look that telegraphed, "Yes, we all would, dear, but come on."
Despite all the sentimental longing for LSU Tigers tailgating and the scent of Zatarain's crawfish boil on your fingers, moving home rarely crosses the minds of us expatriates. Louisiana is a great place to be from, but the sense of fatalism that pervades life there casts doubt on whether it will some day be great place to be. In Louisiana, to be educated is to love the state and hate the state–and, for many, to leave it.
But Jindal did go back, despite his great education and virtually unlimited possibilities anywhere he decided to go. The son of immigrants from India, a Republican in the quintessential corrupt Democratic machine-run state, a convert to Roman Catholicism with a fancy education has gone back and vowed to fight the corruption. Dreher has hope for his state again. Maybe it won't just be a great place to be from. Maybe it will be a great place to live again.
By Lars Walker, Friday, 26 October , 2007 @ 8:18 am
Walker Percy went back too, if I remember correctly.