Gore and the Greenie-Weenies oppose offshore oil drilling anywhere off the US coast – Oops! Excuse me, except by Occidental Petroleum in Gore’s case. Actually the decision is up to the individual states and the people who make these decisions in the state agencies (generally greenies themselves) seem to agree with Gore and the environmentalists.
As usual, here in Louisiana, the northernmost banana republic (I was born in Cuba. I know one when I see one) we see things differently. Of the 3,739 offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico nowadays, 3,203 lie off our coast. We love offshore oil drilling, and not just for the loot extorted from oil companies for the privilege.
But then we’ve never followed the federal lead on anything. Indeed we’ve been in hot water with the feds since well before the Confederacy, since-in fact-Thomas Jefferson bought us at Napoleon’s fire sale back in 1805. William C. Claiborne, our first American governor, was described by historian Charles Dufour as “a strait-laced Protestant.” Not the right man to send down here.
“To bring these people to reason!” He thundered in his first letter to his boss, Thomas Jefferson, “we’ll have to train the cannons on them and batter down the walls of the city!” New Orleans was the first “Little Havana.” In Miami they complain that “those damn Cubans!” even after thirty years “Won’t speak English!” In South Louisiana some Cajun families still speak French – and that’s after 230 years. Some, descended from Spanish settlers who arrived at the same time, still speak Spanish. But what alarmed Claiborne was his first Mardi-Gras.
The letter went on. “They are uninformed, indolent, luxurious – in a word, ill-fitted to be useful citizens of a Republic. Under the Spanish government education was discouraged and little respectability attached to science. They have no accomplishments to recommend them but dancing with elegance and ease. The same observation will apply to the young females, with the additional remark, that they are among the most handsome women in America.”
English novelist J.B. Priestly visited New Orleans in 1938 and wrote an article for Harpers magazine titled “New Orleans, First Impressions.” He sounded a lot like Claiborne 130 years before. “Men of our race cannot thrive in such a climate.” he huffed. “Our characteristic virtues cannot flower in this soil. The puritan tradition never meant anything here, and the absence of it still leaves a mark. There is a Latin atmosphere of sunshine, saints and sinners. ”
And good thing too. We might be eating Kidney Pie down here instead of Jambalaya and Gumbo if we’d behaved like Beltwayers back in 1815. I refer to the Battle of New Orleans.
“Oh the wickedness! The idolatry of this place! Great Babylon is come up before me!” That was Rachel Jackson, Andrew’s wife, writing about New Orleans in 1815. Rachel was the Rosie O’Donnel of her day – a fat, noisy harridan, offensive to eye, ear, and immortal soul.
America owes her dearly. We became a continent-girdling nation at her unwitting instigation.
Rather than endure this daily racket and earthquake Andrew would strap on his sabre, mount up, and hit the field with his troops, smiting all enemies of the pugnacious young republic. Cannibal Creeks, Bloodthirsty Seminoles, Redcoats – a man could leap into a fray with these and come away invigorated. Sitting across the table from Rachel was a different matter. Hence, our current borders.
When she wrote about the “wickedness” Rachel’s husband and a gaggle of pirates, smugglers, trappers, cajuns, creole gentlemen, and assorted rascals and boogalees from this “Great Babylon” had just visited a merciless stomping on the Bloody Brits at the Battle of New Orleans, against odds of ten redcoats to one boogalee. And not just any ten redcoats. Led by Wellington’s cousin, Sir Edward Packenham, these Brits had just defeated Bonaparte’s Grand Armee in the Peninsular war. They came swaggering up the Mississippi armed to the teeth and expecting a rout.
A rout they got. The bogalees were used to shooting ducks on the wing, rabbits on the run – suddenly they see the redcoats lined up and marching. They looked at each other wide-eyed.”Can it BE!?”…must be. “Well HOT-DAM!” Blam!-Blam!-Blam! The redcoats hadn’t learned a thing from Mel Gibson.
History records no battle so lopsided in odds or startling in conclusion. Rachel’s New Orleanian hosts were celebrating the fabulous victory with-what else?-a party, a ball actually. Like many northern visitors to Mardi Gras she was aghast at the proceedings…”Oh the Wickedness!”…
Things haven’t changed much. And good thing the Louisiana troops didn’t perform like the Beltway troops. When confronted with a British force much smaller than the one at the Battle of New Orleans, the Beltwayers (who outnumbered the Brits) scrammed for the hills. The British marched unopposed to Washington, DC, and torched the place. President Madison fled. Surrender looked imminent…. Then Bonaparte distracted the Brits again, saving the Republic. It’s an ugly and shameful story of gross cowardice, bumbling, and buffoonery that somehow inspired our national anthem. Go figure.
Actually it figures perfectly. Lets see, that war saw scrappy Southerners perform the most brilliant victory in the annals of American arms – hell in world arms; it saw Beltwayers involved in the most shameful defeat-to this day-in American history. It was a hideous rout. So which one features in the national anthem?…”The rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air”…The Beltway battle, naturally.
Here’s a lesson for anyone who thinks Beltway parochialism is anything new.
Anyway, a little history to help explain why we so rarely fall into lockstep with the feds. And oh, don’t forget, it was Pierre Gustave Tonton (PGT) Beauregard, A New Orleanian, who gave the order to fire on Fort Sumter. And it was south Louisiana political boss, Leander Perez-a man who called George Wallace a softie and a sell-out-who prepared the dungeons in an old Ft. St. Phillip at the mouth of the Mississippi River, for any “Yankee anarchists” who set foot in his parish during the civil-rights struggles.
By “parish” we mean what you people call a county. We still operate under a gumbo of the Napoleonic and Spanish civil codes in Louisiana. No counties and no UCC down here. Significantly Ft. St. Phillip was built and named by Leander’s ancestors for the main political champion of the Spanish Inquisition, King Phillip I. And don’t you Protestants out there get all huffy now. Cromwell and his roundheads killed far more Catholics in three years rampaging through Ireland than the Spanish Inquisition killed heretics in 300 years. And you liberals who hate all religions? Don’t look so smug. Castro killed as many people in his first decade of power; the Bolsheviks in the first week. Look it up in The Black Book of Communism if you don’t believe me
Anyway, in his defiance of the feds, Leander Perez brought even Louisiana Governor Earl Long (Huey’s brother) to the edge of apoplexy. “Come on, Leander!”Uncle Earl bellowed at the perpetually scowling Caudillo.”Whatcha gonna do man?! The feds have the Bomb!”
Now where were we?…Oh yeah, off shore oil drilling gives many people the willies. Even some who should know better. Those pictures of birds and beaches covered in black goo serve to nudge many otherwise sensible people into the ruts of political correctness. Too bad.
Most oil spills occur from tankers, not production platforms or pipelines. Tankers are used to transport foreign oil here. We’d use less foreign oil if restrictions on offshore oil drilling were removed. So there.
But forget cheaper oil and less pollution for a second. Any fishermen or scuba divers out there should plead with their states to open up offshore oil drilling post haste. I’m talking about the fabulous fishing-the explosion of marine life that accompanies the offshore oil platforms.
“Environmentalists” wake up in the middle of the night sweating and whimpering about offshore oil platforms only because they’ve never seen what’s under them. The explosion of marine life around the platforms turned on its head every “expert” opinion of its day. The original plan, mandated by federal environmental “experts” back in the late 40s, was to remove the big, ugly, polluting, environmentally-hazardous contraptions as soon as they stopped producing. “Fine” said the oil companies. About ten years ago some wells played out and the oil companies tried to comply. Their ears are still ringing.
“Don’t you dare touch those rigs!” We screeched…”You leave em right there! Buster!…that’s better. They ain’t goin nowhere! And that’s final!” We were sputtering, spraying spittle.
(That’s exactly what Ronald Reagan would have told Fidel that about Elian-but don’t get me started on that!)
And why did we get so wild-eyed and hysterical about the possible departure of the platforms? Some of us looked like Joe Carollo, other’s like Marysleylis,
Fish life had exploded around these huge artificial reefs, that’s why. We envisaged our favorite fishing spots snatched up in dawn raids and hauled off by jackbooted feds, to the clapping and cheering of the pinko media, all to comply with some idiotic regulations placed by silly bureaucrats long ago. And it wasn’t our imagination either. To wit:
*A study by LSU’s sea grant college shows that 85 % of Louisiana fishing trips involve fishing around these structures.
*Same study shows that there’s fifty times the amount of Marine life around an oil production platform as around the surrounding mud bottoms.
* Louisiana started a “Rigs to Reef” program which pays the oil companies to keep the platforms in the Gulf! Neighboring states like Alabama and Florida stand in line to buy old ones from the oil companies to dump of their coasts to enhance fisheries.
*Japanese concerns are buying them from Shell Oil for aqua-culture projects.
*Commercial fishing vessels from Taiwan and Japan fish Louisiana’s waters.
*Louisiana produces one third of America’s commercial fishing.
* Most of the nation’s spearfishing records were winched aboard around these oil platforms.
*And not one oil spill! Not one!
In 1986 Louisiana started the Rigs To Reef program, a cooperative effort by oil companies, the feds, and the state. This program literally pays the oil companies to keep the rigs in the Gulf. Now they just cut them off at the bottom and topple them over as artificial reefs. 58 have been toppled thus far. Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries officials were recently invited to Australia to help them with a similar program.
Yes, Australia. Yes, the nation with the Great Barrier Reef-the world’s biggest natural reef, the world’s top dive destination-they’re asking help from Louisiana about developing exciting dive sites by using the very structures that epitomize-in greenie eyes-environmental disaster. In Louisiana we know better.
You could cover the Great Barrier Reef with a huge oil spill and radioactive waste, spear every last one of it’s fish, including the angel and butterfly fish, during a mega spearfishing rodeo featuring ten thousand drunkards blasting the fish with power-heads, purse-seine, trammel-net and long-line the area until there was nothing left but three half-starved butterfly fish-do all this, then drop three oil platforms nearby and in three years you’d have more and bigger fish than the total of those photographed by the enviro-yuppies around the Great Barrier Reef.
Put that in your environmentalist pipe and smoke it.
Perhaps I exaggerate a little. But you get my point. A coral reef might be pretty, an “undersea rain forest” in the words of yo-yos like Sting and Jackson Browne. Viewing them might help with your “transcendental meditation” afterwards. But if what you have planned afterwards is a serious bar-b-cue featuring five kegs of Bud, a White-Russian machine for the women, 7,500 cold drinks for the munchkins (all of which will be opened and not one of which will be empty-or even half-empty) and requiring enough grilled fish for this raucous horde of hungry bogalees, cajuns, and red-necks, I’d head for an oil platform.
The panorama under an offshore oil platform staggers the most experienced divers. I’ve seen divers fresh from the Cayman’s Wall surface from under rig too wired on adrenalin to do anything but stutter and wipe spastically at the snot that trails to their chin. I’ve seen an experienced scubababe fresh from Belize climb out from under a platform gasping and shrieking at the sights and sensations, oblivious to the sights and sensation she was providing with her bikini top near her navel.
I’ve seen the less venturesome surface and vow never to rig-dive again. Feeding six-inch parrotfish fifteen feet under a dive boat while surrounded by ten yuppie-dive mates and three dive masters on a Caribbean vacation is one thing. Swimming through schools of 30 pound jacks, against a backdrop right out of Dune, Total Recall, or Aliens is quite another. Flavor it up with the snaggletooth grins of a dozen five-foot barracudas, who surround you-then scatter at the approach of a 15 ft. hammerhead shark, who snatches the 20 lb. red snapper from your dive buddy’s speargun in an explosion of scales and fish scraps.Then three manta rays-each wider than your garage-materialize from the blue haze behind the shark. All this after a descent through 40 ft of chocolate murk (Mississippi River water floating over the heavier salt water) where you couldn’t see two feet while being buffeted by a raging current. After this, most divers are quite ready to devote the rest of their diving lives to feeding the parrotfish and petting the manatees, thank you.
***
(A book titled Helldiving that deals with scuba-diving around these platforms will be out this December. It’s an adventure book. How else to describe a book about guys (and a few gals too) who plunge 200 ft under the Gulf, jab 400 lb. tiger sharks and 300 lb. grouper, wrestle them to the surface-then bar-b-cue them? But it’s not all gore and lechery. It’s also laced with viciously sexist and reactionary politics. We’re talking a literary value-pack for the Southern white male here-and his wife or girlfriend, if she has a sense of humor.)
Credentials: My work is published in Sierra, Scuba Times, Salt Water Sportsman, Bowhunter, Bow Masters, Buckmaster, Tide,Ocean Sports International, and a few others. I write monthly features for Louisiana Sportsman , Louisiana Conservationist, and Game & Fish.
One of my articles titled, “Why We Hunt,” provoked the biggest blizzard of hate-mail in Sierra’s history, or so the editors told me. They even sent me a humongous envelope crammed with the blistering prose for my reading pleasure. Reason for all this outrage? I told the truth.
Credentials
I was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1954, emigrated with my family in 1961 and grew up in New Orleans. I earned a BA in history from the University of New Orleans in 1977 with best-selling author, Dr. Stephen Ambrose (a rabid New Leftist at the time. Don’t let him fool ya nowadays. Pat Buchanan is one of the few who know. ) as a professor, friend, and writing coach. Then a MA from Tulane University in the same discipline the following year. I’ve been married for 20 years (to the same person) and have three kids.
I’m a frequent guest on New Orleans’ radio talk shows where we discuss my unorthodox “Cajun-Cuban” fish and game recipes and timely hunting, fishing, and spearfishing tips-not to mention Elian Gonzalez. I had a ball with the Pinks and Reds last month.
While a student at Tulane, where Ché Guevara T-shirts were commonplace, especially among faculty, I also wore one. But mine showed a different pose from the one you see on Havana billboards, Ivy League campuses, and Hollywood mansions. Mine was a bound and terror-stricken Ché, standing next to a smiling Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA operative who captured him in Bolivia.
Felix looks like me in a hunting picture-except that my deer is dead. All in due time. The mighty Ché got a taste of the same medicine he applied to 8,000 Cubans (The Black Book of Communism) seconds after the shutter snapped. Ché was hell on smiting his enemies alright. But only when these enemies were bound, gagged, and blindfolded. His academic groupies and press agents beat the drum about some “valiant guerrilla fighter” but any “battles” in his “war” against Batista escaped those who lived in Cuba, especially those who supposedly fought against him. As in southeast Asia, the blood really started flowing only when “Peace was given a chance.”
The proof of the pudding was indeed in the eating in Ché’s case. Finally finding himself in bona-fide battles, finally up against men who could shoot back in the Congo and Bolivia (Cuban exiles working for the CIA as it turned out. Who says Ms. Justice is blind?), Che was outfoxed, outfought, routed, and got a taste of his own medicine. Thanks to Felix Rodriguez, justice has never been better served. Though Felix wanted him alive, the Bolivians insisted on wacking him. They envisaged the worldwide media circus had he been taken back to the US alive. They were undoubtedly right.
But the Bolivians didn’t tape Ché’s mouth shut before blasting him, whereas Ché had insisted on gagging his Cuban execution victims as they were tethered to the stake in front of the paredon. Their shouts of “Viva Cristo Rey!” and “Viva Cuba Libre!” as the volleys ripped into them had to be muffled, you see. They were upsetting the other prisoners, in their cells awaiting their turn.
My father was one, listening to the shots every dawn, waiting his turn-which never came. He still can’t figure out why. He lives here in New Orleans now, and bow-hunts deer from climbing stands at the age of 73 (same age as his University of Havana classmate, Fidel). Anyway, my T-shirt made for lively class discussions. I felt like David Irving at a B’nai Brith meeting. I’d have loved one with Ché hanging feet first, like a buck on the meat pole, but alas, you can’t have everything. The class discussions were lively enough, believe me: “Hey, freedom of expression, right? Don’t you Reds and Pinks always squawk about freedom of expression? And you want me to remove this shirt?”
Got to where I almost needed bodyguards for protection against these “champions of freedom.” I know how David Irving feels. Though he’s obviously nuts, the campaign against him makes me chuckle bitterly. I know a little something about the denial of mass-murder. Like I tell my Jewish friends: “Imagine Holocaust denial as the official version of history from academia and the media! Imagine if that was all you heard.” That’s how us Cuban Americans feel.
“Why “President” Castro is no mass murderer. Those are laughable lies, propagated by the millionaires and mafiosos he dispossessed. He has a different view of democracy from us, that’s all.” And so on, and so on. Oh well, maybe I can write about that another time, Mr Rockwell.
July 28, 2000
