Voodoo Doctors for Ron Paul (New Orleans Part 1)

We spent about two or three days in New Orleans and while there are too many stories for one post I'm not going to break them up exactly according to day, that being said it is going to follow the general outline of my time there with just a few events moved around for the sake of brevity and clarity. The first morning there we left our hotel which was nicely located just about three blocks from the French Quarter and walked down into the city to get some breakfast. After looking around for a while we just picked on place essentially at random and went to get something to eat. Despite how hot it was out it wasn't so bad in the shade, and I was outvoted, so we sat outside in a courtyard area that had the look of being unchanged for the past hundred years. The food was good, and we ordered entirely too much of it, Harry and Mike each got a sandwich so big that finishing half of it was difficult, but the most remarkable thing was our waiter who had such the accent and mannerisms of the old South that it felt like we had become unstuck in time. Breakfast being at about noon we also stopped and tried some of the local beers which were pretty good. After breakfast we just sort of wandered around the historic streets of the French Quarter.

The buildings in all of the French Quarter were beautiful old stone and brick buildings with balconies on every level and with plants and people leisurely sitting taking in the day. I've heard the criticism that New Orleans has become so focused on tourists that what you see there today is more an image of what used to be there than the actual culture, but it did just seem like everyone was quietly going about there lives and while there was definitly a lot of stuff catering to tourists the city wasn't exactly overrun. I think some of that had to do with the fact that we were there during a lower season, as the heat and hurricanes that come in the summer tend to make spring and winter bigger tourist seasons. We walked around a lot, which is always a good way to see any city. We passed a number of parks and came down near the river to what was essentially the heart of the city. Harry wanted to look up some local artist that his parents and some of his Aunts and Uncles knew. He gave him a call and we went looking for him finding him sitting outside near one of the parks with a bunch of his art put up for display and sale. The art itself was really colorful stuff mostly being impressionist type works about jazz. In a number of the paintings that frames themselves were painted as well as if the color had just spilled out off the canvas.

One of Harry's relatives had offered to put some money toward a painting as a housewarming gift for his new condo so Harry talked to the guy for a while and eventually picked out some paintings that he really liked. He had been looking at one of the larger ones but Harry eventually decided to go with a series of three smaller ones that made there own little jazz band, with a pianist in one, a saxophone player in another, and a drummer and singer in the third. The artist was an interesting guy to he had lived in New Orleans forever and some of his work was in local galleries. He was older now so I think he mostly just took it easy sitting out by a park with some of his stuff. After Harry paid him we took the paintings over to a post office to get a bunch of bubble wrap and boxes to put them in. After using what seemed like ten pounds of bubble wrap we put them in a box. Harry decided not to mail them though since we had driven and they would be safe wrapped up in the trunk of the car. While we were doing all this though it had started to pour outside so we were sort of stuck looking for a taxi. After not being able to find one for a while we just eventually put some plastic bags over the top of the box and carried it back to the hotel in the rain.

After spending a little time in the hotel the rain let up. Mike was taking a nap so me and Harry just went out to walk around New Orleans a little more. We walked over toward something one of the guide maps just described as a Voodoo Museum. On our way there we walked down the famous Bourbon street which had literally nothing besides strip clubs and bars. Harry's dad had once called Bourbon street the "Disneyland of Sex," and I think that's pretty accurate. Whatever once had been there the whole place now was just a monument to tourism, overpriced beer, and strippers. What's more it lacked the honest sleaziness of some of the more unseemly parts of cities like Bangkok as it had all been done up in neon to give it a more friendly atmosphere for tourists. I did stop and take a picture holding a sign which simply read "Huge Ass Beers to Go" as New Orleans doesn't have any open container laws so people can get there alcoholic beverage of choice and carry it around with them as long as they don't have glass. There were a lot of places actually that sold what looked like basically alcoholic Slurpees.

When I had head about a Voodoo Museum I imagined something formal with a more anthropological take on Voodoo, what I got was a shrine for the true believers. The guy at the front desk, who I believe was the only one working that day at the little place, looked about as little like a Voodoo Doctor as you could imagine. He was a middle age, maybe late 40's early 50's, overweight white guy sitting behind this desk wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. We had some time to wait there as we called Mike and told him we had found the place and it took him a while to make his way down to where we were. As we were waiting we started to talk to the guy as we were the only people in the whole place. This guy may have looked like a joke but he took his Voodoo about as seriously as anyone I've ever meet took anything. He talked at first in a bit of a whisper so we had to lean in a bit to hear what he was actually saying. I asked him some questions about Voodoo and he told us a bit of his life story, how his family had been at one point in the past big plantation owners in Louisiana and Virginia and that people in his family had started to learn Voodoo from there black servants. He told us that he had been to Africa at one point to do some Voodoo initiation ritual.

If this just sounds like the guy was having us on, or essentially conning us, I can't prove that anything he was saying was true but it was just something about the earnestness with which he talked about it or the way he despised people who made light of Voodoo that made him sound extremely credible. And while he was pretty dressed down at the time there was a quite creepy picture of him wearing a robe and holding a snake. Besides telling us about Voodoo he loved to name drop and talk about the museum. I think we heard about every celebrity who ever came in there and exactly how respectful, or not, they were to Voodoo. He described Brad Pitt as something of an air head, and Angelina Jolie as like a dominatrix. I don't remember exactly how we started talking about politics, I think he asked us what we did and Harry mentioned he worked for a Senator, but the political conversation was certainly interesting. I was going on with something about single payer health care, which he didn't seem to be very interested in, when out of no where he just turns to me and goes, "Are you gay?" For a second I was just confused wondering if he was joking or what exactly brought on this question. I just turned back to him and said no and he sort of continued on. Harry joked later that I must have been promoting the homosexual agenda and Mike wondered if it was a pick up line.

After talking about politics for a while he said that the only candidate he really liked was Ron Paul. For those of you who don't know who Dr. Congressmen Ron Paul is he's a former OB/GYN from Texas and long serving member of congress who ran for the Republic nomination on a campaign that basically defines the term grass-roots. Paul basically didn't do any of his fund raising or spending, instead having people basically raise there own money and decide how to spend it. I don't think anyone was more suppressed than Paul when his little campaign took off finishing third and even once I believe second in a large number of primaries. Paul who is sometimes known as Doctor No for basically voting against everything in Congress ran on a platform of basically shrinking the federal government as much as possible and attracted support from everyone from hippies to CEOs. At one point his supporters even raised enough money to have a blimp advertise his candidacy. Hearing that the white New Orleans Voodoo Doctor is a big Ron Paul booster is just about a perfect as you can get. The Voodoo Museum itself wasn't that big or interesting but I considered coming back for a Voodoo reading but could just never really get my head into it enough.