FROM NEW ORLEANS:

First, you’ll notice that this post was written in New Orleans.  (Be jealous!)  I’ve been attending an advisory committee of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), held at the new VA Hospital on Canal Street.

(House in the Faubourg Marigny, from Wikicommons.  See below for more.)

What we covered isn’t necessarily of interest to Windrose readers, but it’s worth pointing out that the VA is working hard to clear up the mess of its 2014 scandals, and while certain regional offices of the VA are doing well — San Diego, for instance, and now New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina — others are decidedly not.  The United States is a country where respect for veterans has solidified into a cult, a cultus in the Roman sense, equal parts a civic and religious devotion.  Everyone from Congressmen to stadium announcers to radio DJs invoke the veterans and, especially, the gratitude Americans owe them. It’s not a bad thing, even if it is a bit puzzling to people from other countries.  (It can sound a bit Greek colonel-y to European ears.)  But it makes some of the points discussed in this week’s committee meeting even more uncomfortable.  Twenty American veterans take their own life every day, for instance.  Only about six of them will have been previously identified as at-risk by the VA.  The past three Secretaries of the VA have made zero veteran suicides a goal for the Department, but for all the new facilities and telehealth capacity in the works, that figure doesn’t seem to be going down.

No one should be sent to war and then abandoned as soon as they’re home again.  The VA senior staff would be the first to agree with that.  So would just about every American, and sincerely.  And yet the contradiction between the constant invocation of “our veterans,” and the reports we heard this week about veteran health and suicide, is sharp, and ugly.

UK ELECTION

The Independent ran a story this week on a UKIP candidate in Norfolk, who made some, er, interesting claims about her party and race.

Catherine Blaiklock , running in Great Yarmouth, decided to prove once and for all that her party was not racist.  She actually brought a photo of her black British-Jamaican husband to a debate and held it up:

(Photo by George Ryan for the Great Yarmouth Mercury)

Ms. Blaiklock later told Vice, “I sleep with someone who is black, who is, you know, of Jamaican origin!  So I am 100 percent not racist.”

Cue the Get Out trailer:

Ms. Blaiklock was also proud to point out the UKIP is the only party in England that screens its candidates, to keep out supporters of the racist British National Party (BNP).  Of course UKIP does.  UKIP is the only party that needs to.  And even then, BNP will lay always behind UKIP like a nasty shadow.  Like Jobbik lays behind Fidesz, in Hungary, and like American racist Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute behind Steve Bannon and the Breitbart News crowd.

Ms. Blaiklock, for the record, want to “Make Yarmouth Great Again.”

IN WASHINGTON, THE RATS JUMP OFF THE SHIP

The big stories out of Washington right now are about the chaos — the rumors, Trump’s pressure on Comey, the secrets exchanged in the Oval Office, the spies of the Kremlin.  What’s just as interesting, though, are the predictable parts of the story.

Like Trump backing down from his bold promise to break up the banks.  For all that talk on the campaign trail about the nefarious power of Goldman Sachs behind Hillary Clinton, Trump never had any personal animus toward financialized capitalism.  He’s no Red Tory and he’s no more a working class champion than his friends across the water, Mr. Farage and Madame Le Pen.  He’s a New York business mogul.  Full stop.

Another prediction coming true: now that Trump’s ship is sinking, all the rats are jumping off.  Ann Coulter, according to Fox Insider, is “ready to jump ship.”  There you go.  Now Jason Chaffetz is quitting.  Probably just in time.  He won’t be the last Republican to run for shelter, and the sight of Ryan and McConnell on national television insisting that they had always opposed the President will, sadly, not surprise anyone.

I don’t like Jason Chaffetz.  But I am grateful to him: he proved that an alliance between the green left and rural voters is possible, not just in the Global South or European countries like France but in the United States.

Chaffetz was all intent on selling off Federal land, but a coalition of rural hunters, fishermen, outdoor enthusiasts, together with urban environmentalists and conservationists, forced him to call it off.  The Windrose stands firmly in favor of continuing that alliance into the future: not just on issues of public land and national parks, but of water and air quality, further subsidies for small to medium scale agriculture, the encouragement of responsible hunting, rewilding and the protection of endangered species, and increased investment in rural communities, to include universal access to WiFi.

EN MARCHE!

The Windrose notes with approval French President Macron’s broad, cross-party picks for his Cabinet.  We especially welcome the fact that half the Cabinet are women, and that the Environment Minister is Nicolas Hulot, the former Green Party candidate and TV host.

(Hulot, from Wikicommons.)

Hulot’s background as a nuclear lobbyist is troubling, but not too troubling, and it’s as much of a relief to see a Green on Marcon’s Cabinet as it to see so few former Hollande stalwarts.  Marine Le Pen, after all, had insisted that a Macron presidency would be Hollande Part Two.

Defense Minister Le Drian is also reassuring, despite the neocolonial, paternalistic overtones of his work in Mali.  A Socialist Hollande holdover, he is staunchly pro-NATO at a time when the Atlantic Treaty is retreating east, back to Europe.  His expertise will be critical in maintaining European security.

The Cabinet as a whole has a Gaullist feel to it this time around, much more than it did under Hollande.  And that is decidedly a good thing.

NEW ORLEANS

As promised.

The Faubourg Marigny is still beautiful and crazy, the Spotted Cat is still packed to the windows and everything still smells like beer and pee and mildew and honeysuckles.  It’s a bit like the neighborhoods in my home town that I miss, only crazier.  But there’s something troubling afoot: almost everyone there was young and white.

An artist I met on Frenchman Street, also young and white, directed me to St. Cloud for a drink.  I went.  I loved it.  It was the kind of place I like: brick walls unpainted, dogs sleeping on sidewalks, people relaxed and happy to shoot the breeze.  But it was just as young and white: maybe 70 percent white to 30 percent black is my guess.  New Orleans is 60 percent black, according to the 2010 census.  I’m young and white, and this bothers the hell out of me.

The Windrose is based out of Washington, DC, and everyone in DC is familiar with the G-word: gentrification.  It’s a nightmare.  In less than five years there will be a Whole Foods in Marigny, and everything will be over.  At that time the people of New Orleans — the real people, the ordinary people, the decent people — must take back control.  It used to be manageable; it’s not anymore.  They must put a stop to this out of control immigration.  There must be much stricter border controls — maybe a wall — and better vetting, to make sure that the people coming into New Orleans don’t bring their foreign, un-New Orleanian values with them, that they respect the local culture.  New Orleans for the New Orleanians.