This is an Essay About Mississippi, American Decline, and Battlestar Galactica

This is an essay about Mississippi, American decline, and Battlestar Galactica, in some order, with perhaps something about being a Millennial mixed in, and also the usual stuff about New Orleans and/or New York that you can safely guess you’ll find in almost anything I write.

I think the Mississippi stuff is here because right now I’m working through some personal issues involving my relationship with Mississippi, which has technically now been my state of residence for about half my life. (Actually, if we break it down mathematically, it looks like this:

• Residence in Louisiana: 1997-1985=12
• Residence in Mississippi: 2009-1997=12
• Residence in New York: 2011-2009=2
• Residence in Mississippi: ?-2011=N/A

This adds up to 26, which is the same number of years as my age, so it is accurate.)

Please note my specific use of the term “state of residence” rather than “home” since I’ve never really thought of Mississippi as “Home,” even when I was a curmudgeonly fourteen year-old who listened to conservative talk radio in my bedroom. Today, for me, the word “home” has three different definitions: first, the regular small-h home, which is the place where my family lives, a house in a small city in South Mississippi, just barely on the Mississippi side of the Louisiana/Mississippi border, called Picayune; second, the really small-h home, which refers to my current apartment on the edge of Jackson, Mississippi (before using the word in this way I usually have to swallow, as if I’m choking on it a little before I can get it out. This has less to do with the fact that I’m in Jackson and more to do with the fact that I’m simply not in either of the other two places about which I’m talking — I also used this version of “home” when referring to my apartments in New York); third, the large-H “Home,” used by people from New Orleans who aren’t currently in New Orleans to refer to New Orleans.

Accordingly, I’ve always felt like both a Southerner in the Mississippian sense of the term, and absolutely not one of those, since as a person who thinks of New Orleans as Home I am looked on by the Southerners as an outsider despite, or even partially because of, my twelve-year-long Mississippi curriculum vitae. The CV itself is basically a happy one, is the thing — Mississippi and I are historically on good terms. There are pretty things and there is much fascinating history, a wonderful university in a nice town called Hattiesburg, and a coastline that is by turns charming and glitzy. I am a foreigner from a place generally not loved by Mississippians, yes, but me and the state, with all its warts and and all its beauty marks, have generally maintained a stable, supportive relationship based on, if not love, at least mutual affection and respect. Lately, that’s changed. Lately, it’s not affection and respect: it’s more radical feelings like love and hate, and more and more I’m drifting over to hate.

Place is my obsession. One of my best friends sent me a text recently: “I’ve never known another person more obsessed with their scenery than you.” True, probably.

A writer named Lafcadio Hearn wrote, in 1877, of New Orleans that “Times are not good here…But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.” True, definitely. The issue with New Orleanians is, even when we make what the world tells us is the right choice, and we go somewhere else for the sake of career opportunity, we become sad — not just because we aren’t taking advantage of the many good things about our city but also because we feel guilt that we chose the thrifty economic logic of Protestant America over burning eros, and also over the rare opportunity to live in a place where just living makes you part of a grand story of death and renewal still being written after three hundred years.

Guilt makes you do strange things, like be selfish and lash out. Once I invariably defended Mississippi from its national detractors. “You’re from Mississippi?” someone asked me a long time ago. “Aren’t people, like, racist there?” And I told him something like, “I don’t think it’s different from anywhere else with all that stuff.”

Except it really is. And I’ve been latching on, and lashing out.

TV series don’t normally grab me from the pilot, because TV pilots often seem overproduced to the point of being sanitized, and so are not necessarily indicative of the series to follow; and also when it comes to television I’m incredibly hard to please. There are three exceptions, and they are, in chronological order: Lost, Firefly, and Mad Men. The first exception is unfortunate because the result was I wasted two years of my life delving into a world I thought was deep and carefully structured and worthy of geeking over when it was in fact just bullshit flung against a wall randomly to manipulate the nerdy part of your brain that likes to feel smart. In the case of Firefly I ordered the full series while in college on a whim and watched the pilot and loved it and watched “The Train Job” and saw Mal kick that Russian dude through the engine, and I have been a Browncoat ever since. And Mad Men: I like to drink bourbon and wear suits and skinny ties to the office, where I work in advertising, even though the office dress code is pretty casual.

Battlestar Galactica is not an exception, because the pilot is way too long and doesn’t need to be like a two hour movie, and because the pacing of the entire first season is like that, overlong and distracted from the primary virtue of the series exactly when it should be most focused on it. (Things get better in season two, to the point that sometimes when I go back to my apartment during lunch hour I grab leftovers and watch an episode just so I can see what happens next. I think the kickstart that finally gets things moving is when they shoot Edward James Olmos, because after that everything gets more awesome, including Edward James Olmos.) This, of course, is the idea of separation from civilization, the feeling of isolation, the way that home has been destroyed and the survivors must go on, nomadic refugees in this sort of cosmic Grapes of Wrath where the Great Depression is replaced by a Cylon-nuked home world. One of the biggest mistakes the series makes is to have all that “Meanwhile on Cylon-occupied Caprica” nonsense during the first season. Returning to Caprica shouldn’t be an option, at least not so early in the series, because the sense of melancholy awe generated by the way the fleet moves through open space with only a legend to guide it, the knowledge that there is absolutely nothing to fight for except sheer survival, that’s what drives the dramatic tension. That’s what most effectively draws us in.

Decline is an attraction. In the case of Galactica it’s quite a sudden decline (though from the bits of information I have on the short-lived series Caprica, the human civilization of the BSG universe had been in decline since long before the Cylons went Dr. Strangelove on everybody), but it’s decline nonetheless. Galactica is unique among television science fiction in that it actively analyzes the minutiae of decline; what happens when, for example, rather than care about the currency of a dead state, people simply resort to bartering on the black market for everyday goods, food, medicine; what happens when people realize how shallow the veneer of political authority is; and so on. A couple months ago on NPR there was a story about Greeks who, faced with the ineffectiveness of their government and the continued collapse of their economy and the general sense that their entire nation is rapidly coming apart, simply stopped participating in the routines of everyday civilization. They rolled through unattended toll gates, quit coming to work, didn’t bother with school. Because what’s the point when the whole system has come apart? America hasn’t fallen that far yet. We’re going for a slower but still unnecessarily extreme decline, pumping resources that could have gone into massive infrastructure improvements and technology upgrades into our aristocracy instead, sacrificing our actual standing in the world so that we can live up to rhetorical ideologies that let us live pleasant patriotic dreams about global dominance.

A professor of mine in New York once said of the Italians: “Those people have decline down better than anyone.” Meaning: they’d dominated the world, filled it with art and philosophy and religion, rolled their armies across continents, but now they just wanted to ride trains and see pretty things and drink some wine and relax and let come what may. America’s not falling this way: we, instead, grasp at each rung of the ladder above us as we continually slide down to the one below, pretending that we’re still at the top. All the while we cling to the very ideas that started us on our fall.

It may be insanity to keep doing the same thing while expecting different results, but it’s something far scarier to keep doing the same thing while earnestly believing that someone else has been in control all along, doing something completely different. Evidence of American decline exists in the fact that an entire mainstream party believes it better to let our roads rot and our bridges collapse and our national rail system remain the punch line to an international joke than spend a single dime if the dime is raised from a half-percent of additional taxation on the capital gains-driven incomes of our aristocracy.

In America, we don’t need Cylons. We’ve got Americans.

The same kind of thinking that enables an entire American political party to believe their opponents have been destroying the country, even though its own policies have enjoyed three decades of dominance, is at the heart of the things that have driven me from defender of the South to tip-toer along the narrow demarcation between loving and hating Mississippi. Mainly, I have lately been running into example after example of willful blinding ignorance on the issue of race, and exposure to said has resulted in my reexamination of a plethora of incidents and comments I’ve observed over the course of the twelve years I’ve called this place little-h home. When you hear completely decent, absolutely normal, highly respected people in decent, normal, respected families talk about how interracial marriage is just wrong, and then hear during the course of going about an average day about how such and such a place has so many whites and blacks getting together and even getting married, you start to realize just how mainstream such views are. It’d be one thing if you had to journey into the backwoods or spend time in the trailer parks and otherwise deal with the so-called “white trash” to hear such things, but that’s not been my experience. A poll came out not too long ago that found something like forty percent of  Mississippi Republicans believe interracial marriage was wrong, and generally the poll received from the Mississippi Republican audience nothing but appalled reactions and claims of liberal bias and race-baiting: the usual attempts of the party of personal responsibility to avoid responsibility for its own errors. But is that number really so hard to believe when highly-placed local members of county political clubs express this kind of thinking openly, no reservations, during dinner conversation, over a beer on the back porch, while having a business lunch out in public, absolutely without fear or sham? No. Then what’s going on?

I read newspaper stories about the white kids who drove into Jackson and came upon a black man and brutally murdered him with their fists and legs and then their truck, and then I read newspaper stories in which their fellow kids, back at their high school, are interviewed, and say things like: There isn’t a problem with racism here, we have plenty of “colored people,” this is one of the best places to live in America. And they absolutely believe this to be true.

Every year of the twelve I’ve lived in Mississippi I’ve heard someone, sometimes a liberal, usually a conservative, explain that there is racism everywhere, and it’s everywhere in equal measure, it’s just they hide it in better in places like New York, whereas in Mississippi you know who the racists are. But living in other places, I have learned that this is bullshit. There is racism everywhere, but there seems to be more in Mississippi not because of some illusion but because there actually is way more racism in Mississippi.

There are two reasons American conservatives are so offended by charges of racism from American liberals. The first: American conservatives who are well-intentioned, completely kind, absolutely good people who don’t even think of race, take offense at being accused of racism because they aren’t racists; the second: American conservatives who don’t allow themselves to understand that talking about “the colored people” is fucking racist, that thinking interracial marriage is wrong is fucking racist, and so either equate rightful charges of racism with Jim Crow violence alone, or are simply, deep in their subconscious, feeling a wicked guilt that is very unlike the melancholy pain of the expatriot New Orleanian. Whatever: the point is you don’t hear the n-word dropped in public by well-respected, county-level, politically-notable conservatives in New York, but you sure as fuck hear it from same in Mississippi, and I know because for twelve years I’ve heard it without ever once needing to go look for it. Any claim that this is untrue is caused either by careful sheltering or culpaple ignorance.

What is the disease that enables the tax-cutting supply sider to believe the socialists are ruining America when our tax burden is at a historic low following thirty years of supply side economics? How is it we can spend thirty years deregulating our financial systems and cutting taxes, enabling the financial systems to combust, reducing the economy to ash while simultaneously creating massive deficits, only to see our citizens form tea parties based on, effectively, regardless of the stated reasons for their initial formation, opposition to government regulation and taxation?

Why doesn’t anything make any fucking sense?

I’m repeating myself here, but I’m using different words, and that makes it okay: What is most fascinating about Battlestar Galactica is that the human race is set adrift by disaster, with its home burned behind it. The Katrina experience for New Orleanians was something like this, because the overwhelming majority of people in the metro area evacuated before the storm and went away and lived to see the city destroyed behind them, setting them off on multi-month, sometimes multi-year, sometimes indefinite journeys across the foreign arena of America. (Once, shortly after we moved to Mississippi from Gentilly, in New Orleans, my mom took us all out to Picayune’s annual Christmas Parade, which is a parade during Christmas based on the New Orleans Mardi Gras model. Across South Mississippi there are multitudinous examples of this kind of cultural exchange: there are Mississippi po-boy places and Mississippi sno-ball stands and Mississippi Mardi Gras parades. In most cases these exchanges reflect the shared cultural history of the parts of Mississippi from Hattiesburg on south, especially Mississippi’s rather wonderful Gulf Coast, which share a French colonial ancestry with Southeastern Louisiana; in other cases, the Mississippians just don’t want to go to Louisiana because they don’t like people from Louisiana. Anyway: new friends from Mississippi came to the parade with us, or we went with them, and my mom did the normal New Orleans thing and packed an ice chest to keep with us on the parade route. She packed food and she packed beer. Before the parade she opened the ice chest and pulled out a beer and offered some to a Mississippi friend. He, calmly but hilariously, freaked: You can’t have that out here! By drinking out in public like that we were risking arrest, or whatever, and this was something that had not even been on the periphery of my mom’s considerations. Also, during high school I worked as a cashier at one of the two local Winn-Dixie supermarkets. One weekend a harried man with a white t-shirt and a heavy Yat accent bolted into the store and, while hurrying past me, looked my way and asked, “Hey, man, where’s yall’s liquor section?” to which I, of course, shook my head and told him, “We don’t have one, man.” He skidded to a stop with a sneakers-on-basketball-court squeak, and, confused, asked me how come. I said, “Dry county.” I don’t think he knew what that meant, which is fair, because until we moved to Pearl River County I don’t think we did, either.)

If leaving by choice causes guilt, then leaving because there may soon not be a city anymore causes a kind of trauma unshared by any other human beings in the Western World: San Franciscans might see their city wrecked by an earthquake, but it seems only New Orleans inspires active national discourse about how it’d be wrong to even rebuild and why are those people asking for help, they live below sea level, the lazy stupid fools. New Orleanians are faced with the constant threat of extinction not because of Mother Nature, but because at some point America will just decide we’re not worth it.

After all, it wasn’t an asteroid storm or supernova that wiped out the Twelve Colonies in Battlestar Galactica; that disaster was actively and malevolently planned by intelligent beings. Similarly, New Orleans wasn’t nearly destroyed by a hurricane, but rather because, as America declines and devotes its national resources in ever-greater percentages to the protection of its aristocracy, it simultaneously chooses to not invest same in costly but, you’d think, worthwhile projects like adequate flood protection, or coastal wetland restoration.

These are the kinds of choices declining powers make. Is it any wonder that, finally, my generation is reacting?

On Saturdays this Fall I’ve visited the campus of my alma mater, The University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg. It’s a beautiful campus and an incredibly underrated school, the kind of school with many individually respected parts that, for any of a number of reasons, never receives the collective notoriety that it deserves. It’s my first year back for those famous and/or infamous Southern college football weekends since returning from New York, and each week I meet friends and family and drink and eat and walk across green spaces and through tree groves thick with crowds, and reconnect with people I haven’t seen in years. I go to the games and sit high in the Rock, our football stadium, and watch our team have one of its better seasons in recent memory.

As the sun begins to set, the sky takes on this orange and blue and pink color scheme, with smears of purple clouds drifting behind the concrete of the stadium and the sillouettes of the Administration Building’s Capitol-like dome and the blocky form of the Science Tower. Looking across this vista during a break in the on-field action, you see that everything here, in Mississippi, is happening in a forest. Hattiesburg is a city of fifty thousand, with downtown dive bars and restaurants, and a campus many times the size of the one I attended for graduate school, with eighteen thousand students living on it and around it in houses and large apartment complexes. But all of it, the little downtown memorial park into which we’d wander in the late night hours when we needed a dose of beauty, the old courtyard of our old favorite music venue, wedged between crumbling brick buildings, the banks, the old homes, the train station, the coffee shop across from campus with the hipsters smoking out front, even the strip malls you get on the I-59 side of Hardy Street, it’s all surrounded by masses of towering dark green pines. Seeing this, you start to realize Mississippi is a wilderness; seeing this, you realize Mississippi can be a breathtakingly beautiful wilderness, and maybe it’s just that even as the agents of America’s decline do their work, Mississippi hasn’t completed its own development. It’s still being formed into what it might someday become, and so maybe it’s worth fighting for, against the many of its own unknowingly ensuring its near third world status. New Orleans is a living entity that exists in cycles of disaster and renewal that are all interconnected by a shared cultural experience, food and music and so much more that people can’t understand unless they’ve felt the way the city can get into your blood and bones. But Mississippi lives a linear, novelistic story. It is a long, spiraling, Faulkneresque prose narrative. Like the work of Faulkner, I love it and I hate it.

And I have no answers here, not even about Battlestar Galactica, because I’ve just started season three, and things look promising but the writers do this annoying thing where Edward James Olmos’s son is this kind of plot wheel that they spin every other episode and off he goes doing something irrational that makes no sense given the character he’s been up to that point. From idealistic, rebellious crusader for maintaing democracy to depressed private detective in a span of two episodes, nothing he does surprises me. I call him Little Adama. None of this is relevant.

I’m finishing this while drinking espresso in a Jackson, Mississippi place called Cups, which has great coffee. But I’m not at the Cups down the road in Fondren; rather I’m at the one in a decorated strip mall sort of place with wrought iron balconies and electric gaslights and red brick, designed to look like it was pulled from a block of Decatur Street, really, and so it’s called “The Quarter,” and the signs on Lakeland Drive are decorated with bright colors and the shadows of New Orleans second line brass bands.

Behind me and to my left, on the wall, inside the local Jackson place consistently and justifiably called the best coffee shop in this city, there is a gorgeous black and white image of St Louis Cathedral.