Mardi Blas 2000 Debauchery ain't what it used to be. Time was when skin meant something. When National Geographic was the stuff of male adolescent wet dreams. When Howard Hughes elevated Jane Russell to instant international stardom by having her expose a few square inches of frontal cleavage and Brigitte Bardot entered the movie pantheon by means of a few square inches of bared reverse cleavage. In that quaintly antique time, everybody knew that if you wanted to really let go, to see and do it all, or at least get so drunk that the next morning you'd think you'd seen and done it all, what you had to do was go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Your ready and willing correspondent and long-time student of debauchery just returned from Mardi Gras 2000 and is here, sadly, to report that it just ain't so. Not any longer. The French Quarter today? Imagine Disneyland with alcohol, and you've pretty well got it. Yes, the buildings are still there, some quite lovely in their Sherwin-Williams facades. But like an aging prostitute, New Orleans 2000 exists largely on its memories. The slightly dirty streets are filled with dim echoes of sins and excesses long past, filtered through bad jazz badly amplified. The parades? Ah, the parades now are prophylactic. Germ-free. The parades have been made safe for humans. They don't throw doubloons anymore for fear of eye-injury. Only beads, beads, beads. You can only wonder how many cities in China are booming from the production of beads for Mardi Gras. The floats? They too look mass-produced, maybe by some low-rent shop that couldn't get the bid for DisneyWorld. If you want a symbol for Mardi Gras 2000, the happy face is it. I've never been in one place with so many people (maybe a million for the last parade on Fat Tuesday), and so many people were (are you ready) smiling. The last parade is a humdinger, with 70 floats and high school bands from all over (Detroit?!), taking 6 to 8 hours to pass a given point. It winds through much of the city (NOT the French Quarter). leaving a trail of trash smelling faintly of beer and urine (but you never SEE anyone pissing; one of the little mysteries of Mardi Gras). A family affair. Everyone brings a ladder and sets the children on top. And we all yell and wave our arms, praying that the gods of plastic passing just a few feet away will deign to shower us with more beads, please. It's all very, um, pleasant. A million smiling people line St. Charles (one of the great residential streets of the world, but who's looking at the architecture), happy children everywhere, explosions of pink azaleas in every yard. Costumes among onlookers are rare. A young monk in brown cowl displays a small sign: "Will Bless for Beads." Smile. A ghostly Socrates and several companions in white gowns with dozens of empty whisky bottles roped around their waists carry a placard: "Departed Spirits." Smile. A "Brown Meanie" appears (remember the Blue Meanies in Yellow Submarine?): huge torso on spindly, jodhpured legs, shiny black riding boots, big revolver, no less than four telecommunications gadgets on his belt... oops, closer inspection reveals it's no costume; he's a Lousiana highway patrolman. Smile. By late afternoon the parade is over, and the non-familied persons adjourn to the French Quarter. We're primed, ready for the Climax, so to speak, ready for a hit of Real Debauchery, some down-home, Southern-style sin, a few dirty deeds worth repenting during the whole of Lent which starts tomorrow. Well. If New Orleans has become a kind of large, dirty Disneyland with alcohol, the French Quarter is its Food Court. The Vieux Carré on the last night of Mardi Gras has about as much edge to it as a Gillette razor after thirty shaves. Oh sure, there's drinking, a bit of flashing. Flashing? How far down have we gone? This far: it is immediately obvious that more than one of the young women who are a bit too compliant in responding to suggestions that they lift or drop their tops have in fact come well-prepared for this bit of performance non-art. Their breasts have that certain glow and smoothness, their nipples that certain too perfect pink that comes only from your better cosmetics. And as the hour approaches midnight, the occasional pot-bellied, underendowed male flashers would have been better advised to have stayed in their pickups. One young woman, after repeated flashes, reveals that bystanders who may wish to view her charms at greater leisure can visit her web site. She's even handing out business cards. This goes on till midnight, when the police traditionally move in to gently clear the streets so the garbage crews can work all night to get the city back to its slightly less-dirty image, ready for the next pack of tourists tomorrow. Oh sure, there are hints still of the "real" New Orleans. Bars where the simulations of the whole range of sex occasionally veer over the line and stop being simulations. Restaurants where gourmet geniuses still strive nightly for palate orgasm. But mostly what you've got is Mardi Gras Lite, Mardi Gras Plastic, Mardi Gras Blas. <> So what happened. Where did sin go? Old-fashioned Sin (meaning sex of course) is obviously still alive and well in the churches of Fundamentalist America. It's still being well-advertised any hour of the day on television. But what of real sin? What I read from my immersion in Mardi Blas is that maybe we're at an intermediate stage, growing out of our adolescent fixation on sex, beginning to realize that sexual misbehavior is not the problem, at least not the Big Problem, the real Bugbear all those satellite channels are stilling claiming it is. Mardi Gras now is like porn movies. We've done it or seen it done enough times that it's boring. Blah, indeed. Debauchery requires a certain socially accepted code of behavior, which can occasionally be broken, with delight. The old forbidden fruit syndrome. With wall-to-wall sex on the satellite, in the video stores, on the Internet, porn, unless you're really horny, is just plain boring. The zipless fuck has gone mass-market. The only real sin I saw at Mardi Gras 2000 was in the parking lots of New Orleans. No, not acres of people copulating in public. What there was was acres and acres and acres of SUV's, Winnebagos, Airstreams, a fleet of expensive, gas-guzzling, polluting wheels to transport a million would-be sinners to the city of their lascivious dreams. Which fleet I took to be the outward and visible sign of the unrestrained greed necessary for a million people to get enough excess money to be able to come south looking for a brief, titillating hit of Real Sin, unaware of the fact that when it came to sin, they were riding in it. Welcome to New Orleans, the City That Sin Forgot. END
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