In Regards to the Hospitality Zone

Hey there. 

My Name is Jacob Germain, I’m a resident of the Seventh Ward in an area that is called the “St. Bernard Crescent” by realtors and landlords who want to distance it from being in the seventh ward.

My apartment is inside the original hospitality zone as it was introduced, though not much hospitality happens here and I’ve since been written out of the bill. I live in one of those parts of town that we warn tourists away from because presumably the people of my neighborhood are going to rob and shoot them. My immediate neighborhood used to be up and coming, but this and that happened and it ended up falling to the wayside. The streets are busted, there’s a blown out former adult education center down the street, every other lot is abandoned or blighted. 

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about this bill and why two thirds of the revenue from this bill is NOT going towards infrastructure improvements. I understand some representatives are here from the CVB, purportedly to support hospitality in general and the wonder and glory that is a service economy. What they’re not here to talk about is the fact that they stand to make an additional 5 million in taxpayer dollars every year if this bill passes. They’re not interested in fixing the broken streets, the busted sidewalks, the damaged infrastructure of any part of this city, let alone the French quarter. They’re here to line their pockets with public money.

I’ll be frank with you: I’m already aware that this legislature is the result of a number of backroom deals. Just look at where the money is going. It’s not cleverly hidden or obscured, but laid bare in the law. This is Louisiana politics as usual; the kind of political profiteering that makes it possible for some people to be rich in a city of minimum wage service jobs and rampant unemployment.

You should rethink this legislation. You should reconsider what its purpose is and why you’re passing it. You took an oath to serve the people of Louisiana; people like me and my fellow hospitality zone residents. You did not take an oath to serve the highest bidder.

Thank you for your time. 

[editor's note: I wrote this as public comment for the committee hearing on the Hospitality Zone bill. the bill was amended at the hearing to feature a newer 50/50 split between infrastructure and marketing, with 20 percent going to the CVB, who hired around 50 people to wear red shirts with the phrase "tourism matters" and stand around during the hearing. The bill is vastly improved, but they still stand to make $2 million a year from taxpayers. Not mentioned here is the Convention Center holding $30 million in infrastructure improvements for ransom unless this bill passes. It's a whole lotta fucked, folks.]

Problematize

                People should have a reasonably equal chance at succeeding in life, or maybe people should be able to do what they want to do. Or maybe people should be able to live life according to their principles without undue hardship. People should be free, except when that freedom infringes on other people’s freedom, except when their concept of free destroys the existing systems of society. There are all kinds of ways to construct a moral framework without using a traditional religion, but none of them are sufficiently perfect. No moral framework is ever perfect. Everything needs qualification.

                Let me cut to the chase: there’s no reason to construct moral frameworks. Reject them when people try to sell them to you, no matter what their intention is. Moral frameworks only create division and foster “us vs. them” thinking. Do not reject the people, do not shame those who do build frameworks, but recognize where that leads. Reject no one.

                The irony here, of course, is that I’m describing a moral framework. I’ve delineated what is good and what is bad. “Moral frameworks” are something to reject, people are something to embrace. An enlightened master in my framework is a person who accepts people and rejects their moral frameworks. So really it doesn’t mean anything. I can’t tell you how to be happy; you’re going to have to figure that one out, yeah? Live how you want. Don’t hate other people, not cause it’s “bad” or whatever, but it won’t make you happy. New moral framework here: being happy is good, being sad is not. Sad people are failing to live up to moral standards, happy people are succeeding.

                Not going to work either, happiness isn’t exactly a binary proposition. Sometimes you’re clinically incapable of being happy, sometimes your experience has created a problem where you can’t actually feasibly happy. People suffer from ptsd and depression and all kinds of things no matter whether they are trying to be happy or not. Life circumstances can cause someone to totally involuntarily hate someone. Cultural conditioning does that all the time.

                Maybe being happy isn’t right. Maybe you can just not make other people sad. But that’s another set of issues. Some people get sad over weird things. Communication is imperfect, and we’re trying to bridge a gap between people with wildly divergent social backgrounds. We’re all living drastically different realities, which is why we developed a series of social expectations in the first place. Society bridges the gap and gives everyone a reasonable expectation of how another person will behave and maybe what their motivations are. This way we’re not terribly shocked when someone jabs their open hand at us. We know it’s a gesture of friendship and meeting and we’re supposed to shake it with our hand in turn. Similarly we recognize that someone gesturing at us with an angry face and a middle finger raised means us ill will.

                Similarly, moral frameworks are intended to give us an idea of what we’re supposed to striving for. When we say something like “people are basically good” what we mean is that we’re all socialized into a certain framework of social expectations where bad people would presumably not exist because we responsibly believe that being bad would make them feel bad, especially because being bad makes us feel bad. This breaks down in the face of pathologies where people are incapable of feeling guilt or social obligation, pathologies where nearly every behavior triggers a guilt response, and rationalizations where people will mentally justify bad behaviors as actually being good and thus don’t trigger a guilt response.

                Since so many exceptions exist to this sort of thing that maybe it’s more fair to just say something like “approach each situation with an open mind.” Or “don’t prejudge any person or situation” or something like that. I’m not sure that’s fair either. Prejudgment is something that we do as a species as a way of efficiently categorizing experiences and making them useful in the future. We prejudge that fire is hot, for example, so that in the future when we see fire we know to stay away from it because it’s hot. Shutting off a structural facet of memory is much more easily said than done and probably not a great idea. I’d suggest maybe you just don’t behave like you’re prejudging them anyway, but it’s essentially impossible to entirely separate your thinking from your behavior.

                Do you see what I mean about moral frameworks? They’re slippery, imperfect things. Like fish downriver from a paper mill. Do what you want. I don’t believe in free will anyway, so you’re just going to do whatever it is you’ll do. Godspeed.

Indivi/dualism

In college type papers, the introductory part of an essay is where you define your terms so that when you go dropping dat literacy like turds in a bowl, people know exactly the smell of yo shit, which is a heavy-handed similie/metaphor that both describes the functionality of term definition (its purpose) and implies that collegiate writing is shit. 

Anyway anyway, defining terms is pretty important because as you learn partly through life and partly through a liberal arts education, everyone defines everything differently. What I say when I say “good” is an entirely different concept than what, say, a catholic priest says when they say “good.” This is because we come from completely different socio-cultural backgrounds and our experiences, which shape the opinions we have, are entirely different. I find this concept to be shockingly obvious, but that’s because my socio-cultural background encouraged “out-of-the-box” thinking and lead to a sort of reflection that many people do not have the opportunity to. It’s a dangerous and sort of insidious arrogance to assume that those around you are operating with a similar background as you, but it happens all the time anyway. We make it even worse by supporting things like “idiocracy” and political cartoons and the sorts of thinking that says that people who think differently than you are dumb, ignorant, intellectually inferior, incapable of making rational decision, crazy, deluded, brainwashed, possessed by demons, or whatever. When we do that, we’re saying “my way is the only way to think.”

Everyone does this. We do it especially to our friends and lovers, who we assume to be of similar mental capacity and opinions to us, and in a lot of ways, they are. People habitually make friends with other people they assume to have similar socio-cultural backgrounds to them, both consciously by group association and unconsciously simply by having similar interests or places they visit. Our world, whether this is our intent or not, becomes pretty homogenized because of it. Even our attempts at broadening our friend base have a tendency to fail, as those you may be attempting to make friends with are either not looking for friends outside of their socio-cultural standard or they’re basically similar to you in that they are also looking for friends outside of their socio-cultural background.

It’s a toughie, but nothing to worry overmuch about. The attitude that “broadening your horizons” is a good thing is itself a construct of a certain socio-cultural set of morals that define the ideal person as being open-minded and broad as possible. If that were true, however, there’d be no real differences between anyone to be broad and open-minded about. We would all exist as part of an amorphous mod-hippie blob of, like, peace and love, man. What I’m telling you here is that people are all different because of their set of experiences and that set is what makes them have the opinions they have. No one is “wrong,” we just have different perspectives on each situation. This is the core of individualism as I’m defining it here. The generation and culmination of unique perspectives through years of experience in varied socio-cultural backgrounds. To be individualized is to become or express that individual perspective.

Individualism is valuable. There are potential problems with individualism, such as entitled behavior (or in broader terms, solipsistic thought) and libertarianism, but on the whole it’s important to recognize how absurdly miraculous emergent behavior can be. Did any of you guys read Watchmen? It was pretty big a while back. There’s a line by hyper-rational god-dong Dr. Manhattan where he talks about recognizing the sheer miracularity that humans exist at all, that the swirling eddies (it’s a bunch of tough looking biker dudes spinning around in place) of time would lead to the creation of this human and not that human and indeed a human at all. It’s so commonplace today to be really blasé about it, or to be blasé about all things (the less you care, the cooler you are) so it’s hard to keep this kind of attitude on the forefront of your thoughts (Manhattan’s problem). But we absolutely should and must and have to.

Dualism is the idea that things exist in opposition to each other. Not as detailed an explanation as individualism, but then it’s not as detailed a concept. Dualism is another way to describe black and white thinking, binary thinking, dichotomous thinking, and etcetera. There’s a lot of words for it because we as people have identified it as a problem many times over. Every so often someone comes up with a new way to describe it for a renewed audience so it can be railed against once more. “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who employ binary thinking and those who do not.” The critical thought portion of that quote (I’m hoping you’re paying attention, but I won’t hold it against you if you’re not) is that railing against binary thinking as a clear and definite problem is itself a form of binary thinking. It is immoral to think in black and white terms. It is moral to think in shades of grey. There is no middle ground.

Moral statements are all like this. You’re either good or you’re not. There’s no “kinda good” or “sorta bad” only the idea that you’re going to hell or heaven, aligned with satan or god, fallen before the eyes of allah or pure and upright, a slut or chaste, democrat or republican, conservative or liberal, gay or straight, man or woman, us or them, human or animal, land or sea, day or night, dead or alive, god or man, so on ad infinitum. It’s a part of how we arrange the world around us, how we describe differences. There’s no escaping it. We can’t just decide that from now on everything is going to be plotted on a scatter graph. We’re not installing analog logic gates into our computers so they can measure exact charges and theoretically store an infinitely large number in one bit depending on how sensitive our detectors are. Binary thinking is just how we do. There are a number of potential reasons for this, but they’re neither here nor there (but instead inhabiting an invisible grey area that we can’t see or describe).

Daoism is on the surface dualist. It’s actually very heavily so, with an idea of yin and yang as forever in contention with each other. Later mysticism added the eight trigrams as describing the eight basic energies that comprise all situations and things on earth. They’re actually little sets of three bits each, capable of expressing a value from 0 to 7. It’s the very definition of binary thinking. But that’s mysticism and the attempt to turn Daoism to practical uses, such as Feng Shui and divination via the I Jing. The core idea of the Taijitu ([) is that we have all of this energy in us. We embody all of the principles that embody the entire universe. We’re capable of expressing ourselves in all of the myriad ways the universe can express itself. Even yin possesses some part of yang within it, and vice versa. That’s what the little dots inside each side of the Taijitu represent.

What do the two have to do with each other? Well, “individualism” and “dualism” are the same word plus or minus (but not neither) “indivi,” for one. But what I’m really here for is the interaction of the two ideas. Individuals experience life differently from one another by virtue of their social situations. Those situations are absolutely not binary in any capacity, except that you could possibly describe them using a large enough list of yes/no questions (this is how computers work, by the way) but the amount of data generated by describing their perspective through binary means is prohibitively large and possibly approaching infinity, especially as time elapses (this is why computer simulations will never be perfect, by the way).

(Sorry, that was a bit of an intellectual integrity break and beside the point. I just get anxious if there’s a significant problem with a broad statement I’m making like “life experiences are not binary” and I don’t point it out. In my head lives a little curmudgeonly forum shitposter who comments on all of my thoughts in the most negative/unkind interpretation possible. The dude’s a total douche, seriously.)

Anyway, experiences are not binary and thus individuals are not binary, yet we as people use dualism to describe the world around us. The world around us includes other individuals. It’s incredibly easy and common to reduce someone into “that kind of person” or a group to “those kinds of people.” We habitually make statements that we know are logically impossible, like “republicans hate women” or “religious people are all crazy brainwashers” and when we’re called out on it, we don’t abandon the statements entirely, we just dial it down a bit until we’ve used enough binary descriptors to feel comfortable with our statements. “Extremist misogynist male conservative republicans hate women” or “fundamentalist Christians of specifically evangelist sects are crazy brainwashers.”

Both of those statements describe people, but neither describes individuals. People aren’t a series of labels accrued over time and political change, people are people. We’re all different, even the people we don’t like and the people will never be able to make a connection with. Reducing people to a series of labels with our own individual definition for each of those labels is folly of the highest order. It’s going to happen anyway, but you must absolutely be aware that you’re doing it. You must be aware how you’re doing it. You must be aware why you’re doing it. You’re alive in a world filled with nigh-infinite (at least so many that it may as well be infinite) other perspectives. To throw all of that away just to live within yourself and your perspective is to waste what precious time you have on Earth.

I’m not asking you to broaden your horizons (though it’s not a bad thing) or make new friends or stop being racist (though that’s probably a good idea too), I’m asking you to pay attention to your surroundings. Pay attention to your thought processes. Ask questions. Ask all the questions. Ask why you’re asking questions. Spend some time in a quiet place with just you, yourself, maybe a notebook and a pen and just think. Think about why you did what you did yesterday. Think about why you chose to eat what you ate. Don’t let yourself be satisfied with an answer like “I was hungry. Pizza tastes good.” Why does pizza taste good? Why were you hungry? Were you hungrier than you are at other times? When was the last time you ate pizza? What brand of pizza do you like? Did marketing affect your choice of brand? What specific flavors of pizza do you enjoy? Is your taste in flavor a regional phenomenon? What flavor did your parents enjoy? Were other flavors available or did you learn to enjoy what you had? Why haven’t you tried a new flavor? Are you afraid of change in habit or simply eating for the comfort of eating something you know you’ll like?

There are so many ways to interpret and appreciate every event. Living life only planning ahead for the next dopamine hit is (honestly a perfectly valid living strategy) to consign yourself to being just another individual, a sort of non-player-character in your own life. Develop passion. Develop inquisitiveness. Learn to be obsessive and detached and emotional and spontaneous and strange and ruthless and empathetic all at once. We’re not yin or yang, we’re yin and yang.

Tourist Economy

So yeah, tourist economies. I tend to think people know this stuff, but I forget that it’s not something you think about unless you live in one. Tourist economies are incredibly seasonal. There’s a lot of money to be made (mostly by people who own tourist businesses) during the tourism season, which is usually defined as the spring and fall, when weather is temperate and it’s pleasant to walk outside. It’s no coincidence (well, kind of a coincidence for Mardi Gras) that all of the major festivals are scheduled for those times of year. What this means, though is that the portions of the year that are not in season, there’s no tourism and consequently no money. There are no jobs here during summer unless you’re a long-term employee. The town becomes completely dead as few tourists visit and the people in town with money leave to avoid the heat. Crime goes way up as result of broke-ass punks with nothing to do wandering around and forming gangs and shiz, basically shit all goes to hell. Also there’s hurricanes. 

That’s how it works. That’s also why no one moves here really. There’s no real sustainable economy. After the port became more or less obsolete (and no one wanted to spend the money to modernize that shit) Moon Landrieu and his mayoral contemporaries decided that the town needed to be converted into a tourist destination full-on. He built the moon walk, he designed the laws that keep cars off of royal by day and bourbon by night, he allowed for hotel corporations to build high-rises downtown. All of that shit started in the 80s. And it’s now all we’ve got. There are no tech jobs here. There’s some local banks, but they’re losing money to larger national banks due to their conservative and myopic lending practices. There are oil jobs but no one from here gets hired to work in the oil business, at least not in management. And there’s tourism. Hospitality is the official marketing friendly term for this industry, a term that encompasses travel, hostelry, restaurants and related accoutrements. The hospitality industry is the driving force of New Orleans. Nearly everyone who lives and works here performs in some capacity related to an industry devoted to getting people to visit here and hemorrhage money. That’s why we call it a tourist economy. We can’t survive unless people think there’s a good reason to visit, so we come up with lots of good reasons to visit. We’re not a swinging party town solely for our own benefit. We’re a swinging party town because it inspires people to visit and put cash in our g-strings.

So yeah, that’s where we’re at. And no one visits in summer because it’s too hot and all of our biggest festivals are planned for the spring+fall. So everyone is forced to work around that, to save money for summer from the spring or else find themselves shit outta luck cash-wise. It wouldn’t be so bad if the people working in the hospitality industry were paid anything approaching a living wage, but wealthy tourist business owners are well aware that most of their employees (bartenders and wait staff especially) will just end up working for tips as it is and so they’re paid server’s minimum, something like $2.66 an hour. During the summer where businesses can go for hours without a single tip and half the employees brought on for the spring Mardi Gras-French Quarter Fest-Jazz Fest are laid off just to cut costs (hospitality business owners, as you might be gathering, are generally huge dicks, and worse rarely local, usually collecting money from New Orleans tourism and funneling it to Biloxi or Milpitas or something), there’s a severe uptick in poverty around the city.

It’s a fucked situation, but one that’s been in the making for a few hundred years and perpetuated by the same cadre of wealthy white people that have been in control of this town essentially forever. They’re independently wealthy, they can just put their money into stocks and live off appreciated value (that’s “capital gains”). This power base runs local politics, local preservation societies, and local tourism boards. The system is invested in and self-perpetuating because people (like you) don’t put up a whole lot of fuss over it and blacks are culturally and socially disenfranchised despite being the majority in this town. So yeah, until some kind of major political upheaval happens, New Orleans is a tourist town and we have to deal with seasons.

Recursion

Hey, listen to this as you read, yeah? Multimedia chops, I'm the big bad boss man from a dot com start up, revamping internet 0.5 to 1.0 :



My favorite novel is Stephen King’s Insomnia. Well, no, that’s not really true, but only untrue insofar as I don’t have a hierarchical rating system for things I enjoy. I’d find it incredibly difficult to try to stack Insomnia next to Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It’s a pointless distinction anyway. The only purpose of a hierarchy is to be useful in rationing out a limited resource. My enjoyment of things is not a limited resource, especially my enjoyment of things I no longer need to put time into. A more realistic measure might be “which of the two are you more likely to read in the future?” though that’s not a particularly useful definition either, because I own both and have plans to read neither and anyway there’s new things to try all the time. I digress.


I liked Insomnia because I felt I could really thoroughly relate to the main characters in their creeping insomnia. I think King did a fantastic job of portraying the feeling of lacking sleep, the sort of hazy “I am going crazy” cloud that descends over the entirety of reality, distorting some noises, making lights brighter or dimmer, sapping your attention. It’s like trying to drag yourself through a awkwardly acoustically designed stage through clouds of weed smoke while a rave is going on. It’s awkwardly designed because every so often there’s a multisided and mirrored convex pillar distorting the noise and light so if you stand just so, you’ll be blinded and deafened or maybe not. Being sleep-deprived is like reading that paragraph over and over.


I’ve been insomniatic since I was old enough to have a notion of set bedtimes. No amount of guilt-tripping, diet changes, lifestyle changes, no place I’ve lived, essentially nothing I’ve done has ever produced any more than a temporary shift in a stereotypical sleep pattern. I am a fraud, so to speak. I don’t have any problems sleeping. I can sleep all day if I so feel. This is why I garner no sympathy, reap naught but shame for how I sleep. Perhaps here I could rail against the establishment, justify my sleep schedule and feel superior in the knowledge that the typical hours that the rest of society runs on is a socially constructed system of moralistic and disconvenient bullshit. I don’t really feel like it. I just wish I were asleep right now because I have to get up in four and a half hours and listen to a health lecture (or watch a ridic movie) covering genetic ideas I already know. I won’t get to go home until 7:15, and I won’t sleep then even, as my roommate will be home and making noise and all of that. Eventually I’ll pass out and everything will be okay supposedly because it will be the weekend or something. I dunno.

And listen to this why not:




I’m not really sure why I’m writing this either, I have other things to write. I have stuff to do, I am busy, perpetually busy. Why? Because I keep putting it off. I keep putting everything off because I don’t want to deal with it. I want to deal with other parts of my life. I need to go resolve some interpersonal shit with a ton of fucking people, but I can’t do that either. Instead I have to stare at a screen and convince myself to be particularly passionate about tourists and tourism when the class has reached that magic moment of recursion where the class isn’t really introducing anything new anymore and instead is reinforcing concepts or identifying things taken for granted. I worry all the time that I’m going to be an academic failure because I literally can’t reconcile the bullshit with my conscience. I can’t imagine doing anything if I don’t feel really good about it. I’m not really principled, I’m fickle and petty and what makes up my “conscience” changes from week to week, if not day to day, but if nothing else I’m a god damned stubborn asshole about some things and I’m well aware that that is what will inevitably hold me back.


I’m also way too damn smart. Inevitably everything I think ends up coming under self-scrutiny. I’m not even really an author anymore, as I sit here and reinterpret what I’m writing as I write it. I consider “well, you just wrote that to reinterpret your sloth as some kind of ennobling behavior, when in reality it’s just a moral failing that you’re refusing to deal with, in part by writing about it in ways to ennoble it and justify it to yourself” or I consider “well, it’s still true on some level right?” until I don’t really know how I should feel about it anymore and whenever I do feel something I feel guilty about feeling that something because I’m not sure if it’s because I am making a calculated effort to present it or if I’m sincere and if I am sincere what does it mean about a person who is that way and how can it be criticized and should I change it so I’m less criticizable? I’m a walking, breathing argument.


I’m not sure I’d have it any other way, either. I both admire and totally disrespect people who have any sort of surety in themselves. Confident sorts of people, confident of opinion or attitude or whatever, are totally uncritical of their activities. How could they be? Criticism undermines confidence. But being uncritical means that you’re not thinking, that you’re just passively living in the world without question even if it’s your own world that you’re not questioning. You may as literally well be an animal of lesser cognition who just so happened to be enculturated and look like the rest of humanity. That’s why no real person is without some weakness or insecurity or disconfidence in them at some juncture (except, I dunno, the autistic and Asperger-ed [criticizing my own statement and adding qualifiers. Qualifiers I’m not even all that comfortable with, as I’m sure it’ll draw ire from somebody somewhere {most likely the autistic or Asperger-ed}]) that makes them relatable and related to the rest of the human race.


Criticism itself too is criticizable. You can problematize anything, as long as you have the moralistic cojones to beat off the hordes of people interested in their view of the world. Academia properly expressed is a lot of bullshit authors bullshitting together about their bullshit, and even my opinion under their bullshit rules has merit. The smartest academes are well aware that the system they’re participating in is on many levels complete crap, but they do it anyway because it’s one of the few socially sanctioned places for people who like to do nothing but talk to hang around and talk. It’s the only place in the world where an egalitarian merit-based system will teach you about the pitfalls of egalitarian merit-based systems and then grant you merit based on how well you absorbed the lesson. It’s missing the forest for the trees, or whatever hackneyed phrase works here. I’m still in college, god dammit, not because I really want to be or because I fundamentally support the system, but because it pays my bills and fulfills my fetish for listening to people passionately talk about things they’ve studied for years. If I could find a decent job where all I had to do was listen to people’s stories about what they’ve learned and what they’ve read and where they’ve been and who they’ve met, I would take it in a heartbeat. For fuck’s sake, if I could get a decent job building houses or fixing bikes or some mindless-yet-unionized factory work, I’d do that. But jobs are hard to find and colleges are pretty much right there and that’s where we’re at.


If you want to know a secret, I added that last bit because I had a momentary pang of guilt/realization that I’m still writing in a super-rich country as a member of a fairly privileged segment of society. As the phrase goes “my privilege is showing” (a hilariously awful method of criticism, as my privilege is not and never has been “mine,” even as the phrase indicates that I have some sort of control over it [problematizing the concept of “privilege” {I’m sure I can find at least a dozen papers to cite}]) and I need to acknowledge it, lest some random stranger come along and point out how good I have it and what an awful whiny person I am for complaining. Except that person already came along and he lives inside my head and follows me wherever I go and I can’t sleep because