Of Nameless Nonsense and Naked Emperors

When I write these posts, I usually spend a couple of days writing down the things I want to talk about (as they pop randomly into my head), and then sit down and arrange them into a rough outline before I start writing. But this time I'm skipping the outline, because I can't seem to arrange my thoughts into a coherent form. Sometimes you don't really know what you think until you sit down and write about it for a while. Which is one of the reasons I have this blog.

Anyway, this post is going to be a little unstructured, because I only have a vague idea of how the things I'm thinking about relate to each other. Worse, there's no word for the category they all fit into. Let me try to explain what those things are, by telling about some recent encounters with them.

I recently went to a conference for librarians. When I got to the hotel, I asked one of guys out front where the parking was. He said, "Oh, it's all valet parking. We'll take your car, sir." I looked at him and thought, "Well, crap." The thing is, I hate valet parking. It's always presented as a helpful, top-shelf service, offered up to make your life easier. But it doesn't. All that happens is some stranger takes your keys from you and whisks your car off to parts unknown. If you leave anything in it, you have to ask a valet to go get it. And then you have to tip him. I hold that valet parking has two purposes, neither of which have anything to do with convenience: 1. Making socially-insecure people feel like they're doing something fancy 2. Making money.

After the valet had careened out of sight in my car, I wrestled my bags back from a bellboy that wanted to carry them, headed up to my room, and sat down in an elegantly excruciating chair to look over the conference program. It was packed with ads from vendors and corporate sponsors, and for some reason, this reminded me of the valet parking. Professional conferences, I thought, can be a lot like valet parking: they don't necessarily serve the purpose they claim to serve. People think of them as a way to meet other professionals and share ideas (or to get drunk, hook up, and go sight-seeing). And they are all these things. But they're also a way for vendors to try to sell you things, and to get your contact information so they can bug you later. Conferences also seem to be big moneymakers for the organizations that sponsor them. In the case of libraries, they charge the librarians (who already pay yearly dues) to go to the conference, and they also charge the vendors big bucks for the best spots to set up their booths. And then they sell ads in the program.

Even the people attending the conference aren't there for the reasons they might claim. They aren't just there to share information and build professional networks. The people giving presentations, for example, aren't just trying to share what they've learned. They're giving a talk at the conference because it looks good on their resume. Sometimes it's based on a paper they wrote. And why did they write it? Because it looks good on their resume. Or they need to get published if they want tenure (academic librarian jobs are often tenure-track). Maybe they also did it because they had something valuable to contribute, but anybody who has read many academic papers, or sat through many conference presentations, will know that's not always the case.

These were my thoughts as I sat there reading that program. But then I remembered why I was there (or did I?) and decided to go to a keynote speech by a mover and shaker in the library world. The talk lasted about 45 minutes, and to be honest, I can't remember just what it was about. But I do know she was a great believer in "going forward" and "reaching out", and that she used the word "conversation" at least 35 times in 45 minutes. She seems to know what she's doing, too, so my money is on "conversation" as the go-to buzzword in the coming year. If you want to get ahead in 2013, don't say "let's talk about that". Say "we need to have a conversation about that". "Conversation" is the new "leverage". It will take you far.

I don't mean to sound too cynical about conferences, much less librarians, most of whom really do want to help people. It's just that librarians--like members of every other subculture--have their fads and bandwagons. One way of showing you are on a particular bandwagon, or that you belong to a particular subculture, is to use its buzzwords. As my friends and coworkers will tell you, I have a bit of a thing about buzzwords. I hate them. Corporate-speak, education-speak, bureaucratese, technobabble and psychobabble; they irritate me to no end. But it's not just a mindless peeve. They grate on me because I'm a passionate believer that people should think for themselves, and think about what they are saying. If people are using faddish buzzwords, that tells me they're doing neither. Instead, they're acting like a talking herd animal, sort of a cross between a parrot and a lemming. They're not thinking. They're imitating.

Some of those buzzwords don't really mean anything at all, but they serve a purpose nonetheless. They show that the person saying them is part of the in-crowd, and up on the latest fads...er, trends. They also seem to inspire a certain kind of impressionable person, so they get plastered all over educational manifestos and corporate websites. And conference programs. Buzzwords have some nastier cousins, too. Things like euphemisms, weasel words, loaded language, and vague or impenetrable language--like buzzwords, they have a purpose other than clear, honest communication. But these can be used to obscure and distort the truth. As George Orwell put it in his important essay Politics and the English Language, this kind of language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

So, how did I get from valet parking to buzzwords? The point I'm trying to make is that people are always saying, doing, and believing things not because they are true or useful, but because they serve some other purpose, which usually has to do with money, in-group identification, or both. That's what ties together valet parking, resume-padding professional activities, buzzwords, catchphrases, and all kinds of other things people do without stopping to think about why they're doing them. There's a disconnect between the assumed purpose of the words, ideas, or activities and their actual purpose. Sometimes they have no purpose at all, except that they have caught on, and people will feel like they're out of touch if they don't do them.

This is a problem, because doing things that are, at best, useless, is a waste of time...at best. Life is just too short for that nonsense. But it's hard to speak clearly about the problem, because that there's no standard term that describes this category of things. There's no widely-known conceptual framework for understanding what they are, and how they relate to each other.

Personally, I tend to relate them to the Hans Christian Anderson story The Emperor's New Clothes--surely as wise a fable as has ever been told. If you haven't read it in a while, here's a refresher. Two swindlers convince an emperor that they can make him a wondrous set of clothes. These clothes will make him invisible to stupid or incompetent people, and in fact, the clothes themselves will be invisible to such people. The swindlers get their looms and go to work, pretending to spin and weave. When the emperor and his ministers come to check on their progress, each of them realizes with horror he can't see the clothes. But of course they all keep their mouths shut, so everyone thinks everyone else can see the clothes. Finally, the emperor strips, dons his new, invisible finery, and parades down the street. None of his subjects says a word, because they've all heard that stupid people can't see the clothes, and besides...it's the emperor! It takes a little boy to point out the obvious: "But he's not wearing any clothes at all!"

I love that story, because it seems to me that a whole lot of the things people take seriously in this world are just different styles of imperial non-clothing. They're just...made up. They don't serve any purpose, or not the purpose people think they serve. But people believe in them, and therefore we all have to spend a lot of energy dealing with them. The naked emperor holds up non-existent hoops, and makes us all jump through them.

As insightful as the story is, though, it doesn't give us a good word for this kind of nonsense--this misplaced importance we give to things that may not even be real or true or valuable. Saying "that sounds like the emperor's new clothes" is just too wordy. Other options--bullshit--for example, aren't precise enough and may not be socially acceptable, despite their clear usefulness. Also insufficient are the various terms for pointless activities (jumping through hoops, going through the motions), and the necessary multitude of terms for pointless or misleading language (cant, bafflegab, blather, drivel, verbiage, twaddle, buzzwords, codswallop, weasel words, euphemisms, loaded language, purr words and snarl words, lip service, etc). There's no term that draws all these things together in one basket and gives us a handle to carry it with.

We need one. We need a word that lets us identify this stuff to each other, so we can try to root it out. We need to be able to point to empty buzzwords and activities done for the sake of appearances, and say "Hold on, that's _______!" I'm not suggesting we use such a word as a thought-terminating cliche, along the lines of the current usage of "class warfare". The word should promote critical thinking, not shush it. We need a good word for describing things that are useless or worse. We need a word that reminds us it's time to look around and see if we're on a bandwagon, and to check whether the driver is wearing any clothes.

Such a word might remind people to spend more time asking questions like: "That word you keep saying: what does it actually mean?", and "How do you know that's true?", and "Does this idea really do anything useful, or is it just fashionable?", and "Is this crap really necessary?" What, in other words, is the actual point of this thing we are talking about? Of course, such a word should itself be watched closely, so it doesn't turn into another meaningless buzzword, emptied of all meaning. That would be ironic, but not unprecedented. After all, "drink the kool-aid" began as a clever, if tasteless, metaphor for the dangers of blind conformity. Now it's become an overworked corporate tic, and the only people who can sincerely say "don't drink the kool-aid" in 2013 have, in fact, drank the kool-aid.

The reason we need this word, and the reason people should ask these questions, is that even though the emperor's new clothes don't actually exist, they still manage to do real harm, because people believe in them. Think about how many people spend big chunks of their lives doing things for the sole purpose of padding their resumes: joining committees they don't have time for (and possibly aren't even needed), writing papers that don't advance knowledge a single step, giving talks nobody really listens to, and so on. Parents push their kids to take on too many extracurricular activities, for the same reason. Some people waste their precious days in other ways, but still for the sake of appearances. Does anybody buy a Cadillac Escalade, for example, to actually take off road? No, because that's not what it's for. An Escalade is for showing people that you drive an Escalade. And then there's the stuff people believe in, that just isn't true. How many people have devoted their lives to forgotten religions that nobody believes in anymore? How many people were murdered for questioning those forgotten, non-existent gods?

The common denominator of all these things is that they involve mistaking appearances for substance or ideas for reality, and that people do them without stopping to ask why. They "give an appearance of solidity to pure wind".

If it's true that nonexistent imperial clothing causes trouble, so do the naked emperors themselves.  Some people make a whole career out of imperial nakedness. In fact, maybe "naked" isn't a strong enough word. As Lewis Grizzard said, "'Naked' means you ain't got no clothes on. 'Nekkid' means you ain't got no clothes on and you're up to something." These people are full-on nekkid. Those who learn to manipulate language and appearances, and make others believe in things that aren't really there, can become extremely powerful, and often quite destructive. They may actually believe their own nonsense--they probably think they're really wearing clothes--but that's beside the point. The point is that they're hawking nonsense and people are wasting their lives buying it. Skilled naked emperors go far, because we take them seriously. For example, the speaker I saw at the conference, who kept saying "conversation", is pretty powerful in her world. She may mean well, and she may even be doing a lot of good, but I can't help thinking that part of the reason she rose to the top of her field is that she's good at keeping up appearances--at joining the right committees and throwing around the right buzzwords. Lots of powerful people--politicians, university presidents, corporate heads--have an intuitive sense of managing perception. Maybe my view is jaundiced, but many of the ones I've met strike me as soulless phonies; "perma-grin zombies", I call them. You can go a long way by being a soulless phony--a nekkid emperor--if people are gullible enough to think they're admiring your clothes, instead of staring at your bare backside.

How do we respond to all this imperial nakedness, and even outright nekkidness? By not putting up with it. By teaching kids to ask tough questions about whether conventional wisdom is true, and whether common practice makes sense. If society has made up various types of nonsense, it will take a society-wide movement to un-make it. When questioning and critical thinking fail, satire is a time-honored method of dealing with nonsense. My whole point here, after all, is that nonsense should not be taken seriously, and nothing deflates a bloated sense of importance like laughter. Naked emperors, in other words, deserve to be mooned. As Orwell says about bloated, insincere language (just one variety of imperial nakedness): "One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase...into the dustbin where it belongs".

So how about it? What are we going to call this stuff, so we can actually talk about how to rid of it?

Can You Say "Shibboleth"?

I've had the good fortune lately to go to a couple of fancy dinners. I call it good fortune because the company was good, not because the event was fancy. The food was not especially tasty, but it was presented with great style and pomp: it looked pretty. And then there was the silverware. My plate was surrounded by a garrison of forks, spoons, and knives. I had no idea which spoon to use for the soup, or which fork to use for the salad. Worse, there were glasses placed, with perfect symmetry, on each side of my plate. Which glass was mine? I chose the wrong one, of course, thus stealing my neighbor's glass. This breach of etiquette sent shock waves around the table, as each of my dinner companions had to use their neighbor's glass instead of their own. I apologized in my politest Arkansas accent, but if any of my dinner companions had decided I was a yokel, that probably didn't help.

All this would have bothered me if I were a more formal person. But I laughed it off, because I figure things like that shouldn't be taken too seriously. Knowing which fork to use--and speaking in a certain accent, for that matter--are nothing more than shibboleths. They don't have any particular purpose except to identify who belongs to a particular group...and who doesn't. Using the wrong fork immediately identifies me as someone who hasn't mastered the rules of etiquette. My accent identifies me as being from the hilly part of the south--not a region associated with sophistication in the average American mind. Linguists know that pronunciation is arbitrary, and has no intrinsic association with intelligence, but I can attest that people will judge you for having an accent like mine. The shibboleth is still in effect, no matter what the linguists say. But when I think about the origins of the term "shibboleth", I realize it could be a lot worse.

The word "shibboleth" comes from the Old Testament. In the late second millennium BC, the Israelites were still a set of quarrelsome tribes who hadn't yet united into the Kingdom of Israel. The Book of Judges tells how two Israelite tribes, the Ephraimites and Gileadites, went to war. The Gileadites defeated the Ephraimites, leaving many Ephraimites stuck in Gileadite country, east of the Jordan river. As they tried to cross back into their own country, the Gileadites stopped them at the river. The two tribes spoke the same language, but unfortunately for the Ephraimites, they had different accents. Judges 12:5-6 tells what happened next.

Whenever one of the fugitives of Ephraim said, "Let me go over," the men of Gilead would say to him, "Are you an Ephraimite?" When he said, "No," they said to him "Then say Shibboleth," and he said "Sibboleth" for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand of the Ephraimites fell at that time.

A fateful word, shibboleth, but not because of its meaning. Depending on who you ask, it meant either "ear of grain" or "torrent". The point was that Ephraimites said it differently than Gileadites, and that allowed the Gileadites to identify their enemies. Shibboleths have been used in warfare more recently, too. In World War II, Allied soldiers would distinguish Japanese soldiers from other Asians by asking them to say, "lollapalooza." Since the Japanese language doesn't distinguish the "L" and "R" sounds, the Japanese would say "rorraparooza"--a dead giveaway, often in the literal sense. A fictional shibboleth appears in the movie "Inglourious Basterds", where an Englishman posing as a German soldier is caught making a hand-gesture a German would never use.

Not all shibboleths are so deadly, or even particularly nasty. Accents, in-jokes, fashions, slang, musical preferences--all these things can function as shibboleths. Many of them are pretty harmless, and just used to distinguish some subculture, often distinct only in its sense of fashion or music. There are all kinds of pop culture shibboleths I haven't mastered, but no one is particularly mean to me because of that (there's the occasional snotty hipster, but life is too short to concern oneself with the opinions of snotty hipsters).

However, the shibboleths of formal etiquette can get nasty (though not usually downright murderous). Knowing your table settings is a shibboleth indicating whether you know the rules of etiquette, and that is historically a way of indicating whether someone is from the upper or aristocratic classes, because only people from those classes had the means to learn such things. That's why etiquette is full of rules that don't really serve any purpose except to differentiate people who know the rules from those who don't. The word "etiquette" actually means "tag" or "label" in French. Having etiquette labels you as being from the refined classes. It's a behavioral badge, but a badge nonetheless.

Of course, etiquette can be more than just a set of shibboleths. It can also give people guidelines for being polite and thoughtful. But that purpose can be lost in the minutia of social rules. The shibboleth function of etiquette, when you think about it, is not very polite and thoughtful at all, at least to the people it excludes. Arbitrary social rules are also a burden for the people who know them, because life would be simpler (and often less expensive) if they didn't have to bother with them. People will work very hard to appear better than others.

It's odd how notions of good behavior are still bound up with old notions of class, or even old-world aristocracy. Think about the word "classy", as in, "That was a classy thing to do." "Classy" didn't originally mean "thoughtful and admirable", but "what a person from the higher classes would do". Today we think of a "gentleman" as a man who has good manners, but once it simply meant somebody who didn't have to work with his hands, or even work at all, regardless of how polite he was. The word "courtesy" originally meant "the proper way of acting at court." Americans still say certain behaviors are "noble" even though we have never had a class of noble men and women here. The aristocracy often weren't very noble, anyway, if by "noble" you mean "well-behaved and honorable". In fact, the oldest noble families in Europe first became nobles by fighting brutal wars.

The problem with confusing good, thoughtful behavior with class-based shibboleths is that class divisions don't necessarily reflect good behavior. In fact, most people today would say that a rigid, hereditary class system is a form of societal injustice. People aren't members of the upper classes because they have good manners, but because they were born in certain families, or made a lot of money and bought their way in. As the old saying goes, "Make money and the world will conspire to make you a gentleman." Making your money in a gentlemanly way is optional, and often counter-productive.

I don't mean to bash the upper classes here. I've known people from the upper classes who were truly noble, but I've also known some who used social niceties as a weapon to shame others.  I don't care how "well-bred" they are, those people can be as mean as scorpions in a skillet.

The point of all this is that we need to disentangle true courtesy from arbitrary shibboleths, and politeness from class and wealth. If some rule of etiquette makes life more pleasant, or shows thoughtfulness and respect toward other people, then let's keep it. If it's merely a shibboleth, good for nothing but distinguishing one group of people from another, then toss it in the garbage, where it belongs. I'm all for refinement and politeness when it serves a real purpose. After all, people can be pretty nasty creatures when they aren't taught manners, and the current parenting style ignoring rudeness strikes me as a horrible idea. But what's also a horrible idea is continuing to use arbitrary rules to distinguish people based on social class. If we could root out shibboleths masquerading as manners, and focus on actually being nice, thoughtful, and honorable, the world would be a simpler and kinder place. As Emily Post herself said: "Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use."

Black Jack David and the Gypsy King: The Mythic Roots of a Folk Song

Not long ago, I left these Louisiana swamps to go home for the weekend, back to the Arkansas Ozarks where I grew up.  I guess I was a little homesick, because I loaded my MP3 player with traditional songs; mostly old Anglo-Americans tunes from the southern hills.  Some those songs strike primal chords in my emotions, because I've heard them as far back as I can remember.

I can't play a lick on any instrument, but my great-grandfather, Neal Morris, was a singer and recollector of old songs, and he can be heard singing on some of the field recordings collected by the great folk music collector Alan Lomax.  Neal's son (my great uncle) was the folksinger and folklorist Jimmie Driftwood.  My great-grandfather died before I was born, but Jimmie Driftwood lived until I was in my mid-twenties.  I never got to know him that well, but I went to his house many times as a kid; and listened to him and the rest of my extended family sing into the night.  Sometimes, I would fall asleep, and have to be carried out to the car.  That twangy mountain music would run through my dreams all the way home.  No wonder I still have an Arkansas accent.

Skeletons of Mardi Gras: How the Walking Dead Are Keeping Traditions Alive in New Orleans

When I pulled onto Esplanade Avenue on Mardi Gras morning, the clouds over New Orleans were just losing their sunrise glow. I found a parking spot in the shadow of I-10, which sits right on top of Claiborne Avenue in the Fauborg Tremé neighborhood; one of the oldest predominantly black neighborhoods in the country. The famous Zulu parade would be be coming down Claiborne later, but that's not what I was here to see. On this most festive of days, I was in search of the walking dead.

Not long after leaving my car, I heard a faint crrrraww! sound to my left. Several blocks away, a handful of black-clad figures with huge white heads emerged into the street, and then vanished, followed by a small parade of brightly dressed onlookers. I pulled out my camera and ran after them.

The North Side Skull and Bones Gang were on the move.  Several African American men and boys were making their way down the street.  They wore black sweats with skeletons painted on them, and paper-mache skulls the size of beach balls. On their white butcher's aprons was a leering skull design. All of them carried big bones in their hands, which they used to bang on doors on either side of the street. One particularly scary looking Skull walked on stilts, making him at least nine feet tall. The leader, a big guy with antelope horns protruding from his skull mask, boomed in a deep voice “Skull and bones gang! Mardi Gras morning! Wake up!” Some of them shook tambourines and rattles, and one—I think the one on stilts, though it was hard to say with the masks--kept making the eerie crrrrawwwww!! call.

Doors cracked, and people peered out at the apparitions on the street. Most of the grown-ups smiled and said “Good morning”, or “Happy Mardi Gras!” Kids peeked around their parents, looking thunderstruck. “Get up outta that bed! It's Mardi Gras morning!” the bone men yelled, “You gotta get your life straight!”

The North Side Skull and Bones Gang are the best known of several “skeleton gangs” that roam the streets of New Orleans on Mardi Gras morning. They claim to be the oldest skeletons, tracing their history to 1819. If so, they've been waking people up on Mardi Gras morning for nearly 200 years. But they aren't just trying to get the party started. They have a serious message, too. As they walked down the street, they greeted people emerging from doorways, shaking hands, patting backs, and bending down to talk to kids. I couldn't hear most of what they were saying, but based on what I've read, they tell them to be good, stay away from drugs, and do their homework. If they don't, they say, the bone men will come back for them.

By appearing as the walking dead, the bone men remind people--young and old—to live well while they're alive. As the words on their aprons say, “You next!” Sometimes they dance in a circle and chant “You better get your...life together, next time you see us...it's too late to try!”

Not everybody welcomed the Skulls that morning, though. When they banged on one door, an irate white woman with a Midwestern accent appeared and said, “Why are you doing cop-knocking first thing in the morning? I had to stuff all my s**t under the couch, what the f**K!?”. The leader of the Skulls, somehow looking disgusted through a giant paper-mache skull mask, said “Then move outta the city.” All the onlookers nodded in agreement. Another woman, whose husband opened the door and shook hands with some of the Skulls, pointed at the leader and said, “Don't touch me.” I couldn't hear what she said next, but she seemed to think the Skulls represented black magic or devil worship. I heard the big Skull in the antelope horns saying, “No, no, that's not what we're about.”

It's hard to pinpoint the cultural origins of the skeleton gangs. Some sources vaguely suggest that the North Side Skull and Bones Gang was started by a merchant marine from New Orleans, who witnessed the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico, and decided it would be perfect for Mardi Gras. If that's true, the tradition was borrowed from a combination of old Aztec celebrations (the Aztecs being big on skulls) and European traditions like the Danse Macabre motif in art, and the idea of the dead becoming restless during the three day period of Halloween, All Saint's Day, and All Souls Day (October 31-November 2). One of the Skulls I talked to later that day, however, said the tradition was related to Lent, and that skeletons are a reminder that the pleasures of the flesh—the carnal things celebrated at Carnival—are fleeting.

But I suspect there's more to the story. New Orleans is often called the most unique city in the United States, and most people assume that's because of its French heritage. They're partly right, but New Orleans preserved more than French culture. It also preserved African culture; more so than nearly any other place in North America.  Under French (and Spanish) law, slaves had more extensive rights than in the Anglo-American south. One result was that they were allowed to gather on Sundays for dancing and drumming at the place now known as Congo Square. This would never have been allowed in Anglo-America. The Congo Square gatherings helped preserve rhythms that mostly disappeared in other parts of the United States; rhythms which reemerged in Mardi Gras Indian chants, jazz, and rock and roll. If New Orleans preserved this musical aspect of African culture, there's every reason to think it preserved other aspects, including African religion. After all, African music and African religion aren't easily separated. One of the functions of the drums was to call forth the spirits. Those drums certainly fill me with the spirit.  I don't happen to believe in the kinds of spirits the Congo Square drummers believed in, but I can see how they came to believe the drums allowed transcendent spirits to enter their bodies.  I mean, it's a pretty accurate description of what it feels like.

One of most important African religious traditions to be preserved in New Orleans was Voodoo. Just to be clear, I'm not falling for the Hollywood version of New Orleans Voodoo here. Most of the “Voodoo” you see in the city today is strictly tourist kitsch.  However, Voodoo (or Vodou, or Vodun) is a real religion, and it did play a role in New Orleans' history.  Voodoo originated in West Africa, and is still an important religion in some countries there, especially Benin.  It was blended with Catholicism and Native American religions to produce produce Santeria in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and Voodoo in Haiti.  Voodoo came to New Orleans with slaves, soon after the city was founded. After the Haitian revolution, many white refugees fled to New Orleans, bringing slaves with them. The Voodoo tradition was even stronger in Haiti, of course, and remains the predominant religion there to this day. The 1800's were the heyday of influential Voodoo practitioners in New Orleans. The most famous was Marie Laveau, whose tomb is in St. Louis Cemetery Number 1, right next to Congo Square.

In Voodoo, there is a supreme god, who stays remote from human affairs. Lesser spirits known as Loa are the ones who deal with people. One group of Loa are the Ghede, who are simultaneously spirits of death and fertility. The Ghede are a sort of family, often pictured as skeletal figures wearing black and purple. They're a wild bunch; drinking spiced rum, dancing the suggestive Banda dance, and swearing profusely. They are the spirits of fertility, but they are dead, so nobody can punish them for their lewdness. They can do what they want. Interestingly, many of the Ghede, especially Papa Ghede, their patriarch, are very fond of children. The Ghede are closely associated with the more powerful Loa, Baron Samedi (Baron Saturday) and his wife, Maman Brigitte. These two resemble the Ghede (and are sometimes considered a part of them) with skeletal faces and black clothing.

When the Skulls finished their rounds on Mardi Gras morning, they returned to the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Tremé, just across Armstrong park from the cemeteries and Congo Square. Their leader, Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, traded his giant skull and antelope horns for a skull mask and top hat with a cross in front. Now he clearly resembled Baron Samedi or Papa Ghede. Barnes seems to see the Northside Skull and Bones Gang in terms of the Ghede tradition. In interviews, he explicitly links the skeleton gangs to the Ghede tradition in Haitian Voodoo.

I don't know if the skeleton gangs really originated with the Ghede and Voodoo.  It's intriguing that both the Ghede and the skeleton gangs (or at least the North Side Skull and Bones) seem concerned with the welfare of children. But maybe the tradition originated from multiple sources: African, Catholic, and perhaps even Aztec (if the Day of the Dead connection is true). All these traditions were influencing each other well before New Orleans was founded. Besides, people tend to come up with similar ideas independently. If you believe the spirits of the dead remain after the body dies, you could easily conclude that the dead had lessons to teach us. One piece of advice they might offer is to live life fully, and not join them sooner than necessary. This sort of idea has surely occurred to people around the world.

Whatever its origins, the North Side Skull and Bones Gang today seems mostly concerned with maintaining the traditions and culture of black New Orleans, by encouraging young people to participate in that culture, and by warning them away from the drugs, guns, and violence that are all too common there. The people involved seem quite capable of making a difference. When I started reading about the Skulls after Mardi Gras, I realized how talented some of their members are. An older gentleman I spoke with turned out to be Ronald Lewis, the creator of the House of Dance and Feathers, a museum of black New Orleans culture in the 9^th ward. Another member is Royce Osborne, creator of an excellent documentary about Black Carnival traditions in New Orleans, called All On A Mardi Gras Day. Their leader, Bruce Barnes, is a park ranger at the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park, a multi-instrumentalist who leads a Zydeco band called Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots, a former professional football player, and an important community leader.

Underneath their masks, the North Side Skull and Bones Gang are talented, influential people They're fighting for a worthy cause, and helping preserve a truly unique heritage. I hope they go on banging on doors and waking people up for years to come.

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Links

Backstreet Cultural Museum
 
All on a Mardi Gras Day 

House of Dance and Feathers

Sacred Ground (a good article about the North Side Skull and Bones Gang, and the Tremé neighborhood)

Signs of Life (a photo exhibit featuring the North Side Skull and Bones) 

It's Sort Of Weird How Often People Say "Sort Of"

Why do people who are trying to sound erudite keep saying "sort of" and "kind of"?  I kept hearing people speaking this way at the American Library Association conference in New Orleans yesterday. You hear it all the time on NPR, not necessarily with the reporters, but with the people calling in or being interviewed.  There's sort of this tendency for people to say "sort of" all the time.  If they really want to emphasize something, they might even say "really sort of".  Why on earth, if you're trying to sound smart, would you use filler phrases like "kind of" and "sort of"?

I think part of the answer is that these phrases aren't just filler.  They resemble other filler words, like "um" or "uh", in that people say them unconsciously.  But "sort of/kind of" seem to carry some real meaning, too.  They serve as hedge phrases, to make people sound less blunt.  In this sense, they're related to the "like" of teen-speak, which really, like, drives the grownups crazy*.  More than that, though, these phrases seem to be unconscious affectations or signals, which say "I am speaking the way thoughtful, educated people do".  "Sort of" and "kind of" serve as indicators that the speaker is part of a certain subculture (more or less the NPR-listening, college-educated, self-consciously-cultured subculture), and can speak the way their peers in that subculture do.

Which is really sort of mildly annoying to me.  I'm very attuned, for some reason, to people's unconscious badges that mark their subcultural identity.  I notice how skateboarders walk differently than hipsters, and hipsters smoke their cigarettes differently than construction workers.  But when the subculture I'm observing is one that I'm (loosely) associated with, like that bookish, NPR-listening crowd, those subcultural badges irritate me.  I'm part of that subculture that tries not to be part of a subculture (we're probably very predictable).  I know I probably wear my share of these badges, but I do think there's a good reason to notice when you're unconsciously mimicking your peers.  As soon as you start automatically speaking and dressing like a particular group of people, you run the risk of automatically thinking like them.  And if you're automatically thinking like any group of people, well, that really sort of means you're not thinking at all.  It's not that I think people should immediately cease and desist with the "kind of" and "sort of".  It's just that it wouldn't be a bad idea for them to notice it, and stop to think about what else they're doing, and thinking, without really thinking about it.

* Wikipedia says that people have been using "like" this way for a long time, but it became popular with the beatnik character Maynard G. Krebs, on the TV show Dobie Gillis in the early '60's.  Of course, we all know Shaggy said it a lot on Scooby Doo.  So, like, people that are grandparents now used to talk like this.  In fact, some of them still do.  Wikipedia also says words like "like", "um", "uh", "well", etc, are called discourse markers or discourse particles.  Apparently, linguists used to think of these things as mostly being filler, but now see them as carrying real meaning.  I think I'll look into this some more, once I find some readable sources on this stuff beyond Wikipedia.  Here's a couple of interesting ones:

Just Like, Er, Words, Not, Um, Throwaways.  Michael Erard, New York Times

Like, what is the meaning of "like".  USA Today