During the years I was in school there, the governor of Louisiana was one Edwin Edwards, who rivalled any politician of his day in both color and flamboyance. He served four non-consecutive terms in that office, basically two years in the governor’s mansion for every one year he was later in federal prison.
Edwards had more than his pretty boy good looks going for him. He had quite a way with words. He once acknowledged during an ethics controversy about illegal campaign controversies that “It was illegal for them to give, but not for me to receive.” In the run-up to his third successful bid as governor, Edwards gave a quip about his confidence in the upcoming contest. “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” He was right, and this quote is referenced to this day, but usually without attribution.
By the time he was running for his fourth term as governor, Edwards had already stood trial and been acquitted of multiple federal crimes, including bribery. His opponent in that race was David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. This was one hell of a contest, and it resulted in some of the most outrageous bumper stickers ever seen in politics. “Vote For the Crook. It’s Important.” ranks pretty high, but my personal favorite from this race is “Vote for the Lizard, not the Wizard.”
But good bumper stickers, whether they were official or unofficial, would never be quite enough to save Edwards from himself. He retired from politics after that fourth term, but he didn’t retire from corruption. In 2000, he was found guilty on seventeen counts, including racketeering, extortion, and money laundering, but Edwards pointed out that the charges were not for anything he did as governor. On his way to federal prison, he said, “I will be a model prisoner, as I have been a model citizen.” Whether that simple statement is dripping with irony or tripping with self-delusion is something I’ll leave on the table for future consideration.
I once asked a friend of mine whose family had been in the state for generations about the ability of Louisiana voters to overlook unethical, corrupt, and sometimes downright criminal behavior in their elected officials. He told me simply that politics in Louisiana is about entertainment as well as governance, and the voters fully expect that some of their politicians are going to get caught with their hand in the cookie jar. They figure taking a cookie or two is not really a problem, but it is a real problem when they try to take the whole cookie jar.
When I was told this decades ago, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. On the one hand, it kind of speaks to a certain sophistication generally not afforded to the average Louisiana voter by virtually anyone who isn’t from Louisiana. To paraphrase Janet Malcolm, it’s the kind of hypocrisy that allows for human fallibility and reconciles the needs for order and pleasure. In this sense, hypocrisy is indeed “the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way.”
Now I’m not talking about the kind of hypocrites who argue that they support free speech while banning books from libraries and removing opposing opinions from certain platforms. Nor do I disagree with Lucius Garvin, a relatively obscure politician who was briefly governor of the relatively obscure state of Rhode Island, when he said, “Our conventional morality often serves as a cover for hypocrisy and selfishness.”
But what we have today isn’t the application of the lubricant sometimes needed to keep things agreeable and pleasurable, particularly in the public sphere. We’re not talking about a Governor Edwards who did everything possible to obscure his corruption and managed to do so in a charismatic way with a certain panache, leaving his detractors baffled, his supporters nodding, and everyone else shrugging.
We’re talking about the whole cookie jar. Increasingly, it seems to be like the movie title–Everything Everywhere All at Once. Not just at any one level. Federal, state, and local governments seem to be harboring their own boondoggles of various sizes and potential criminalities, with participants who are sometimes elected, sometimes appointed, and sometimes just opportunistic.
Those years Louisiana had with Edwin Edwards seem downright quaint by comparison to what’s happening all over today. Or maybe that’s just me.
