Hello, it's Lane, Captain Levinson. Long time, no see, no hear, no talk. We've been working on a bunch of stuff over at Tripod and you're about to hear one of the things we've been doing over the past couple of weeks. I had the honor of being invited by the New Orleans Museum of Art to be in conversation live on stage in front of an audience.
As part of the museum's literary arts and letters series, this is something where Noma, the New Orleans Museum of Art, welcomes authors, poets, journalists, playwrights, literary scholars, all different types of folks to the museum to have public conversations that reflect on literature and often find this classic intersection of arts and culture. And so they bring out different literary figures, and then they also pair them with local people in the community to moderate that conversation. So I was asked to speak with a sociologist and native New Orleans named Peter Marina. He wrote a book called Down and Out in New Orleans, Transgressive Living in the Informal Economy.
It was a really interesting book. He did this thing, which we talk about at the very beginning of the interview, which you'll hear, but he bases this book off of a book that George Orwell wrote in the 20s. It's a much lesser known Orwell book. You'll probably know Animal Farm.
This is not Animal Farm, but this is called Down and Out in Paris in London. And Orwell was there at the same time that some of these other big literary figures were, but he went broke and then ended up living kind of on the fringes and entering these informal economies and lifestyles in Paris and London in the 20s and wrote this ethnography about these communities that are living outside of the mainstream capitalist society from 100 years ago. And so Peter Marina, who's from New Orleans, decided to take that model and do something very similar in contemporary New Orleans today. And for 10 weeks, he embarked with $100 in his pocket on finding a service job in the French Quarter and busking on the streets of Frenchman Street and miming in front of the Superdome, doing tons of different gigs and meeting the people that live in what he calls kind of this underbelly of the city.
So tons of amazing anecdotes, experiences, and stories. Our conversation focuses a lot on what he learned about the people that are opting out of the society that we live in, very much based off of the ways that our capitalist structure can be oppressive to people. So I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. This in typical Christotippet, unabridged, transparent, full-length fashion is the entire uncut interview and conversation that I had with Peter Marina.
We also posted a shorter 10-minute version. So you can choose which one you want to listen to. You can do both, as I often do, when I listen to on being a listen to the 50-minute version. And then I'll find myself just continuing to listen to the hour and a half version right after that.
You know, when you're cleaning your house, time just flies by. But we have both available for you right now. This is the long one. It's the one I recommend.
So you're doing the right thing. And enjoy my conversation with Peter Marina. You are referred to as something called a transgressive sociologist, which is this new breed of sociologist, something I personally had not heard of. So can you tell us what that is?
What is a transgressive sociologist? Absolutely. Me and a few professors, a former professor of mine, we wanted to build a new subfield of sociology. And we were calling it transgressive sociology.
And in order to do that, we have to distinguish, well, what is transgression as opposed to something like deviancy, which is a subfield of sociology? And we can envision transgressive sociology or transgression as something that's like deviancy, but with intent, deviancy with self-actualization and transcendence. And we argue that today in a world of massive structural transformations growing inequality and the rise of discontent and maybe an understanding that perhaps our legitimate institutions are delivering as they should, that more and more people will respond in transgressive ways, whether it's through transgressive individuals, transgressive cultures, transgressive nation states. And so this is something that we want to study and think that's kind of a coding edge of a type of new discipline.
But we also think about, and I'll give you a little background, a lot of academics write, and they describe people, especially institutionally vulnerable people. They're seen as almost like mundane creatures, like these people that are either driven by their own innate biological predispositions, or that they determine by these outside structural forces that are impinged upon them, almost like robots compelled to act a certain way. And one of the things I tried to do in this book was give people their sense of agency, almost like a free will, that people have the ability to violate the structural, or to go against the structural expectations that are imposed upon them, that they can respond differently in new and creative ways to their own structural conditions, that people have the capacity to resist the ordinary, to go against the grain, to push back against those structural forces that are trying to shake them, to reinvent their own narratives, to come up with their own scripts. And that's one of the things that I think makes sociology so interesting, is accounting for people's agency, their capacity to act in completely unexpected ways, and you would think, broccoli can't say, I'm not broccoli, but a person can say, I'm not a man, or I'm not a woman, or I'm not going to follow that script.
And I don't think that a lot of academics give enough to agency. And so that's one of the things I try to capture, is the ability of people to challenge, to resist, and to transgress the ordinary. Well, to give the audience a better understanding of what this book is about, you base the book on another book that was written almost 100 years ago by George Orwell, called Down and Out in Paris in London. So reading, there's a lot of quotes from that book in your book, which makes me really want to read that book as well.
Tell us a little bit what that book is about, and why you decided to apply the same premise and charge that Orwell did in Europe to contemporary New Orleans. Sure, absolutely. So George Orwell would probably a lesser known book than things like Animal Farm in 1984, Down and Out in Paris in London, where he was hanging out in Paris in the interwar period in 1929. And he was staying in the equivalent today of a hostel.
And he got his money stolen. And he found himself down and almost out living in Paris. And so there's Orwell, Down and Out, beneath the veneer of this bourgeois society, exposing this cultural underbelly of Paris. And to me, it was just amazing to go into those kinds of less-seen worlds.
And not coincidentally, in 1920s, New Orleans was going through its own renaissance as well. And people like Handing Way were here, and other literary critics of the time, this New Orleans as Paris of the Mississippi. And post-Gattrion in New Orleans, and you see another influx of all these creative types and bohemians and intellectuals and artists that are coming here and bringing in this new bohemia to the city of New Orleans. And I figured, how interesting would be to juxtapose what Orwell was doing in 1920 Paris, and to see what living down and out would look like here in New Orleans.
And so I had to do the same thing at Orwell. I had to find a job. He found a job as a Pungier, a dishwasher, working in a lot of those French restaurants. And so I didn't know what kind of job I would get, but I ended up getting a job at Cafe Bignet on Bourbon Street.
That's how I started. Yeah, well, actually, that brings me to something that I wanted to ask you about. During this gig at bartending, you wrote almost in this diary confessional fashion after a full day of this, or maybe it was a few, not a single critical, creative, or intellectual thought passed through my brain today. There was no time for it.
And then you go on to say that there's this false narrative in our country about what hard work is and what hard work means and what hard work brings someone. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. I mean, it kind of reminds me, Chomsky talks about this.
If you would tell an American in the 1850s, you talk about the concept of wage work, they would say, especially Republicans. That's not American. That's chattel slavery, working for a wage. And when you do it long enough, you can feel that.
And so wage labor, wage slavery, was something that was meant to be an apprenticeship. It was meant to be temporary, where you learn a trade. You learn as going to become your own craftsman. And of course, it's not to turn that it took in the United States.
And so I would talk to a lot of other workers, and I would say, man, don't you exhaust it after a shift? You need three beers. Just to wear off the shock of everything that just happened. And they're like, oh, you're new to bartending.
You get used to it. We do this day and day out almost every single day. And it gave me an appreciation for what so many New Orleans to go through, who depend on a service industry to make a living. And as we all know in this room, they do it for basically poverty wages.
What were of all the things? And you can look audience know some of the other things that you did in this 10-week period. What are the things that surprised you that actually came naturally to you? And that felt right.
And what were some of the things that were just impossible? You look at this cultural underbelly in New Orleans. And you become impressed with all the different ways that people find to make a living, all the different talents that they have, where they can really strut their stuff, spread their wings, become who they are, avoid that humdrum mainstream conventional life. And live free without a boss and be self-entrepreneurs.
You look at one character in a book, Shannon the French Ministry Poet. She sits there on French Ministry. And you have the strollers doing a marinine stroll, walking through DBA, and Boone Island, all these other places. And they stop.
They see Shannon. And they ask, oh, you can make us a poem. And she would say, pick a topic. And they'll say, pick a love or absent or something else.
And right there in the spot she'll bust out a poem, read it to them. And every all the hours I spent with her, people were always impressed at her poetry. And one of the things about doing this type of ethnographic work is the type of research that I do. You don't just observe people.
You don't just talk to people. You want to also perform how they perform. You want your body to move, how their body moves. You want to try to be as best as possible, get into their consciousness, their mind.
And so I would try to write poems. I'm not as good as Shannon or anything. And I try to do things like pantomining under the shadows of the super dome with Tim the Goldman. And you realize it's not that easy to mine, to stand there, to find a pose, to where tours will look at you, get nervous, you start blinking.
So you just become so impressed, I think, with how people are able to carve out their own type of lifestyles in this cultural underbelly. Yeah. And I mean, you also try to challenge the general public's perception of these people, also making clear that there are oftentimes that someone that you're seeing out on the street performing or busking, that was an active choice. And I think just giving some of the power back to that individual that these are people that have sometimes fallen into a situation and fallen on hard times and are down and out.
But many of these people have decided to opt out of the type of capitalist society that they find oppressive and are finding their own way by doing these things by choice. And it's just a reminder to never be thinking that we know why someone is doing what they're doing. Yeah, absolutely. I'm almost finding strange that so many people conform.
So many people go to work. So many people abide by the rules. And in sociology, we don't ask why or so many people deviant. We ask, why do so many people conform?
Most people, if they had no financial or economic loss to not going to work, they wouldn't go to work anymore. They wouldn't do it. Which tells me that most people go to work every day for fear of what's going to happen to them if they don't do it. Which means that we have an entire economic system that's based on coercing people to go to a place they don't want to go to every day, simply out of fear of some type of economic loss.
Something else you quoted about from George Orwell, that because there is this subconscious, whether we're totally aware of it every day or not, this drive to plan our time and lives around accruing health or any degree of wealth. It also then creates this strict image of those that have any degree less than us. And there's a quote here. There are two quotes from George Orwell that I'm going to read.
It's curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level. And then he later says, it is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you. That all made me want to ask you, you know, what do you think about capitalism Peter?
You like it? Right now we have this neoliberal economic system where you have a 0.1% that controls our political and economic system. Capitalism is supposed to breed things at competition originally. Now we see the absence of competition.
We see multimedia conglomerates controlling the media industry. We see corporations controlling and dictating our foreign policies. And what this has done is create, I think, a pulverizing and unprecedented sense in social inequality in this country. And maybe it's time to re-examine what type of economic system that we needed.
Maybe it's time to understand that capitalism was necessary to get us to where we are now. But perhaps we need a new type of social or economic transformation to push us into a different type of history, when that serves the people. You know, it was a Christian philosopher, Kurgagar, who argued that when you separate the empathy or emotions from the intellect, that's a sign of society's decline. If you have an empathetic society, you couldn't deny healthcare to a single human being.
You would understand that education should be free for everyone and anyone, as far as you want to go through graduate school. You'd understand that every human being deserves basic things, not only healthcare, but food, roof over their head, basic dignity. And today, I think it becomes obvious, especially when you hang around a lot of these people that are, you know, institutionally vulnerable, that this basic empathy, that the basic social contract that we have with our fellow brothers and sisters is being violated. You know, entering this world, both, you know, in some ways the mainstream service industry, getting the bartending job or working at a restaurant, and then also more of the, as you call it, the underbelly where you're doing these sideshows and freak shows and you're out on the street performing, you're squatting.
It also put a light on race relations in both worlds, in the service industry, just getting a job as a bartender, and also in these more alternative informal economies. You make a lot of observations about race when it comes to you jumping in for an experiment and getting work and seeing how other people are treated. So can you talk about that? Sure, I mean, you can see in New Orleans, and this is putting it mildly, that a lot of black folks get the short end of a stick.
I mean, people that produce the culture of the city in the fauxbergs and the surrounding areas of the city, only to watch it get sold by a billion dollar tourist industry in the French Quarter. That doesn't benefit the cultural producers. And on top of that, we all know the story now of gentrification, that disproportionately impacts a lot of renters and members of the black community in a lot of our historically black neighborhoods who are getting continuously pushed out and pushed out. And you're wondering, what's gonna happen to the city of New Orleans when those people that produce the culture, that produce the jazz, that produce the music, that produce our food when they're no longer living in their traditional eight neighborhoods, when they're pushed out from outsiders.
And so I think that this is a form of, this is just a new form of colonialism, called post-colonialism or neo-colonialism. But it's the same thing, it's the economic exploitation of a group of people for the benefit and profit of a few. And we can see that, and you can see it all over. And a lot of these musicians, they'll busk, they'll play on the streets, they'll also work in the service industry, and carve out their own living with limited institutional resources that a lot of us tend to take for granted.
It's evident in the city of New Orleans. So there's one thing that I wanted to mildly challenge you on, if that's okay. Absolutely, that's a curveball there. Reading your book, I figured you'd be up for some type of challenge.
But speaking of the poverty that we see in New Orleans, there's one night that you spend at a homeless shelter, and you go to the New Orleans Mission on a Rev. Castle Haley Boulevard. And it was informative for me because, I mean, of course, I have been there actually and done a bunch of interviews there, but I of course have never spent the night there, and you really, here it really documents exactly what happens from the moment you're waiting online until you're doing all the things you need to do to get a ticket to be able to sleep there to the hour by hour regimented schedule that takes place in the potentially 12 hours that someone might spend there. And like the system that you're talking about, that we're all existing in in this capitalist society, that inside that homeless shelter is quite oppressive in ways too, and there are a lot of things pushed on individuals that are just trying to get some food and a roof over their head in a place to sleep at night.
And so after describing, and I'm gonna ask you to describe some of that for the audience, but after describing how horrible it was to stay there for the night and all the reasons that it felt so belittling, you said, sleeping at homeless shelters is highly structured once a homeless man enters the shelter, which must be by 6 p.m., the workers completely regulate his life. One feels worthless in a homeless shelter, and worse, beholden to others who can quote, save you. There is nothing more revolting than getting help from people who fancy themselves as your saviors. In many ways we are fortunate that shelters such as these provide homeless men and women a place to eat and sleep, but I prefer a night beneath the overpass or in a squat any day.
And that felt like an intense statement to read because as you discuss this as an experiment, this is a 10 week procedure that you're embarking on and you spend one night at the homeless shelter, but it's safe to say you don't know what it's like to sleep under an overpass for three months or a year or five years where that person might really wanna take the night at the mission or as many nights at the mission as they can get. So I just wanted to push back slightly there and say, what do you think about that, about saying, well I'll take the overpass when there are people that wouldn't take the overpass. Yeah, absolutely, and that's why I think it's great that there's only shelters are there. A little bit about the experiences there.
Going back to Orwell's quote that the moment your income drops below a certain level, people feel they have the right to preach over you, and that's exactly what happened. I transformed from a professor to this person trying to get into a homeless shelter and they pack you down and you go through the different people who ask you a lot of questions, or you're a drug addict or you're this or you're that. And then finally you get to the religious part where they tell you that one of the reasons why you're like you are, that you're down, that you're out, is that have you thought about Jesus? And of course they're preaching to you and telling you you need to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, but you can say no, and you can still say it to place, but nonetheless there's a preaching because you're poor.
Somehow if I had more money, I don't need to be preached about Jesus. The moment my income drops down, now I need Jesus in my life, right? And that's, and so you feel the sense of a loss of dignity when you go in, when people preach to you, and that's kind of what I was trying to hit on. You lose your freedom and to certain extent, lose your dignity, and I think that part is important too.
Those moment shelters are important. We should have, there shouldn't be any homelessness in the city, especially when we have so many vacant housing. We have enough wealth in this country to make sure everybody has a place this day. So those things are important, but also, you're preached to.
Also, you lose status, you lose dignity, and that's not something that necessarily happens when you're squatting illegally in those houses. And that's not something you have to deal with when you're under things like the clay bone overpass, but I think it's probably not an easy choice for people that live under those conditions. You know, some of these things that we're mentioning, whether it's the mission or squatting in the band and home, or to me what was the scariest scene in the book where Peter goes out into the middle of the barotario preserve at like 3 a.m., tripping on mushrooms with two other people and swiping away at huge spiders and to do this ritual, this religious ritual, that was the most horrifying scene to me because imagine being in the middle of the barotario preserve in the middle of the night with no lights and being pretty messed up on some type of substance. It was horrifying.
But you put yourself in a bunch of dangerous situations and you have various degrees of privilege that allow that to happen. Were there any moments where you truly felt at risk or that your life was in danger? I'm not sure. I mean, sometimes staying in the vacant housing, I don't like it.
The Marina family has a thing with roaches. And so there's a lot of roaches in the vacant housing. I remember when I was a little kid, my father, we're all sitting in the living room, watching TV. Everything is fine.
All of a sudden there's a roach and here's my father screaming in Spanish. Go on, you all, go get out, Johnny! He's trying to get my mother screaming, running out of the room and the dogs are barking. And so now when I see a roach, I get these heart palpitations.
So maybe there's a roach in the vacant housing. But I remember that night in the barotario swamps that the police had followed us. And for a little while, we were kind of ducked out hiding from the police that were looking for us. And then we realized, oh, we're not really doing anything wrong.
Let's just go say hi to them. So we walked out from behind bushes or something. And we said, hey, how are you doing? We were cultists.
And we're doing an anti-gree-gree ceremony. Is that OK with you? And they were kind of taken aback. They weren't from New Orleans or anything.
They were from somewhere else. They had just gotten on the force. They were like, what? Is this weird, losing at a place?
So I thought that was kind of a nice moment there. They're like back to way slowly. And they were more scared than you were. It's more or less.
Well, speaking of your father, both your parents are Cuban immigrants. And your father was the head of the Narcotics Enforcement Division of the NOPD. He wasn't the head, but he was a commander. Narcotics is also a commander in the Vukary District, the 8th District here in New Orleans.
And so I'm used to dealing with police, I suppose. Well, when I learned that about your father, it made me wonder, you were spending tons of time with people that do lots of drugs in various degrees, various types of drugs in various ways for various reasons. You participated in that during these 10 weeks, and you did various types of drugs. And you did admit in the book to trying to sell pot to make some money and being horrible at that.
So was your father in your head as you were spending time with all different types of people you were meeting, thinking about your father interacting with those people, those same types of people in his work? And how were you reckoning with that? And also, did you talk to your father about this? And what did your father think of this whole project?
I didn't talk too much about mushrooms or anything like that. I mean, New Orleans, let's face it, that most of the police aren't concerned with middle-class kids doing kicks and giggles like mushrooms or anything like that. And so to me, I never felt threatened in any way. You think about the war on drugs, and the war on drugs was something that was done to, and sometimes you even get admissions from this from powerful political figures, like Nixon's advisor who straight-up admitted that, the war on drugs was purposely created and manufactured to undermine the black community, especially the high-to-the-civil rights movement.
It was also used to undermine progressive type of thinkers that were challenging things like the Vietnam War. And they admit it was highly successful in undermining that black community. And I think today that war on drugs is still very much intended to do that. And so it doesn't really target so much middle-class people doing mushrooms in baritaria swamps.
More targets people that work in this informal economy to oftentimes subsidize otherwise poor wages. But at the same time, a lot of the people that you got to know and befriended and worked with or found a swat were terrified of the police. Sure, I mean, some of the characters that I met were very much involved in that underground economy. Being a, when you're a sociologist, you have to make sure you maintain, you have to decide your level of participation and observation.
And I think that there's no hard standard rule on what that level of participation observation is. You kind of have to, you know, you have to find your own moral compass to get as close to the people you're trying to understand without doing what they call anthropology going native or joining them, you know. And so I stuck to my own moral compass. And so people that were involved in, I think, heavily in the underground economy, I stayed away from that.
I kept it to something simple like, all right, everybody's doing mushrooms going to the baritaria and that's about it. Although I knew some of them were involved in that, that underground illegal economy, I tended to stay away from there for ethical reasons, but also to protect them and to protect me. Mm-hmm, a lot of times, even for myself as a reporter, if I go and talk to someone, I'm always wondering, and hoping that I'm not intruding or that they're not feeling exploited from my, you know, talking to them for an hour and then telling their story. It's, there are so many ethical questions in journalism and so goes the same for what you do.
So how did you explain to the people that you were, you know, saddling up with for a while, what you were doing and how did they receive that? Sure, well, I'll start off with this. In any type of work like this, whether it's sociology or anthropology, it is exploitative. There's no sugar coding.
It is exploitative to a degree. And I think there's ways to, I don't know if compensates the right word, but there's ways to deal with that. And one of the things that I try to do is allow my research participants, their voice to come out, their experiences to come out for them to give, to give voice to their own narrative, to tell their own stories the way that they see it. And for me to not become too involved is interpreting what they're trying to say.
So in other words, you engage in research to empower the other, to give them a microphone so they can speak out. It is still exploitative, certainly, but it can also empower as well. And so as sociologists, anthropologists, we try to navigate that line and do justice to the people that we're researching and trying to understand. As far as me, I'm honest about who I am and what I'm doing.
I'm a native New Orleanian. I'm writing a book about the cultural underbelly of the city. I mean, who isn't writing a book anyway, right? Who isn't doing something creative anyway?
So they're just like, yeah, he's a guy writing a book about us, cool, let's hang out and do stuff together. And I think the more that they, and these people became friends of mine, I'm still friends with them. After this, I'm gonna go hang out with them. And so you develop friendships with people.
And I've never liked that colonial gaze, that anthropologists have done what they study the other. I think it's important to develop genuine relationships with people. I'm not some sociologist pretending that I have the clipboard and the lab coat and asking people, that's, I don't think it's a very good style. I think if you expect people to spill out their vulnerabilities to you, that you spill out their vulnerabilities to them.
And you make it as a democratic and egalitarian as possible when you do the research. Well, that reminds me of something else you wrote here. This is quoting you. You say, regardless of their studies and liberal attitudes, educated people know almost nothing about poor people, except what they read in books.
And you wrote a book. And I'm assuming that mostly educated people read the book. And so what were you trying to do that was breaking a mold of actually, in a lot of ways you're still fitting in this mold, right? Of going and writing a book for educated people to read, to hopefully learn something different about impoverished, you know, factions of the population.
So how were you trying to break that mold and what were you trying to have educated people like all of us in this room learn? Sure, I mean, you know, it's interesting that most sociologists and anthropologists, they study the poor because they don't get access to the wealthy. How do you get access to the inner circles of power? It's very difficult.
And so, you know, you picture a lot of academia with the heroic academic leaving the safe confines of the university to go into the dangerous streets of social life to find out what's going on so they can report back to, you know, the decent folk of the world, right? And in many ways, I become so aware that, you know, I'm part of that too. And so, I think it goes back to kind of finding ways to approach it in a way that people can give voice to their own lives, people can narrate their own story, that you can show the agency that people have, that they're just not these cultural dupes or that they're not these biologically predetermined people or they're not just some variables that you find in the dusty manuscripts of anthropologists or criminologists that they have a narrative that they write and rewrite and reinvent and they do it all the time, that the poor, they're so-called underclass, whether willful or not, and a lot of these were by the way, the willful underclass, the willful poor, that they are not these blank resourceless minds but people that are trying to fashion for themselves a new type of dream that goes against the state and perhaps outdated American dream that delivered for some but not for most of us. And I tried to capture that the best that I can, I tried to make them part of the research process as much as I can, and most of the time when I give these talks, they actually come here, they couldn't tonight, but they actually come here with me and they interact with the audience and answer questions and talk to, and I think that's the best way to do it.
Again, bringing, making the relationship egalitarian, breaking down boundaries between as much as possible between researcher and research and empowering the other as well to tell a different type of story that you're not gonna find in conventional academic texts. Yeah, which is definitely, I could say, what this book is like, is unlike any other book I've read. And I want you to read one, while we still have some time, I want you to read one passage here. You know, some of what I love about the book is that it's a reminder that despite these wealth disparities, we in New Orleans are constantly in contact and colliding with people that are living all the different types of experiences and with people that have nothing and with people that are extremely wealthy.
And you can't really avoid it here. You know, you can choose where to live and you can kind of surround yourself in a certain way, but if you leave the house, you're gonna see someone living in a totally different fashion and with totally separate means from what you're used to and comfortable with. And there's this one scene here that I love because I find it hilarious and also beautiful and also something I know I've seen living here. And it's a scene depicting what you call a bum bath.
So can you tell the audience what a bum bath is and then I'm gonna have you read this passage. Absolutely. We're at Checkpoint Charlie's. I've always loved Checkpoint Charlie.
I went there when I was a kid all the time and this is one of these strange places where everybody is, you know, head banging to the band and people eating hamburgers and people dancing and you can walk in with your laundry, go in the back, get your laundry done, go and eat, listen to music, have a beer, what a great way to do laundry. So I've always liked the Checkpoint Charlie's. So there was this one time I was at Checkpoint Charlie's with my friend Jimmy and he had walked into the bathroom and there was this dude, 5060s, buck naked and he's giving himself a bath from the soap and water that's on his sink and Jim looked at him and his guy buck naked looking at Jim and he's like, where's the soap, where's the goddamn soap in here? And so it was just a moment, you know, Jim came back and told me all about it.
And so if you live on the streets, you have to find ways to bathe, clean yourself and yep, that's one way. Right and just the way that people find and take something that they need and see it in a way that one would and who's been conditioned to think like, well, I can't wash myself here. And then it's kind of you challenging any notion in this book of like, well, this person can and he is and he's getting clean. So there's that, you know.
Absolutely. And most cities you couldn't do, in New York, they would call the police on you. I mean, immediately they would call the police on you. In New Orleans, man, in that way, New Orleans is a very forgiving culture, whatever eccentricities you have, whatever you got.
Yeah, it's okay. It kind of, you know, we almost developed this kind of almost blasé in different attitude in New Orleans because everybody is eccentric and all these people have their own kind of thing going on where we have so much stimulation all the time where we almost have like an indifference with all these eccentricities and peculiarities that we see all the time. Well, something else I thought was really fascinating that I hadn't totally thought about before in terms of world colliding is the way that you describe and how Orwell so aptly puts, you know, I think it's, you know, hunger, looking hungry is fatal and makes people want to kick you, which is, I'll just always have that line in my head. And yet tourists come to town and they're taking photos of people and they're putting their hands around people and they're posing with people.
And then you write about this idea of those tourists going back to their middle-class homes and developing their photos. And often these people, you know, in the streets of New Orleans being framed in the homes of people around the country and around the world, which is just so fascinating to me, you know, that there are these people that we judge and perceive in a certain way. And yet we're putting them up in our homes. What made you think of that?
Is that something that is discussed? Or, you know, when someone takes a picture, what's their conversation around that? Well, a lot of them, like, Uncle Louie was just up there. I think they arrested Uncle Louie not too long ago.
I don't know if you all know the story. But Uncle Louie, he's been doing the dog thing for, I don't know, how many years? And there's pictures of him everywhere. And when you talk to him, it's a sense of pride that how many people can make a living on the streets like I have and also be a semi-celebrity.
Tim, the Goldman reminded me of that all the time. Eric Otterium, I think there's a show, something called American Horror Story on Net. I think he was like on the opening scenes. He's in a picture there and he told me about that.
And he's like, I do shows from all over. People know who I am. I've been on a couple of reality shows. And so I think it is a sense of pride where people get to spread their wings in a way that they otherwise wouldn't be able to.
And so, yeah, they can not only make a living on the streets, but they can become somebody. And in a world where it's increasingly difficult to become somebody, here they are doing it in their own way. Yeah. Well, we have time for one more question.
And then there will be some time left for you all to ask Peter some questions. But I wanted to end with you giving us awesome advice if that's OK with you. But you say towards the end of the book, and you mentioned this earlier that whether we're aware of it or not or agree with it or not, you believe that there's this new type of colonization happening. And that unless you are in the 1% AKA a colonizer at this point, you are being colonized.
And then you charge the reader of the book to take back their cities, whether it's here in New Orleans or anywhere else in the country, and take back the city from that tiny pool of the wealthy. I think you say the greedy hands of the hyper wealthy. So how do you suppose that happens? How do you suppose this road that you see us all kind of plugging along on how do we stop that?
Well, I think one way that brings back this idea of agency that we don't have to keep with the normal scripts. We don't have to keep doing the things that we do every day. We can make different decisions. And part of the anti-arcast in me wants to say, what we need is massive structural transformation.
We need to take away a social world that depends on hierarchy, where there's big bosses on the top telling everybody else what to do. We need to take private profit away from things like health care to education, to maybe even real estate. That this is probably not the best way. Perhaps we need economic democracy.
If we can envision a political democracy, what about economic democracy within our institutions? But I think none of that will happen unless we can put empathy back into our, now go back to empathy, unless we can put empathy back into our consciousness. Because when you have empathy in your consciousness, you can't keep society going the way it is. You can't displace people.
You can't deny people health care. And I think that's the thing that's been driven out of our consciousness. And until we can return that to our own intellect, born in Kirkgaard again, I don't see us using our agency. I don't see us engaging in that type of change.
And so I think change requires structural transformation. But that's not going to happen until people have a transformation in their own consciousness and their own heart. Liberation begins here before you can externalize that, and change your actions that creates structural change. And so I think that's the first step.
Liberate your own heart first. And then think about how you can use whatever power and resources you have to become subversive yourself, to become transgressive, and to realize who side you're on and to fight for that side. You all got that? Well, Peter, thank you so much.
Really appreciated this. Thank you. Thank you. Tripod is a production of UW&O New Orleans Public Radio in collaboration with the Historic New Orleans Collection and the Mid-Lose Entrepreneurial and Studies at UNO.
Special thanks to Evan Christopher for the opening team music and to the entire tripod editorial committee, as well as Tripod's editor, Eve Abrams. Catch Tripod on air Thursday during morning edition. And again, on Mondays during all things considered. Of course, listen to the Tripod podcast.
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I'm Lynn Katherlin, and I'll try to punch you later.