Tim Murphy

Reporter

Tim Murphy is a reporter in MoJo's DC bureau. Last summer he logged 22,000 miles while blogging about his cross-country road trip for Mother Jones. His writing has been featured in Slate and the Washington Monthly. Email him with tips and insights at tmurphy [at] motherjones [dot] com.

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This is America, Speak Cajun

—By Tim Murphy

| Tue Aug. 3, 2010 3:00 PM PDT

Lafayette, Louisiana—One of the larger themes behind this trip has always been, amorphous as it might sound, to make some sense of the map. Part of that is geographical: Do these towns with the funny names on the map really exist? Did Vermont quietly leave the Union without anyone noticing? But it's cultural, too. You develop an odd sense of what a particular region is like if you spend your entire life reading about it without ever once walking its streets and talking to its people. For most of my childhood, for instance, my mental image of Atlanta came exclusively from old photos from Civil War anthologies: black-and-white, bustling with horse-drawn carriages, and prone to periodic outbreaks of cholera. Think of it as cultural autodidacticism.

So on that note, it was kind of awesome to arrive in the Cajun country of southwest Louisiana and discover that, in the heart of a region possessed by a "This is America, Speak English!" nativism, you can go to a gas station, or a convenience store, or a diner, or anywhere else locals tend to gather, and with a little bit of luck, hear people speaking an Old World tongue passed down from their exiled Canadian ancestors and kept intact over three centuries. For lack of a better analogy, it felt a bit like Samwise Gamgee's first encounter with the elves.

Whether Cajun will surivive a fourth century is unclear; the handful of aging fluent speakers I talked to all had the same complaint: The younger generations just don't feel the need to keep the tradition alive. And that's probably true. But if Cajun fades away as a spoken dialect, it's at least sticking around a little while longer in musical form. In Lafayette, at the epicenter of Acadiana, we caught a twinbill show at a local bar featuring two popular Cajun bands, the Pine Leaf Boys and Feufollet (which translates to something like "Will-o-the-Wisp," I think). Both groups were young—twentysomethings, mostly—but the crowd covered a much wider range, all there to hear the distinctive accordion- and tambourine-flavored Old World rhythms.

Anyway, this was really just an excuse to post some cool (and pretty unique) music, so here are the Pine Leaf Boys:

And here's Feufollet, below the jump:

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Heavy Artillery and the Wisdom of Strangers

—By Tim Murphy

| Mon Aug. 2, 2010 6:10 AM PDT

Ferriday, Louisiana—Ever since we jettisoned our trebuchet somewhere outside Murfreesboro, we've been traveling a little light in the way of high-powered weaponry. If pressed, our first line of defense would probably be a bag of fried pig skins (impulse buy), but even at their most potent, those would take a few decades to kill you. We're toast, basically—as strangers we've met have been quick to point. Here's some sage advice we received—entirely unsolicited—from the two employees of a one-room diner in Natchez, the first a thirtysomething male named (I think) Marsaw, and the second a woman a few decades his senior.

"You're going through Texas!," says Marsaw. "What kinda gun you got?"

"Just our fists."

"You mean you're not carrying a gun?" Marsaw's incredulous.

"We like to think we're pretty intimidating people."

The woman laughs, which I'll just assume is her defense mechanism. We get that a lot.

"My dad always said, 'Always have a flashlight and a gun wherever you go,'" says Marsaw. "'That way if you need to stop and fight you won't get shot in the back.' You can pull out the .22. Protect yourself."

The flashlight seems kind of superfluous in that scenario, but okay.

The woman jumps in: "Well you can just use the tire iron [she makes a violent thwacking gesture]. You know, it's legal to put the tire iron in the glove compartment in Mississippi, from the trunk. You can just do that."

"Well they should get the .22, too."

"Yeah, but if they don't have a .22 they gotta use the tire iron."

"Yeah, .22 and a tire iron."

Done and done. Of course, if you buy a .22, you'll probably want a concealed-carry permit to go with it. Utah, anyone?

A Sense of Where We Are: Acadiana

—By Tim Murphy

| Fri Jul. 30, 2010 7:28 PM PDT

View Westward Expansion in a larger map

The View From My Windshield: I've Known Rivers

—By Tim Murphy

| Fri Jul. 30, 2010 5:50 PM PDT

The Mighty Mississip': (Photo: Alex Gontar). The Mighty Mississip': In Natchez, the Mississippi River is now more of ornament than lifeblood (Photo: Alex Gontar).Natchez, Mississippi—Old river towns don't age, they just fade away. Back in the glory days of the old river, when men were men and "steamboat captain" was an acceptable career choice for a 12-year-old boy, Natchez-Under-the-Hill was one of the best places in the country to get stabbed, beaten, shot, or all of the above.

Things have quieted down since then; the "riffraff of the river," as Twain called the drunken (and violent) river rats and women of the night who populated lower Natchez, left town ages ago, along with the steamboats and the Mississippi's grip on the American economy. In their absence, the city has morphed into a vacation hotspot for seventysomethings, marketing its antebellum mansions, B&Bs, and a floating riverboat casino called "The Isle of Capri." Walk just a few blocks, though, and you'll find crumbling wooden houses and businesses so thoroughly shuttered no one's even bothered to board them up.

Obama's War on Churchgoers

—By Tim Murphy

| Fri Jul. 30, 2010 5:21 PM PDT

Evolution of Species: The Neshoba County Fair is like "one big family reunion," says one attendee. That's me in the blue. (Photo: Tim Murphy) More Bros in More Places: The Neshoba County Fair is like "one big family reunion," says one attendee. That's me in the blue. (Photo: Tim Murphy)Natchez, Mississippi—I only have a few rules for this trip: never turn down a free meal; don't use the bar soap at a public shower; and if a political candidate begins her stump speech with the phrase, "What I've gotta say is not gonna be politically correct," always—always—make sure I have plenty of juice left in my Quick-Quotes Quill.

So with that in mind, I present Gail Giaramita, Constitution Party candidate for the House seat currently held by Travis Childers, a Democrat. Ms. Giaramita probably won't be the next US Represenative for Mississippi, but if she loses in the fall, it won't be because she ran away from her principles. As her campaign site puts it, "As a nurse, Gail views America as a body with cancer."

That's pretty much her stump speech, too. Here's what she told the crowd at the Neshoba County Fair last week:

"What I've gotta say is not gonna be politically correct, but it's gonna be the truth. Nothing's gonna save America, unless we turn back to Holy God," says Gail. "And when I say that, I'm talking about Jesus Christ."

"There are two reasons why God has blessed America and the first is because we stand by Israel...There's a book out there that's interesting, and it shows that when America pressures Israel, catastrophes happen." And what does that entail exactly? Two words: Hurricane Katrina (gays: you're off the hook!). Gail is running for Congress to put a stop to the nonsense. Ever since the Supreme Court outlawed school prayer, the nation has been in a precepitous decline falling deeper and deeper as Christians become relegated to second- and then third- and maybe even fourth-class citizens.

Under Obama, things may be worse than they've ever been: "I don't know if we're gonna be arrested for going to church. I don't know!"

This may have only been the second most bizaare speech I saw at the Fair, though. First place goes the Honorable Vernon Cotton, an incumbent circuit court judge who began his speech by speaking directly to his challenger, seated a few rows from the front: "You were in my dream last night. I dreamed that you were robbed at gunpoint. Killed. Dead." Just like the Lincoln-Douglas debates.