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New Orleans has also had a pervasive cynicism of the sort that is not identified with America. Corruption may not be any more prevalent there than in any number of other rotten boroughs around the country, for instance -- even though there are people who believe that the line at Galatoire's Restaurant, which does not take reservations from anyone, is the only aboveboard operation in all of southern Louisiana -- but the New Orleans assumption of a corrupt motive in any act can make Americans feel naive. In 1975 I asked a French Quarter character I knew what effect the Superdome would have on the city, and he said that once the land deal was done and the insurance written, "the rest is commentary."
It's possible to argue that New Orleans never completely accepted American middle-class values because it never had much of a middle class -- at least not until the expansion of the oil-company regional offices attracted hordes of white collars in the early '70s. It's possible to argue that the Protestant work ethic never caught on in New Orleans because it isn't Protestant. But it's dangerous to assume that the character of New Orleans is derived from the origins of its inhabitants. The New Orleans Mardi Gras was started by Protestant businessmen. The traditional New Orleans neighborhood guy, sometimes known as a yat -- that character who greets people with "Where y'at?" -- is likely to be of the same Irish or German descent as the Brooklyn dockworker he sometimes sounds like. The person I have known who most naturally fit into the pace of New Orleans -- a person whose normal and astonishingly effective way of keeping appointments was to stroll around the French Quarter, assuming he'd run into the appropriate person by and by -- was born and raised in Pottsville, Pa.
For whatever reason, New Orleans people tend to be more tolerant than most Americans -- particularly most Southerners -- when it comes to sins of the flesh. They not only eat different food but also give food and drink a priority unknown in the rest of the country. Years ago, the man who told me about northern Costa Rica responded to news that New Orleans had landed some new manufacturing operation -- news that would have had them dancing in the streets in Atlanta -- by expressing concern that the influx of executives could make the line for lunch at Galatoire's longer. I have a nephew who recently moved to Atlanta after several years in New Orleans, and when I asked him the difference in the two cities, he said, "That's easy. When you play - softball in a city park in Georgia, you're not allowed to drink beer. In New Orleans there are a lot of people who don't know you can play softball without drinking beer." Early on, New Orleans established an atmosphere of laissez- faire, and sometimes I think that by now there aren't enough Southern Baptists in the world to reverse that.