Lambert Timothy James - Cast Away - For These Reasons

Once the sun goes down, it is advisable for any caring soul to avoid venturing into the vicinity of the city center. I have found myself downtown late at night, waiting for the Greyhound bus to take me back to Tampa. I swear criminality is not what people have to worry about. The upsurge of homeless laying their boxes down, trying to find shelter around the imposing local Catholic Church building and the central park is heartbreaking. Adding to that humiliation, the homeless are constantly being harassed by the police on patrol, enforcing what I call a zero-tolerance of the poor decree passed by the local council. As a tactic to get rid of the poor, once arrested and released, they are given a Greyhound ticket out of Saint Petersburg to any destination of their choice, which is usually Tampa. I do think it is one of the most creative and diabolic measures taken with the goal of safeguarding the city's quixotic image.

When somebody says quixotic image, for some reason my mind centers on the city of Burma, officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. My enchanting depiction was, for a long time, the result of a leaked video of the General Than Shwe's 2daughter wedding in 2006. There were strings of diamonds and tons of champagne bottles on display. It was estimated that she received tens of millions of dollars' worth of gifts, including luxury cars and houses. I can remember being so envious of the groom, watching him pouring champagne over a cascade of glasses and helping his bride slice into a huge wedding cake. At the news of Aung San Suu Kyi being released from house arrest in November 2010, I took a second look at the video and did some research. In the video, the smiling guests, wrapped in the finest clothing and expensive jewels, were all part of a brutal and sanguinary military leadership who had an ironclad grip on the country. This opulent party was happening while Burma's level of poverty and military repression continued to rise.

The military junta has since then gone through a strategic renovation. The surgical changes are noticeable; these tigers have adopted formal civilian outfits. Their sincerity is questionable. The ruling elite members are still the same. I do not see them relinquishing control over the Burmese military forces, which is unmistakably the source of their control over the country and its vast resources. So far, the offensive charm appears to be working. Yangon International Airport is busy yet again rolling out a red carpet on the step of world power brokers and their squads of financial crooks' jets. No doubt in my mind that parties will go on for some time again, although in secret.

The event got me wondering, what has happened to the most exhilarating party in the United States that was no secret by any means? In 2003, getting "fresh off of the boat" as many of my American compadres would label the Caribbean and African newcomer like myself, I came across a brochure of "Mardi Gras" events in New Orleans, Louisiana, jam-packed with images of young folks partying and with delightful praises of bayou gastronomy. A couple of friends and I could not wait to cash in a bunch of coupons stacked in the booklet. Needless to say, we drove down to the "Big Easy" as fast and drunk as we could. Miraculously, we did not end up on some chain-gang in Mississippi. The food and the hospitality on Bourbon Street were outstanding. Only few party musketeers could boast that every one of their notorious Bourbon Street rituals was a triumph. Let's just say that each time we left the hotel with hundreds of beads, following the festivities' sacrosanct tradition, we stumbled back to our room with empty hands... Wink, wink!

On our way back to Florida, with our minds still floating up in the sky, we missed the ramp to the Hale Boggs Bridge over the Mississippi River. Anyone who has been to New Orleans knows that the bridge is the only way of getting out of the city. There was no need to panic until we realized why the hotel concierge instructions were to avoid, at any cost, venturing outside the touristic parameter, which is roughly around the French Quarter. Oh, Lord! For the first time on our sojourn in New Orleans, the décor was of concern. We all sobered up fast. It is not far-fetched to say, if the police had tried to pull us over, they would have had to follow us back to Bourbon Street. We were not about to make any stop in the middle of that jungle.

To get an idea of our ragtag group, we were raised watching the black family in the Cosby show series, scenes of New York City in Eddie Murphy's comedy hit "Coming to America" was too surreal to be true for us. In other words, we were from predominantly affluent families that got more than a proper share of wealth in the "Ã l'Africaine" Capitalism system. Even though we had a considerable number of black American acquaintances back in Tallahassee, Florida, which is a classic college town and a serene state capital, those Negroes in N'awlins and the surrounding projects scared the hell out of all of us! We should have known that something was fishy about this city. New Orleans produced one of the most prolific rap groups that we loved at the time, and the "Hot Boyz" is one of them. Their creative rap prose, raw style, and catchphrases cannot naturally come from a place of joy and kumbaya; instead, it is a sanctuary of pain and desperation. If that red flag was not visible enough, the group's initial low budget music videos gave a tour of their world, a cornucopia of poor dirt-ass people in front of poorly maintained public housing blocks.

Sadly, these days, some opt to ignore or chose to forget the fact that way before the devastating hurricane Katrina 3swept through the city, New Orleans had some of the shittiest places in the United States comparable to parts of third world countries I have traveled to. As my friends and I came to find out, those shameful pockets of the "Big Easy" were superbly tucked away, out of the view of the drunken college students and other tourists. Hurricane Katrina only flushed out the city's dirty secret, and the entire United States pretended to be surprised. Really, what else do you expect when the city sanitary sewers overflow? And now that the chocolate city, as it was called by the New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (sentenced ten years in prison for bribery, money laundering, and other corruption), is rebuilding, it probably is praying for its problems to never come back, wishing it could declare a section of its former persona non-grata residents.

"Persona non-grata" might not be stated in the city of New Orleans' Christmas wish list; but it has been Teodoro Nguema Obiang, the son of Equatorial Guinea President, status in France and most civilized nations. France got exasperated by the Negro Prince's opulence, and in 2012, it was reported that the French police suddenly decided to act on a past lawsuit brought by different activist organizations and took away a couple of Obiang Jr.'s toys. The subsequent viewing of all the baubles pictured in French magazines surpassed my imagined folie de grandeur, which included eleven luxury cars (two Bugatti Veyrons, a Maybach, an Aston Martin, a Ferrari Enzo, a Ferrari 599 GTO, a Rolls-Royce Phantom, and a Maserati MC12), some bottles of Château Pétrus (among the world's most expensive wines), and a 3.7 million dollars clock.

Not one to be outdone by the French, the Americans attempted to put a bigger dent in Obiang Jr.'s fortune. The public got blitzed with the news that the United States Justice Department filed a 70 million dollars forfeiture action against Obiang Jr. And voilà , another list that included a Gulfstream jet, Michael Jackson's infamous gloves, and a villa in Malibu, California. Wait a minute! The kid was still allowed to parade around vast amounts of money in the United States after the scandal that forced the Riggs Bank to shut down? Somehow, the United States Justice Department never troubled the bank's largest single depositor at the time, with over 700 million dollars. What is there to make of all of this juicy story? By no stretch of the imagination, the very young Teodoro Nguema Obiang has presumably amassed all of that uncovered fortune while earning a salary of less than 100,000 dollars per year as Equatorial Guinea's minister of Agriculture and Forestry.