What's in a name?

I am a sucker for a used book sale. The book sale at the Rust Library is where we picked up over a dozen books (can you believe? And we were actually being conservative) this weekend. Bad Bet on the Bayou: The Rise of Gambling in Louisiana and the Fall of Governor Edwin Edwards, by Tyler Bridges, was the first book I picked up; it had me at hello:

“New Yorker correspondent A. J. Liebling called Louisiana ‘the westernmost of the Arab states’ and said the state’s politics were ‘of an intensity and complexity that are matched in my experience, only in the republic of Lebanon.’”

Wow, can’t say that I was expecting that one; I wanted to know more. If you’re from Louisiana it almost reads like a surrealistic long-lost (and often tragic) family history. Wherever you’re from it is a fascinating and almost soap opera-ish. It will make you frustrated like the following discussion about the New Orleans casino bill:

“The casino bill contained an additional feature, one that would become controversial. Louisiana’s 1974 constitution required the legislature ‘to define and suppress’ gambling. Given that, how could the legislature legalize a New Orleans casino? How could anyone argue that a casino wasn’t ‘gambling’ and thus not subject to being ‘suppressed’? A crafty pol came up with the solution: The bill would call the casino ‘gaming,’ not ‘gambling.’ By making this small change, supporters argued, the legislature didn’t have to ‘suppress’ the casino, a view eventually upheld by the Louisiana Supreme Court.”

Of course this is a very small portion of the story of the bill, but the point is that this is a worthwhile read. I highly recommend it.