Justify My Love

Louisianans love their rogues

The Cajun King is back! Former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards appears to have picked up where he left off prior to entering federal prison in 2002.

“I really feel like I came out of prison more popular than when I went in,” Edwards said Tuesday evening at his first public appearance since being released from home incarceration.

Give the old boy his due. Edwards will be 84 on Aug. 7, but he looks great. He still has that wit and charm that helped elect him governor for an unprecedented four terms.

That’s not all, either. How many men his age can brag about going to a public function with a 32-year-old beautiful blonde on his arm who will become his bride in a matter of weeks.

The occasion was an awards dinner by the Foundation for Historical Louisiana. Edwards was there to help honor Leo Honeycutt, the author of the former governor’s only authorized biography, but he quickly stole center stage.

“I’m very, very happy to be back,” Edwards said. “I’m very pleased and flattered and honored that people have been so nice in welcoming me back. I didn’t really expect to have that much sympathy from people.”

Still media star

Edwards was quickly surrounded by TV cameras and a swarm of media personnel. The Times-Picayune of New Orleans ran a series of photographs of the former governor on its website.

A giant 84th birthday party and roast has been scheduled for Saturday, July 30, in New Orleans. Edwards had planned to hold his first news conference that afternoon. However, he didn’t miss an opportunity to say a few words Tuesday, and he received two standing ovations.

Why does he think he’s still popular?

"I think in some part because people realize that an injustice has occurred and that I treated as a man," he said. "I took it. I survived. I said that I go out, and I did."

These words are similar to comments Edwards made the days of former governor reported to prison for a term that lasted nearly nine years.

"I have done nothing to justify my presence here today," he said outside the gates of the federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas. "But I will not start ... or rail against the system. This is the system. It is a good system.It went wrong, but I will not be the first or last person to visit these doors unfairly. "

Friends were quick to tell Edwards that they wish would go for governor again.

...Enfilade and Defilade...: Justify my love

The thing I like most about Tim O'Brien books (other than some spectacular paragraphs: see below) is that he has dedicated his writing career to understanding that one year period where he fought in Vietnam. It makes me feel a bit more legitimate in my attempts to understand my own time as a peace-time grunt, in my attempts to contextualize and crystallize the experiences of myself and other Canadian grunts, past and present. Today, Maj. Kevin Barry, CO of 3PPCLI, called me, in an email to one of his officers, "a friend of the Regiment.". And I felt that I had made one more step back into the thing I ran so hard and fast from 2 decades ago. In short, I felt pleased, validated and successful. Or maybe what I'm doing is ghettoizing myself. Time will tell. Time is also what turns kittens into cats. "Insight, vision. What you remember is determined by what you see, and what you see depends on what you remember. A cycle, Doc Peret had said. A cycle that has to be broken.And that requires intense concentration on the process itself: Focus on the order of things, sorting the flow of events, to understand how one thing led to another search for the time this happened was extended in a vision of what would have happened. Where was the fulcrum? Where did he tilt due to the imagination?

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