We Are All Omar the Tiger, or, the Louisiana GOP is Decadent and Depraved

12 November 2024

Over the last several months, Louisiana’s governor, Jeff Landry (R), has spent a lot of time advocating for the return of LSU’s real life mascot tiger, Mike, at LSU’s football games in “Death Valley”. The tiger originally stopped being forced to attend games in 2015, due to concerns for the animal’s welfare, as Mike had fallen ill. It is cruel enough to confine an apex predator like a tiger to a cage for long periods of time, but the addition of chemical sedation, deafening noise from the stadium audience, and sometimes even jet flyovers, adds a new level of depravity to the spectacle.

Landry, in his crusade to sell the public on bringing Mike back to the games, even had his health secretary, Ralph Abraham, otherwise known for being a big time opioid pusher during the height of opioid overdose deaths in Louisiana, moonlight as a veterinarian to green light Mike for appearances at the games.

Landry’s tiger wish was finally granted last weekend, but not with Mike. Instead, a rent-a-tiger from Florida named after general Omar Bradley was brought in to the LSU game against Alabama in Baton Rouge. LSU was subsequently thrashed, 42-13, in front of the poor tiger that served as the team’s stand-in mascot. What did Landry have to say? “Our tiger, our live tiger, unfortunately, disappointingly, was the only tiger who showed up Saturday.”

A poll from the Shreveport Bossier-Advocate showed that an overwhelming majority, 90% to 10%, thought the live tiger’s presence was a bad idea. These results, however, came from after the game. Louisiana’s population is nothing if not superstitious, and this goes double for the simple-minded crackers in the heart of tiger country. The tiger is belived to have cursed the team, and it was Landry’s hubris that unleashed the curse.

The tiger debacle, and in particular Landry’s smug, self-satisfied, statement after the team’s crushing defeat, is a great example of Landry’s politics of reactionary nostalgia and the overarching conservative project of political intervention into our everyday lives. Landry’s intervention into the internal affairs of LSU’s athletics department in order to have a live tiger appear at some football games shows just how mundane and whim-based this intervention can be. If Landry is willing to throw his weight around in order to abuse a tiger, what other interventions into our everyday lives are he and his party-line sycophants willing to make?

The LSU fans don’t blame the tiger. They place the blame squarely on Landry and the political circus he has created around the team. This sympathy for the tiger may reflect the dawning realization among Louisianans that we are in the same predicament as Omar: trapped and subject to the most venal caprices of capitalists and reactionary politicians who, above all else, are trying to make a buck off of us. We are all Omar Bradley the Tiger, with those in authority over us being beyond our control, feeding us sedatives while they take actions that negatively impact our health and our livelihoods.

It’s possible that the tiger debacle was an attempt to create cover for another travesty going on in Baton Rouge this year, namely a special legislative session seeking to overhaul the state’s tax system. The Louisiana GOP behind Landry is advocating for a new regressive tax code, reducing the income tax for the highest earners while increasing and imposing new sales taxes which disproprotionately burden Louisiana’s working class and petty bourgeois professionals, while maintaining handouts to big businesses like Louisiana’s ITEP tax subsidies. Louisiana’s capitalist ruling class wants to shift the burden of funding its own instrument of political dictatorship onto the working class, their beast of burden. Never has the bourgeois class dictatorship been more naked.

Landry and the GOP, however, are paper tigers. He was elected with the votes of just over half of 36% of voters who bothered to turnout for his election. If the Louisiana working class organized consciously for itself, it would be able to crush the reactionaries in both major parties. The Louisiana GOP’s policy of working class immiseration may be what finally snaps Louisiana’s workers out of their sedation. If it isn’t, we deserve what we’re going to get.