Au revoir to NOLA

I'm back from our trip to New Orleans, and trying to switch my brain from beignets to blogging. Our favorite activity was the New Orleans School of Cooking with Ricardo as our chef, instructor and raconteur. Of course, we're not really going to make authentic seafood gumbo or etouffe, because we're too lazy, but we've seen it made.

We went to Preservation Hall and jazz clubs, but also enjoyed the many street musicians in the French Quarter. There's music everywhere.

We also visited the National World War II Museum, which opened in 2000 as the D-Day Museum and kept on growing. There are lots of testimonies from men and women who served in the military or on the home front, lots of artifacts, fancy visuals and a "4-D" movie, focused on the American experience in World War II.

I was startled by the old-fashioned patriotism: The museum tells the stories of the "good war" in which we were the good guys and the Axis powers were the bad guys. There is no soul searching, no "interrogating" the narrative. Japanese-Americans were interned -- but volunteered to fight and became heroes. Blacks were treated as second-class citizens -- but worked in defense plants and served bravely. Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed a lot of civilians -- but it ended the war without a bloody invasion. And so on. (My uncle was on a troop ship headed for Japan when the war ended. Instead of hitting the beaches on a second D-Day, he ended up on the beach in Honolulu.)

It's the way history was taught when I was a kid. We accentuated the positive. I kind of like it.