CenLamar | Est. 2006

In early September, former Louisiana governor and erstwhile presidential candidate Bobby Jindal stood before the Washington Press Club and tore Donald Trump to shreds. “It’s been a lot of fun, but here’s the problem,” Jindal said. “Donald Trump is not a serious candidate. He’s a narcissist. He’s an egomaniac. The only thing he believes in is himself. I want to say what everybody is thinking about Donald Trump, but is afraid to say.” Jindal was daring to go where no other Republican candidate had gone before. He called Donald Trump “unserious,” “unstable,” “insecure,” and “weak.” He doubted Trump had ever even read…

A day before Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for President of the United States, I witnessed something I never would have imagined possible only a year ago, SMU cheering wildly for the most famous Democrat in Louisiana, James Carville. Southern Methodist University is my law school alma mater and the alma mater of practically half of my family, including my father, grandfather, and sister, and the place in which my paternal grandmother is interred. My great-grandmother on my maternal grandfather’s side, Jodie, enrolled in SMU’s very first class in 1915, only to leave after a couple of weeks. A…

Yesterday, I ascended the elevator to the fourth floor of the Louisiana State Capitol for the first time since Bob Mann and I posed for a selfie in front of the dead-color, underpainting of former Gov. Bobby Jindal. Hundreds of visitors had seen this surreal masterpiece of Jindal before, a painting that manages to be both tone-deaf and color-blind, a paradoxical yet unintentionally illuminating portrait of a man who spent much of his early adult years struggling with and writing about identity politics and the allure of acculturation. But for whatever reason, no one had thought to share this vitiligo-inspired,…