If I Were Rex, I would be the most honored mortal in all of New Orleans on this coming Mardi Gras Day. For Rex has reigned as King of Carnival since he first appeared in 1872. And now seven generations of New Orleanians, let alone many millions of visitors from all over the world, have hailed His Majesty, and reveled in his royal colors-purple, green, and gold.

If I Were Rex, I would proudly have my own song, "If I Ever Cease to Love," a hit tune of the early 1870s from a musical comedy named Bluebird. They'd play it when I entered my Grand Ball and after the meeting of the Rex and Comus courts on Mardi Gras night at the culmination of Carnival season.

And If I Were Rex, my face would be engraved on more than 600,00 doubloons, continuing a tradition begun in 1960.

If I Were Rex--oh, come on; let's get serious. It would be either an incredible miscalculation of unimaginable proportions or simply a silly dream of the night, inspired by the excitement of the season.

Those of you who really know me also know that I greet this annual fortnight of frivolity and lunacy with an appreciable degree of ambivalence. As long, I suppose, as one doesn't take it too seriously, Mardi Gras will provide a great deal of fun-especially for the children who line the parade routes, sitting as royalty on their thrones at the top of tall ladders, or perched upon the soon-to-be very sore necks of their elders.

Errol Laborde, who presumably knows, maintains that among the original incentives for the founders of our city's Mardi Gras observance was a desire to provide a much needed distraction from the tension and misery occasioned by Reconstruction. So the plan was to add some colorful fun and to draw tourists back to the city with a new parade. Rex was founded as a daytime parade to augment the nighttime celebrations of Twelfth Night Revelers and Comus.

History's first and only Jewish Rex, cotton broker Lewis Salomon, in a 1921 interview with The Times-Picayune on the 50^th anniversary of Rex, candidly admitted:

Carnival was being talked about, when the war was over, as a sort of tonic for the wearied South.

Perhaps, following 9-11, Mardi Gras is just the ticket this year for a "wearied" nation and city, as we determine to not only stubbornly defeat the tyrants and spoilers of this world, but also to cherish and celebrate our own local joys and regional delights.

If I Were Rex this year, I'd want to find a way of somehow communicating an important idea to my loyal subjects. Emerson insisted that "Life is a festival only to the wise." So I'd want to remind them that, in good times or in bad, nobody ever really finds life worth living. One has to make it worth living. Or put another way, don't expect that life's carnival parade of joy will effortlessly make its way right to your door!

You've got to get up and go find it. You'll have to wait for it to arrive and, of course, you've also got to find a place to park!
 
 

If, as Emerson says, "Life is a festival only to the wise," then there's another thing beyond plastic beads and cheap doubloons I'd better share with my subjects. If I Were Rex, I'd want to tell them that nothing is so important in life than to find one's self used by a great idea. Every one of us can be used by a great idea, even we who are not geniuses. Imagine if every time God wanted to do great things, He had to make perfect persons? Well, the world would be pretty hopeless for there is always a critical shortage of "perfect persons."

The great preacher, Harry Emerson Fosdick, used to insist:

Generation after generation, men (and women) come and go. They pass. But ideas do not; they abide. On each new life when it arrives they knock and say, "Let me use you in your time!" The ultimate meaning of our lives, therefore, lies in the ideas which we allow to use us.

Plainly put, If I Were Rex, I'd want to make it clear that there are some ideas I should never want to use me. I suppose old Rex would find it impossible on Mardi Gras Day to urge his subjects to deprecate drunkenness and the foolish supposition that real problems and perplexities can ever be avoided by traveling the road of drug or alcohol abuse.

And, If I Were Rex, here's another unworthy idea by which I'd never want to steer my life's star: the nation of exclusivity! Social snobbery and racial or religious bigotry and homophobia, these are well-worn, ancient curses on humankind, as old as the Tower of Babel, and still quite vicious and full of sufficient venom to account for the fall of New York's Twin Towers. Exclusivity- human arrogance-is an idea I should hate to have use me and mine, or you and yours.

And finally, If I Were Rex, I should want to impress my beloved subjects with an awareness that for all of the evil and harshness in our world, its inequities, humiliations, and pain, life continues to be rich in meaning and opportunities for grandeur. Cynicism is one of humankind's oldest enemies, and we betray our humanity when we allow this fraudulent fiend to use us and to take us captive.

Yes, If I Were Rex, I could serve no higher goal and service to those who applaud me as their sovereign for a day than to underscore in unconditional clarity that as we breathe, so we are being used by our ideas. And all any one of us can do in the course of our lives is to choose which ones shall use us.

If I Were Rex, and thought and behaved as such, I dare say no throngs of crowds would line my way. Why, I'd be the loneliest king of any carnival. They'd throw back my beads in contempt at my float and proclaim me the "anti-Rex"! But no matter; it was all a dream anyway, don't forget!

This day on which the real Rex parades and upon which his reign is counted, lasts only one day a year, and no harm is done to pass it by in revelry and excess.

But suppose, mind you, only for the purpose of discussion, suppose that we could be persuaded to summon the faith and hope and discipline to transform ourselves into gentler, more humble and humane souls, even despite our hurts and hardships, and hence, to become, each one of us, worthy ourselves to be crowned the kings and queens of that worthiest realm wherein live such blessed ones for whom, as Emerson said, life itself becomes every day a festival. Would that that could be so!