225BatonRouge.com

Alabama stole our mojo.

Mojo—you know, that intangible knack for prevailing, that inexplicable tendency for wonderful things to happen in the face of overwhelming odds.

Like when Kathy Lee Gifford retired from Regis. Oh, sweet mojo.

Closer to home, state regulators possessed mojo when they publicly busted Entergy for whisking self-important men in suits back and forth between New Orleans and Baton Rouge in a jet paid for by utility customers.

Some other state officials had mojo a couple years ago when they hired a Michigan highway builder to widen I-10 and I-12. The Angelo Iafrate Co. guys finished the job under budget and ahead of schedule, something no long-time Louisiana resident believed even possible under the universal laws of physics.

But we didn’t need to understand because we had our mojo working.

Traffic eased up. We got Whole Foods. Downtown came back to life.

Even when hurricanes Katrina and Rita blasted Louisiana, they bracketed Baton Rouge, leaving us high and dry. And suddenly we found ourselves the biggest city in Louisiana.

Boom. Total mojofication.

But somehow we gave our mojo away. The formal transfer, I am now convinced, took place Jan. 3. That’s the day Tricky Nick Saban took the head coach’s job at Alabama, scooping up our mojo like a fumbled football.

Then, in May, Alabama’s state officials hit the extra point, convincing ThyssenKrupp AG to build, if I understood the newspaper accounts correctly, the largest private factory in the history of human endeavor, including the Great Pyramids.

How could Louisiana’s garish, $1.6 billion seduction fail? The Entergy light bill would have been too high here. Oh, the sting of the counter-mojo.

There were ample warning tremors, but they went undetected, like when Mercedes-Benz opened a plant in Tuscaloosa in the mid-1990s. In Shreveport General Motors builds pickup trucks; in Alabama, Mercedes builds driving machines.

Mojo.

So now we’ve got Alabama, riding high, packing 92,000 fans into McKethan Stadium for the spring scrimmage—a trumped-up practice, for pete’s sake. They can feel the mojo.

Our joie de vivre once sustained our reputation nationally, like life support. When the formerly funny comedian turned embittered conservative Dennis Miller wanted to mock the deep south, he targeted Alabama, not Louisiana.

“Alabama!” Miller intoned. “You talk about Darwin’s waiting room—there are guys in Alabama who are their own fathers.”

Oh, snap.

But now that we’ve squandered our mojo, we might ask a new question.

Who’s our daddy now?