Nagin Gets Medieval
“Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it’s destroyed and put stress on this country,” Nagin, who is black, said as he and other city leaders marked Martin Luther King Day.
If we’re reckoning God’s wrath in body counts and national stress, then God is less mad at America than a lot of other countries. We’ve lost a couple thousand in Iraq and another 1200 or so as a result of Katrina. The Asian tsunami killed off 250,000. So by Ray’s noggin, God is madder at Asia than He is at America. The last time I checked, very very few Asian troops are in Iraq under false pretenses, or any pretenses at all—they’re just not in Iraq.
Let’s look at a couple more body counts, just to try and square up Ray’s logic. Whenever there’s an earthquake in Iran, they can count on losing about 25,000. Same for Turkey and Mexico and a few other countries. Heck, the Kobe quake in Japan back in the 1990s destroyed most of that city and killed 5,000. Even that’s more than we have lost in Iraq and Katrina combined.
So by Ray’s reasoning, God is madder at all those other countries than He is at America. Maybe he should stop to wonder why that might be the case. Freeing 50 million people from brutal tyranny is no small thing.
The sad fact is, Nagin has joined most of his fellow Democrats (and, to be fair, Pat Robertson) in some pre-medieval thinking. You heard it from the left right after 9-11, in the Barbara Kingslover “we had it coming” mantra that was at the time outrageous but is now lefty mainstream. The old medieval mind sought direct causes in human behavior for all maladies and disasters. For every bad thing or sickness, there must be a human failure at the root. That thinking is against all scientific thinking, and goes back a long way, to the first biblical book ever written, the Book of Job. Job had quite a few disasters befall him in succession, and his pals pointed the fickle finger of blame right back at Job. It was the first recorded instance of blaming the victim. The balance of that book, which is more than 5,000 years old and was probably written before Genesis, is intended to refute that kind of thinking and get us to, among other things, stop blaming the victim. God Himself actually weighs in on the debate, in order to smack down victim blaming as an unimpeachable witness. This was a long time before the ACLU decided to drive God from the entire planet.
So Nagin wants to blame the victim. Unfortunately for him, that can cut in a way he won’t like. Let’s say God is mad at New Orleans instead of the entire US (since, after all, Katrina didn’t destroy the entire US, just New Orleans). Maybe God is mad at the debauchery that is a regular feature of New Orleans life. Maybe God is mad at generation after generation of graft and corruption that have been a fixture of New Orleans and Louisiana politics. Maybe God is mad at the voodoo and witchcraft that permeate New Orleans’ spiritual underbelly. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe God is mad that the levee board let shoddy workmanship pass muster year after year, and that the levee board itself was nothing more than one more political football, or that New Orleans essentially had no plan to deal with a disaster that had been foreseen for decades. Maybe God destroyed New Orleans, but spared the rest of the country, because New Orleans was just too corrupt to allow to keep going.
Look, I don’t think God destroyed New Orleans because He was mad at it or the US. I think that that’s primitive thinking best left to the mullahs and the witch doctors, and should be beneath a mayor of a major American city. I think a hurricane blew in and did what hurricanes do. But if Nagin wants to go around invoking God’s name in all this, well, he might not like where that leads. God has much more reason to be mad at Ray Nagin than at the US or George Bush.
UPDATE: I missed blogging on the “chocolate city” remark. WND caught it, though.