Alright, blogland, help me out here. In my last post, I offered that Ray Nagin, mayor of NO, swallowed one foot speaking from le pulpit du cocoa and shot himself in the other by retracting his statements. Now, Nagin tells a Lakeview audience that he will oppose the four-month moratorium on rebuilding as proposed by the Bring New Orleans Back commission and that people should choose to rebuild where they see fit.

“I’m a property-rights person,” Nagin said. Of a scenario with gap-toothed neighborhoods vying for city services, he said: “It’s not something I would recommend, but I’m not going to be moving forward with a four-month moratorium.”

The Problem: The man has no feet left to destroy. We need a plan, even if it isn’t linear.

Not a big fan of immediate consensus, I’m down with Nagin’s right to dissent: he’s a businessman who sees the possibility of flight from a city that puts the brakes on the passionate momentum of its citizens. Additionally, I readily perceive that most of the economically better-off and already-locally-employed residents of Lakeview (and other parts of the city) want to get back to their lives and jobs, and have decided to rebuild on the sites of their old homes.

But, a plan, even a non-linear one, is better than none. Is it wise for Lakeview residents to be left to their own devices when a large part of their neighborhood lies 5 feet or more below sea level and are as susceptible to repeated flooding as parts of eastern Orleans Parish? Who will oversee how these homes are rebuilt as per post-Katrina standards, ones that don’t exist yet? Should the city spend money to provide utilities to the jack-o-lantern, “one resident [that winds] up the only person living on a block?” How can law enforcement work efficiently in the absence of a populated grid? What about next year and the year after that?

In his latest speech, Nagin also said that “neighborhoods that come to a quick consensus on their plans for rebuilding most likely will receive the best results from the city.” Unless Nagin and the commission stick to their guns on this Consensus Towards A Planned Neighborhood concept, what I foresee is summed up in two words: Shanty Town.

Houses begin to pop up everywhere, not up to code and outside the realm of where the city now functions well. While the haves rebuild with insurance money and contractors, how do the have-nots do it? Are they going to be able to afford new and stronger homes in condemned areas? Already poorly-insured, who’s going to insure them now? Speaking of “off the grid,” there will be nothing to stop the criminal element from setting up shop as they see fit. Minus a vibrant and vigilant community atmosphere and a fully-equipped police force, crime will only prosper with hodge-podge rebuilding.

This scares the hell out of me.

My Recommendation: The city should allow communities with solid plans (raised land, raised houses, paid flood insurance) to go ahead. As for the rest of the city, wait for a well-researched map with the most recent flooding and topographic data. Swallow the hard pill and make smaller the footprint of the greater New Orleans metropolitan area. No jack-o-lanterns. No homesteading or Little House On The Bayou. No living off the grid. If that’s what a resident wants, that resident pay higher real estate taxes and a premium for utilities and police patrol. It is every human’s right to live where s/he wants, but it is not the responsibility of the city and its tax-paying citizens to cover his/her behind should disaster strike again.

“What defines a neighborhood?” [Nagin] read from the list of Lakeview residents’ questions. “You,” he answered.

Willy Nagin to Willy-Nilly Nagin in one week. What a stressful life the guy must lead. He signed up for it, though, and he makes his speeches. Yes, Ray, “you” is important, but so is a viable future. “You” cannot go through this over and over again.

What makes New Orleans different from any other city in the United States? We’ve mentioned music, food, a mixed bag of culture and heritage, poverty and wealth side by side, and an overall easygoing way of life which treads a very fine line between relaxed and apathetic. However, in the last week, on listening to objections to Nagin’s speech from various corners of the globe, I realize that New Orleans and its surrounding parishes are different in that religion is a way of life down here. It’s so in the blood of this nook of the south that we take it for granted, even if the Big Easy houses more churches than bars.

Almost everyone I have spoken with regarding the chocolate-God fiasco doesn’t mind the chocolate comment, it’s his “talking to God” that doesn’t sit well with them. How dare Nagin invoke a wrathful God who taught New Orleans a lesson; won’t the rest of the nation lump him (and our city) in with crazies like Pat Robertson?

As a friend loves to point out, “Le contexte est plus fort que le concept.” The context is stronger than the concept. Nagin was talking to a largely black, God-fearing and older group of devastated New Orleanians on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. He wanted to inspire his people and dispel their myths, not scare them even more than they already are. If he were to come before this group and talk about science and socioeconomics, his audience would have gone away only with the assurance that the city was trying to kick them out.

By using the local vernacular and by invoking a god in whom they have unwavering faith, his goal was to ensure non-whitification and to point out the deficiencies of a large part of the black community, in their ecclesiastical language: “We’re not taking care of ourselves. We’re not taking care of our women. And we’re not taking care of our children when you have a community where 70 percent of its children are being born to one parent.”

[Why did no one stand up and applaud this part of his speech? Only there to take him down, huh?]

Instead, if Nagin had said, “Well, you see, given the level to which large portions of our parish are below sea level and our part of the country is susceptible to economic instability and hurricanes, we cannot definitively assess the business impact of repopulating a city to its previous proportion with the assurance of housing and jobs.” No, that would not have gone far. And would not have given his audience a lot to think about in terms of personal responsibility. From his flourish-addled speech, it seems to me that Nagin does not want to rebuild solely for the pre-K populace but for a racially-mixed and more aware set of people, be they black or white.

To New Orleans, I say this: What are you trying to rebuild? If you want that big town, with its diverse social characteristics, you cannot forget and underestimate its revivalist roots and branches. To you, the mayor should not use words that “offend,” yet this is the lingo of a large part of the city. You can’t have it both ways. Old-time culture and progress can co-exist, but only when its practitioners, in this case New Orleanians, understand the myriad different contexts that make up our strange city and absorb the concepts accordingly. There is no linear solution for New Orleans.

To everyone else, I say this: The object of this post is not to excuse Nagin’s words. All I ask is that America and the world, again, appreciate the context in which any concept is utilized. I just cannot believe that most would summarily conflate Nagin’s God references with those of fundamentalist loonies.

In reaching out to his people with the realities and responsibilities that face them, Nagin swallowed his foot in the eyes of the rest of America. Worse, he shot himself in the other by apologizing for his speech, because he didn’t want his city to suffer a public relations nightmare.

What’s done is done.

Can we go back to rebuilding now? I’m glad to see that nola.com has reached beyond this drama with only a single mention of it on the front page. There is a lesson to be learned from all of this: even heart-shredding and brain-wracking disasters cannot cure the human ability to misprioritize.

A part of me doesn’t want to promote this as there are far more important issues facing New Orleans besides Nagin’s misguided dessert references, but the graphic (and message) involved is too priceless to pass up:

Now, will everyone stop talking about chocolate before I’m forced to make a Chocolate Bar run?

More: I’m watching the news on the local NBC affiliate and a Katrina evacuee, interviewed on Nagin’s cocoa-licious speech and his recent apology, just said, “I don’t care who’s in New Orleans right now. I don’t care if it’s chocolate right now – it should be white and black, you know, it should be Oreo …” Ok, you’re offended but have now distilled it down from generic chocolate to a Nabisco product. How? Wha …? Wh..? Nevermind.

This is it. That’s all I’m going to say about this.

Close friend and VatulBlog reader, Joel, remarks: “Your mayor claims that soon New Orleans will be ‘a chocolate city’ again. Don’t get me wrong; that sounds delicious, but from a political standpoint, should he really be spouting so graphically and metaphorically to the national press, representing humans with flavors? Seems a bit odd to me.”

Some thoughts:

a) Well, I did ask yesterday if that makes me a certain mixture of chocolate, coffee and cream,

b) So, is that all non-white people bring to a city – color?,

c) Technically, white, milk and dark are three different varieties of chocolate, and he didn’t specify which,

d) This is the man who told the federal government to “get off your asses” after Katrina hit and, right before Ivan last year, advised us to keep our Benjamins handy just in case we needed to “conduct business” (I’m voting for him based on those statements alone)

e) he suffers from PTPRWEDIDSD – Post Traumatic, Pre Reelection, What Else Do I Do Stress Disorder, and

f) more than likely, he is extremely busy and someone else wrote the speech for him (which explains the “odd” aspect of it).

For the record, I have NO IDEA where the God Smote New Orleans stuff came from – still thinking about the angle or pathology (or Americans’ use of the Old Testament when convenient) on that one.

As for “chocolate,” New Orleans is a predominantly black city and this was his attempt to reach out to the majority of his displaced populace. Although I understand that a word with which he chose to do it irritates some people of color, the mayor was just trying to keep it real while under a lot of stress. I’m more interested in exploring his Sodom & Gomorrah reference, which, if you look closely, isn’t really right-wingnutty but more Christian leftish.

The bottom line is that it is still too early for lots of New Orleanians residents to make firm decisions about their return, and to tell what kind of a city this is going to be in six months, two years or a decade. It is still way too early for Nagin to declare his still-evacuated citizens a lost cause or to say they’re coming back. Even if a diaspora, they are still his people and still need some sort of guidance. It is his job to keep them from feeling alienated.

Let’s make a deal – I’ll ask Nagin to stop referring to his people as foodstuff if the rest of the nation stops calling us a “veritable gumbo” of this, that or the other.

If Nagin’s going bananas, we must consider replacing him, but I am not one for changing my plate midmeal. On the other hand, if he was simply abusing metaphors, the man needs a new speechwriter, and not tomatoes, thrown at him.

There’s nothing wrong with food references if used clearly, you see.

Speaking of Benjamins, Happy 300th Birthday, Mr. Franklin!