In New Orleans, Messiah preaches Sermon on the Mount, invokes very unfortunate analogy Update: Letter from New Orleans

posted at 12:17 pm on August 27, 2007 by Bryan
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OMG!!! A Christianist who might become president!!!

Speaking to Sunday church congregants in New Orleans, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama invoked Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount days before the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

“Getting ready to talk to you today, I recall what Jesus said at the end of the Sermon on the Mount,” Obama said at New Orleans’ First Emmanuel Baptist Church. “He said, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on a rock.”

“The rains descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house. But it did not fall, because it was founded on the rock,” he continued.

That’s an interesting parable to invoke. It’s the parable of the two builders, from Matthew 7. One builder builds on a solid foundation and his house survives a storm. The other one built his house on sand, and when the storm comes, the house is destroyed.

Now, brethren, let’s apply that parable to the tragedy of New Orleans. New Orleans was built on shifting delta soil 16 feet below sea level. Its water table is so shallow that the dead are buried above ground. Without the levees, New Orleans can’t survive any storm at all. Lake Pontchartrain will flood most of it, as we saw two years ago. It’s also probably America’s most corrupt city, and in particular the levee board was run more along lines of patronage and favors than competence. The police force had ghost officers, and many of its real ones abandoned their posts after the storm. The mayor failed to execute a key component of the region’s storm strategy, leaving thousands stranded while city-owned buses sat unused, and eventually flooded. Many of them were less than a mile from the Superdome. The governor dithered and dodged and cried and she blocked the Red Cross from delivering supplies to the Dome. Lining New Orleans up with the parable, was it built on a foundation of rock, or a foundation of sand?

So is Obama invoking that parable to blame the victims for having a long history of making poor choices, from where they build to the people they select to govern them? Unlikely. But that is pretty much how the parable reads — build your life on a weak foundation and you’re inviting disaster.

Nobody but nobody is going to go to New Orleans and teach that lesson, though.

*Corrected the name of the lake. Duh on me.

Update: William found this video of Sen. Obama promising more cops, doctors, teachers, insurance and the works to get people to move back to New Orleans and rebuild.

I think it would be foolish to move back there if you’ve left, based on a) how the locals and state officials performed and b) the fact that while the state will get a new governor and with that probably better leadership, the city still has the same lousy mayor.

He finishes with a fun flourish on how our foreign policy differences should end at the water’s edge. That’s one sermon that he ought to preach at his own party first.

Update: Jim from New Orleans writes–

Immediately after Katrina, my entire company moved to Houston. So I spent a year in Houston. I finally found a job back in New Orleans, which enabled me to return. (My house had minimal damage.)

I can now see more clearly than ever that New Orleans is an extremely corrupt and backward city. They have LOST approx 5 BILLION DOLLARS of the “Road Home” money which was supposed to finance people repairing and rebuilding their homes. Much of the city looks like Katrina came yesterday, not two years ago. Mayor Nagin is clueless, as is Governor Blanco. I also put Michael Chertoff in that category, because he is the ultimate head of FEMA, which has been almost a total disaster.

The cities around New Orleans are booming and rebuilding. Even Chalmette, totally destroyed by Katrina, is making a comeback. But New Orleans is stuck in a quagmire. My wife, a local architect, tells me that when she goes to City Hall for a building permit, inspection, etc., it is in total disarray. But when she goes for the same thing to the surrounding areas outside the city limits of New Orleans, things go smoothly and quickly, and everyone is smiling.

Getting back to my Houston experience, I had hoped that enough people who evacuated to Houston and then came back, would have brought back with them some ideas about how a city could be run. But somehow, this hasn’t happened.

The one bright spot in all of this is that Katrina wiped out the totally corrupt New Orleans public school system, and it is being replaced by charter schools, which are developing the reputation of being very good schools. For example, Algiers Charter School Association (http://www.algierscharterschools.org/acsa.htm) are those public schools on the west bank of New Orleans. (That’s where my son attends.)

Actually, there are two bright spots — GO SAINTS!!! We came within a whisker of going to the Super Bowl! We WILL beat Indy on the first game of the season.

Thanks for Hot Air! Please bring back the extremely entertaining videos you used to do, such as the Cindy Sheehan fast.

As a Cowboy fan I can’t share Jim’s enthusiasm for the Saints.

Blowback

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