If Mayor Ray Nagin were as dumb as he seems, he couldn't possibly have progressed beyond third grade.
This must all be a stunt. As he prepares to exit City Hall, he is having a great laugh at our expense.
While he, his wife and assorted flunkies see the world on our dollar, he neglects no opportunity to unburden himself of some fatuous observation and make all his constituents writhe in embarrassment.
They deserve it to some extent, because they re-elected him after he repeatedly made a bozo of himself in the aftermath of Katrina. He came in for a lot of public criticism at the time and it must have bruised him, for he now appears determined to exact a terrible revenge. He has resolved to see how New Orleans likes having a doofus for a mayor.
New Orleans does not like it one bit, to judge from reaction to the latest idiocies to have escaped hizzoner's lips in an interview with the Associated Press in Cuba.
Nagin, his wife and 15 local officials flew down there for several days for the alleged purpose of studying hurricane preparedness.
New Orleans will probably be better prepared for the next hurricane anyway, since Nagin will be out of office before the season begins and it is inconceivable that his successor will not turn out to be an improvement.
The trip cost taxpayers about $2,400 a head, according to a City Hall flack, although we have learned not to trust much that comes from that quarter. Whatever it cost, it wasn't worth it, for Nagin showed in his AP interview that he learned nothing that wasn't already universally known.
Hurricane response is better organized in Cuba because the "government says, 'This is what we're doing, these are the resources we are going to deploy,' and it pretty much happens," Nagin enviously observed. Not pretty much, Mr. Mayor, but totally. In a police state and under a communist government it pays to do as you are told. But we don't cotton to tyranny here.
In the chaos after Katrina, civil rights and due process were not always meticulously observed in New Orleans, but there is no loss of freedom when hurricanes strike Cuba. There can't be because there is no freedom to start with.
Thus Nagin was indubitably correct when he observed that Cuba does "a much better job than we do of knowing their citizens at a very, very detailed level, block by block."
Revolutionary Defense Committees make sure of that. That's why so many fled the Castro regime and why Cuba ought to give any American the willies.
Nagin also suggested that Cuba didn't need to buy rice from Vietnam, but could get it "from us." Either Nagin is under the impression he is governor, or there are rice fields in Orleans Parish that nobody else knows about.
The Cuba trip was not announced in advance, which rather adds to the impression that the administration was keen to avoid public scrutiny while extracting as much fun as possible at public expense.
The administration was similarly shifty in June when the Nagins, accompanied by four other city officials, took a 10-day trip to Shanghai and Sydney. Nagin's original story was that an anonymous benefactor would pick up most of the tab. Since Nagin and his wife had already showed a taste for exotic travel at the expense of a city contractor, the identity of his latest sponsor became the topic of lively speculation.
Either that sponsor was afflicted with shyness, or never existed in the first place, for when the bills came in, taxpayers were on the hook for almost $30,000.
It is true, as a mayoral flack pointed out, that officials often take trips for purposes of economic development. But Nagin is clearly more into larks. We are asked to believe that his efforts on this occasion did bear fruit in insofar as some company somewhere - nobody would provide a name - is considering setting up shop in New Orleans. Nobody will believe it, of course. Meanwhile, according to the flack, Shanghai officials "have expressed interest in promoting New Orleans as a tourism destination."
Consider the possibility that, if they said that, they were just being polite.
It is fair enough that everyone in town should think Nagin a fool. He obviously thinks the same of us.
James Gill can be reached at jgill@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3318.
