Sour Grapes

You know something? To hell with New Orleans.

Coming as it does now, it sounds like sour grapes. I wish I’d had this all written down Friday night and Saturday morning when the idea finally coalesced. The hell with New Orleans. They’re not worth any sympathy, empathy, money or good will.

A great deal of the pre-game coverage – even in Philadelphia, home of the quote “Brotherly Love? Not on Game Day.” – said that New Orleans ought to be permitted to win. Even that folks ought to root for the Saints to win because the Big Easy needs the win. They deserve it.

Bollocks to that.

I once had some sympathy for New Orleans. They’d taken some lumps. They’d effectively lost their city. But it’s a fun town, a little bit on the edge, and ought to be resurrected if only to preserve a place that maintains an attitude that the United States need. But now? The hell with ’em. First it was the stories of the bad behaviour during Katrina. Parking lots full of school and city buses sitting unused while people desperately tried to evacuate. Then it was the wholesale looting, bowb your buddy week on a grand scale, the multitudinous horrors of the Superdome.

OK, so they took some lumps. Mistakes were made. Fair enough. Now’s your grand chance to rebuild, to do it right this time, to ensure nothing of the sort ever happens again. The money comes in by the bucketload, blue ribbon commissions are established to make the new New Orleans the best city in America. And what happens? First, the citizens re-elect the same small-minded backstabbing politicians that caused the problem. Not the same sort of people but different enough that some change might be OK. No. The exact same people. Now I read that even the most minor building code requirements designed to limit the damage in a Katrina repeat are being merrily ignored because people feel too bad to rebuild correctly. Doomed neighborhoods are being re-established with doomed houses on doomed streets because the damned doomed people are absolutely blind to the possibility that the next time won’t be any different.

So the hell with them. The next time I hope New Orleans is wiped off the face of the Earth. I hope every idiot who wouldn’t move to higher ground or reinforce their foundation or build their house a little higher drowns horribly in the muddy swirls of the Mississippi. I hope the Feds shrug at the requests for money and say, “We helped last time, and you ignored the good advice. You’re on your own this time.”

Bollocks to New Orleans. I hope they merrily rot in hell.

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