NEW ORLEANS – It could have been a beautiful thing. Amidst Ray Nagin’s poignant speech, yesterday, there was much buzz about which direction the mayor of New Orleans would lead his rebuilding city. On one horizon, there was the peace and harmony of a multicultural city by the Gulf, rebuilding itself into a beacon for other cities to aspire to. On the other horizon was the unrest and turmoil of abandoning the levees and the debauchery and running to higher ground to start over. Nagin decided to go a different direction altogether.
Ray Nagin spoke of how God was showing his displeasure with the black man when he destroyed New Orleans last year. He then went on to say that New Orleans could, would, and should once again become a “Chocolate Town”. Right-wing talk radio jumped all over it, of course, and tried to brand Nagin as an obvious racist, wanting to hang him from the highest tree to prove that black men in power were inevitably racist.
After a bit of clarification, however, it is apparent that Nagin wants to turn New Orleans into, literally, a town made of chocolate.
In his vision, New Orleans would be rebuilt to exact scale, from Canal Street to Decatur, from Bourbon to Magazine, out of chocolate.
Logistically a nightmare, Nagin promises that a city made of chocolate would set the standard for any city touched by disaster to rebuild itself by. Instead of paying the billions of dollars required each time an at-risk city is destroyed to envision it as a bigger and better city, just rebuild its walls and roads with rich and creamy chocolate.
While the city council is reeling at the proposition, major chocolate manufacturers such as Hershey, Nestle, and Mars Company are jumping at the chance to outbid each other for the contract.
Citizens in Hershey, PA, however, are calling Ray Nagin a numbskull, as the original “Chocolate Town” has been trying to figure out a way to pave their streets in cocoa beans for decades and have yet to.
Atlantans also have a problem with it, as they were the first figurative “Chocolate Town”, with Martin Luther King making so many of his memorable speeches there and their election of a black mayor in the 1970s.
Nagin, however, promises that this is possible, because it came to him in a dream presented to him by God, with Gabriel, the Archangel telling Nagin that New Orleans was destroyed exactly for this purpose.
LushForLife.com wishes to express its firm support for Nagin in his quest, as we think it’d be really neat to drink away our sorrows in the seedy French Quarter and then get fat and nasty by curing our buzz munchies by gnawing on the side of Rick’s Cabaret at four-thirty in the morning.
A fundraiser sponsored by the bidding chocolate companies will begin next week in Metairie.
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