An almighty political mess

There were always two subjects guaranteed to get my grandfather started: politics and religion. Mention of either in his presence was guaranteed to start his face reddening, nostrils flaring and eyeballs bulging.

The problem was that, while my grandfather was an excessively political person, he thought religion was a load of bunkum. Mix the two by mistake in the same breath and you were guaranteed to see his face cloud in a frighteningly Vesuvius-like manner, followed swiftly by a verbal explosion that parted your hair.

New Orleans' mayor Ray Nagin is therefore extremely fortunate that my grandfather is long dead and buried. His comments on America's Martin Luther King Day on Monday would have had the dearly departed old man doing things that Krakatoa would never have dared.

Here it must be pointed out that the good mayor has had a stressful time of late. Hurricane Katrina turned his city into a cesspool in September, and things have not been quite the same since.

'Surely God is mad at America,' the black mayor told his mostly black audience, revealing that he has perhaps been doing a little too much thinking of late. 'He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country. Surely he doesn't approve of us being in Iraq under false pretences.'

That guaranteed a bruising one-on-one with my grandfather in the afterlife. Mr Nagin then decided he had nothing to lose: he declared that New Orleans had to be a mostly black city again because, 'it's the way God wants it to be'.

My grandfather occasionally visits me in my dreams, scowling threateningly and doing unspeakable things with religious texts before disappearing in a cloud of steam and pumice. I awake in a cold sweat, murmur something blasphemous to put his spirit at ease, then drift off again. I slept soundly on Monday night, obviously because Mr Nagin had a dream-time visitor. On Tuesday, the mayor apologised, saying his comments about God were inappropriate and he needed 'to be more sensitive and more aware' of what he was saying.