“Do you know how to make chocolate?” So said my mayor after a speech on Martin Luther King Day a couple years back, and my city hasn’t been the same.  Why is my hometown mayor coasting? New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is so clearly done with his job, it leaves one to wonder whether he ever cared about New Orleans at all. His apparent apathy for New Orleans stems recently from three events: naming Ed Blakely as “recovery czar,” his best “Where in the World is Ray Nagin” impression and, of course, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. These are in order from “egregious” to “understandable.” The Los Angeles Times called Ed Blakely “the master of post-disaster.” He masterminded recovery efforts after the devastating California earthquake in 1989 and the late 2007 tsunami in the South Pacific. The Center for Sustainable Urban Development at the University of California is named after him. When he came to New Orleans, too many needs and too little leadership became the theme. “Mayor Ray Nagin put forth a ‘laissez-faire’ rebuilding effort in his campaign for re-election last year. The concept was to leave things alone for a year and see which neighborhoods came back and which didn’t,”  Patrik Jonsson wrote for the Christian Science Monitor in Jan. 2007. In came Blakely, and just as quickly, out went Blakely. In the mastermind’s eyes, the biggest impediment to recovery in New Orleans isn’t faulty levees, corrupt government or even the absence of President Obama. It all boils down to racism. “Everyone’s a racist,” Blakely told CalTV, the online Web news show run by students at the University of California-Berkeley. “There is a sense now in the white community — there’s blood in the water. I think unless the next mayor is very clever, it’s going to explode,  and there will be race riots in New Orleans.” This should raise a question: Did he want to do the recovery in the first place? No. “My health wasn’t good and, secondly, I had other things I wanted to do and administering a recovery is not one of them.” He would later tack on further insults about New Orleans’ city workers being “unsophisticated,” the residents “lazy” and that the city “expected someone else to do it all along, despite his confidence in making New Orleans “smarter and better” upon arrival. Whether or not this person was qualified or even willing to administer an enormous recovery, he was hired by and earned the respect and confidence of Ray Nagin, so much so that Nagin went to Sydney, Australia, (with taxpayer money) to recruit him. The New Orleans Times-Picayune recently did a profile of Nagin’s travels around the world, culminating next month with a four-day retreat in Merida, Mexico, which includes a “private tour by bus of the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza, complete with in-bus cooler, lunch and a one-hour open bar at the on-site Mayaland Hotel,” according to the Times-Picayune. The trip will also outsource jobs from Louisiana to Mexico, as the mayors of both cities agreed in September about “the possibility of moving struggling local firms’ production facilities from Louisiana to Mexico to help the companies save money.” Granted, Ray Nagin had to be mayor during the worst natural disaster in American history. But this doesn’t excuse Nagin’s inactivity in declaring a mandatory evacuation only hours before the storm hit, leaving thousands of residents to fend for themselves without dozens of city buses, later photographed underwater. If he cared, it certainly didn’t look like it. He looked like a Snickers commercial, desperately wanting to get away — which he did several times. Remember when he got swine flu in China? His trip was financed by the taxpayers. Congratulations, New Orleanians. You paid for Ray Nagin to get swine flu. It’s so good to see taxpayers’ money going to something that will help New Orleans in its recovery efforts — namely, getting Mayor Wonka out of the Chocolate City.Eric Freeman Jr. is a 22-year-old political science senior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_efreeman.—-Contact Eric Freeman Jr. at [email protected]