9 out of 10! So Close! Dammit!

Scorecard of Doom

from Sploid

Did New Orleans Get All 10 Biblical Plagues?

Let's take a look and see how many of the 10 Plagues of Egypt have now hit New Orleans.

Here's a list of the horrors allegedly sent by a Hebrew god, YHWH, to punish the Egyptian government for enslaving the Israelites:

1. River turned to blood

How about the water filled not just with blood, but rotting corpses? Check.

2. Lots of frogs

According to this story, as the flood waters filled New Orleans, the city was "quiet except for the chirping of thousands of frogs." Check.

3. Lots of fleas and lice

Well, we know how awful the mosquito problem has been, but what about literal fleas and lice? Seems the Katrina shelters are filled with both! Check.

4. Lots of flies, and/or beasts

The Hebrew is a bit vague here (despite the work of Sploid's top Torah scholars). It can mean flies or some kind of nasty beast. Flooded filthy New Orleans has plenty of both. Check.

5. Something kills all the livestock

Not only has this particular plague hit hard in the Katrina Zone, but it really got busy with Hurricane Rita. Many thousands of cattle that survived the storm were then stranded by floodwaters, where they waited for rescue or died. Check.

6. Skin disease involving boils

The Centers for Disease Control said Katrina survivors were found with "staph or MRSA infections...usually manifested as skin infections, such as pimples and boils, and occur in otherwise healthy people." Check.

7. A destructive storm

Hmm, no real evidence of that, but hurtful rumors in the liberal/conservative media suggest there was some kind of destructive storm. Also, the Egyptian plague storm featured the novelty of destructive fires along with the storm itself. Check, check, check.

8. Locusts

This might be our first strikeout. Locusts? Do those things even exist, or are they one of those made-up bible creatures like angels or the Virgin Mary?

Nope, locusts are real insects...and the New Orleans locust is called a "cicada." The grotesque song of this monsterous bug is the one sound you can never escape in the destroyed city. Check.

9. Darkness

Let's see, the black clouds of Katrina were followed by a month without electricity. No lights. Sounds like darkness. Check.

10. Death of the Firstborn

This one's tough to prove. According to the Book of Exodus, YHWH showed his or her loving nature by killing thousands of male infants, children and adults - every firstbon son of the ruling Egyptians. Oh yeah, and the bastard killed all the firstborn of livestock, too. (We thought the livestock were all killed in an earlier plague.) So far, it appears that at least some of the firstborn of New Orleans survived, although there is no real proof.

Easier than trying to prove anything is to simply invent a metaphorical answer that satisfies the purposes of this investigation. Indeed, the biblical plagues themselves are known to scholars as nothing more than metaphors. The whole "Israelites enslaved by Egypt and saved by Charlton Heston" story was most likely cooked up during an actual historic situation, when at least some members of various Israelite tribes were enslaved by the Babylonians after Babylon conquered the Hebrew land in 586 AD. Much like a Bob Marley song, the idea of the Exodus story was to cheer up the doomed and inspire hopes of emancipation by concocting a legend in which the Israelites actually take revenge on their captors and return to the homeland.

In other words, all 10 biblical plagues did in fact occur in New Orleans, thanks to Katrina and a particularly hateful god who thought it would be fun to make the poor blacks suffer the worst.

It is no wonder the president speaks glowingly of the Hebrew god; both bring incredible death and destruction upon the world and especially upon their own people, and both are untouchable daemons who each sit upon a throne made from the bones of their followers.