God and New Orleans

1. The Power of prayer

I was struck by the interviews with people who escaped the New Orleans flooding with their lives. Many of them said that they prayed hard and God had saved them. There was a disconnect that no reporter seemed to question, or even to notice: did these people think that their neighbours who had drowned had prayed any less hard?

2. What happened to the levees?

Hurricane Katrina has been described as an act of God - consideration of what notion of a God acts like that is beyond the ambit of today's posting. It is widely known that the US is God's Own Country (despite many other competing claims, presumably from simple minded anti-Americans); further, in their words (and Dylan's), they ' have God on their side'. This being so how could God have breached the levees and wrought so much destruction and death?

The answer is clear, only America's enemies, not their celestial champion, must have been responsible. This being so why have the US intelligence services, which were so efficient in discovering WMDs in Iraq, been so tardy in discovering the Al Qu'ida operatives who callously blew holes in the levees?

However, if I trawled the wilder reaches of the US blogsphere I fear I will discover many references to their sighting and interminable discussion of the reasons for the federal Government cover-up.