Carlos Mencia Quotes
Why are we rebuilding New Orleans? Whose idea was this, Aquaman?
Mencia, Carlos. No Strings Attached. Comedy Central Records, 2006.
This egregiously insensitive statement was one of the reasons he was fired from heading the relief effort and then resigned from the government. He had been a political appointee of George W. Bush with no previous emergency management experience. He had been a lawyer and his management experience consisted of managing horse shows. While many blamed the President for the terrible appointment, the Senate confirmed Brown with not a single No vote, yet his lack of experience was known to the Senators.
Statement after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans including almost all of the public housing.
Hurricane Katrina had destroyed most of the infrastructure of New Orleans and the levees were breached.
Nagin was being aggressively questioned about why New Orleans was not rebuilt from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. He gave as an example the fact that the World Trade Center site in New York had not even started with any rehabilitation. The politics of rebuilding after a catastrophe have become very complicated regardless of the location. Many in New York found the wording “hole in the ground” insensitive as 2,000 people had died on the site. The reality is that both rebuilding efforts were severely hampered by political issues: In the case of New York, the kind of memorial that would be appropriate for “hallowed ground.” In New Orleans, the issues of rebuilding in risky area vs more protection was debated as well as the racial effect where New Orleans had been a majority Black city before but depending on how it was rebuilt might not be after.
Ned Arnel Mencia, known professionally as Carlos Mencia (and previously Ned Holness) is a Honduran-born American comedian, writer, and actor. His style of comedy is often political and involves issues of race, culture, criminal justice, and social class. He is best known as the host of the Comedy Central show Mind of Mencia which produced four seasons before being cancelled in 2008. Around this time, Mencia received several accusations of plagiarism and joke-stealing in his stand-up routines.
