Now that the beer is warm, the pizza's cold, and other shit has happened, everyone has to digest what happened. And what happened was that NAWLSINS IS BACK. NAWLINS. ONCE DESTROYED, WE BACK AND WE BETTER THAN
Okay I can't even complete the charade, it's that annoying. Let's go over this, point by point. Why? Because you're reading this and I'm writing this and if you don't like it, there's the door.
1) The game sucked. It just did. Indy's defense was thwarted by this new strategy called the "slant pass," which apparently nobody ever saw before. So they were defenseless against it. I guess maybe when you're a rookie coach, you have all your NFL experience reset, and you're like a baby out there just discovering the world. So you're beaten by a really simple strategy thrown at you again and again because you're not countering it.
Everyone was predicting an offensive blowout, and we didn't really get it. I'm not quite sure how that happened. Offensive blowouts in themselves aren't interesting, but what we got was just a general feeling that everyone was wasting time out there until the fourth quarter. It was like an unremarkable regular-season game. Oh well who cares?
2) Nobody has any fucking personality. One of the fun things about sports is watching the people play, and watching the people act when they're not playing. It creates intrigue, because it shows that the people playing the game aren't robots and shit. They're actual people with personalities. Hopefully interesting personalities.
But not this time. Who's the star of this game? Well Peyton Manning yeah, but Peyton is basically Johnny Unitas reborn. He is an automaton designed solely for playing football. When he's not doing football-related activities, he's mothballed until needed again. I know he's in commercials and shit and acts kinda like a goof, but that only works because it works against his assumed personality of being kind of a drone. Like how Al Gore looks when he's joking around when everyone expects him to be a robot. Or something.
Drew Brees isn't any better. He's Mr. Republican. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that. You were a Republican once, and you wrote for our newspaper. I will never let you live that down no matter what happens. But the problem is 1) he's REALLY Republican. Like, he unironically thinks Bush did a good job. George W., not Reggie, you stupid idiot. 2) he doesn't give a shit about anything, probably. He's probably looking forward to retirement, where he plays golf or something.
So who's left? Reggie Bush has already been exposed as being mediocre. They tried to play up Pierre Garcon because he's Haitian, and the country blew up recently, but that didn't fly. I think football in general has this problem because there are so many players and they all play with masks and shit, so it's hard to identify them on the field. That's just my guess, though. It's hard to stand out when you're one of 22 people doing mostly the same shit.
If you're a Hofstra alum, and I know you are, you might be aware that New Orleans' Marques Colston was a Hofstra grad. He was in our now-defunct football program. Some people are trying to act like this is cool, as if they personally know Colston. That's a pretty stupid thing to say/do.
The week before the Super Bowl is supposed to be the time where everyone goofs off and does crazy media shit, but nothing happened this week, so there were no stories to tell or anything. Oh wait, there was one...
3) Hi, this is Ray Nagin. No, not me, the photo. That one right there, of the guy. That's Ray Nagin, I guess I should say. He used to be mayor of New Orleans before last night, when some guy named Lan Drew won or something.
Why do I bring Nagin up? He was mayor when New Orleans was nearly literally wiped off the face of the planet. Remember that? Yeah, that came up.
Hurricane Katrina should've been a wake-up call that this country can't get its shit together for anything serious. But of course when the city drowned (and you wrote about it too, wow this shit is really coming together huh?) everyone just blamed it on the black guy and tried to sweep it under the rug. Well it didn't work. Everyone saw how pathetic the response was and how disastrous it was.
So the story became, how do we fix this city? How do we help the people who were displaced? Well that was the story for a while. After a couple of months when everyone was distracted by something stupid, then people just pretended that nothing happened. It was football season, and the Saints beat the Falcons, and that meant the city was back.
But no, it wasn't "back." I mean, it was functional. Some parts of it were, that weren't ruined, they were functional. And the city could sustain a football team and stuff, and that meant the city was back to normal. Except it was missing like 300,000 people at the time, which was a significant portion of the city. But don't worry, the Saints Did A Thing and now all is well.
Well now all is REALLY well because they Won A Game. That's even better. When they were showing "the city" celebrating the victory, you'd be hard pressed to find a single black person in the crowd. Y'know, the people most affected by the hurricane? Yeah don't worry the city is fine, look the other way.
Why am I complaining about this? Because it's stupid. It's dumb and it actually hurts people because it provides an excuse to keep gutting what's left of the city and replacing it with bullshit. Not that I care what happens to New Orleans proper, but don't come up to me acting like what happened was a tragedy, and then act like nothing's wrong because a team comprised of rich, spoiled mercenaries won a game. If you showed me the Saints roster and showed me that more than 20% of it lived in New Orleans proper, I'd be really, truly shocked. These people are as New Orleans as the 2009 Yankees were New York. Hell, even less so.
I don't like being guilt tripped by people who don't give a shit, so don't take this as a sign that you should feel guilty. Just relax and read this shit. My point is that the city is still a wreck and nobody honestly gives a shit. If you lived in New Orleans, are you really supposed to be happy? Maybe if you're rich and white and lived in the older parts of the city that better withstood the hurricane, I guess it's cool.
Let's check out the kind of people who "care" about New Orleans. This was actually said about someone who actually represents the state said about the hurricane and its effects on people:
"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
Yeah, that clean-up came at the cost of thousands of lives lost and thousands more severely disrupted, if not ruined. The homeless rate in the city is higher than any other in the country, including fucktowns like Detroit. Many of the buildings affected are still in disrepair and nobody has any clue what to do with them long-term or what to do with the people who lived in them. They're just kinda in a holding pattern, hoping everyone gets bored and walks away or something. Just don't look at the hobos, okay? No, no Clancy don't reach into your fucking pocket. Just stop.
Back to Nagin for a second: When the hurricane passed and people were wondering what the hell was gonna become of the city, Nagin was like, "Don't worry. This city will be a chocolate city. We'll get everyone back and we'll be back better than ever. Now watch this drive."
I dunno about the last part, but the first part pissed off a lot of (white) people because they thought, "Chocolate city? Like only blacks are allowed?" Well no. If you fucking read about the history of New Orleans, you'd see that it was a predominantly black town. And now it's not really predominantly black, because most of the black residents were forced out. They were scattered around the country, to hellholes like Oklahoma. So you can see already that it's still tough being a black dude in this country when people think that sending you to Oklahoma, for any reason whatsoever, is "humane."
Nagin was talking about the city's identity. The city's culture has been mostly formed by blacks and creoles and other non-white peoples. It's a bit uncomfortable to admit if you're a fucking retard and care about things like that, but it's true. You know that thing New Orleans is really famous for? Jazz? Yeah, that was a black thing. Black people invented it and shit. White people actually were offended by jazz at first and considered it jiggaboo music and shit like that. It actually offended their racial sensibilities.
New Orleans was formed by its ordinary citizens. That's how cities are formed. Boston wasn't formed by a bunch of fucking WASPy shitlickers going to Red Sox and Patriots games, it was formed by ordinary colonials, and then later Irish immigrants, with a sprinkling of Italians. Not exactly the exalted members of society. New York was the same way, except throw in more Italians, more blacks, more Hispanics, more Jews and more Albanians. New York isn't just Wall Street and Times Square. If you live in either city, though, you already know that. So you'd probably be offended if someone just considered New York to be Manhattan, and everything else was irrelevant.
Actually, it'd be worse if people considered New York to only be Manhattan, and then went on to say that shit that came from Harlem, or Brooklyn or the Bronx to also be New York. Well no, that's not how metropolitan areas work. They're very complicated entities that can't be broken down into a chucklefuck stereotype, no matter how much fun we get portraying all New Yorkers as irritated Brooklynese Italians or all Bostonians are retarded Irish drunks. Although to be fair, most Bostonians are trash so it doesn't really feel so bad stereotyping them.
So everyone is trying to act like New Orleans is going through some kind of catharsis with this Super Bowl? Like all the city's white people are now happy and shit, and all the problems are solved? It doesn't take a rocket brain surgeonist to see that's not the case, but it's pretty annoying to see ad people trying to portray this as anything other than a bunch of rich people having at it at a kid's game where nobody really gives a fuck who wins. Even Peyton couldn't have been bothered by the outcome. So why should anyone else care? For fuck's sake.
Here's a really neat parallel: When 9/11 happened, and the Yankees were in the World Series, how often did we have to hear how New York NEEDED them to win as like some kind of fucking pick-me-up? How childish do you have to be to even actually say that out loud? Like my friend Joe (actual person) is supposed to feel glad his dad was vaporized, because the Yankees won? And what does that make the Diamondbacks? Like they're supposed to be al Qaeda or some shit? Are we supposed to just like the Yankees because A Bad Thing happened to New York? Even I wasn't standing for that shit.
Of course the Yankees lost and nobody said this was a tragedy for New York, even though a victory would be redemptive or some shit. I think because nobody was so depraved that they would actually consider a team losing a game to be manifestly bad for a city to endure, a city that suffered a severe terrorist attack. So why are we supposed to feel the same way for New Orleans?
I could go on but I think I've made my point. New Orleans will still be a wreck tomorrow morning, and the people affected most by Katrina will still be swept under the rug. But yeah, congrats City With Severe Problems, you won the Super Bowl. Where are you gonna go next?
OKLAHOMA!!!!!!
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