The Blood Drenched Hand

While I really never thought I'd talk about this here, I love football.  That's right, even professional football, the ugliest kind.  But make no mistake, it is a money game and a blood sport.  I guess, even with my relentlessly advancing years, I'm not suffering low "T" yet.  I still feel a charge every time they tee up the ball.

Nevertheless, I am on record other places as being rather stridently insistent that we pay far too much attention to such nonsense, wasting time and precious resources which should be expended on more important matters.  Case in point: last Saturday the election for one of only two At-Large City Council seats in New Orleans enjoyed a scant turnout of 16.6% of the eligible voters.  In other words, hardly anybody gives a hoot about participatory democracy anymore.  I guess it's just too quaint.  Conversely, on at least 8 Sundays a year, even more if you count the pre-season or times when the team is successful enough to earn a home stand in the playoffs, the huge Superdome Stadium is packed to capacity with citizens who have to pay to get in.  One is almost tempted to think maybe if we bring back the poll-tax more people would vote.

But here are the important points.  First of all, if anyone really wants to argue that some mystical "invisible hand" of pristinely virginal market forces somehow always allocates social resources most efficiently and efficaciously, I give you the blood drenched hand of the NFL, along with our empty voting booths and crowded Coliseums.  Secondly, the recent trashing of our city, however indirectly, by NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, in singling out our Saints organization as somehow uniquely violent, beyond the typical and long accepted norms of that gruesome blood sport, is not only hypocritical and self-serving, it is unforgivable and begs an appropriate response.

Having a living icon of the blood sport, Bill Parcells, step-in as interim head coach this year, since Goodell has benched ours, is an appropriately concussive answer.  If Parcells agrees to do it, I am signing on right now to erect a statue of him on the apron of our Superdome, assuming Mercedes will permit it. 

That's just one more galling thing about this money game blood sport.  An elitist upper crust (some say former Nazi-Fascist  collaborationist)  luxury car company has high-jacked our taxpayer half-billion dollar stadium investment for a piddling ten million dollars, just so they can affix their logo to it: something rather like the caviar of graffiti.