I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans, I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

For those of you with an adverse reaction to football discussion, please skip down to the next paragraph, in which we use sports as a vehicle to make a broader comment on society. Everybody else, today's game can't help but make me a bit sad, not so much because I hate the Chicago Bears, but because it is bad from the perspective of being a general football fan and an American. As to the first, I am a New York Giants fan, and can't really claim a preference either way between Chicago and New Orleans. We lost to both this season by substantial margins, but don't have a huge history in my viewing lifetime to consider either much of a direct rival. Having seen just about every Bears game this season, on the other hand, I can tell you they are one of the ugliest teams in the NFL to watch, whereas New Orleans can be one of the best. The Bears have an awful quarterback who occasionally manages to hit his speed receiver, Bernard Berrian, for a 40-yard pass, but generally misses everyone else most of the time. Most of their scoring comes directly from the defense, the best in the league at forcing opposing fumbles. Watching their games involves long periods of utter boredom punctuated by turnovers resulting in scores, followed by more boredom. New Orleans had an exciting attack, mixing running and passing, and were actually fun to watch. This may sound like a strange complaint coming from a Giants fan, as our great teams were known for superb defense and capable offense, but the comparison doesn't hold up. Our Super Bowl winning defenses were sack monsters, not fumble inducers, leading to highlight film hits (and occasional ends to careers in a famous case). Moreover, Phil Simms may not have been all that exciting, but he was an accurate passer capable of driving the offense when necessary, famously connecting on 22 of 25 passes to set the Super Bowl standard for accuracy in 1987. The Bears' only forerunner in all of Super Bowl history, combining a pretty poor offense with an insane turnover-oriented defense, are the Baltimore Ravens of Super Bowl XXXV, who beat my Giants. God, I hated the Ravens then (still do, in fact), and wish I didn't have to watch their onfield doppelgängers play in two weeks.

The more important story for this Super Bowl, however, is that it represents a lost opportunity to bring New Orleans back to the forefront of America's attention, breaking through our cultural ADHD. If Bush is the worst president we've ever had, reason #1 is starting a preventive war of choice against a vastly outmanned opponent and still managing to lose, all while we forgot to finish yet another war that was extremely winnable at first but is growing less so as our troops our sucked away, in both cases failing utterly at providing the humanitarian assistance that was our clear moral obligation. Reason #2, however, is that Bush managed, through his own inaction and the inaction of his incompetent cronies, to lose an entire American city!?! Dkon can comment more on the state of things there, but suffice it to say the Big Easy will never be the same, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, suffered because of the direct incompetence of our government. How this isn't a bigger issue still, less than a year and a half later, mystifies me. New Orleans appearing in the Super Bowl wouldn't have directly solved any of the city's problems, but it would have focused the media spotlight back on the city where it belongs. Admittedly, we would have heard a nearly endless succession of heartwarming pieces about the gritty families who have returned and the troubles they've overcome, but we would have also heard the occasional bit on the greatest diaspora America has seen since we decided to move most of our Native American tribes two time zones to the West. Thank God John Edwards seems to have noticed we as a nation still have a huge, completely morally unacceptable problem here, and hopefully the media will wake up again sometime before the election to ask if our candidates plan to do jack to improve the situation there. The Saints in the Super Bowl would have provided an immediate opportunity to start the process, but unfortunately the Monsters of the Midway were too strong on defense. Look for either the Pats or Colts (it's currently 7-zip Pats, eight minutes into the game) to make them pay for their disservice to America and the displaced residents of what was once The City that Care Forgot.