Hurricane Katrina, conversely, is no laughing matter. Ask Roddy White, who found out last week that even though New Orleans has exploited every iota of their 2005 disaster to better celebrate a Super Bowl win, any mention that the "Who Dat Nation" might be a little self-righteous in their usage of Katrina as a plot device is simply off-limits.
Roddy's tweet exposed a loophole that's gone previously unnoticed by most NFL fans: New Orleans is more than willing to capitalize upon Hurricane Katrina as a means of fabricating a redemption narrative for their football team. But those same opportunists squawk with incredulity when opposing fans, players and media treat that horrible disaster with the same triviality.
Before we address this question of whether we have the right to tell victims of horrific tragedy the ways in which they are and are not allowed to "capitalize upon" their misfortune, let's take a minute to look at where this so-called trivialization originates.
American football fans spent 40 years not paying very much attention to the way New Orleans had woven its underperforming football team into its highly ritualized civic and spiritual calendar. New Orleans has a way of elevating or infusing joy into things that other cities may find embarrassing or, worse, take for granted. People think this is a lazy or backward or half-assed place but one thing New Orleans does not do half-assed is love. And New Orleans always loved its football team. For a while last year, people outside of New Orleans were forced to pay some attention to that. And many of those people, as is often the case, just didn't get it.
And that's okay if they don't get it. It's not their city or their team. We do what we do. Other people do what they do. Unfortunately what happens often when people who don't get something are asked to explain that which they do not get is they make something up that they can get. The thing that made the most sense to national media covering the Saints in 2009 was the Katrina meme.
As the Saints embarked on the run that led to their championship last year, the Katrina linkage Godfrey is pronouncing himself brave enough to "call out" as "sloppy grandstanding" wasn't coming from us. It was coming from nationally based commentators and from network television crews covering the games. And it was awful. People could set their game clocks by the first Fox Sports stock footage of flooded homes. There were drinking games themed around it. It was tone deaf and phony and grating and you knew it was coming every time. But anyone with a eye on local coverage or, at the very least, a NOLA-centric Twitter feed knew how annoyed and offended most of us frequently were by it.
From our perspective, the constant flogging of the Katrina meme not only re-hashed and, in fact, trivialized our experiences here after the flood but also called the focus away from a moment in time we had invested decades of communal yearning in the hope that we'd be around to see. Sure, the flood experience was something we could glom onto that a little but it wasn't the reason for our collective mania. When media people who don't know New Orleans very well watched Saints fans dance and parade in the streets for weeks after the Superbowl (without breaking or burning anything, mind you) the best explanation that fit their understanding was that we were exhibiting some sort of post-traumatic episode. How could they understand that this is just how we are? Not everybody gets it.
After the Superbowl, Wang summarized the mood of the Saints fans more than eloquently here. Maybe Godfrey thinks it's "self-righteous" I just thought he pretty much nailed it.
But this? This wasn't "just another Super Bowl" and these Saints aren't just another Super Bowl Champion. This was epic. It was special. Hell, special doesn't even cover it. It was unique. Singular.
And Saints fans aren't the only ones who think so. No, even people who didn't have a dog in the hunt agree. Casual observers got swept up in it. Cynical sports fans softened. Even many Colts fans, with the sting of defeat still fresh, tipped their caps and, to a degree that I'm sure had to have been surprising for them, smiled right along with us and shared a little of our unparalleled joy.
These Saints were a real life Rocky fuckin' Balboa.
Why? Because it was special. Not just because the Saints won, but because of how they won. Because of who they are. Because they did it right. They did it clean. They did it convincingly. They did it with class and poise and discipline and a genuine appreciation for the profundity of what it was they were in the final stages of accomplishing. Not just for them, but for us. These guys get it.
And you didn't have to be a Saints fan and you didn't have to have followed them all season to see it, and to know that there wasn't anything phony about it. The Saints weren't shy about putting it all out there. They praised us as much as we praised them. They thanked us as much as we thanked them. They kept us front and center, and they didn't have to.
And, unlike many in the national media, these Saints clearly understand that this thing didn't just start in September of 2005. No, this thing goes much farther back than that. That they get that makes it real.
This isn't to say that many New Orleanians haven't found... I don't know... call it inspiration in their team's accomplishments that have temporally coincided with these difficult times. But why shouldn't that be okay? Saints fans certainly deserve at least some of that since A) the flood was something that happened to us B) we are all entitled to a little bit of genuine catharsis in these once-in-a-lifetime moments and C) because fuck Steven Godfrey and fuck Atlanta anyway.
Besides, if they're really upset with us for getting too much football in our Katrina or Katrina in our football, they're not even looking at the appropriate season. The way I see it, our true football related "victory" over Katrina was the fact that the joyful ritual of Saints games wasn't permanently removed from our calendar altogether. And this was a victory we realized in 2006, not 2009.
But, as is often the case, they still don't quite get it.
Update: And now SB Nation has taken the post down. Maybe they were attacked by wayward Wikileaks supporters.
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