After the Saints’ miserably agonizing Bountygate year, the football gods spared New Orleans the final indignity by not sending the archrival Atlanta Falcons to the Super Bowl. While San Francisco fans, past conference foes, are only a wee bit more welcome, the crowd for the Big Game is far more than about the opposing teams. Rather, attendance is dominated by the sports elite, along with the movers and shakers in entertainment and big business, who are part of the show come to town. They last came to the city for the 2002 game, and, though so much has happened since, they will marvel at how much remains the same. What both high rollers and cheap drunks love about New Orleans is that it’s a place where anything goes as long as nothing changes. Tourists delight that they can walk French Quarter streets carrying drinks and drop in and out of sex shows, but that every window frame and shutter, regardless of what goes on behind it, is constitutionally protected. Since they last came, no edifice has been modernized, gentrified or torn down to make way for a McMansion, as happens all the time back where they come from. Getting around town, visitors will see that plenty is changing, as evidenced by actual cranes in the sky, as the community and its economy continue to rebuild and, within reason, reinvent themselves. Also, the political scene of the city and the state is represented by a clean, energetic new cast. Yet old reputations die hard and can overshadow shiny new images. Read the full column here.
(John Maginnis publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com.)
