Bruce the Blog

Sure, Peyton Manning’s a legend in his own time. Shades of Joe Montana and John Elway the way he can close out games, gets cooler the hotter the pressure. Dares you to stop him. Picks apart defenses with the ease and clarity of a speed-reading Rhodes Scholar deciphering Dr. Seuss.

But Peyton’s already won a Stupor Bowl (most of them are; the rare-in-a-while exception lives up to the Supermania).  So has his little bro Eli. Two Super Bowl rings is more than enough for any one family, let alone a set of siblings who didn’t even bother sharing them across the generation gap. Today’s kids are so darned spoiled, especially when they’re sinfully talented quarterbacks dancing behind a bevy of behemoths who feast on raw meat smothered in helmets and padding.

Let’s cut to the chase. How can you on Feb. 7, 2010, NOT root for N’awlins, for saint’s sake? It’s not just the double-entendred “romance” of balconied, bumptious, rococo Bourbon Street, with its “thou swill” allure, or those powdered, fat-friendly beignets, or those hurricanes (a really bad double-entendre), or the French Quarter, or all that jazz.

We’ve just been terribly reminded anew of the real meaning of the oft-corrupted word “enormity,” which means not merely huge but unspeakably huge horror, as in Holocaust or Sept. 11 or tsunami or Katrina hurricane or Haitian earthquake.

Those of us living in relative paradise, geologically speaking, can’t begin to fathom life under water, under rubble, under ground, under unlivable circumstances. Back a couple years, I sat comfortably on a bus as it “toured” the notoriously disfigured Lower Ninth Ward, where front stoops stooped to nowhere because the house foundation formerly attached had been swept down the block and knocked on its side. It wasn’t like a war zone; it was a war zone.

Yes, the New Orleans Saints, NFC Champions for the first time in their history, are sentimental favorites to win the Super Bowl. Even the team’s stadium name is prophetic: Superdome.

On Sunday, after watching on Friday the star-studded Hope for Haiti Now telecast organized by the reinarnation of Cary Grant named George Clooney, I spent the best eight bucks imaginable by downloading the telethon’s commemorative album of today’s top recording artists who performed on the special. It’s good music for a great cause: humanity.