New Orleans seems like an excellent place to get loaded on shrooms and edibles during the Super Bowl. Maybe wander Bourbon Street, hustle a few well-heeled visitors, gobble some Lucky Dogs from a cart in the French Quarter. Get into weird adventures.

But I am not in New Orleans, and I certainly was not there last night for Super Bowl LIX. I have never been to New Orleans, in fact. That’s a gross oversight I’ve been trying to correct. No one would pay me to cover the Super Bowl this year. Cheapjack cowards. So here I am on the NFL’s Boxing Day in frozen-ass suburban Detroit.

I do have the shrooms, legally owned and kept in an elegant lacquered Johnathan Adler trinket box on my nightstand. They’re branded as “Penis Envy” mushrooms and I am reliably informed that’s a very fine strain for seven or eight hours of mind-altering pleasure. Much like New Orleans, I’ve never been to wherever mushrooms take you. I’m saving them for a special occasion, like the Super Bowl in a place ripe with freakish Lynchian possibilities. Or Donald Trump’s funeral.

I certainly wouldn’t go to New Orleans to sit in the press box on drugs or stone-sober with a thousand replacement-level sportswriters and dilettante sports gambling stenographers to write about the fucking game. And the idea of marching around the media center at the vast New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center for staged interviews with bored players and coaches in the run-up to Sunday seems less appealing than a back alley colonoscopy without propofol.

While the Super Bowl attracts platoons of Oscar Madison oafs to the press box, it also lures enough genuinely talented X’s and O’s reporters and stats freaks that can analyze the nuances of the game plans and roster matchups like West Point instructors deconstructing Napoleon’s campaigns across Europe. No one needs my feeble typed utterances about what turned out to be a mediocre game. I know my limitations.

No, I wanted to be in New Orleans for the all-consuming pleasures of the flesh, mind, and soul. The place is the story as much as the game. There’s nothing original about covering the scene around the Super Bowl, just as there’s nothing fresh about the Grantland Rice slop pumped out about What The Action Means on the field. But that particular city and its environs in the waning days of a failing empire populated by 340 million rotted souls — mine most of all — is a story I wanted to tell, preferably with an unlimited expense account, total insurance coverage, and no deadline.

But I’m a thousand miles from New Orleans and the game is over. It was a dull one-sided affair whose biggest storyline was halftime performer Kendrick Lamar reminding the world that he thinks Drake is a pedophile (and subtly digging at MAGA), and legions of reactionary shitheads moaning that the performance was TOO BLACK for their vanilla sensibilities and pablum tastes. For the liberals and Leftists, the Kansas City Chiefs are a MAGA proxy, so they delighted in the Eagles’ 44-22 rout.

It was during the halftime show that a performer unveiled a combined Sudanese-Palestinian flag with GAZA and SUDAN written on it, and he was chased from the field. Today, the NFL banned him for life from all games, events, and stadiums.

The empire’s spectacles must not be disturbed! Especially with a sold-out crowd of celebrities, dignitaries, oligarchs, gilded Swifties, and various princelings, grandees, swells, fops, and other assorted strivers, hustlers, crooks, and local petty nobility.

Had it been an Israeli flag, would the punishment have been the same? It’s a fair question to ask. The NFL always sides with capital and power while barely giving lip service to the working class whose labor, money, and eyeballs it requires to exist. “End Racism” wasn’t stripped from the Super Bowl field because bigotry has been conquered. It’s because, despite whatever gibberish NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell peddles to credulous reporters, blatant racism is back in power in the United States and was in attendance at the Super Bowl.

Hence, the anticipatory obedience.

Trump reportedly left in the third quarter, after it was clear his preferred team wasn’t going to win. He left and started tweeting about ending the fucking penny. Had the Chiefs won, he’d have slithered his way into the celebration. But they lost and he’s shown ugly disdain for Philadelphia in the past, and the Eagles skipped visiting the White House after they won the Super Bowl while he was president last time. He had a tantrum about it.

The entire situation is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with our failing republic.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald said that. He loved football, writing, his wife, money, and liquor, and usually not in that order. I’m also an unreconstructed football junkie while I simultaneously view the Super Bowl itself as a crass orgy of morally bankrupt consumerism and unrestrained parasitic capitalism. It’s the ultimate free-market gladiatorial spectacle for the masses. Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand would have bet on the Chiefs and William F. Buckley Jr. would have worn a bespoke Harrison Butker jersey ordered from Brooks Brothers. Nixon loved football.

Half the 100 million-plus Americans watching tuned in for the TV commercials that use celebrities to sell us beer, cars, insurance, unhealthy snacks and other garbage. The other half makes wild bets on the superhuman millionaire players turning each other’s brains to jelly live on 4K television beamed to just about every spot on Earth where human beings live.

The NFL in coming days or weeks may tell us that the Super Bowl (and you better have a goddamn license to use SUPER BOWL®©™ or they’ll get your ass, mister) was watched by double the audience initially estimated by Nielsen, which itself has tweaked its viewership methodology that will boost the game’s eyeball total to a record high. Beyond the initial audience estimate, the league in the past has paid Nielsen to concoct a deep-dive study to prove even more people tuned in. The Super Bowl viewership is prideful ego boasting and not much else (I used to write professionally about the viewership stuff, and you can still find it on the New York Times website). Still, the gaudy spectacle does reach across much of the Earth.

Here’s a sample of the NFL’s global dominance: There were two Super Bowl viewing options in fucking Lichtenstein. The island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic where Napoleon was banished after Waterloo in 1815 got the game on ESPN. And even the 40 residents of the South Pacific’s ultra-remote Pitcairn Island, where the mutineer survivors of the 18th century “Mutiny on the Bounty” saga hid, got the game for 99 cents via DAZN.

Just incredible. The bread and circuses are undefeated. While FIFA soccer is the planet’s most popular sport, every square inch of the Earth also belongs to the NFL, which plans to play more games overseas. Much of the human race on Sunday got to see Donald Trump milling about the Superdome and shaking hands in his role as America’s imperial neo-fascist figurehead while Elon Musk, unseen back in Washington, continued his unconstitutional project to pry apart the entire United States government for fun, profit, and revenge. It’s like having Nero and Caligula in charge.

All of which makes the Super Bowl seem like an unfortunate distraction. Not because good people fighting fascism and oligarchy do not need fun and joy — you can easily find old photos of Civil Rights leaders laughing and dancing in their private moments with family and friends — but because the spectacle itself is an avatar of all that’s wrong with America. And what poisons America eventually fouls the rest of the planet.

Yet there I was on Sunday, ass on my couch gobbling meatballs and cheese, with the game on my television while I posted a series of curated tweets to Bluesky about the economics, history, broadcast details, and trivia about the ultimately meaningless game.

I should loathe the NFL and its Big Game, and I often do (particularly as a lifelong Cleveland Browns fan), but I also return each autumn like a hopeless junkie that’s run out of excuses about quitting his addiction cold turkey. It’s a personal failure, one of many.

That’s why I like to imagine myself at the game instead of at home as just another spectator. And in my former career, I came close to getting the chance to attend. But, alas, I wasn’t producing enough shareholder value.

Anyways, if I’d had a press pass yesterday, my instinct was to skip the game entirely and indulge all the city has to offer. And preferably with a head completely hijacked by powerful mushrooms while I punished my liver with overpriced drinks at the Old Absinthe House. I’d have wandered the French Quarter until I found Tennessee Williams’ apartment at 722 Toulouse Street immortalized in Vieux Carré. Then discovered something gloriously strange to read at Frenchman Street Art & Books or Crescent City Books. Surrendered to weekend brunch jazz at Arnaud’s. Fattened myself with Baked Alaska at Antoine’s, fresh beignets at Cafe du Monde, and Eggs Hussarde at Brennan’s. Tried muffaletta at Central Grocery. Downed a Pimm’s Cups or two or a dozen at Napoleon House. Taken in the loud boisterous beauty of a second line parade.

And then gone to write something about professional football and what it all means as the United States crumbles into the most bottom-shelf Boone’s Farm fascism imaginable. Hell, anything I wrote from the Cresent City probably would have read just like this essay, but with more exciting first-hand details and maybe an arrest or two. The real story is out on the streets, the life and atmosphere in Tremé and the Ninth Ward and the various faubourgs and districts where people live and die under the American system. The real story is not inside the NFL’s Mardi Gras of capitalism and empire.

I don’t know when the Super Bowl will return to New Orleans. Maybe never. The upcoming sites are Santa Clara and Inglewood in California, and Atlanta. A man can get himself into plenty of wild adventures in those towns, but none of them have anything on preposterous, enchanting, menacing, tragic, and magical Gulf Coast gothic Creole Bohemia that is New Orleans. A week in sunny plastic Weimar Los Angeles is tempting but I’m not sure it’d be the same intense spiritual bath as New Orleans. I’d love someone to pay me to find out next February.

“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland,” Tennessee Williams wrote, shitting on my hometown. And 19th century journalist Lafcadio Hearn said of New Orleans: “Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists … but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.”

Hearn specifically meant Cincinnati, and as a native Ohioan I can tell you he’s correct about that city. Nothing ever changes. It just gets more expensive.

The Super Bowl is one of our most expensive luxury spectacles, with the mob long priced out of it. Attending is only for well-heeled fans able to afford the small fortune required to get tickets, lodging, and travel. And to impress the aristocracy, Super Bowl cities slick themselves up, get fresh coats of paint, new banners and signs, and herd the homeless out of sight.

It’s part of the kabuki necessary to justify the enormous expense of hosting this imperial extravaganza, one that civic boosters claim will rain golden sums upon the city in fabled “economic impact.”

You may hear or read credulous sportswriters cosplaying as financial journalists, mindlessly quoting impressive statistics about the Super Bowl as a financial windfall for New Orleans, a diverse city that struggles to help its poor and struggling. A word of caution from someone that used to write about this stuff for a living: It’s bullshit. The numbers are cooked. Reputable economists will tell you that. It’s the NFL and local chamber of commerce folks that pay for these studies that actual economists will shit upon from a great height.

In a Super Bowl, the NFL will get richer. Fox will rake in the advertising money. Some local businessmen will line their pockets. A few vendors may pick up a few extra bucks. But the businesses back where the visitors come from won’t be getting money. It’s simply spending shifted around and hoarded by the usual suspects. Perhaps that’s the real game.

Meanwhile, Fox Sports boasted of its plans for 67 hours of Super Bowl coverage in the week running up to Sunday’s kickoff. How many hours of critical coverage has Fox News devoted to the constitutional crisis that Trump and Musk have created by gelding Congress and ignoring the courts in their project to dismantle the federal government and democracy in the name of white nationalist tech oligarchy?

Zero. The network is state media for the regime. The president, in an interview Fox News has been dribbling out, has tripled down on his plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza of two million people so he can personally own the land and build MAGA-ritavilles and beachfront condos all over it for wealthy assholes. Perhaps Gaza will land a Super Bowl one day.

With all that’s going on in the world, it’s hard to take any of this breathless Super Bowl coverage seriously, and I acknowledge my own shameless hypocrisy in watching and writing about it. If what Trump and Musk are waging against the Constitution, things may soon turn tragically ugly, enough that we could see major events canceled and the population stunned out of complacency and ignorance. Maybe that’s what we need.

A Super Bowl? In this moral economy?

Honestly, who gives a shit.

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