I always thought my first Internet controversy would be about one of my political columns. I was wrong, and have apparently earned the enmity of many New Orleans residents.
During the Super Bowl power outage at the beginning of the third quarter, I tweeted several “jokes” directed toward the Super Dome and the stadium’s team, the New Orleans Saints. Like most of my tweets in general, whether or not my jokes were actually funny is a highly debatable question, but I never expected it to result in the rage of “Who Dat Nation.” Within seconds of my first tweet, I had been re-tweeted by @angrywhodat.
I had not mentioned him in any of my tweets, nor did I use any hashtags, so I presume he found out about my comments because he sits on Twitter all day waiting for someone to insult his city. For some context about this particular Saints fan, he had previously re-tweeted with approval someone who blamed the blackout on African-Americans having been hired to rig the lights. Soon, the dregs of New Orleans were upon me – and I was accused, at least from what I could understand through the poor grammar of my opponents, of being a troll who hated the Saints for no reason.
Given that the New Orleans Saints are a franchise that ran the modern National Football League’s worst bounty program while pretending to be a heroic franchise bringing pride back to New Orleans, I welcome the hate of these Saints diehards. I just regret that the Twitterverse focused on one my lower-quality Super Bowl tweets, rather than focusing on my best material from Super Bowl Sunday.