I actually watched Monday Night Football this week. Normally, I forget that it's on unless the Packers are playing, but this week as I was flipping channels I noticed The Edge playing with Green Day on the Superdome floor. That was enough to suck me in. I watched the rest of the game, which was great (blocked punts! double reverse!).

The NFL did a great job of recognizing that this particular Monday night game was special. The Superdome was open for business, the crowd was emotional and hey, the Saints are unbeaten! If you want a music performance that suits the importance of the occasion, you pull in the big guns: U2. The boys' soaring songs lend gravitas to the event, but they still rock, so they're fun too. Bono and the gang, aided by Green Day put on a great show punctuated by a rendition of "Beautiful Day" flavored with New Orleans references. The crowd loved. I loved it. ESPN loved it. Entertainment Weekly's Pop Watch loved it. But one Tyler D. character didn't. He said:

I like U2 and Greenday, but I thought it was kind of strange to watch a celebration of New Orlenes and not have some sort of African-American performer involved, considering most of the communities that suffered the most from Katrina and the lack of government support were prodominantly African-American communities. I mean, U2 and Greenday are like two of the whitest bands ever, and while I realize that doesn't exclude African-American audiences from enjoying their music (and I realize the NFL has to be family-friendly since they exposed us all to nipple-gate), I'm just puzzled that some musical-artist-of-color wasn't involved. Even if they had some traditional jazz music, it would have seemed more appropriate.

I was unaware that white people were unaffected by Hurricane Katrina. Ask our own Laura about that. I was also unaware that entertainers need to mirror the ethnicity of their audience and that it's somehow offensive if they don't. Huh. The NFL could have pulled in an all-star team of black artists and they would have just as much to do with New Orleans as Bono. I find it incredibly offensive that my whiteness or Bono's whiteness somehow means we can't really understand Hurricane Katrina and therefore it's inappropriate that we be any part of remembering it.

Imagine if we applied that kind of reasoning everywhere. U2 shouldn't have played the Super Bowl after 9/11 either, since they're not even American. Whitney Houston wouldn't have performed the Super Bowl national anthem in 1991 because, hey, America is mostly white. Tammy Baldwin should be kicked out of Congress because the vast majority of her constituents are straight.

When will people get it through their thick skulls that they can be represented by people who are not exactly like them? I hate to drag MLK into this, aren't we supposed to judge people by their character, not their color? Why do I feel that it's the most "liberal" among us that have yet to grasp that concept?