A Cowboys Stadium Big Enough For Jones's Ego

Bugsy Siegel, in the 1991 film "Bugsy," walked into the desert and envisioned a glittering gambling palace.

Jerry Jones, in the 2009 real-life "Jerry," walked out of Texas Stadium and envisioned a bigger one across the parking lot or, well, in nearby Arlington, Tex.

Hello, Las Vegas.

Hello, Cowboys Stadium.

When I first saw Cowboys Stadium on NBC last week, I half-expected it to lift off the ground and return to Jupiter. It's not a football facility, it's a UFO with urinals.

You know the expression:

Money talks and [a word I cannot print] walks.

From the soil of the Texas terrain has risen Jerry Jones's $1.15 billion monument to himself (or as was said in "Citizen Kane" about Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu: "Cost: No man can say"). If we are in the midst of the rise and fall of the American empire, at least we're going down in a heap of corporate excess and gridiron glory.

As Jimmy Johnson might exclaim, "How 'bout that Cowboys Stadium!"

How large is it? Cowboys Stadium makes Super Walmart look like 7-Eleven. You could fit every Starbucks west of the Mississippi inside of it.

There are 120-foot glass doors that slide open at either end of the stadium; Windex costs alone put the team over the salary cap.

Texas Stadium, built in 1971, was perfectly serviceable. Cowboys Stadium, sitting upon 73 acres of heartland that won't be grazed by cattle any time soon, is three times bigger than Texas Stadium. If Jones were elected president, he might knock down the White House and replace it with the Whiter House -- it would be the first government building with a retractable roof.