the beautiful game
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The rather worn cliché that sport is war without guns, that our support and loyalty to our teams and nations is our modern-day expression of our tribal roots, happens to be true. If fundamentalists would just play sports instead of assassinating tennis players for wearing shorts, no doubt they'd spend less time flying planes into buildings.
Last week, the biggest sporting event on Planet Earth kicked off in Germany. The World Cup makes the Olympics look like an elementary-school sack race, and inspires a more passionate following than global jihad. Soccer is being hailed as the true ambassador of Olympic spirit — less specialist, less corrupt, less phony than the actual Olympics.
Soccer "closes the schools, closes the shops, closes a city and stops a war," the lead singer of U2 says in those lush Irish tones as your giant HDTV fills with images of children in war-torn rubble playing keep-me-up and women in burkhas having a kick around in front of the secret police. The World Cup is undoubtedly about more than just soccer: it is geopolitics laid bare. Hooligans abound, but ask your average soccer-nut to defend his sport of choice and he'll look at you tearfully before launching into a poorly articulated explanation about how "soccer is a universal language, a symbol of the essential unity of mankind, an expression of our global harmony, and all that kind of stuff."
Last week, the biggest sporting event on Planet Earth kicked off in Germany. The World Cup makes the Olympics look like an elementary-school sack race, and inspires a more passionate following than global jihad. Soccer is being hailed as the true ambassador of Olympic spirit — less specialist, less corrupt, less phony than the actual Olympics.
Soccer "closes the schools, closes the shops, closes a city and stops a war," the lead singer of U2 says in those lush Irish tones as your giant HDTV fills with images of children in war-torn rubble playing keep-me-up and women in burkhas having a kick around in front of the secret police. The World Cup is undoubtedly about more than just soccer: it is geopolitics laid bare. Hooligans abound, but ask your average soccer-nut to defend his sport of choice and he'll look at you tearfully before launching into a poorly articulated explanation about how "soccer is a universal language, a symbol of the essential unity of mankind, an expression of our global harmony, and all that kind of stuff."
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posted by þΛųL jØŋαŦhΛŋ @ 12:45
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