A good few months ago I posted a profoundly provocative anti-football rant, cunningly disguised as a 5-part autobiography of the last seven years of my life, or vice-versa, or something, in which I wrote the following:
There is something about football that I haven't mentioned yet, and it is something that these days gets very little attention. It concerns women and football.
Now there are many reasons why lots of women watch football. Some for the same reasons that men do - to see the occasional bit of spectacle that the sport offers, or because watching and following the game is usually a social thing. Some, it has to be said, are Uncle Toms, showing or developing an interest in it in order to please men.
Some women play football too, but like women's boxing the professional game exists as a side-effect of men's football. We don't see it on TV, and it's no accident that the best known player is the ex-wife of one of football's leading men. And, like boxing, when it does get some coverage it is often just for the titillation of men. Women footballers, unlike their male counterparts, have no visibility and no power.
The fact remains; football, in terms of the sport we see on TV, the thing that is so often cited as one thing that unites all the people and peoples of the world, does not involve women at any level.
Among the many people keen to prove that I was, you know, as I so often am, wrong, were a couple of posters who pointed out that actually, in the United States the women's game has a lot more prominence than the men's sport, and that most American people would be more likely to be able to name a female player than a male one. It seems that in the land of the freeandthebrave, 'soccer' is something of a girl's game.( Read more... )
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Thanks to Wikipedia I have acquired a new hero: José Figueres Ferrer, aka ‘Don Pepe’, the Costa Rican President in the 1940s-50s, who certainly achieved a great deal more progressive change in his nine years of power than Tony Blair has: in his first term in office he nationalised the banks, gave women and illiterate people the right to vote and abolished the army. This last move is of course absolutely laudable - it is difficult, let’s say, to imagine Blair or even Gordon Brown doing the same – but it led to short-term problems during the, ahem, war with Nicaragua seven years later.
In 1958 the then vice-president of the US, Richard Nixon, was spat at by a crowd in Caracas, Venezuela while visiting on a goodwill tour. An inquiry was held to attempt to ascertain the causes of the incident, and Ferrer was asked to speak before the Congress in Washington. The wonderful speech he gave reminded me of one of something I posted last year on the politics of spitting, actually my second favourite thing I’ve wrote here, in which I typed:
One of the other potential uses of staring, spitting and other generally anti-social behaviour is in the field of International Relations. A logical and non-violent way of resolving the territorial disputes of the world is in the same way that cats do - if Saddam Hussein had had the foresight to piss all over Kuwait in 1990, the Americans would have been understandably less keen to go in and remove him. Similarly , if Mao Zedong had sent all those young Chinese soldiers to North Korea in 1950 armed only with the simple order to stand on the border and spit, maybe one million lives could have been saved.
Somehow I’ve always managed to restrain myself from adopting expectoration as a form of direct action, although the constant vigil outside the Marie Stopes Centre in Ealing next to where I work presents quite a challenge to this. In the speech Ferrer explicitly cites spitting as a form of resistance against imperial power, against what he calls the ‘moral spitting’ of the powerful. It is well worth reading the whole thing; it is a rousing piece of rhetoric, which may just make you want to, regardless of the potentially drastic consequences, run up to the gates of the nearest American embassy and let fly:
"As a citizen of the hemisphere, as a man who has dedicated his public life to promoting inter-American comprehension, as an educated man who knows and appreciates the United States and who has never tried to hide that appreciation to anyone, no matter how hostile he was, I deplore that the people of the Latin America, represented by a fistful of overexcited Venezuelans, have spat on a worthy public officer who represents the greatest nation of our time. But I must speak frankly and even rudely, because I am convinced that the situation demands it: the people cannot spit on a foreign policy, which was what they tried to do. But when they have exhausted all other means of trying to make themselves understood, the only thing left to do is spit. ( Read more... )
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My New Favourite Person, Matthias Matussek, a journalist for Der Spiegel magazine, wrote recently in the Guardian's Germany special:
It was after repeated futile complaints about the primitive image of Germany cultivated by the English (as Nazis and frozen-faced engineers), that a plan was hatched by a group of German politicians and diplomats, among them my brother, Thomas, who was, until March, German envoy to Britain. What if they flew in a few English history teachers and wined and dined them like little potentates at the government's expense? If, after their stay, the teachers knew more about Heine's poems, Claudia Schiffer's golden tresses, Beethoven's symphonies, Humboldt's adventures, Willy Brandt's biography and, ja, if we must, notorious "pop idol" judge Dieter Bohlen (Germany's answer to Simon Cowell) - the good news would gradually filter down to the pupils.
Nearly two dozen teachers were invited to Berlin, Dresden and Bonn. They resided in five-star hotels, attended the opera, sauntered around the Reichstag, and - as emissaries of not just England but Britain - exchanged platitudes with representatives of the German nation. This red-carpet treatment cost German taxpayers some €52,000 (£35,000).
And what did the rotters do? They spurned all the attention as though it were some kind of indecent proposition. "It wasn't a great experience," a paper quoted one teacher, Peter Liddell, as saying. At the opera, the woman next to him nodded off, he reported. They went along for the ride. But that wouldn't change the curriculum, which - after all - calls for Hitler, Hitler and more Hitler. A colleague summed it up for the record: "Nazis are sexy. Evil is fascinating."
There are three simple lessons here. One: the British have zero interest in the new Germany. Two: the British have zero interest in the old Germany. Three: the British are interested only in Nazi Germany.
And that, I would say, is not a German problem, but a British one.
Gut gesagt! I'd imagine that in the Rwanda-Somalia-Cultural Revolution style chaos of the British Secondary School Classroom, amidst the shouting and the stabbing and the smoke, the teacher is comforted by the fact that there is always a magic word which will make the students shut up, sit down and pay attention. That word is 'Hitler'.( Read more... )
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Provocative funnyman Charlie Brooker just took the words right outta my mouth and wrote something about the current fashion for hoisting the England flag out of car windows:
Imagine the outcry if government passed a law requiring the nation's dimbos to wear dunce's caps in public. No one would stand for it. There'd be acres of newsprint comparing Blair and co to the Nazis. We'd see rioting in the streets - badly organised rioting with a lot of mis-spelled placards, but rioting nonetheless.
Those protesters who burn flags outside embassies have got the right idea - but they shouldn't be burning them because they disagree with something the country in question has done. They should be burning flags just because they're flags. And flags are rubbish.
I'm not sure if I dislike flags as such, although I certainly share some of this writer's concern about recent displays of my country's emblem:
Is it just me, or is anyone else slightly worried about the number of St George's flags flying from road vehicles right now? Of course, these displays of patriotism are to be expected in the build-up to next month's World Cup - which England enters with more confidence than at any time since 1970. This time, though, the flags seem to be on show earlier than ever.
In fact, they started appearing the day after the local elections on May 4. Apart from the Labour meltdown and the Tories getting their first respectable vote for 14 years, the big story of the election was the rise of the British National party, which gained 28 seats, nearly 20 in London alone. Could it be that many of the England flag-wavers are in fact supporters of this racist party, glorying in their "victory" and celebrating their racial pride?
I agree with both articles in that I think that the only reason anyone would want to buy and display their country's flag is because they are either right-wing or a little bit thick - or possibly, in a tiny minority of cases of course, both. Taking pride in the place where you happen to have been born is, in my humble onion, akin to holding up a piece of paper with 'MY MUM'S BETTER THAN YOUR MUM' written on it. At the same time, it is true to say that there have been a lot of people who aren't white proudly displaying the flag, so it may well be that we are witnessing one of those 'look at me I'm queer!' reclaiming-abusive-words-and-symbols-from-the-right-wing moments. I sincerely hope so. ( Read more... )
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According to this, racismo in Brasil is an unbailable crime for which the, well, racist must be imprisoned.
No way the Polícia can have seen any Brazilian TV over the last eight years, then. But just imagine if we had that law here in the UK. We could lock up all the BNP voters! And then burn down the jail and send this dick off to Guantanamo Bay:
Justin Hawkins to release controversial World Cup song
It mentions the war...
The Darkness frontman Justin Hawkins is to release his own World Cup anthem - and it's bound to prove controversial.
Going up against Embrace's official Germany 2006 England song 'World At Your Feet', Hawkins has previewed his own song, 'England', under his solo name British Whale.
The star told The Sun newspaper that he thinks England's bid for glory is being undermined by political correctness, with people being too scared to mention the Second World War triumph of 1945.
In response, 'England' mentions the event in the lyrics.
Hawkins said: "The whole point of an England World Cup song is to assert our national identity and talk about the achievements of a great nation.
"Why can't we commemorate all those men who gave their lives in the name of freedom in the war? And, of course, in this case - to bash The Hun? It's a national sport."
I wonder if he prefers it to football?
Speaking of anti-German racism, I'm actually quite hoping for massive violence from the British contingent in Germany this summer. Not that I've got anything against German people, of course, especially as I am one myself - I just can't wait to see the stuttering reaction from the Sun and the Daily Mail if it all kicks off... Will the headlines be HAVE A GO AT THE KRAUTS or ALL TOGETHER LET'S HAVE A DECEMBER 1914-STYLE TROOCE? Maybe Melanie Phillips will pop up and start complaining that it's just not politically correct to hate German people any more. And I wonder what the Tommies make of Geoff Hurst's admirable campaign for the German National Tourist Office - is he still a National Hero to Sun readers, or is he a sausage-guzzling sunbed-reserving Quisling TRAITOR?!?
By the way, did I mention that I met Caetano Veloso a couple of weeks ago? We shook hands and everything. Now that's a fucking hero.
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