In keeping with the World Cup theme of the month: Today take a step back and examine some opposing vewpoints on the role of football, or sports in general, in our global society.
David Smith gives an account of the benefits of soccer in the world at large in World Cup Dreamsby quoting Danny Jordaan of the World Cup organizing committee: “If you want to raise the social issue, ask them, ask those football fans who have no houses, no job. Ask them, ‘Do you want the World Cup in this country?’ You’ll hear an overwhelming yes because that is the lifeblood, that is the generator of hope, that is what puts a smile on many African faces. That is important on the continent. Football is a giver of hope and life and we must never argue that we must deny the fundamental pleasure and joy that football can bring.”
Yesterday Terry Eagelton gave us an alternative view in his Football: A Dear Friend to Capitalism: “Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides to the point of collective delirium….With football, by contrast, there can be outbreaks of angry populism, as supporters revolt against the corporate fat cats who muscle in on their clubs; but for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham.”
Or if you really want to intellectualize the game, watch the following:
A favorite American teenage past-time seems to have found a new home in the most unlikely of places: Afghanistan. Photographer Noah Abrams set out to document the country’s emerging skateboarding scene last summer, and the result is an illuminating set of photographs. Abrams says,
“The smiles and genuine excitement the kids had for skateboarding were quite simply one of the most pure expressions of joy I have ever had the privilege to witness. To see that kind of happiness exist in a place that has seen such hard times, for me, was really humbling. I can really only speak from the time I spent in country, but in my experience, life there certainly isn’t easy. However, spending time there was a great reminder that although culturally we may be very different, at the end of the day our goals as people are pretty much the same. We all want to be happy, and no one wants to suffer.”
The purpose of this piece is to visualize the vast network of altruistic human organizations in every country, city, and community around the world, all working in parallel together. Despite their enormous diversity of size, focus, and geographic location, these organizations are all united around a core set of values in which compassion and stewardship are made highest priorities. The hundreds of millions of individuals who are creating and running these organizations bring a nourishing richness of passion, imagination, and integrity to this process. In that way I think of this piece as being like a compass, pointing toward a true source of hope and inspiration for our times.
Tashi Dhondup is a Tibetan musician sentenced to 15 months of re-education through labour for “separatist activities” related to his music on January 5, 2010.
High Peaks Pure Earth , a blog reporting on Tibetan freedom, has more.
A thousand Nigerian soldiers surrounded the Kalakuta Republic and burned it to the ground on February 18, 1977.
As republics go, Kalakuta wasn’t very large. Only 100 or so people lived there. But the immensely popular musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti had created this compound, in the Nigerian capital of Lagos, as a joyful and democratic space in an otherwise corrupt and dictatorial country. The sovereignty of Fela’s republic was always under threat. And even though the invaders threw his mother from the second floor on that day in 1977, and even though the soldiers cracked his skull, and even though the government jailed him for trying to defend himself, Fela continued to fight back. He used his Afrobeat music and biting lyrics as his weapon.
“Too much sweets will give you rotten teeth,” Fela declares in the new musical that recreates Kalakuta on Broadway. “Too much Nigeria will give you broken heads, burned houses, dead students.” Fela had about as much of Nigeria as any one person can handle, yet he remained powerfully attracted to the country that his mother had devoted so much of her life to liberating from colonial rule. He put out more than 70 records, toured the world, and shared the stage with other famous musicians. But he always came back to Nigeria, where he hoped one day to become president.
The Broadway show, which is a powerful cocktail of music and dance and politics, doesn’t provide much detail about the rotten state of Nigeria. It is, after all, a musical. And Fela’s songs, though sharp and critical, tend toward general, even allegorical, indictments. The song “Zombie,” for instance, doesn’t mention Nigerian soldiers by name but rather critiques their well-known reputation to follow whatever orders they are given. Fela’s protests are multi-barbed, and can be easily applied at home and abroad. At one point in the Broadway show, during the song “International Thief Thief,” dancers hold up signs accusing not only villains of the Nigerian drama like Shell, but also more universal targets like Halliburton and the International Monetary Fund.
Given the squalor of Nigeria, it’s hard to believe that the country is now the world’s eighth-largest exporter of oil. “Nigeria earned more than $400 billion from oil in recent decades,” writes Peter Maass in his new book Crude World, “yet nine out of 10 citizens live on less than $2 a day and one out of five children dies before his fifth birthday. Its per-capita GDP is one-fifth of South Africa’s.” This comparison is particularly painful, and explains Fela’s comment in the excellent documentary Fela: Music Is the Weapon that even then, during the apartheid era, “the situation here is worse than in South Africa.”
There were actually two Kalakuta Republics. Fela got the name for his little Monaco of music from the time he spent in prison, when he discovered that the prisoners nicknamed his jail the “Kalakuta Republic.” In Swahili, “kalakuta” means “rascal.” As Fela explains, “If rascality is going to get us what we want, we will use it; because we are dealing with corrupt people, we have to be ‘rascally’ with them.”
The Nigerian poet Chris Abani also uses music as a weapon: the music of poetry. His collection of poems, entitledKalakuta Republic – named for the prison where he too spent so many days – includes the powerful “Ode to Joy,” about a young boy of 14 whom the police torture to death when he refuses to finger an innocent man. The poem concludes:
an act insignificant
in the face of this child’s courage
we sang:
Oje wai wai,
Moje oje wai, wai.
Incensed
they went
on a
killing rampage
guns
knives
truncheons
even canisters of tear-gas,
fired close up or
directly into mouths, will
take the back
of
your head off
and many men
died singing,
that night.
Notes caught,
surprised,
suspended
as blows bloodied mouths
clotting into silence.
Chris Abani headlined the Split This Rock poetry festival last week here in Washington, DC. It was a mighty gathering of word-warriors from around the world. The festival began during the dreary days of the Bush administration, a group of the most tone-deaf, word-challenged, and brute politicians as we’ve ever had to endure in this country. We live in more enlightened times, perhaps, when the “Black President” that Fela sang about has come to occupy the White House. But we continue to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. We continue to enrich the Pentagon beyond its most extravagant dreams. And we continue to freeze all other government endeavors because of our deficit (of imagination).
For a few days, however, the poets of Split This Rock created their own Kalakuta Republic here in Washington: a refuge for those who believe that art can transform our world. It is, for the moment at least, a republic as small as Fela’s was. The United States “continues to turn up individuals making works of art,” writes essayist Lewis Lapham in TomDispatch, “but they traffic in a medium of exchange on which the society doesn’t place a high priority.” Still, the sounds and the words produced in Fela’s Kalakuta continue to resonate in our own republic of letters – on Broadway, in Chris Abani’s poetry, and in political music from Springsteen to M.I.A.
Avatar has become a pop culture nexus for Palestinian rights activists. The film portrays the struggle between a heartless interstellar corporation and the Na’vi, lithe and luminescent aliens indigenous to a planet rich in the lucrative mineral “unobtanium.” The Na’vi live atop a rich deposit of this shimmering ore, so the corporation and its thugs want to remove them, by any means necessary. For activists, the film is an apt analogy to Israel’s annexation of Palestinian territory. So what do these idealistic youth do? Dress up like the aliens.
The protestors appeared in Bil’in, a Palestinian town cut in half by the Wall (whatever adjective, security or Apartheid, no one on either side disagrees that the structure is a wall) and Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem which Israeli settlers have laid claim to and from which Israeli authorities have evicted Palestinians.
When I was in Bil’in in April 2009, the buzzword on the banners was “Occupation Flu,” play to the now-almost-forgotten H1N1 craze. Demonstrators gathered every Friday after prayer to confront Israeli soldiers who meet Palestinians’ stones with tear gas and flash-bang bombs. I was there to write a story, here, which explains more about this weekly protest.
A protestor shields his nose and eyes from the effects of tear gas.
The most striking aspect of this re-appropriation of a distinctly American, Avatar meme, is the irony. And right across the barbed-wire fence opposite from Bil’in are Israeli soldiers whose weapons supplied by American taxpayers. So, as Joseph Nye would explain, that’s an example of U.S. “hard power.”. Then, on the other side, the Palestinians to score by appropriating imagery siphoned with sophistication from the mighty currents of American “soft power.”
Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê has opened a new exhibit called Elegies at P·P·O·W. It serves as a prelude to Lê’s exhibition in June at the Museum of Modern Art, entitled The Farmers and The Helicoptors.
P·P·O·W features works based on the United States’ troubled exit from the Vietnam war, specifically the jettisoningof helicopters from the overcrowded decks of aircraft carriers evacuating military and diplomatic personnel.
Yesterday, Barack Obama announced to West Pointers, as well as the rest of the world, that 30,000 more American soldiers will be fighting in Afghanistan by Summer 2010. Instead of another Obama photo, the Washington Post’s front page featured a shot of the West Point cadets listening to their Commander in Chief, and looking worried.
Obama’s decision comes amid debate amongst the chattering classes about what to do in Afghanistan. Even Thomas Friedman, who still supports American involvement in Afghanistan, expresses skepticism concerning the wisdom of continued U.S. presence. On the other side, Stephen M. Walt, a professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote an editorial in the latest issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs about how the U.S. should abandon a failing campaign he deems pointless anyway. “U.S. victory in Afghanistan won’t put an end to al-Qaeda,” Walt writes. “And if the outcome in Afghanistan has little effect n the threat al-Qaeda poses, there is little reason to squander more American blood and treasure there.”
Al-Qaeda isn’t the reason the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan, the Afghans are. The United States can’t ethically occupy and destroy large parts of a country and then leave it to humanitarian NGO’s, like the UN, to clean up the tragic mess. Moreover, Mr. Walt’s solution to curbing al-Qaeda’s influence in the country involves “cruise missiles and armed drones,” technologies that have so far had hit or miss success in, well, not killing civilians. Basically, what Mr. Walt advocates is resetting Afghanistan’s broken bones excruciatingly slowly and fomenting resentment of America’s very existence, not just resistance against its military occupation. If the plan in Afghanistan in the first place was preventing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, winning the hearts and minds of young, impressionable men, then incinerating their grandmothers isn’t the way to go.
But what makes more boots on the ground a better choice than just lobbing missiles on occasion? Obama’s commitment of 30,000 more soldiers means that America’s presence there have the aid of 60,000 more eyes and ears, and along with each pair a human conscience and intuition, not an exorbitantly priced guidance system some contractor cheated the Pentagon into purchasing.
But this means hundreds, if not thousands, more Americans will meet gruesome deaths or injury at the hands of the insurgency. That said, the American death toll will probably never surpass the number of Afghan civilians who have already faced similar horrible fates, like the 35 refugees who perished on November 11th (Armistice Day, ironically enough) when a U.S. air strike mistook their vehicle for an enemy target.
The United States needs to stay in Afghanistan to ensure that the destruction we’ve wrought on the country wasn’t for naught. Cutting and running isn’t an option. And even if defeating the Taliban doesn’t make American soil safer, as Mr. Walt suggests, it might be able to improve the lives of Afghans through agricultural development and funding for education, which is what will make sure the Taliban, if they’re ever decisively ousted, don’t regroup and return to power. More than that, the only way to finally defang the Taliban for the sake of the Afghans is to enter into negotiations with them, if only to split the organization into Taliban who will talk and who won’t. This is the tactic Gen. David Petraeus employed in Iraq in 2007 to break the back of the Sunni insurgency. While no policy of occupation in Afghanistan or Iraq will result in national liberation, there are methods of mitigating the intensity of internecine violence.
Nevertheless, I should temper this enthusiasm for a bolstering American force with the fact that all of it could just as easily go horribly wrong, depending on the consciences that sit behind and between those 120,000 young eyes and ears. And while I wouldn’t venture to recommend any tactic in particular for the Army and Marine Corps to follow, wanton brutality against civilians and torture will result in America continuing to fail.
Obviously, an escalation of the war, which is what Obama’s move means, is nothing short of tragic. Indeed, some of those West Point cadets in the audience will meet their death because of the President’s decision. With them, countless Afghans will also die. But our withdrawal guarantees the slaughter of those who aided our occupation. Without a government pliant to the West’s will, funding for humanitarian and development efforts will cease, left without any sort of assurance of security from a sovereign authority, Afghan or American. In the scramble for power after a hasty U.S. withdrawal, violent clashes between rival ethnic and religious elements of Afghan society are a virtual certainty. Clearly, any bargain we might make with the present situation in Afghanistan involves some measure of innocent blood being shed in the future. And national liberation might have become an obsolete aspiration, since nationhood today demands the immediate dilution of sovereign power to the indifferent mandates of supranational authority.
More than that, perhaps we all need to temper our expectations for Afghanistan. A mountainous, landlocked country, it is likely Afghanistan will never develop, doomed to remain beholden to the good will of a concerned global citizenry and beleaguered by the ambitions of Empire. A nation building enterprise there is a bit like performing brain surgery on one whose faculties may have already suffered irreparable damage.
