It is as if all the
unrest across the world has come to a head in one country, Brazil.
It is as if The Arab
Spring, the upheavals in Greece, the bank crisis in Cyprus, the
Occupy Movement in New York and elsewhere, the stresses and strain in
Bahrain, the divisions in Turkey have all coalesced around a warm-up international football tournament.
All in time for the
big one next year: The World Cup, the greatest corporate spectacle on
the planet.
Albert
Camus, Nobel Prize
winner for Literature and goalkeeper for Algeria, once
said
Everything
I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.
And it is football,
the glorious global game that provides the occasion. The world's
greatest spectacle seems to be one spectacle too far. The preliminary
warm-up tournament, The Confederations Cup, becomes the focus for the
massive public discontent in Brazil, a country trumpeted in The
Financial Times and other journals as an economic miracle, where 'morality and obligations' are kicked into touch.
People
have had enough of such miracles. Enough of the transfer of public
money to private hands; enough of the myth of progress as a mask to
cover corporate greed; enough of austerity, cuts and poor services;
enough of division and separation; enough of the corralling of wealth
into fewer and fewer hands.
Enough
of heroes?
Reports
come in of social media challenges to the great Pele, Brazil's heroic
footballer, who linked blood and country in a call to citizens to
stop protesting and to support the national team.
Another
former Brazilian footballer, Romario, once commented that
Pele,
when silent, is a poet.
Watch
Pele (and Bobby Moore) beat the Nazis and win World War 2.
How
easy will it be for the citizens of Brazil to escape to victory?
http://www.philosophyfootball.com/new_win.html
https://www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter
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