World Cup gone bananas

In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

Well, it's almost World Cup time. Which means, even more so than usual, the most-viewed article in the world today is likely to be: Ronaldo's model girlfriend says she won't pose nude

It's interesting how the world's biggest sporting--some would say any--event is beginning to catch on in the U.S. The rest of the world is beginning to react as we start to pay more attention to their sport, and of course as we start beating them at their own game.

London's Guardian newspaper writes:

The United States always feels challenged by the World Cup. Unlike the Olympics, where Americans tend to dominate, the US has rarely shone in the tournament, although it famously defeated England in 1950. It is an 80-1 long shot this time and may struggle to overcome group stage opponents Ghana and the Czech Republic, let alone Italy. For Americans used to winning, there is something vaguely shocking about this.

But US soccer-related insecurity is political and cultural, too. For four weeks, the world shows its back to the number one nation. The usual hierarchies of power are turned upside-down; the agenda is no longer Washington's to command. It is not often that old enemies, such as Mexico, or relatively new ones, such as Iran, get the chance to "beat" the US. But either may do so in Germany if their teams progress.

It's an interesting piece that goes on to spell out exactly how much this sport matters to the rest of the world, in at times chilling ways.

The U.S. is currently ranked #5 in the world by FIFA, and although the rankings aren't taken as gospel they do mean something. Maybe more telling is the U.S. advancing to the quarterfinals of the last World Cup, where it clearly outplayed Germany and were it not for a ridiculous hand goal no-call we'd have found ourselves in a shoot-out with that most traditional of European powers.

Since World War II we've always been the exception, in everything; the only country that exerted its own gravity, that really could, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, create our own reality.

But post-Iraq War I think we've started to come back down to earth a bit (a bit). Part of it is other nations finally getting their acts together and chipping away at our economic and cultural dominance, tying us--especially economically--into global systems that we no longer entirely control.

Part of it is our own internal decay--things like our crumbling infrastructure, deteriorating educational system, broken political system. Related to that is a psychological tiredness that we've got a long slog ahead of us against terrorism and really, it's no fun doing it all alone.

Undoubtedly, though, the main reason the U.S. seems more plugged into the rest of the world is that more of us are originally from or related to the rest of the world. This diversity means that what once may have seemed foreign or exotic literally no longer is so. So we are more interested in what's going on beyond our oceans, whether it's movies or politics or literature.

For the next month, it'll be all soccer, all the time for billions around the world, and millions here in the U.S. I'm very curious to see how much of a light is shone on Germany and Europe's imbedded racism, which for whites is perhaps most readily seen in the football stands.

ESPN's investigative series, Outside The Lines, had a well-done story over the weekend that focused on France's Thierry Henry (one of Time magazine's 2005 European heros), a black soccer star who got tired of the monkey/banana/spitting/diatribes/chants that are par for the course for black players in Europe. He got his sponsor Nike to help him film some commercials basically telling fans not to be racist.. and started a foundation to spread the message.

Watching the story, it's astonishing that in 2006 Europeans consider it normal for thousands of fans at games to hold up Nazi flags, scream abuse at non-white players, and openly parade their racism. Of course the majority of fans don't act that way, but it's insane that they essentially shrug their shoulders and say what can you do, there will always be some crazies.

Especially because it's not just some crazies--extreme right wing parties like Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front (who won 15% of the votes in France's presidential election in 1995) are part of the mainstream political landscape in Europe, regularly garnering substantial numbers of votes and parliamentary seats. And, as I've mentioned before, the biggest problem in Europe today is many white Europeans do not consider non-whites to be really French/German/Dutch/etc.; they still see them as a foreign element in their society, to be tolerated (or beaten) but in either case identified as other.

The ESPN story made the point that Europe never went through our civil rights struggles of the 60s, in part because there weren't large numbers of minorities on the continent at the time, and so naturally their views are behind ours when it comes to race. Naturally.

I'd say they are now going through that struggle; which means they're going to have their firehoses and dogs moments, their firebombings, their lunch counter sit-ins, their bloody Selmas, and ultimately their last stand in the schoolhouse door.

Which makes it odd that FIFA, which like most European institutions loves to lecture non-European countries about their societal shortcomings, would choose to stick a World Cup right in the midst of all this. In some ways it'd be like if they played a soccer tournament in South Africa during apartheid (instead of in 2010).

The Times, in their usual soft shoe manner when it comes to racism in Europe, sortof wrote about the topic, Surge in Racist Mood Raises Concerns on Eve of World Cup :

As he left the soccer field after a club match in the eastern German city of Halle on March 25, the Nigerian forward Adebowale Ogungbure was spit upon, jeered with racial remarks and mocked with monkey noises. In rebuke, he placed two fingers under his nose to simulate a Hitler mustache and thrust his arm in a Nazi salute.

Marc Zoro, right, an Ivory Coast native, was a target of racial slurs from the home fans in Messina, Italy. Adriano, a star with Inter Milan, tried to persuade him to stay on the field.

In April, the American defender Oguchi Onyewu, playing for his professional club team in Belgium, dismissively gestured toward fans who were making simian chants at him. Then, as he went to throw the ball inbounds, Onyewu said a fan of the opposing team reached over a barrier and punched him in the face.

International soccer has been plagued for years by violence among fans, including racial incidents. But FIFA, soccer's Zurich-based world governing body, said there has been a recent surge in discriminatory behavior toward blacks by fans and other players, an escalation that has dovetailed with the signing of more players from Africa and Latin America by elite European clubs.

This "deplorable trend," as FIFA has called it, now threatens to embarrass the sport on its grandest stage, the World Cup, which opens June 9 for a monthlong run in 12 cities around Germany. More than 30 billion cumulative television viewers are expected to watch part of the competition and Joseph S. Blatter, FIFA's president, has vowed to crack down on racist behavior during the tournament.

Underlining FIFA's concerns, the issue has been included on the agenda at its biannual Congress, scheduled to be held this week in Munich. A campaign against bigotry includes "Say No to Racism" stadium banners, television commercials, and team captains making pregame speeches during the quarterfinals of the 32-team tournament.

Players, coaches and officials have been threatened with sanctions. But FIFA has said it would not be practical to use the harshest penalties available to punish misbehaving fans — halting matches, holding games in empty stadiums and deducting points that teams receive for victories and ties.

Players and antiracism experts said they expected offensive behavior during the tournament, including monkey-like chanting; derisive singing; the hanging of banners that reflect neofascist and racist beliefs; and perhaps the tossing of bananas or banana peels, all familiar occurrences during matches in Spain, Italy, eastern Germany and eastern Europe.

We have to differentiate inside and outside the stadium," said Kurt Wachter, project coordinator for the Vienna-based Football Against Racism in Europe, a network of organizations that seeks to fight bigotry and xenophobia in 35 countries.

"Racism is a feature of many football leagues inside and outside Europe," said Wachter, who expects most problems to occur outside stadiums where crowds are less controlled. "We're sure we will see some things we're used to seeing. It won't stop because of the World Cup."

Particularly worrisome are the possibilities of attacks by extremist groups on spectators and visitors in train stations, bars, restaurants and open areas near the stadiums, Wachter and other experts said. To promote tolerance, he said his organization would organize street soccer matches outside World Cup stadiums.

Recent attacks in the eastern Germany city of Potsdam on an Ethiopian-born engineer and in eastern Berlin on a state lawmaker of Turkish descent, along with a government report showing an increase in right-wing violence, have ignited fears that even sporadic hate crimes and other intolerant behavior could mar the World Cup, whose embracing motto is A Time to Make Friends. ...

In mid-May, a former government spokesman, Uwe-Karsten Heye, caused a furor when he tried to assist visitors by advising that anyone "with a different skin color" avoid visiting small and midsize towns in Brandenburg and elsewhere in eastern Germany, or they "may not leave with their lives." ...

Gerald Asamoah, a forward on Germany's World Cup team and a native of Ghana, has been recounting an incident in the 1990's when he was pelted with bananas before a club match in Cottbus. "I'll never forget that," he said in a television interview. "It's like we're not people." He has expressed anger and sadness over a banner distributed by a right-wing group that admonished, "No Gerald, You Are Not Germany."

Cory Gibbs, an American defender who formerly played professionally in Germany, said there were restaurants and nightclubs in eastern Germany — and even around Hamburg in the west — where he was told "You're not welcome" because he was black.

"I think racism is everywhere," said Gibbs, who will miss the World Cup because of a knee injury. "But I feel in Germany racism is a lot more direct."

It's astonishing the Times starts the article with the misleading item of a black player making a Nazi salute, before explaining deep inside the story behind it. Word choice is also interesting, from the headline--racism isn't a 'mood'! people getting beat up is more than a 'concern'--to lumping hate crimes in with "other intolerant behavior".

People can soft-pedal it all they want, but Europe has got to deal with its racist core. There's something rotten with your society if in the 21st century large numbers of people feel comfortable throwing bananas at black players in public.

Uncredited image of Thierry Henry found in various places online.