Don't believe the hype

I have decided to use the all-star break to blog on one of my other sports passions, world cup soccer. I have myself visited a number of blogs devoted to the subject and read through the long lists of comments theyt attrace. All I can say is that there has never, and I mean never, been an ad campaign more deceptive than the one-worldism marketing ESPN ran to attract Americans low oin soccer interest but high on political idealism. We all know that international sport, like the Olympics, can be war by other means, but that is also to say that they are war in sublimation. If world cup managed to be that, I would think the ads about a ball closing shops, stopping wars, changing the world, were profoundly silly, but no more misleading than your average marketing device in favor of an innocuous commodity. What these blogs convinced me, however, was that if the tournament brings the world together in the sense of magnetizing global attention around a single spectacle, mutual animosity remains the deciver energy invested. As an Italian-American, I can't say I was the least bit surprised at the degree of slur-dripping animus directed at the Italian team and Italians generally. As an american, I was similarly unsurprised at the enmity expressed toward the French. After all Francophobia, even more than Muslim or Arab bashing, is our last fully legitimated prejudice in this country. But who knew so many people had such deep-seated hatred toward the Portugese? World Cup evidently doesn't really supply much in tghe way of sublimation of ethnic hostility, it seems to actualize some that are otherwise largely dormant.