Jogo bonito

The planet is aflame. War, famine, pestilence. The air, water and topsoil—life itself—threatened everywhere, but that will all have to wait—it's time for the World Cup.

I'm sorry, I can't bring myself around to calling it football. On different occasions, I lived in London, Ireland and Sydney for extended periods, and I cringe today at how affected I was in my adoption of non-Yank slang. For fuck's sake, I'm an Amuhhrican.

For a year or so I worked near Tony Karon in the big open-plan Pathfinder office in the Time Inc. building. I didn't know him or read him much then— but now I find him a terrific political writer, insightful and urbane and never tendentious (on occasion, however, I do quite enjoy a bit of tendentiousness).

In "How to Watch the World Cup: Politics and War by Other Means," Karon offers a non-condescending guide to just how fucking important it all is.... Here he compares the styles of Germany and Brazil, the 2002 Copa finalists:

[The] teams ... represent global North-South polar opposites in the way the game is played. As Muhammad Ali was celebrated not just for his unique skills in the ring but for his iconic resistance to the racial order, so the universal popularity of Brazil is based not only on its exquisitely poetic style -- the "Joga Bonito" (beautiful game) -- but also on its role as a proxy representative of the Global South.

The German game epitomizes the industrialized West: physical power, relentless drive, unshakable organization and a machine-like efficiency in punishing opponents' mistakes. It's a kind of Blitzkrieg -- the modern German game, as Simon Kuper has noted, had its roots in Nazi sports culture and the militaristic virtues it lionized -- that overwhelms opponents with physical power on the ground and in the air, often winning "ugly" by a single goal. The best-known German players of the past half century have been goalkeepers, field commanders in defense and midfield, as well as clinical if artless goal-poaching forwards. There has never been a Pelé on the German team; in Brazil, by contrast, each year brings a new crop of awesomely talented teenagers from the favelas whose audacious skill and flair inevitably anoints them as "the next Pelé."

Brazil's style is more akin to advanced guerrilla warfare in which the insurgents have the momentum and the confidence. They combine impossible skill with breathtaking audacity and guile, an ability to shoot from great distances and apply boot to ball in a manner that improbably "bends" its trajectory. The telepathy with which they are able to anticipate each other's movements allows them to dazzle both the opposition and the crowd with the fluidity of their passing movements and their propensity for doing the unexpected. The adversary literally never knows where the next attack will come from, or what it will be. And the smiles of the Brazilians, even in crucial games, tell you that they're enjoying themselves. On the field, you'll rarely see a German player smile.

When Ronaldinho, currently rated the greatest player in the world, spotted the English goalkeeper David Seaman two yards off the goal line in their 2002 World Cup clash, he unleashed a 40-yard free kick that looped over Seaman's outstretched gloves, wickedly dipping and curling into the top corner of England's goal. So thunderstruck were the English TV commentators that they insisted the strike was a fluke, a pass that went fortuitously awry. It's for such moments that the soccer fans of the Global South live.

And he correctly points out that this is a rare chance for people like me to root for the Yanks without inhibitions.

President Bush may give the event a miss -- one can only wonder what he would make of a game in which the U.S. has a negligible chance of being world champion; for Americans with qualms about their country's imperial role, by contrast, supporting the plucky and rather well-liked outsiders of Team USA is an opportunity for guilt-free patriotic fervor.

Read the whole article...

And don't miss this fun video....