On Sunday I shall mask my face with blue and white stripes on one side and bars of red, yellow and black on the other. The gladiators of Argentina and Germany will face each other in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana Stadium in the beautiful game’s grand finale.

French fan combining patriotism, nostalgia and chic.

I will be watching with friends in a bar with a big screen and drinking beer from the bottle. I don’t particularly like football – or soccer. I don’t understand the offside rule. But I do appreciate the passion football inspires when passion for politics is all but dead and passion for all things artistic will follow as art becomes business and artists are in the business of accumulation and repetition.

By a quirk of my father’s career and constant reassignments, I was born in Brussels. I took my first steps in Italy fourteen month later. Family legend has it that my first words were ciao for now. Should I, when Argentina knocked Belgium out of the cup, felt some hurt national pride? With so much expected, and so little delivered, should my patriotic hackles have risen after Italy’s ignoble exit?

Then, I am neither Belgium nor Italian, but English, and our gladiators slid home like Richard the Lionheart with his bedraggled army after failing to take Jerusalem in the Third Crusade. The world Cup is war. We fly our flags, paint our faces, dress in the costumes of the players in a show of nationalism, patriotism, loyalty. When Germany thrashed Brazil by an unprecedented 7 goals to 1, the host nation went into mourning. Rather than empathise, I thought this was the best possible result, a crude but necessary awakening. Brazil spent $14 billion on the World Cup, the most ever, with close to $1 billion on security alone, according to CNN.

Secure from whom? Surely not the one million street children being molested and damaged in Brazil’s cities, little girls not yet in puberty selling their bodies for 25 cents to buy food? Had the Brazilian government built one less stadium and saved $1 billion, they could have built the schools and hostels that would have solved the problem for street children forever.

Gladiators, Bread and Circuses

Do nationalism, patriotism and loyalty still have the same significance? I mentioned where I was born because where we are born is a quirk of fate. Samuel Johnson in 1775 coined that famous phrase that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. If we look beyond the geographic accident of our birth place, our loyalty must be with the one million street children, not the shapes and colours of the national flag. In a world where what separates people is less our nationality and increasingly the widening gulf between rich and poor, loyalty to a nation becomes loyalty to the banks and corporations that own the politicians, own the means of production and distribution and own our thoughts through the media. Brazil lost the semi-final match, but while their compatriots in yellow jerseys are weeping, the players, whatever flag, remain winners with the average $5 million a year they take to the bank.

In ancient Rome, the gladiators fought to the death in the arena to amuse the ‘shallow populace,’ the creation of public approval through ‘diversion and distraction’ described by the poet Juvenal as Bread and Circuses. The World Cup and Olympic Games are our bread and circuses. On balance, I believe they are a good way to bring the people of the world together. But while we wear our colours, we must not forget the darker sides of patriotism that leads to conflict – while we wait for Sunday’s final, the tanks are rolling and the guns are firing somewhere in the world, usually for reasons hard to understand and directed by politicians few people have any trust in and believe it is probably in some way to their advantage, not anyone else’s.

When the next candidate for office says: I love my country, take it as Juvenal would have done, with a pinch of salt. Truth, Lies & Politicians? Read on before the KICK OFF. Feeling passionate? Leave your thoughts in the box below

 

 

 

 

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The post Gladiators of the Beautiful Game appeared first on Chloe Thurlow.