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6 week deep dive into everything from assessing the polycrisis, to media literacy in a post-truth world, to what’s in your Go Bag for WTSHTF.
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(or at the very least, helpfully hopeful)
Onwards to the matter at hand...
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Welp—this month of World Cup festivities, controversies, triumphs and disasters has both united and divided the world.
Visitors from Europe have gawked at Buc-Eees convenience stores, which, in addition to offering a phalanx of gas pumps, sells everything from BBQ smokers to sea kayaks. (Cuz you never know what a fear and loathing roadtrip down ol’ Route 66 will require).
And the Euros have absolutely fallen in love with Ranch Dressing!!!
Plus the gobsmacking portion sizes everywhere from Applebees to the Olive Garden.
(thank heavens for GLPs—arriving just in time to solve our Wall-E crisis.)
#betterlivingthroughchemistry
As is par for the course these days, our Dear Leader couldn’t help himself from peeing on this parade of good feelings—this time, by calling up his good buddy, the President of FIFA (the governing body of the World Cup, whose leader had cravenly awarded Donald the first and only FIFA World Peace Prize when Nobel had snubbed him for the slightly more established honor.)
#trophygeneration
Trump intervened to prevent the USMNT leading scorer, Folarin Balogun from receiving a red card which would then have prohibited him from playing in the quarter finals against Belgium.
To be clear, this is one of several instances where Video Assistant Refereeing fucks things up more than it helps. (Egypt’s denied third goal against Argentina is another glaring example).
Regardless of intent, in the replay, it really looked like Balogun had done a player dirty, and after the play, after the review he got a red card (which kicks you off the field, requires your team to play a man down for the rest of the match, and bans you from the following game as well).
So, shitty call with a brutal impact on the US Men’s National Team’s chances at the tournament they’re hosting.
But only made all the more shitty by the appearance of Trump leaning on his FIFA buddy to get the red card lifted, for some deeply dubious reasons.
Upshot—US got their asses handed to them by Belgium 4-1 anyways. The world now hates the USMNT as an extension of our current administration rather than cheering for an underdog host nation playing “the beautiful game.”
And the Belgians took the piss out of Trump by doing his dance after the game.
His very pregnant mother had been denied her return flight to London, and accidentally gave birth to the future striker in New York instead. And given the luxury of three nations to represent, Balogun chose the U.S.
This is exactly the same nightmare scenario that Trump, Vance, Miller, and our increasingly nativist Supreme Court have been litigating—claiming that this sort of cynical “birthright citizenship” is a moral and strategic threat to the core WASPy values of the US of A.
Unless, of course, said Anchor Babies are helping us WIN (so much winning!). Then “they” become “We” and we get to look the other way.
For now.
But really, Trump’s cynical backing of one anchor baby underpins something you can spot at a glance in the French, English, Belgian, German and most other European teams.
All their rosters are suspiciously dark skinned!
For every blonde haired Viking like Norway’s Erling Haaland, you’ve got Cameroonian/Algerian French team captain Kylian Mbappe.
You can see this positively for what it so obviously is:
the knock on effects of centuries of European colonialism, of the colonized (and subsequently liberated) coming back to their “parent” nations, and taking them up on the promises of color blind, open, liberal societies.
Places where education and hard work offered a fair shot at the good life, and regardless of race, color or creed, you too were part of the great French, British, Dutch (or American) society.
Except that’s not what the ethno-nationalists like UK’s Tommy Robinson, or France’s Marine Le Pen, or Germany’s AfD party would have us believe.
For those white identitarians, a mythically pure European caste is purer, stronger, more moral, and harder working than any of the invaders from the Global South.
Except, apparently, on the football pitch.
Where our purebloods seem to be remarkably flat footed, and in real need of their fleeter footed compatriots.
#RIPJimmytheGreek
So in light of that, wanted to take a more considered wind up to this whole question of colonialism and its legacy. Because it’s clear at this point that “kitchen diplomacy” where we get to enjoy your tacos, kebabs and vindaloo curry, but turn your mothers and children away at the border, is hardly the high ground cities on hills are built upon.
Especially as we appear to be rebooting the kind of blood and soil nationalism that fueled and justified so many of the worst excesses of these earlier eras.
Let’s hop into the way back machine and put this into some context…
***
A little while ago, I was invited to give a talk at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in England. The British equivalent of West Point, Sandhurst is the place where officers of the Commonwealth and their allies are trained.
Graduates range from Winston Churchill and Princes William and Harry to Ian Fleming and the Jordanian royal family. It is the place where the values of leadership are instilled into generations of soldiers and statesmen.
(Granny inspecting Willy and Harry)
Our liaison officer, a veteran of tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, led my wife and me around the manicured grounds, and then showed us into the chapel. There, on Sunday mornings, cadets get a brief rest from the incessant demands of their training, and the chaplain can speak to them as the hopeful and overwhelmed young men and women they often are underneath their crisp uniforms.
As we explored the chapel I noticed the names of all the Sandhurst officers killed in action inscribed on the many columns between the pews.
“Lt. Col James Masterson, killed 28th February 1916, Verdun leaving his trench to rescue fallen soldier.”
“December 11 1899, Magersfontein, Major John Chives killed while reconnoitering enemy sniper placement. Boer War.”
“On the 24 March, 2004, Lance Corporal Barry Stephen from the 1st Battalion, Black Watch Regiment was killed when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded near his armoured vehicle in an action at Al Zubayr, near Basra.”
The unusually personal accounting struck me. This felt different from reading the names etched onto the black granite Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. Those few extra lines commemorating where, when and why these soldiers died brought them to life. Their ghosts guarded that chapel and reminded all the young cadets sitting in the pews of the ultimate costs and purpose of their service.
And on the other hand, those columns clearly marked a couple of centuries of imperial expansion. Sudan. Crimea. Afghanistan (both 19th and 21st centuries). South Africa. India. The Falklands. Iraq.
The conflicts read like a roll call of colonialism and conquest. There was no way around it––this chapel memorialized a time when the sun never set on a global empire. Britain’s ability to project force brutally and effectively often lay at odds with its self-appointed role civilizing the world.
“Look around Africa and Asia,” they might say, “and look at the grand buildings of the colonial era, the roads and rails, the courts, the democracies, rule of law over tribes, and the prosperity we created.”
“Now look at Zimbabwe, South Africa, India, Iraq, [fill in the blank former colony] and see the chaos, cronyism and decay today. It may have been painful and bloody, but we were better than what came before or after.”
That Civilizing Mission (or mission civilisatrice for the French and Portuguese empires), served as a justifying rationale for five hundred years of European colonization.
Beyond simple exploitation of land, labor and natural resources, the argument went, the assimilation of indigenous peoples into the Western Experiment was an even deeper and more noble purpose behind all the warfare and exploitation.
Perhaps no one defended this stance so memorably or controversially as British author Rudyard Kipling (of Jungle Book fame). In his 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden he epitomized the “no good deed goes unpunished” weight of bringing light to the benighted…
Take up the White Man’s burden —
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild —
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
...
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Inspired by Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee and the United State’s war with the Philippines, Kipling wrote a sweeping testament to Western expansion.
But none of those packed the punch of Mark Twain’s sharp rebuttal in 1901 “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” which satirized Kipling and the whole Civilizing Mission. Twain spared no one, naming presidents and prime ministers, and slamming everything from Britain’s conduct in the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Boer War, to the United States’ treatment of Plains Indians.
“Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?” Twain asked. “Shall we bang right ahead in our old-time, loud, pious way, and commit the new century to the game; or shall we sober up and sit down and think it over first?
...Extending the Blessings of Civilization to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well, on the whole...The most of those People that Sit in Darkness have been furnished with more light than was good for them or profitable for us. We have been injudicious....This is not well.”
The critiques only grew more pointed as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and the sun set on European empires around the world. Franz Fanon, the West Indian born psychiatrist, academic and revolutionary, was radicalized by his experiences fighting against the collaborationist Vichy French in World War Two.
Like African American GIs, who returned from service to lead the Civil Rights Movement, Fanon was struck by the contrast between the heroism with which soldiers of color conducted themselves against the overtly racist Axis Powers, and the barely concealed racism of the units in which they served.
Swept up in the ensuing independence movements in Algeria and throughout the former colonies, Fanon wrote two influential books Black Skins, White Masks, and Wretched of the Earth––that offered searing critique of the psychological costs of colonization––that the White Man’s Burden was nothing compared to the weight of the the colonized.
(n.b. Les Blues, the French National football team would be nowhere right now, were it not for this mixed North African legacy!)
It’s this thread that postcolonial scholars have taken up in their sustained critique of European expansion and its more modern extension into a U.S. led military and economic world order.
But in this justified dismantling of the Civilizing Mission, there’s a truth that risks getting missed: bundled in with all of the exploitation, self-serving mythologizing, and naked violence of European colonialism, lay the seeds of the most novel experiment in governance--the first fumbling rounds of the Infinite Game.
So in some resonant way, the Beautiful Game of football and this World Cup is highlighting the Infinite Game that underpins it all.
The chance to play for love of the Game, for team and for country. To see, if we can settle our desires to compete on the grassy pitch rather than the muddy trench—to sublimate our bloodlust and aggression for a gorgeous pass, an impossible save, an overtime miracle.
But for all of us right now, the stakes have rarely been higher. We’re late into injury time, the crowds are growing restless and our trust in the refs has collapsed.
It may all come down to penalty kicks and sudden death.
Let’s hope that those on the field have a better grasp of the dignity and humanity our moment requires than those pundits and politicians shouting from their boxes in the sky.
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