Men are born for
games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows
too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but
rather in the value of that which is put at hazard… This is the nature of war,
whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen
so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and
the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is
therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a
forcing of the unity of existence. War is god (Cormac McCarthy Blood
Meridian p249).
I adore the work of Cormac McCarthy; not having read a word
of his until I turned 33, and mistaking him at first for Carson McCullers, that
altogether less grandiose exponent of the Southern Gothic, it was an
extraordinary personal epiphany to come across McCarthy’s novels during my MA
in Twentieth Century American Literature. The book of his I loved most of all
was Suttree,
a semi-autobiographical account of his life in Knoxville, Tennessee in the
early 1950s, though my lecturers and other students frothed at the mouth over
the grotesque epic Blood Meridian, from where I’ve quoted the speech by the
terrifying Judge Holden which prefaces this piece. On this surface, both the Judge’s
visceral oratory and the book as a whole are awesome, fearful constructs that
seem to update the concept of the Elizabethan Chain of Being, often referred to
as the Celestial Dance, to the American West, reducing human experience to the pavane
of violence, war, and bloodshed that Judge Holden so often praises. However, I
found the endless portrayals and justification of death and destruction to be
ultimately hollow when compared to the realistic struggles of one lonely man in
Suttree.
Writing as I am for an edition devoted to the twin themes of
war and football, under the effusive, corporate shadow of a World Cup, it would
be credible to suggest that Judge Holden’s words are the philosophy of the Honduran
Football Federation. Indeed there is a persuasive argument to suggest that all
football contests, from the most elevated levels of international football to
the basest, internecine contests at the foot of the pyramid between feuding
pubs in Sunday morning leagues are a physical recreation of the philosophical
exposition of conflict delineated by Judge Holden. Examples of football as
warfare are legion; while it’s a cheap shot to suggest the no-nonsense approach
to the game adopted by Honduras, who appear to be a de facto international version of Wallsend Town, who achieved the
extraordinary feat of being expelled from the Northern Alliance for incessant
rough housing, is a kind of warfare, La guerra del
fútbol between Honduras and neighbouring El Salvador in 1969 shows there is
form for this in an altogether less stage-managed theatre than the one overseen
by FIFA.
Two years after that conflict, the struggles for equality by members of
the oppressed Nationalist community in the north of Ireland saw a response from
the ruling Loyalist elite, backed up by the military might of their ideological
Sugar Daddies at the heart of the British state, which resulted in a savage,
sectarian civil war. An example of the repressive, punitive measures taken
against ordinary Nationalists was the expulsion of Derry City from the Irish
League in 1971, ostensibly for security concerns as their Brandywell home is in
the Republican Bogside. Such an action was portrayed as being the right and
sensible thing to do, rather than admitting it was another unnecessary
ideological assault on the most downtrodden section of society.
One of my favourite ever cartoons was a Ray Lowry sketch in the NME in the mid-1980s. In the wake of the US boycott of the Moscow
Olympics and the USSR’s reciprocal absence from LA in 1984, while an endless
stream of county cricketers, some shamefacedly and others brazenly, exchanged
their test careers for a fistful of blood-soaked Rand on Rebel Tours of
apartheid era South Africa, in direct contravention of the 1977 Gleneagles
Agreement, Lowry drew a scene based in the Roman Coliseum. As a hapless serf
was fed to the lions, he cried out Imperialist
Bastards; meanwhile, the garlanded and toga-wearing emperor turned to
his minion and said I do wish they’d
keep politics out of sport.
I was only 9 going on 10 when the 1974 World Cup took place, but I was
made aware by my dad, who insisted we support East Germany over West Germany (I
can still recall him leaping from the couch and punching the air when Jürgen
Sparwasser scored that iconic goal) that the team to hate above all others were
Chile, because of that country’s military regime. The first Rothmans Football Yearbook I owned
was the 1974/1975 edition; in its account of qualification for the tournament
in Germany, it states that Chile qualified after USSR “withdrew following a
protest at the proposed venue for the second leg of their play-off,” almost as
if there was a doubt about the strength of the floodlights or a large enough
press box, though with a snide hint that since Chile had achieved a 0-0 in
Moscow, the Ruskies didn’t fancy their chances and so had taken a hissy fit. I
am eternally grateful to my late father (Eddy Cusack b: 9-3-34 d: 1-8-09) for
providing me with the context that Rothmans
and British broadcasters were unwilling to do 40 years ago.
On 11 September 1973, Thatcher’s favourite despot Augustus Pinochet led a
brutal military coup that deposed the democratically elected Social Democratic
government of Salvador Allende. Thousands upon thousands of Government
supporters, left wing activists and community leaders were rounded up and
summarily executed in the national football stadium in Santiago. Perhaps the
most famous victim was the folk singer and teacher Victor Jara, after whom the
stadium is now named. Jara was shot and his corpse brutally defiled the day
after the coup. His body was thrown in the dirt outside the stadium, from where
his widow Joan and family members retrieved it, to give this brave, honest and
totally innocent man a decent burial. FIFA, sensitive as ever to international
events, insisted that the USSR v Chile play-off went ahead on 26 September
1973. By the time of the scheduled second leg in late November, the
international community had grown aware of the gross violations of human rights
by this illegal US-backed and funded coup; the USSR’s principled stance in
refusing to play in such circumstances was predictably ignored by FIFA and,
decontextualised, used as further anti Soviet propaganda by the BBC. With
Pinochet long dead and democracy restored to Chile, I was able to celebrate
their appearance at this year’s World Cup, which Milan Kundera would recognise
as The Tournament of Laughter and
Forgetting.
No country could have more reasons not to forget the endless privations
it endured at the hands of a cruel oppressor than Ireland and their attitude to
England. Derry City’s expulsion may have been a minor attack on the Nationalist
community on the Foyle, certainly when compared to the shooting dead of 13
innocent, unarmed men on 30 January 1972, in what has become known as Bloody Sunday. Tragically, though
predictably when considering Britain’s attitude to her neighbour, the original Bloody Sunday in 1920 was actually a
greater outrage, as the Black and Tans shot dead 14 unarmed civilians at Croke
Park during a GAA football game between Dublin and Tipperary. War is sport, but
there can be laughter and forgetting; on 24 February 2007, God Save the Queen was played at
Croke Park, before Ireland thumped England 43-13 in the Six Nations. The Irish
nation forgave the British state and welcomed a team to play the quintessential
game of the British ruling elite in the very venue where that country’s
functionaries committed such a barbaric atrocity. However, it wasn’t football.
Perhaps the events of Lansdowne Road in 1995 prevented the chance for Ireland
to overcome England at football at Croker, but the gracious conduct of the
Irish nation in a sporting environment is to be applauded.
Several years after I completed my postgraduate studies,
McCarthy published the book that did not make his name, as his literary
reputation was already established, but finally gave him a mainstream audience
courtesy of the Coen Brothers’ masterful film adaptation of No
Country for Old Men, which led to an explosion of interest in his work.
One of the things I respect most about Cormac McCarthy is that he simply
refuses to discuss the supposed deeper meaning of any of his books, stating “there’s
nothing for me to say. Everything I have to say is there on the page.” However,
I do wonder how he responds to the widespread veneration of the “living prophet
of destruction” Anton Chigurh, perhaps his most bleakly psychotic character, so
chillingly portrayed by Javier Bardem in the film. Rather like the judge,
Chigurh’s words have the same kind of bombastic, quasi-philosophical but
ultimately hollow quality of Judge Holden’s utterances. For instance, is there
actually any real meaning behind the phrase “if the rule you followed led you
to this, of what use was the rule?” Of course in the novel, the character of
Carson Wells has little time to ponder this question before Chigurh shoots him,
but that’s shows what a cruel game it can be. Being a mercenary I mean, not
football.
To me, the central character in No Country for Old Men is
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the ageing law man who has spent all his life trying to do
the right thing and finding himself more and more of an anachronism as the new
TexMex outlaws have technology at their disposal, while he drives a cruiser
that “couldn’t out run a fat man.” Ed Tom knows his time is up as he’s can’t do
anything about “the true and living prophet of destruction” that is Chigurh.
Perhaps Neil Young was wrong and it is better to fade away than burn out.
I am 50 in August and I know I’m becoming Ed Tom Bell’s
football supporting equivalent. More and more I find myself repulsed by the
glorification of conflict in football, whether that be Carling drenched UKIP followers
in England tops brawling in takeaways, the incessant xenophobic rhetoric of the
media or even, at a micro level, posturing oafs on the internet making
nonsensical claims about dust-ups after local derbies, claiming the “real
result” is to be found off the pitch. It’s tiresome and it’s wrong.
Perhaps, as FIFA controls every fibre of the game’s being at
the upper echelons, meaning that popular protests in Brazil are as
decontextualized as the USSR’s refusal to play in Santiago in 1973, then even
Cormac McCarthy’s bleak nihilism doesn’t go far enough. Rather we must take as
our text Guy Debord’s 1967 piece, The Society of the Spectacle, which
helped explained the nature of late capitalism's historical decay as part of
the political manifesto of the Situationist International. In Debord’s terms, spectacle was defined as an assemblage of
social relations transmitted via the imagery of class power, and as a period of
capitalist development wherein all that was once lived has moved into
representation, whereby experience becomes detached from every aspect of life
-:
We live in a
spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense
accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived
by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a
commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the
real. It becomes a substitute for experience.
Pacified by the endless images on our television screen of
football played by superstars of unimaginable wealth, we have become detached
from the reality of the game. No longer are we participants in the bloody demi-monde outlined by Judge Holden, but
instead we are anaesthetized by the media and exist in a stupefied false
consciousness that Gramsci touched on in his theory of hegemony. The warfare we
should consider as being part of football is properly class warfare; change the
game, change the world, but find someone younger than me to help you. I’ll be
watching Northern League football and cursing the professional game with an
ideological bitterness that age entitles me to.
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