[Marxism] Opium, or Blues and Greens?

["Nestor Gorojovsky" <nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Respuesta a:"Marxism Digest, Vol 30, Issue 64"
Enviado por:marxism-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Con fecha:29 Apr 2006, a las 7:24

> >
> To say that soccer is the "opium of the masses" is the same as to say
> that theatre is the "opium of the intellectuals". Renato

Hooray for Renato P.!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Team partisanship in professional sports has become more like -say- 
the battles between Blues and Greens in Constantinople than anything 
else.  It is up to intellectuals to understand the passion, not to 
the passion to open itself up to intellectuals.

In Argentina, at least, masses have found that fútbol ("Soccer") is a 
very good weapon to express themselves against the powers-that-be.  
Of course, there remains little of sports with professional fútbol 
now:  it has become mostly a matter of show business, and 
commodifycation increasingly strips it from any pretense of fair 
competition.  Market rule and fair play don't match. No matter what 
will sycophants tell you, no bourgeois likes competition.

So that the whole thing _might_ look like an opium-smoking 
enterprise.  But the problem is that when you have a mass of many 
tens of thousands of lower class people (alas, mostly males) gathered 
in some closed area, you can sometimes discover that they are voicing 
somthing with a meaning, sometimes some song that the powers-that-be 
forbid, and that they are not day-dreaming nor smoking pipes, but 
they are very consciously using the immunity of the multitude to say, 
to _actually say_ something... and no power can't stop them.

Argentinean imperialist-oligarchic dictatorships throughout the 
second half of the 20th Century have had to suffer such shameful (for 
them, of course) events.  Even during the 1978 World Cup, people 
found out how to express their convictions.  But this was not evident 
to mainstream "leftists", which is a pity.  This was a strange 
battle, a battle fought with paper slots.  And _that_ particular 
battle was a defeat for the dictatorship.

* The battle of the paper slots

If you have some tape of those events you will see millions of paper 
slots flying from the seats to the fields.  This is exactly what the 
military wanted to avoid, in order to show how "polite" and "clean" 
were the Argentineans, something they tried to instil through a 
football commentator of those years, José María Muñoz.  Against this 
there was some kind of a silent revolt by the mass of the people, 
somehow spearheaded by a cartoonist, Caloi (BTW, a Peronist and not a 
"left wing" one!) who worked for the _Clarín_ daily.

There was a custom in Argentinean fields of those times to greet your 
team throwing paper slots to the air, just as when you greet the New 
Year.  The government was very annoyed that this "barbaric" usage -
there were other, more barbaric ones, incorporated by military and 
their friends into in-team politics by those years, but these did not 
worry the government at all- was to be seen the globe over, and 
launched a campaign to put an end to such a "dirty" behaviour.

Then, this Caloi, through a cartoon puppet people loved, Clemente, 
began his campaign:  "Tire, tire papelitos"  (Throw, throw paper 
slots!), which succeeded immensely:  every match in the local fútbol 
championship began with a massive burst of paper slots and players 
began to do their job in fields thickly covered with a carpet of 
paper slots, made as usual by tearing wrapping paper, old newspapers, 
and paper bags at home.  And what was to happen during the World Cup 
was already obvious.

So that the regime had to set back, and accept the "papelitos".  They 
won a last battle in their retreat: in order to have a "neat" and 
"tidy" TV environment, they distributed millions of small light-blue 
and white paper slots (the colors of the Argentinean flag).

Whenever you see a burst of paper slots in an old video tape of the 
1978 World Cup in Argentina, remember that they were a burst of 
popular outrage against the regime.

Este correo lo ha enviado
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[No necesariamente es su autor]
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"La patria tiene que ser la dignidad arriba y el regocijo abajo".
Aparicio Saravia
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