Rugby!

As part of my attempt to become the most European American in the history of all humankind, I have lately been acquainting myself with the strange phenomenon of "European sports."

Football (and I mean this in the literal sense...my Europeanness dictates that there is no such thing as "soccer") is of course the first logical entry in this curriculum. I'm roughly familiar with the game ("Ooooh, so they have to kick the ball...I get it now!") and have watched quite a few games out here, so I felt like I could skip the course and head straight to the final exam, which was the Liverpool-Barcelona game of last week. During it, I made a few anthropological observations:
1. Football is a silly sport. Here we have all of these highly fit athletes running up and down the field, apparently always kicking the ball to the other team and then being forced to run back down the field until someone seems to find themselves purley by accident alone in front of the other team's goal, at which point they tend to kick or head-butt the ball in entirely the wrong direction.
2. The majority of a given game of football seems to consist of people being injured by bumps, slight touches, particularly mean glances, and sometimes by nothing at all. The players writhe about on the ground, clutching randomly at extremities, pounding their hands on the grass, crying, and looking rather like they are furiously deciding not to invite the other team to their birthday party where there will be not one but two clowns.

So I figured to hell with football. I thought of that coup in Fiji last December where the general in charge put off his overthrow of the government for a day because the rugby game was on, and used that as my compass. And you know what? I totally understand his reasoning. I have never been more entertained.

For my American readers, a rugby union game is like an American football game, except better in every way. Instead of stopping every nine or ten seconds to stand around slapping one another on the ass and having impromptu committee meetings, when the guy with the ball gets tackled, punched, clotheslined, or otherwise beaten to the ground, with his last anguished dying breath, he heaves the ball to one of his teammates who runs past, giggling. This guy will then keep running until he too gets smashed by like nine guys from different directions, at which point he passes the ball again and the whole thing continues. Sometimes (and I have no idea why, nor quite frankly do I care) a bunch of guys on each side lock arms and form a phalanx to pound into each other and shove the other entire team over, possibly for the purpose of standing or sitting on their opponents' heads. The game I just watched was Scotland vs. France, and I have to tell you, if you haven't seen six big barbarian Scots knock over ten or eleven equivocating French guys (who you can almost hear muttering refusals to participate in diplomatic endeavors and wondering where their cheap red wine went), then you haven't lived. These guys don't wear pads, they hit hard and often, and I'm pretty sure that if left alone together, the average rugby team would kill and eat the average football team.

And as though this spectacle weren't entertaining enough, the announcers (equipped with inscrutable Scottish accents) are a goddamn laugh riot. After the first half hour, I was tempted to start taking notes--I felt the high point was when they referred to France's only chance as resorting to a Fabian defensive strategy...which, of course, is an allusion to Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, five-time consul and two-time dictator of Rome during the Second Punic War. I wouldn't say I've watched all that many American football games, but somehow I doubt Fabius Maximus was ever mentioned by John Madden.

That, of course, got me thinking. While it can't be denied that most Americans are less well-travelled, culturally experienced, worldly, and polylingual than most Europeans (especially in the last six years, when anti-intellectualism has become a perverse point of pride), I think there is more to the usual claim that Americans are just ignorant. Consider, if you will, that our news media seems geared towards lurid six-year olds, that our politicians rarely if ever talk about actual policies, that the general level of our public discourse is so abysmally low...is it not the case that just as Americans in general are apathetic and willfully ignorant (since all sorts of information is available, they just mostly choose to ignore it) but also that this is perpetuated and reinforced from above?
Take the recent rash of Japanese horror films which have been remade by Hollywood. Is this because American audiences can't identify with characters who aren't white? Is it because Americans don't like to read subtitles? I mean, I'm sure there is plenty of disgusting market research to this effect and it was determined that more Americans will go see films in English starring white people, but the stubborn refusal to try anything else is an interesting phenomenon in and of itself. It's too bad there will never be a case of an American remake being in theaters at the same time as the far superior foreign original film for the purposes of comparison.
Essentially, I think to a large extent the myth of the idiot masses is the opiate of the masses as a whole. I think it is perpetuated at least partially to present an immobile monolithic impression of the hopelessness of change and intellectual development. It is after all an odd bit of doublethink that we are supposed to have great faith in vaunted American creativity and ingenuity (which after all is one of the main motors to our capitalist system) but also are instilled with an unshakable belief that everyone else is a gibbering moron. It's an interesting bit of sociological divide-and-rule.

In other news, I have been delighted to discover that the professor for my Advanced International Politics class (a German with an Italian name who studied in France and became a civil servant there before moving to Denmark and now teaching in Sweden) is the author of a rather good book I've read, and that the professors for my History of Scandinavia 700-1300 (henceforth referred to as "The Viking Class") are a married couple from Oxford who have been writing and teaching together for about fifty years. They're absolutely hilarious, and they seem to have written about half the books on Vikings and medieval Scandinavia that exist in the whole world. I am cautiously optimistic that this next month (in which I have all three classes at once, and then they finish and I have none at all in April) will not be an utter waste of my time.

If nothing else, I expect to watch a lot of rugby.

What I'm Reading
Robert Blake, Disraeli (man, these massive bios of Victorian PMs are excellent!)
H.G.C. Matthew, Gladstone
Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion (yes, the Prime Minister was a novelist)