Meanderings

no straight lines

Give Age a Chance

Jul 5

Posted by ranty in Weird barriers | No Comments

Youth appears as an explicit chief determinant of success in football. Is ageism ok then, if the score sheet says it is?

The media hype surrounding the World Cup  perfomance of the German football team carries an interesting subtext that has been all but explicitly pointed out by Germany’s team manager aka soccer magician-in-chief, Joachim Löw, who is reported to have told his players that they are “younger, fitter and faster” than the opposition. This is more than an encouraging invocation to his players. It is the base principle on which Löw made his site operate. Add to this the media cacophony dismissing Englands “Golden Generation” as a bunch of immobile geriatrics after their 1:4 thrashing by dze Germans and you have all the ingredients for a new dawn of ageism.

The limits of the celebrity cult nurtured especially be European club football have been exposed at this World Cup: In national and European club leagues highly paid individual talent and Messi-anic figures have been carefully welded into collectives that are designed to perfom well, if not always brilliantly, over the course of seasons – to deliver reliable cash flows if nothing else.

Of course the World Cup as an event is anything but non-commercial. It seems a fair assumption though that players and teams themselves are considerably less motivated by material prospects than by idealistic ones, compared to the club competitions. Plus , the WC only lasts a month.  Money, and with it the super-human individual brilliance that it remunerates are less important. The ability to call up the best physical and mental performance in turn becomes imperative at an event lasting a mere 4 weeks, every 4 years: Only youth can accomplish this, seems a sensible strategic conclusion here – at least in Joachim Löw’s mind.

If Löw’s team should make it to the top and win the WC, the loud calls for young squads, and national master plans for football academies and talent scouting will become irresistable. If it makes for good play – so be it. But it might be somwehat tricky to square with the social mission that football has also been endowed with: to not only respect but harness difference including social backgrond, aspirations or skin color; to foster community; to fair-play.  But if young men in their mid-20s are beginning to feel the heat because fitness and endurance start to decline in whatever small degree, they may feel compelled to revisit the question of  just what fair-play is about.

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You are what you do, aren’t you?

Mar 7

Posted by ranty in Other people's paradise and hell | No Comments

Because they all behave the same, they must be the same: Orthopraxy unwittingly adds to the perception of  ‘others’ as a majority.

In his book “Fear of small numbers” Arjun Appadurai argues that minorities – no matter how weak or small – frequently find themselves at the receiving end of majority violence because they remind majority populations that they are falling just short of full racial, ethnic, religious, cultural purity: technically even a few ‘outsiders’ constituting a minority are enough to visibly demonstrate that the majority is not coterminous with the nation or the people. I.e. minorities have the potential – especially in circumstances when social, economic uncertainty is rife – to induce an identity crisis in the majority.

It seems that the notion of an orthopraxy amplifies that dynamic as far as people of (at least nominally) Muslim denomination are concerned. Why? Common practices for prayer and other religious ritual also constitute powerful visual cues – especially so for people looking on from without. Outside observers may not understand what the practice is about – arguably the basis to start debating questions of orthodoxy – but they can nevertheless immediately make out the similarities with mass mediated images of (de-individualized) masses of people behaving the same way (e.g. images of pilgrimages). The visual/physical impression of Muslim orthopraxy on outside majority populations thus has a dramatic effect: In majority perception a local Muslim minority gets identified with a faceless global mass of people considered to be of a kind, i.e. a minority ‘grows’ into a perceived majority. What is more, the perceived unity in practice (of the minority) may also be erroneously construed (by the majority) as a unity in doctrine. I.e. it may give rise to a view that since ‘they’ all, at times act in a similar way, they must be thinking the same way.

There is a related problem: The unquestioned use of the terms ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ and the infamous we/they dichotomy . The notion of orthopraxy is precisely the reason why this terminology can be applied here so easily – from both the minority and majority vantage: one group is made up of people who act out prayer and other religious ritual, the other group are those people who do not. Othopractic unity thus has the power to create and reinforce group delineations of a much stronger black and white kind than any debate on orthodoxy could ever hope to achieve.

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Being dead alive…

Feb 18

Posted by ranty in Other people's paradise and hell | No Comments

Just stumbled across and read a book my Cormac McCarthy – “The Road”. The latest opus apparently of this author previously unknown to me. In short, declarative language – almost simple but for the vocab – he conjures up the hyper-naturalistic image of a post-apocalyptic world where a father and his small son – among the last living souls on earth – are walking, trekking, dragging themselves across an alien landscape, merely to survive…

It struck me that McCarthy describes a living hell – the plight of the last people alive in a dead world – or what must pass as such to North American or European readers, presumably his primary audiences. McCarthy’s hell may be their ultimate nightmare but, set in a world after the apocalypse, it is already removed one degree from us, because it is not quite here and now. Critics are reveling in the book’s profundity accordingly.

But which hell could be more frightening than the one that doesn’t even respect that boundary? This is the plight of people that are (as good as) dead in a world that is alive. And we know this hell. It is what countless survivors of the Holocaust told of: The experience of seeing the others yet not beeing seen, of calling for help yet not being heard, of reaching out for rescue yet not being perceived as anything other than thin air.

And this hell lives on. Right now and right here, everywhere – in the poor neighborhoods of every global metropolis, in the swathes of humanity forced to move in search of safe havens, and the countless individual minds of the despondent trying to make sense of a world where a fictional apocalypse commands more attention than a real hell.