Category Archives: Life

Political Football

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As some parts of Europe prepare for Jean-Claude Juncker’s “Club of the Few” while others fall by the wayside, it’s time to look back at how we got here. Nothing unites Europeans like football, and this year’s Euro 2008 tournament is turning out to be one of the best in a long time, maybe ever. What else could have us feeling sorry for Switzerland and cheering for Austria? Isn’t Europe a more harmonious entity without the English? Would Brussels be paralysed by protests today if Belgium had qualified? And would Ireland have voted No if they were in the tournament?
Part of the fun of football is the way in which it overturns the international order of power politics.

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EURO 2008 football (not soccer!) fever

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Only a couple of days before the big European sporting event of 2008 kicks off in Austria and Switzerland. Who will be crowned European football champion of 2008 in Vienna on June 26th?

For my own country The Netherlands, which finds itself in a Group of Death with France, Italy and Romania, the odds do not look very good. Solid individual players, apart from maybe the current defence line-up, but not always up to par as a team.

Current world champion Italy recently lost star defender Cannavaro because of an injury, but even so the signori di catenaccio won’t have much trouble keeping the gates tightly closed.

The French side, the current vice world champion, looks pretty solid too, with fresh new players like for instance attacker Bafetimbi Gomis. And then there is the Romanian side, a strong outsider wolf comfortably clad in underdog’s clothing. Nobody seems to expect the Romanian inquisition, but this side has nothing to lose in this group and could very well upset at least one of the higher ranked teams.

Last year a Dutch clairvoyant (or maybe somebody who just follows Dutch football very closely) already predicted the Orange Team won’t make it past the group stage. And to add insult to very probable Dutch injury the English, who failed to qualify for EURO 2008, have taken it upon themselves to have some preemptive fun at the expense of the soon to be blue orange squad.

A certain Jon Gledstone from the creative design agency 5th Of November thought up a web campaign called Just Go Dutch to urge his compatriots to support, of all possible teams, the Dutch. You can find the guy’s rather funny webpage here. The Dutch, being the good sports they are, have already thanked Gledstone for his support with an official orange T-shirt showing his name in ‘Dutch’: Van Gledstone.

Anyway, what is your favourite team to win the EURO 2008 Championship? Or, alternatively, who would you like to see defeated? After all, as those dastardly English are showing us in a reverse psychology kind of way, cheering against a team can be fun as well.

PS: A big kiss to Gledstone & Co for at least giving us Dutchies a little bit of attention before we inevitably sink into total oblivion.

*end counter jinx alert*

And then, a LIBRARY!

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The German newspaper whose website could be better organised has a very good article about the Gurtel, Vienna’s other great boulevard, once described as the proletarian Ringstrasse. I never knew this, though:

Wobei auf dem Gürtel früher Linksverkehr herrschte, wie in England. Siegfried Tschmul, ein Wiener Jude, erinnert sich gut daran. Als er 1938, nachdem die deutschen Truppen in Wien einmarschiert waren, eines Morgens aus seinem Fenster hinunter auf den Währinger Gürtel sah, fuhren alle Autos plötzlich rechts, wie in Deutschland. Über Nacht war der gesamte Verkehr umgestellt worden, und niemand hatte ein Problem mit der neuen Ordnung. Da sei ihm klar geworden, dass er Wien verlassen musste. Mit seinen Eltern floh er aus Österreich.

They used to drive on the left? Who knew? And the image of everyone suddenly driving on the right, the morning after the Nazi seizure of power, is better than any novelist could have invented. I liked this, too:

Denn die Rotlichtszene, lange untrennbar mit dem Gürtel verbunden, verliert ihr Publikum, vor allem dort, wo der Gürtel so schick und quirlig geworden ist. Eine der Unterweltgrößen, in Wien “Strizzis” genannt, hat den Sittenverfall schon in einem Interview beklagt. Erst seien die Stadtbahnbögen ausgeräumt und Kulturzentren eingerichtet worden. Und dann hätten sie ihm auch noch “eine Bibliothek hingebaut”.

What did the porno boss find most offensive? The library, damn it.

The absence of politics…?

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The associative mind works in mysterious ways. At least, mine does. The New York Times has an amazing article today called Bacteria Thrive in Inner Elbow; No Harm Done about, as the title suggests, the countless bacteria that live in and on our bodies. It turns out humans are really individual ‘superorganisms’. What caught my associative attention was the following (emphasis mine):

Since humans depend on their microbiome for various essential services, including digestion, a person should really be considered a superorganism, microbiologists assert, consisting of his or her own cells and those of all the commensal bacteria. The bacterial cells also outnumber human cells by 10 to 1, meaning that if cells could vote, people would be a minority in their own body.

Fortunately, nobody gets to vote here. And that is exactly what set my mind off. Bacteria and humans share a common society, if you will, and both parties benefit from this coexistence. There are no codified rules or policy governing the life of the individual superorganism called man. And over the course of ages this has evolved into something that really works well for all parties concerned.

This made me wonder if we do not sometimes overpoliticize certain social issues within our human macrosocieties. Can we leave certain issues of, for instance, cohabitation to the population itself to sort out in a free market kind of way? Or will this inevitably lead to violence and grief (even if there were no populist politicians to stir up the flames) as seems to be the case right now in South-Africa? And, after all, bacteria wage war too.

Well, a naieve mind can dream, can’t it? Anyway, I thought the article on its own was interesting enough to mention here. And maybe some knowledgeable readers can surprise and enlighten us with comments about politics in nature?

Afterthougt: Alternatively, does it really matter if there are politics or not? Aren’t we, somewhere deep down, inexorably governed by the ruthless laws of nature regardless of all the nice ideologies and institutions we invent to prevent ourselves, periodically, from killing each other?

«La nature a fait l’homme heureux et bon, mais la société le déprave et le rend misérable.»

Quote taken from Le Mythe du bon sauvage

Alexander von Humboldt Ate My Hamster

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This post reminded me a lot of Vienna University in 2001-2002; I was there as a SOCRATES student, still actually a member of the Labour Party, while the strange times we live in began. I also first encountered the word “blog” around about then, and indeed visited the Blogger front page, but for some reason I didn’t take the jump to actually get blogging; I therefore bear some responsibility for Instapundit’s undeserved fame.

What do I remember, of the pre-Bologna German university? Well, one thing was the teaching staff, or rather their absence; you could go literally weeks without seeing your professor outside the huge lectures, but why would you want to? Their pompous titles were only matched by their pomposity in general. This didn’t go so much for the postgraduate assistants, but then, there’s only so often you actually want a row about Trotsky…

Another thing was the distinctive Austrian combination of bureaucracy and chaos. It took literally months to complete the process of registration, but it wasn’t as if anyone cared – I often wondered how many of my fellow students bothered to register at all, and how many weren’t even planning to graduate. This Gormenghast atmosphere was only reinforced by the fact I had lectures in the main university building on Dr. Karl Lueger Ring; within the 1870s Italianate monster was a world of high ceilings and flaking plaster, lectures where so many people were packed in the hall that I recall sitting behind a projection booth with my back to the lecturer.

In the entrance hall, there is a huge stone first world war memorial which is kept concealed by noticeboards because it’s ideologically significant to the Burschenschafter on one hand, and the political science crowd on the other. There was a weekly confrontation between the two groups next to it; what with the FPO and Co, we spent a lot of time demonstrating in one way or other. Above all, there was a sense of an academic life left behind, after the ideas and the people had moved on; the plaque commemorating Moritz Schlick, the philosopher murdered during a lecture by a Nazi student, just dramatised this.

Now, partly this was all sui generis. I would guess things were very different down the road at the TU with the engineers. But I do think it represents something like an extreme version of the German system, or rather its (powerful) humanities-plus-Staatsexamen wing. And I wouldn’t feel too nostalgic for it.

But I will, however, remember very well the excellent course which shadowed the European Convention process, protesting on the Ring, telling Robert Menasse he was an idiot…

Regression Roundup

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DTV (digital television) is here; just at a time when people are giving up on watching TV in favour of YouTube. Or so we might have thought. There’s also going to be a switchover in America. What if you’re poor and can’t afford a new television? US Congress has thought of this: two $40 vouchers are to be made available to every US household, on application; redeemable at your local Best Buy. Precedent: the Plebeian Games of Emperor Commodus.

A senior British police forensic scientist wants to put the DNA of children aged 7-12 on the British national DNA database (NDNAD). If they show signs of becoming troublemakers, that is. Precedent: criminological phrenology.

In the UK, unemployment benefit is taxable. (News to me, if not to anyone else.) Precedent: the Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834.

This is the first in a series of posts monitoring regressive trends in our supposedly modern globalised economy. If you have any stories to share, let me know and I’ll include them in next month’s roundup.