Combine one of my favorite political bloggers (Matthew Yglesias @ The Atlantic Monthly) and one of my favorite sports blogs (Free Darko), along with my favorite spectator sport (Hoops) and you get... uneasy satire? I don't know what to make of this piece:
... an alternative does exist: liberal
internationalism or, as they say in the sports world, basketball
(hockey, of course, represents a dystopian vision of Canadian global
hegemony, I don't know anything about soccer, and cricket is the
rotting corpse of British imperialism) . Basketball, like baseball, is a
global sport but it rejects baseball's domineering imperial mien.
Instead of spreading through conquest and invasion, basketball spreads
through Joseph Nye's soft power, gaining adherents through the inherent appeal of this American cultural product, marking out of sphere of influence wider than the American military into the heart of rival great powers like the Soviet Union and Communist China.
Some
would see mere coincidence here, but internationalism is in the game's
very bones -- invented as it was by a Canadian living and working in
the United States, basketball has always been a sport capable of
looking across national boundaries and doing so in a spirit of
cooperation.
I do, however, know of one movie scene that serves as a kind of complicating counter-example to much of Matt's (only possibly serious) piece. It's from Srdjan Dragojevic's exceptionally-twisted (and possibly brilliant) Pretty Village, Pretty Flame:
Within minutes of this shot, Halil on the left and Milan on the right are going to find themselves on opposite sites of the Bosnian conflict, ca. 1992.
Meantime, in the spirit of "the sport that really is the world's sport," I was going to post some highlights from Arsenal's AMAZING games these past two weeks (1-1 v. Liverpool and 2-2 v. Man U), but seems as though every single one that's not a bunch of drunken Gunner fans has been replaced with this message:
"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NetResult." It's been a few years now that NetResult has been doing this and I wonder: Is this really helping the Premier League?