arindehoog

When I was around twelve or thirteen my family took me to Acapulco in Mexico. While there we all got things that were hand-crafted in the region. My father got a typical Mexican machete, my mother got a typical Mexican blanket, and I got typical Mexican diarrhea.

Montezuma’s Revenge, they called it. Named after an Aztec ruler that was caught on the wrong end of a Spanish pike back when the Spanish were refining their reputation of being world-class oppressors. Without going into too many details about the illness itself (groans emitted from a toilet stall that could probably be heard in Brazil) it’s safe to say that something nasty got into my digestive system and turned my body into a 13-hour fire hose. Chances are it got in there because I ate a salad where the ingredients had been washed with local tap water. This was probably the case because we were careful; we never drank water out of the tap. We always drank bottled water, because that’s what you do in developing countries where the sanitation and sewage hasn’t much improved since Cortés– you drink bottled water.

What you don’t do is drink bottled water in places where the tap water is perfectly fine.

According to International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), bottled water in the US jumped 7%, to just over 30 gallons (113 litres) per person last year. This is a lone American filling a shopping cart with bottled water over the course of 2012. Which actually doesn’t sound that bad until you realize that the way the IBWA averaged it out, there are 300-million shopping carts, one for each American. Along these lines, the Associated Press recently lead with this onerous opener: “It wasn’t too long ago that America had a love affair with soda. Now, an old flame has the country’s heart.”

The “old flame”, which the AP is talking about, is water. Ignoring whether or not they realize that fire is the exact opposite of water, thereby literally extinguishing their own analogy, the article goes on to say that the average American drank 55 gallons (208 litres) of water last year. Combine that with the IBWA stats and you realize that around 60% of what’s being drunk is out of a plastic bottle. A bottle that eventually ends up being featured as part of a towering mountain of other water bottles in an Anti-Bottled Water documentary. If you haven’t seen the documentary, you’ve seen the pictures. Usually the mountain sits on the edge a cesspool of slime and shimmers from the smell-waves emanating off of it. Overhead, gulls float around in air the colour of piss, while children sit hunched on the mountain wearing nothing but flies.

Before you get too caught up in the “American imperial consumerist blah-blah-blahs”, according to worldwater.org, the US is ranked 12th in per capita bottled water drinking.The first — and still bearing the standard for making tourists from the global North feel uncomfortable in their bowels’ — is Mexico. The second, with half the population: Italy.

Keep in mind, this is per-person. We’re tossing notions of population – more heavily populated places drink more bottled water — out the window. Those numbers see the US as first and China second. And China, judging by recent news, we can understand. Their fresh water has been turned into pig-and-duck-carcass soup. Bottled water consumption based on population may, like China, show a necessity, whereas per capita, it shows people with too much time and money on their hands.

Either way, it’s the places with perfectly fine tap water I have a problem with. What, you might ask, is the problem with Italy’s tap water? Nothing. The only problem with Italy’s tap water is the Italians. The same could be said for Belgium, Germany, France and Spain (4th, 5th, 6th and 7th, respectively). Actually, generally speaking, Europe is ranked number one as a region for bottled water consumption, with North America and Asia coming in place and show positions. Okay, this trifecta is from 2004 data, but the industry is giddily expecting a 27% increase heading towards 2015.

What we have here is the biggest PR dupe since advertisers set out to convince people that cigarettes were healthy back in the 20s. Basically the same narrative too: Touted as the healthy choice while having it fondled by celebrities. This is the bottled water industry selling people their own tap water back to them at a premium based on the design of the plastic it’s in. Court cases in which companies like Coca-Cola, Tesco, Adsa and Aquafina were shown to have tricked wonks into drinking water available from their own faucets would be comical if the repercussions weren’t so dreadful.

Time to get back to the numbers. Taking the European figures ­— where the tap water is clean. I know, because I’ve been drunk in many European places and have had to guzzle their tap water to re-hydrate, and I’ve been fine — the average person drinks about 111 litres of bottled water a year. And, because single litre bottles are not fashionable enough due to the sensibilities of the modern moron, we calculate by the half-litre and get 222 actual plastic bottles (granted, most plastic water bottles are smaller — 330 ml — but those numbers are too ridiculous to bear mentioning) being thrown away annually. Multiply that by the number of Europeans (739-million, give or take 10-million) and you have… Well, the grounds to shove that half-litre bottle up the place where Montezuma carries out his revenge strategy.

Harsh talk, no doubt. But I’m pretty sure all life on earth, aside from humans, would agree with me on this. The human body, after all, has remarkable enzymes for breaking down the un-biodegradable. Unlike the earth, which needs from about 450 years to forever.

There is reams, and reams, and reams, and reams of evidence that, not only is tap water in developed countries fine, it’s even better for you than bottled water. Largely because bottled water is unregulated in many places. The evidence of unregulated malfeasance is rampant in most industries: A lack of regulation in the financial industry is what caused the credit crisis. A lack of regulation in the street-drug industry is what caused dubstep. Nasty chemicals that mimic estrogen leach from the plastic into the water it contains, giving men breasts and women breast cancer. This is lazy information to come by, all you need is a reliable and ubiquitous internet connection to find this out. And chances are, if you have a reliable and ubiquitous internet connection you have clean tap water, and therefore no excuse. And even if you’ve just had a lobotomy and believe sincerely that bottled water is better for you — sure it may better for you, but you’re not the only person that lives here, you self-centered douche.

http://emajmagazine.com/2013/05/08/your-bottled-water-where-the-sun-dont-shine/

Great news from Scientific American the other day. Researchers figure that by 2050 ships will be able to travel, unimpeded, over the top of the world. That is, go from Barrow, Alaska, to Tromso, Norway, in a relatively straight line on the kind of boat usually seen in rap videos. The upside is that a trip to the Arctic will be fun for the whole family. The downside is that, according to The Guardian, most of the family will be eaten by their relatives during the expected food riots.

Anyway, it’s doubtful we’ll even make it to 2050. Oregon State University Scientists pointed out last week that the Earth is heating up faster than a thirteen-year-old boy at a bikini convention. At least when we get around to snacking on our weaker family members they’ll be evenly cooked. Of course, chasing your cousin around the neighbourhood with a fork and knife will be greatly hindered by the hacking cough you developed due to all the air-pollution in the place you live.

Your neighbourhood, by the way, will be part of a feudal system established by financial industry overlords who, as Bloomberg points out, have finally come around to believing in climate change. Their belief became obvious when they started finding ways to make money off of the planet circling the drain; essentially short-selling our ability to redeem ourselves. They’ll lord over urban areas that are so-over-populated everybody will have to sleep standing up, which may solve the food problem without getting the family involved.

All this conjecture is based on ten days of environmental news-gathering. I haven’t even mentioned the fact that we’ve somehow lost our bees, or that we’re going to have to scrape the dirt off of our bodies with twigs due to extreme water shortages.

Oh, and one other thing: It’s all your fault.

And therein lies the problem with the environmentalist narrative: No matter how you try to explain how precarious things are right now — no matter what scientific measurements, studies and graphs you have available — you come off sounding like the town loony; screaming hysterically while waving your dirty underwear under the noses of embarrassed-looking passerby.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the people that truly care about the environment don’t have a sense of humour about it, and it’s hard to take people seriously who take themselves too seriously. The other problem is if you constantly scream “We’re all going to die!” and nobody does, first you’ll be hated, then you’ll be ignored. People have short attention spans, and climate change is — was a long-term problem. The effects occur in increments; it gets a little warmer, there is a little more desert, the water level is a little higher, a few more hurricanes make off with a few more houses. Seen at the speed of life passing, it’s the movement of a sand dune; barely noticeable — unless, of course, you’re neck-deep in flood waters. Seen at Benny Hill comedic double-time speed; yeah, we’re screwed.

That’s why it’s helpful to have respected media institutions like The Guardian, Le Monde, Die Welt and The New York Times supplying us with well-written, tightly researched insight — not only on how screwed we are, but how we can, and are, mitigating that screwedness. That is, until they go and lose their environmental blog the way the Times did recently.

For environmentalists this is what’s known as ‘a kick in the biosphere’. For the Columbia Journalism Review it was justification for some news-journal-on-news-journal violence. Interesting, because the Review is not exactly known for being green, so imagine how the more environmentally conscious reacted to the news.

Type in ‘New York Times Green Blog’ in Google and you get around 240-million hits, many of them environmental blogs, niche sites and news aggregates freaking out so much they are at risk of never freaking back again. Personally, I try to avoid comment sections anywhere online for fear of nurturing a hatred towards humanity so intense I have to shoot myself in the face. However, in the interest of actual journalism I decided to have a look at what people had to say. What was interesting — and not so interesting — was that the people who are commenting on these sites are people who were environmentally concerned. Makes sense, right?

So then I started scanning the comment sections of the Green Blog. Of course I put all sharp objects well out of reach, but it turns out I could have read them standing on a stool with a noose around my neck. It was a beautiful thing; blog after blog free of nitwits, thugs, fools, rednecks, douchebags, racists or creeps sputtering post-lobotomy vitriol into the comment sections. Instead, it was full of thoughtful insight and well-conceived questions. It was filled with the comments of people who are concerned about the environment. Which says something about The New York Times’ demographic, but more importantly, it says something about the blog’s audience: Only people who care about the environment read it.

That is to say: The people who need to read it the most, never do.

It’s obvious, but people seem to forget this. We’re afraid of scary things. We want our own world-view confirmed, so we hang-out in our own communities. The result is that the environmentally conscious — the reporters authors and people who write and comment on a green website function in a bubble. It’s a self-perpetuating place where information is nurtured and developed and nobody on the outside cares or gives a damn.

No, The Times is not furthering the cause by dismantling their blog, but they’re not hurting it the way people seem to think they are. And, just for the record, the actual ‘Environment’ section is still around, it’s just hiding behind the ‘Science’ section.

Which reminds me of the Die Welt, also the third most-read daily news publication, but in Germany — a place that may not be the most green county in the world, but they are definitely trying, and they are doing a hell of a lot better on the Environmental Performance Index than the Americans. Their environment section is tucked behind the ‘Knowledge’ section. There is also Le Monde which calls their Environment section ‘Planète’. They keep it behind their ‘International’ section alongside other geographic locations including ‘Union européenne’, ‘Asie Pacifique’ and ‘Al-Qaida’. ‘Planète’ Earth, of course, being a geographic location itself. I’m not sure what ‘Al-Qaida’ is doing there, but the EPI ranks France better than Germany.

The point is, when it comes to environmental reporting and the drive to make people more aware, it’s not the header that matters, it’s who reads what’s beneath it. In fact, if you can slip some environmental news in under some other heading than ‘Environment’, or ‘Green’, or ‘Sustainability’, the wrong people might accidently read it and learn something.

http://emajmagazine.com/2013/03/18/if-a-blog-falls-in-the-forest-does-it-make-a-sound/

So, the pope resigned, which I – and I suspect many Catholics – didn’t realize he could do. Apparently there is an ‘ejector-seat’ clause in divine appointments which everyone forgot about, including past popes. That’s why they usually gradually disappear into their robes, getting more and more incoherent, until one day someone gives the robes a poke and a cloud of dust puffs out.

The last time a pope resigned was in 1415. Before this time there were ­– not one, not two, but three popes spread out across Europe. Lacking modern communication methods their respective followers were able to ignore each other, until they couldn’t. When they couldn’t they argued, and in those days arguments took the form of killing the person who doesn’t agree with your views. This was known as The Great Western Schism, and was probably the greatest of the Western Schisms to have happened until Beatlemania. Also, as you can imagine, with so many popes claiming to be more popey than the other guy it was hard to get anything done. Finally, after 40 years of schism, Pope Gregory XII and Pope John XXIII grudgingly resigned, while Pope Benedict XIII was excommunicated and Pope Martin V was made official, and everyone could get back to the business of burning witches.

Since then, zero resignations until now — when Pope Benedict XVI announced he’ll step down of his own free will. He cited declining health and a weakened spiritual and mental vigour. A fairly selfless claim considering that most popes before him claimed spiritual vigour long after their mental vigour had left the building.

His resignation triggered a collective spiritual gasp amongst Catholics on February 11th. Then, when extra drama was definitely needed, lightning struck the dome on St. Peter’s Basilica about six hours later. For Catholics this was significant, although nobody could agree why. For atheists this was aggravating, and for everyone else it was ‘fairly interesting’ because that’s what lightning rods are for. For the media, this was a miracle, and duly inspired they managed to trump the Catholics in terms of attributing significance to the lightning. They also couldn’t agree on why, but had more fun doing it.

The day after, no doubt gripped by religious fervour, the New York Post began speaking in tongues: “Pope: I’m Outta Here Sparking His wrath”, they declared. USA Today managed to keep it together, “Lightning strikes the Vatican – literally”, while The Sun convulsed in a divine seizure: “RATZ ALL FOLKS!; POPE QUITS SHOCK…”

The lightning also had the worldwide press scrambling for clichés they could associate with electricity. They came up with two: ‘Bolt out of the blue’ and ‘Shockwave around the world’. Everyone from the New York Times and the Irish Daily Mail, to Der Spiegel and Shanghai Daily used the phrase “A bolt out of the blue” while the phrase “Shockwave around the world” was enthusiastically flogged like Jesus during The Passion by about 16 top tier news sources including the ABC and the BBC. The Israeli Haaretz, showing an incredible lack of hipness, used “Shockwave around the world” in an article that had nothing to do with Rome, the Vatican, or anything vaguely pope-like.

Naturally, most of these “shock”, “bolt”, “zap”, “spark”, or “jolt” articles didn’t bother to ask how often the Basilica gets hit by lightning, or even mention that it’s the tallest building in the vicinity. Yahoo News did give it a shot with this question: “Was the lightning strike, coming just hours after Pope Benedict’s announcement, evidence of God’s wrath, or some ominous sign from above?”

Yahoo didn’t keep us in suspense, the hard-hitting answer came quickly: “Perhaps, but it was more likely the natural result of a rainstorm that was passing over Rome at the time.” The article continues with the fact that most religious symbols are metal, and high-up, and therefore prone to lightning. Keep in mind, somebody got paid to write this.

The media has since gotten over the lightning and has now moved on to pope selection.

Unfortunately, for them, the mechanics of choosing a pope is a very closely guarded secret. What is generally known is that the Cardinals are summoned to the Vatican, they lock themselves in a room, try to convince each other why their pope choice is the best, leave the room, and over the course of two days drop ballots into a chalice. After this, the ballots are tallied and the guy with the most votes gets to be pope. It’s unclear where the secret is in all of this, but as the BBC – while providing in-depth, step-by-step analysis of the procedure – assures us, it is a highly “secret process”. Everyone else will recognize it as democracy in action, complete with closed-door wheeling and dealing preceding a public announcement about what the elite are going to do whether you like it or not.

Either way, you can expect that kind of context and depth from the BBC. Not like its cross-eyed younger cousin, the Daily Mail, who literally published the betting odds on which cardinal will become pope. The spread was sourced from paddypower.com, a massive UK bookie agency. They gave 3 to 1 odds on: “Cardinal Marc Ouellet, 68. Country: Canada. Elevated to the cardinalate by Pope John Paul II. Significant Views: Belief that abortion is unjustifiable, even in cases of rape.”

The list of candidates goes down the page in this fashion — with stats beside a smiling picture of the potential pope. It looks like a bizarre union between an online-dating site and an off-track betting pamphlet:

20/1 Cardinal Christoph von Schonborn, 68
Country: Austria
Got elevated in ‘62
Likes reading and cycling. Favourite show: Dexter.

12/1 Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco
Country: Italy
Favourite food: pasta.
Favourite sport: Two-man luge
“Nobody blesses a holy sacrament like The Mighty Bagnasco”

The Mail, showing rare restraint, chose to leave out the odds paddypower gave Bono or noted atheist Richard Dawkins’ winning the papacy (1000/1 and 666/1 respectively). ABC News got in on the action as well, but showed a higher journalistic standard by including Bono in their article as well as the odds from the UK’s other massive bookie agency: Ladbrokes.

Clearly this kind of coverage is ridiculous. Turning the highest, most solemn level of the Catholic church into an X-Factor side-show seems unfair, but as Reuters pointed out: “Pope Benedict’s decision to live in the Vatican after he resigns will … offer legal protection from any attempt to prosecute him in connection with sexual abuse cases around the world, Church sources and legal experts say.” And that is unfair.

But it may explain the lightning.

http://emajmagazine.com/2013/02/19/ex-benedict/

I am the holder of many unpopular ideas. One is that Crocs are acceptable — more than acceptable, they are an exemplary form of footwear. Another, is that if we are going to get hysterical about Lance Armstrong’s indiscretions we need to put him in the context of professional cycling as a whole.

The context is that apparently professional cyclists are a bunch of cracked-out wing-nuts whose major athletic skill is crossing the finish line without total liver failure and both eyes pointing in the same direction.

Since before the Tour de France’s inception in 1903 competitors have been tweaking themselves as enthusiastically as rock stars at an after-party. A 1997 IOC report entitled the Historical Evolution of Doping Phenomenon cited a Welsh guy dying from drinking a mixture of caffeine, cocaine and strychnine during a Paris to Bordeaux race in 1866. According to The Guardian, the 1904 Tour de France saw competitors trying to get ahead by any means possible, including hopping on a train to get to the next stage. In 1920 — when trains stations were now being carefully checked for wiry people carrying suspiciously bicycle-shaped bags — a French cycling hero, Henri Pélissier, made the type of admission that would raise the eyebrows of hard-core ravers. In a conversation with a journalist from Le Petit Parisien he produced a phial from his bag and said, “That, that’s cocaine for our eyes…”

“We can’t sleep at night,” he said, “We’re twitching as if we’ve got St. Vitus’s Dance.” Referring to a compulsive dance ‘mania’ that affected only — curiously — a certain part Europe during the 14th to 17th century and was characterized by a chronic, sometimes fatal case of the boogie-woogies.

In 1930 the cases of drug-taking was so ubiquitous that the Tour de France rule book needed to explicitly state that drugs would not be provided by — not the coaches, not the managers, but by the organizers themselves. This is like needing to clarify that the police will not be giving guns to the general population during the next riot.

In the 1950’s and 60’s Pierre Dumas became the first doctor, and official partypooper, to actively campaign against naughty substances on the Tour. This is after such highlights as a French rider keeling over in 1955, apparently unconscious except for his feet still making pedalling motions in the air. In 1956 an entire Belgian team collapsed from eating ‘bad fish’. In 1960, during one of Dumas’s regular tour of the hotel rooms, he found another rider lying on a bed hooked up to an intravenous drip. In ’62 a German rider was found sitting at the side of road during the Tour in an apparent daze. “I ate bad fish at the hotel last night,” he said.

Eventually, in July of 1966, the first anti-doping testers arrived in Bordeaux to look at the competitors’ urine. This triggered a flight response amongst the cyclists who fled the hotel, many, oddly, without their bikes. In the long term the ban and the testing did little to curb the use of drugs on the Tour de France. What it did was create a blossom of creativity in terms of finding new and sneakier ways to put stuff in your body without being caught. It also ratcheted up awareness to the fact that no Tour was complete without the delayed realization that one, if not all of the top five finishers could have won just as easily on foot.

Eddy Merckx, for example, widely considered to be the greatest cyclist that ever lived, won 5 Tour’s during the 70’s. He was busted three times for taking stimulants. The 80s are riddled with more incidents of drug-taking than a Miami nightclub, and the 90s began illustriously with an entire Dutch team dropping out of the tour. In a show of awesome creativity they carefully constructed their excuse: “Bad fish.”

The 00’s saw blood doping, EPO (erythropoietin, look it up), human growth hormones, steroids, stimulants, gene doping, amphetamines, narcotic analgesics and diuretics in various cyclists’ systems. Sometimes one or two, sometimes all at the same time. A good decade to be a research chemist by anyone’s reckoning. Because, of course, forms of these drugs hadn’t been seen before. That’s how you beat the system.

Which brings us to Lance Armstrong confessing to doing very bad things all seven times he won the Tour de France. The confession wasn’t to the Supreme Court, or even a Congressional enquiry, it was to the US’s own Hague Tribunal for Celebrities; Oprah Winfrey. The press, in reaction to this poker-faced disclosure, appeared to react by taking performance-enhancing drugs of their own.

The Washington Post declared ‘Lance Armstrong and Oprah Winfrey: Forked tongue, meet silver tongue.’ The normally nice Canadians turned nasty with a National Post article declaring, ‘I see great symmetry in this Lance Armstrong/Oprah Winfrey affair: The worthless admission and the worthless venue in which it was made; between confessor and confessee.’ The Irish Times, keeping an eye on established drug-use benchmarks, headlined, ‘Charlie Sheen slams Lance Armstrong, defends Lindsay Lohan.’ The British Sunday Telegraph took the scatter-shot approach with, ‘Liars and fakes: the fall of America’s modern heroes,’ ignoring the fact that no British person has ever considered any American to be a hero. The normally cycle-happy Dutch took a slightly unhinged angle with the Aglemeen Dagblaad stating in bold, ‘Bradley Cooper would not relish playing the role of Lance Armstrong.’ And, of course, there is the French who appeared to be waging medieval warfare against the man. Le Figaro said, ‘The axe has fallen. Some people will be furious but others will see justice being done.’ Le Monde went with, ‘Saint Armstrong, pierced with arrows, has finally succumbed.’

What they neglected to mention was that the guy that came in second to Armstrong on three different occasions, Jan Ullrich, got there with chemical assistance. Or, that the Spaniard, Alberto Contador, rode a needle to first place three times since Armstrong’s reign. They also shied away from the fact that Livestrong.org, Armstrong’s charity, is one of the most generous and effective anti-cancer charities on the planet. This of course does not excuse taking drugs to win, but in the case of the Tour de France, who needs an excuse?

The point is, when the media crucifies Armstrong on the days following the International Cycling Union’s planned ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ commission before which he’s meant to testify, consider him within the context of the sport.

If you have to hate him, hate him because he ruthlessly pursued and sought litigation against his rightful accusers — something that takes an astounding amount of balls for a guy that only has one. Hate him because of his capacity to lie so incredibly well for so long. But don’t hate him because he cheated with drugs. You open that can of worms and then you have to pick through every other professional sport with a pair of latex gloves and a box of plastic cups. Don’t even hate him because he somehow debased cycling. He just got caught because certain journalists were pathologically annoyed that an American kept winning the thing.

As French reporter, Pierre Chany, who covered 49 Tours said about doping, “It existed, it has always existed.”

And definitely don’t hate him if he wears Crocs.

http://emajmagazine.com/2013/02/07/dont-hate-lance-armstrong-for-doping/

For a while there was a time in my life when everybody I knew was having babies. It was a time when many potentially enjoyable social interactions were interrupted by a pink noisy thing which had the ability to propel bodily fluids out of every hole in its body like a water cannon at a football match.

It was a time when no statement a parent made concluded decisively, because the baby would emit a loud noise, or bowel movement, or drool, and that would immediately require the full and concentrated focus of its parents’ attention.

It was the endless and brainless doting by parents on a thing which contributes about as much to society as toothpaste does to building construction. The conviction that their baby, which looks and acts like everyone else’s baby, is somehow special, highly unique and more skilled than all the other babies. If I had heard, just once, “Oh look, Christopher is filing our income tax again, how cute.” Rather than, “Oh look Christopher connected his toe to his forehead with a single string of snot, how cute,” I would have been impressed. Needless to say, I never was.

It was also after a long time of this that I realized it wasn’t the babies that bothered me, it was the parents.

I’ve had a similar epiphany about football. It’s not the sport that annoys me, it’s the hardcore fans.

It took me a while to get to this place. At first — as with dealing with new parents — I had a hard time liking the game because I have an allergic reaction to anything that anyone tries to force down my throat. It was expected of me to like football. But, with all the wildly missed passes, the failure to put a relatively small ball in a hole larger than many of its fans’ apartments, and most of all, the drama associated with players flopping around on the ground like hormonal teenagers re-enacting the battle of Dunkirk, liking the sport was pretty much untenable.

But like a mediocre song, heard over and over again, I started to get into it. The currency I was trading in, here, was that I like all sports, and football is definitely a sport. Looked at microscopically – individual ball handling, strategic formations, the ability to keep the ball out of a hole larger than many of its fans’ apartments — there is an unbelievable amount of skill, athleticism and endurance going on… beneath the mosquito-near-your-ear sound of 45,000 vuvuzelas being blown at the same time.

According to a documentary Stadiums of Hate by the BBC, this year, in Poland and the Ukraine, you may not hear vuvuzelas, but you will hear the white supremacist screeching, and anti-Semitic/-black/-homosexual (take your pick) gesticulating and hollering of people that have somehow equated football to nationalism and intolerance.

It’s definitely a documentary with an agenda. And that agenda is — as Jonathon Orstein, the Director of the Jewish Community Centre in Krakow, and interviewee for the documentary puts it —“sensationalist.” In the same June 2012 letter to The Economist he said that he was, “profoundly disturbed by this unethical form of journalism.”

Which may be so. The BBC saw a story that was relevant, would attract viewership, could be sensationalized, and went for it. You could accuse the BBC of unbalanced and poor reporting till the cows come home — or until the racist goose-steps, as it were —but you can’t deny that this sport, unlike other sports, and regardless of where it’s played, has this darker, sinister and ultra-extreme element.

Maybe it’s inevitable. Football tends to spawn high-end nationalism from its fans, and the Eurocup, if nothing else, is a game of nation against nation. The thing is, I’ve never seen a case where extreme nationalism resulted in something good. Exclusionary, ‘us vs. them’ attitudes tends to squeeze off your worldview like a sphincter that keeps most of the human waste on the inside.

The fact that extra police and security need to be imported to protect fans from each other, players from fans and, bizarrely, police from fans, is mind boggling.

The New York Times wrote, “The police and security presence at Donbass Arena was heavy in the wake of concerns expressed beforehand by English officials and the families of some players about possible racist treatment in the host countries of Ukraine and Poland.” The Times did not mention the fact that “Donbass Arena” could easily be misread as “Dumbass Arena”.

Police are at these matches to prevent things like the 74 dead in February 2012 in Egypt. The 30 fans injured in Belgium in 2011. The fan shot dead in France in 2006. And the myriad of other deaths, injuries, racial slurs, attacks, vandalism and social unrest which occurs in the shadow of a single football match anywhere in the world.

Do I need to repeat that the hardcore fan is a miniscule minority in term of the millions that love the sport? It’s true. I was in Holland in 2010 when they lost the final against Spain. When the game ended everyone just went home. The only real injury was to the pillows that many Dutch fans were biting that night in bed.

However, The New York Times reported that, “Last week, black players from the Netherlands reported that fans made monkey chants during a team practice in Krakow, Poland.” The irony being, of course, that the monkeys weren’t on the pitch, they were in the stands. Monkeys that seem to be drawn to football, like flies to. . . well, whatever monkeys throw at each other.

I’ve only seen this kind of blind, irrational hatred from one other group: Parents who think you don’t like their baby.

http://emajmagazine.com/2012/06/19/where-the-monkeys-are/

I can’t for the life of me figure out what ‘UN condemnation’ means. Much more importantly, for the life of Syrians, they probably can’t figure out what it means either. Their lives, after all, hang in the balance of that question.

I know what condemnation means. I know that it’s the noun form of the verb ‘condemn’, which the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary tells us is: 1) to declare to be reprehensible, wrong, or evil usually after weighing evidence and without reservation, 2) to pronounce guilty, 3) to adjudge unfit for use or consumption (condemn an old apartment building), and 4) to declare convertible to public use under the right of eminent domain.

Fair enough.

I also know what the UN is: A multinational organization that can never seem to remember where it hung its good trousers on mornings when there is an early start at the office.

I’m going to guess that in the context of the UN and Syria — although declaring the country ‘public domain’ is desirable — the fourth dictionary definition may be a bit too literal. The third definition makes much more sense from the Syrian perspective, in that they have ‘adjudged’ their government to be ‘unfit for use’. Still, I doubt this is what ‘UN condemnation’ means. That leaves the first two definitions, which have scary-sounding words like, ‘reprehensible’, ‘evil’, and ‘guilty’. Words that have severe tones but don’t really say anything about any actual action, aside from the declaration itself.

This is interesting because ‘condemnation’ has figured heavily in the UN’s lexicon for many, many decades. Archived news articles finds that in ’56 the US wanted the UN to condemn the Soviets for doing bad things in Hungary. In ’61 the Soviets, in a stroke of originality, wanted the UN to condemn the US for doing bad things in Latin America. In ’74 the Brits wanted the UN to condemn the Greek Junta in Greece. In 1990 France asked the UN to condemn Iraq for acting like Iraq in the 80s. The list goes on and on of countries asking the UN to condemn other countries. It seems like the UN has been handing out condemnations like candy at the doctor’s office, and I still don’t know what it means. Or, more to the point: what difference does it make?

Going back to the archives, very little happens after the UN condemns someone. Sometimes there is some diplomatic reshuffling, other times there is a verbal backlash from the condemned. Sometimes there are sanctions — but sometimes there are sanctions even when the UN doesn’t condemn someone. Occasionally, as with Israel in ’74, the condemned country simply ignores the condemnation by the UN and continues doing whatever it is they’re not supposed to be doing. For example, the US keeps embargoing Cuba, the UN keeps condemning it, yet the US keeps embargoing Cuba.

This, to me, is like the staff at a school getting together and deciding that someone is a bully, and then going up to that bully, and saying, “The staff and I have talked, and many of us agree that you are a bully.”

Upon hearing that, even the bully would have a feeling of anti-climax. Especially if he knew how long the discussion amongst the staff went on for. In the case of Syria, the UN, upon pressure from the EU, was figuring on condemning Assad and his heavy-handed treatment of protestors in mid-April of last year. The UN did not actually get around to doing it until the middle of last month — almost a year later. The final resolution, which is not legally binding, was stymied by countries like Russia and China: they condemned the condemnation for tinkering with sovereignty when a political solution is preferable. What that ‘political solution’ could be was illustrated by both countries sending special envoys to Damascus to have tea with Assad.

I have been repeatedly reminded by UN spokespeople that the UN is not a world government. It is merely an organizational body made up of delegates from actual governments and only allows itself to make policy suggestions not laws. Which is fine in terms of protecting national sovereignty, but doesn’t address the problem that arises when that sovereignty is not protecting itself. It’s not fine when it acts like an overweight, sheepish body, stuck in the turnstile leading to the metro during peak time. Until recently The League of Arab Nations has found itself caught behind the UN while it tries to shove through a resolution which attempted to tackle the situation in Syria. I can only imagine which tenuous multi-lateral relationships with UN members kept them from simply throwing their hands in the air and moving on Syria themselves.

I get the impression that if you dropped a pound of wet noodles on the ground and examined it, you would have a fairly good understanding of how countries are related to each other in the UN.

And therein lies the crux of the problem: Nothing stops action like a solid wall of political bureaucracy. And there is nothing quite as politically bureaucratic as the UN. It is, after all, the sum total of nearly 200 member states, each trying to sort out its own pile of wet noodles.

So, as the reports of the ‘shelling’ of Homs turn into words like ‘slaughter’ and ‘devastation’ by the mainstream media, the ghosts that haunt the halls of the UN begin shrieking louder and louder. So loud that those earpieces that UN diplomats wear can barely able block out the racket. Ghosts like Rwanda, Kosovo, and Sudan, which have all been condemned in one way or another by the UN, but became ‘slaughter’ and ‘devastation’ regardless. Which may, in fact, go a long way in explaining the earpieces to begin with. Either way, it definitely explains why the UN needs clean trousers every morning.

http://emajmagazine.com/2012/03/10/un-condemnation-what-does-it-mean/

Did anyone know there was a Dutch Cyclists’ Union? Well, there is. They are part of the European Cyclists Federation – which I also had no idea existed. Even more intriguing, they are partnered with the Dutch Cycling Embassy.

Yes, there is a Dutch cycling embassy. I’m not sure if they function like a regular embassy – you know, you’re being chased by the authorities in a foreign country, and as long as you show up to the Dutch Cycling Embassy on your bike you can seek asylum. Or, when countries are pulling their citizens out of a war-torn state via their respective consulate, the Dutch Cycling Embassy will provide you with helmets and a map of the best bike-route to the nearest border.

It also raises interesting questions about whether you actually have to be a Dutch cyclist to be recognized by the embassy, or can you be any cyclist? If that’s the case, is there an Indian Rickshaw Embassy, or an Italian Scooter Embassy? Maybe a Consulate for Norwegian Para-gliders?

Anyway, if you were to seek asylum at the Dutch Cycling Embassy you wouldn’t be provided with a helmet because, as I said, they are partnered with the Dutch Cyclists’ Union (DCU), and they don’t believe in helmets.

This is according to Radio Netherlands who announced that, “The Dutch Cyclists’ Union is fiercely opposed to helmets for cyclists because they reportedly give a false sense of security.”

I find the use of the word ‘fiercely’ interesting here. It implies that if you happen to be spotted wearing a helmet by the DCU they’ll become so enraged that they will beat you with your own bicycle — in which case it’s probably good to be wearing a helmet. It also flies in the face of the general push towards safety as illustrated by mandatory seat-belt wearing, and not keeping your toddler in the trunk for long rides. Once again Holland is engaging in the kind of behaviour that makes safety-obsessed Americans who have never been to Holland sweat with anxiety.

Which is wonderful. But before we go any further; is there a sudden need for helmets in a country that has been riding bikes since the middle-ages and has about as much use for them as fish have for… well… bicycles?

Well, before we get to the fun bit which features bike accidents so terrible their riders’ become part of their bike-frames, let’s take a look at the general bicycle situation in The Netherlands.

The country contains16.7 million more-or-less Dutch people. They own 18 million bicycles. This means that every man, woman, and child owns one entire bike, and part of another one.

Every day about 13 million people will get on their bike and go somewhere in Holland. Generally the distances they go are not all that long (around 2.5 kilometres), but considering the size of Holland they don’t need to go much further than that anyway.

In 2008 there were 181 bicycle fatalities in The Netherlands according to a road safety report put out by their government. This number represents a low-average since 2001. You put that number up against the 13 million that ride every day and it makes you wonder if the entire Dutch infrastructure is covered with soft, foam padding.

If you look at it another way, 2303 ‘accidental fall’ deaths were reported in 2010. When you consider how flat the country is, this is pretty amazing. It’s not like people are falling from cliffs, or something. Perhaps some of those falls were off of bicycles, but even if you figure in the average 181 bike-related deaths for 2008 it still means that you’re about 10 times more likely to die falling down some stairs in the Netherlands. Which actually makes sense if you’ve seen Dutch stairs. Sometimes I’m amazed they don’t come with rock-climbing equipment.

Many of those bicycle deaths in 2008, by the way, are the result of getting hit by a car. Even so, with 49 deaths per million people a year in the Netherlands, they’ve got the best road safety record in Europe. This may have something to do with the entire country being stuck in a traffic jam 12 hours a day. However, there are some rural roads in Holland which are single-lane, allow two-way traffic, and have canals on either side. This kind of sphincter-clenching road design is begging for head-on collisions, or, at the very least, makes a good argument for pontoons on your car. Regardless, the cars don’t hit bicycles, or each other all that often.

Part of the Dutch Cyclists’ Union’s ‘fierce’ stance against helmets has to do with two arguments: One is that helmets provide a false sense of security; they are only useful if your head is moving at 20km/h into the pavement, which is the speed you fall at when you and the bike are stationary, which means if you fall off your bike in the standing position you probably should think about wearing a helmet in the bathroom. The other, is that people will be discouraged from riding bikes because they associate helmets with danger. As a matter of fact, they quote a study by the Dutch Traffic Safety Council which said that 60% of more-or-less Dutch people would stop cycling if helmets were made compulsory. This is a scary thing to cite when the country is already a perpetual parking-lot because of too many cars.

The DCU’s attitude has to do with EU legislative pondering. The European Commission has already drafted a directive which lays down standards which could be used by countries that want to make helmet-wearing mandatory. More and more countries are adopting parts of the directive, and this no-doubt makes the DCU people nervous the more popular it gets.

(Curiously, the European Commission notes that, ‘In Spain, cyclists have to wear a helmet outside urban areas except when going uphill.’ Aside from the fact that most bicycle accidents happen inside urban areas, it makes you wonder what’s coming down Spanish hills that cyclists don’t need to worry about.)

This is also a perfect example of the cultural soup that the EU is desperately trying to avoid, but keeps adding to. I’ve lived in a lot of EU countries, and in many of them — whether it be because of the geography, road conditions, or their relative ability to drive cars — I would not go near a bike without a helmet. In fact, I probably wouldn’t get on a bike without full ice-hockey padding in many of these places. In Holland, however, they’ve been doing it without helmets for centuries, and they’ve been doing it fine the whole time.

And to the sweaty, anxiety-ridden Americans who worry about what happens in Holland, I’ll say this: Statistically you’re more likely to be shot in the US than die in a bike accident in the Netherlands. Therefore, when your government makes it mandatory for all of you to wear a Kevlar vest, the Dutch government still won’t make it mandatory for them to wear a helmet.

Have we heard the last about Joseph Kony? Either way, it has been fascinating to watch the machine that drove his rise to infamy launch with footage of children carrying guns larger than themselves in Uganda, to the anti-Kony campaign’s producer, Jason Russell, threatening to release his own ‘invisible children’ on the people of San Diego.

The mainstream news tended to avoid the term “public masturbation” and leaned towards phrasing like CNN’s, “running through the streets of San Diego in his underwear.” Or the The Guardian’s more blunt, “running around the streets screaming in his underwear.”

In terms of the amount of dignity afforded to Russell, CNN scores higher. After all, “running through the streets of San Diego in his underwear” is not all that uncommon in that part of California. However, running ‘around’ and ‘screaming’, as The Guardian puts it, suggests the kind of mental state that may require white coats and tranquilizer darts.

The more sensational publications like The Daily Mail, TMZ, and the appropriately named Gawker were happy to be able to use the ‘public masturbation’ button located at the top left-hand corner of their keyboards. A key they haven’t been able to use since George Michael and Pee-Wee Herman were caught doing strange things in public. Both mainstream and ‘soft’ news sources used the word ‘meltdown’ to describe Russell’s mental state. That’s okay though, because the word looked better on him than it did on nuclear reactors, like Fukushima. Everyone, however, ignored the irony that Jason Russell managed to get himself arrested before Joseph Kony did… or will, ever.

But let’s get back to the start.

Being the Internet hound that I am, I was aware of the Kony 2012 video when it went up on March 5th on several online news aggregates and discussion forums. I didn’t bother watching it because naming the video ‘Kony 2012’ made me think it was an election campaign video for someone named ‘Kony’. Within the next two days, however, I knew everything about Joseph Kony, Invisible Children (the organization that made the video), Uganda, child soldiers, and charity funding, and I still hadn’t seen the video.

I watched the criticism towards the video emerge from the blogosphere just as Kony 2012 started popping up on my facebook newsfeed like spots on a teenager. The criticism tended to be quite thoughtful at first — scepticism at Invisible Children fiscal practices, their motivation, their facts. Then, as criticism turned towards the people involved in the Kony 2012 feeding frenzy — the pointlessness of armchair activism and the white people that do it — the mainstream media had finally caught on that something weird was happening in the internet tubes.

Today the You Tube video has more than 80-million views. Some sources say that it crests 113-million views, which may be, if you combine the vimeo and YouTube video estimates. This is a staggering number which easily ranks with total Eurovision Song Contest viewers, the population of Germany, and three times the population of Uganda, give or take the number of children that are tricky to count because they are invisible. It’s the kind of numbers, which make advertisers salivate into their cappuccinos.

It’s also a very difficult number to ignore, especially leaping out of obscurity, as the video did, into the faces of every computer-screen activist and self-made human rights watchdog in the Western hemisphere. The mainstream media, in its usual reserved style, picked up the ball and ran with it — past the goal line, past the sidelines, off the pitch, out of the stadium, and disappeared into the night. Every kind of journalist, editorialist, blogger, and pundit started racing around trying to find an angle to capitalize on the video — a video, which I highly doubt many people watched in its entirety.

Basically, though, you had two points of view — well three, if you think Ugandans have a point of view, which most of the Western media doubts they have. One is that the video is useful, the other is that the video is useless. Pro Kony 2012 people felt that despite dodgy facts, the shaky financial practices of Invisible Children, and the overt emotional heart-string-playing, the video does the job. We, after all, now know who Joseph Kony is, even if he hasn’t actually been in Uganda for a few years now. The Anti Kony 2012 people felt that the video did nothing except create a carnival-like atmosphere amongst celebrities, pundits, journalists, and regular folks who spent the entire time congratulating each other for caring about something while doing a grand total of nothing about it. Sort of like inviting all your friends over to your place before a well-planned big night on the town, and then getting so drunk nobody can make it out the door. Either way, from a mainstream media perspective — from the video’s initial posting, to the controversy over its content, to Jason Russell going bonkers on the streets of San Diego — the darker cloud hangs over the video itself, rather than what happened, or is happening, in Uganda.

What nobody seems to understand is how the video attracted so much attention. They understand what happened technically, but they don’t understand the driver behind it. After all, the last time something stirred up the Western world’s fancy like this was Rebecca Black’s Friday video; a poorly sung and produced pre-teen fantasy with terrible singing which represents everything banal and idiotic about American youth culture. That was until the video went viral and its popularity couldn’t be blamed on young people anymore. It turns out tastelessness can’t be confined to just middle-class suburban youth.

Here’s the twist though, a lot of the people that watched Rebecca Black’s Friday and made it popular are the same people that pushed Kony 2012 past the 100-million mark. Sure they also made Susan Boyle, Justin Bieber, and a dramatic chipmunk famous, but this… this is different. This is actually about something. Okay, in their youthful over-eager way they missed the mark with Joseph Kony by a few years, and they didn’t actually do anything aside from raise awareness for other people to not actually do anything, but for a brief second their eyes were open to the possibility that bad things are happening somewhere, and they felt uncomfortable about it.

And that’s something to feel hopeful about.

http://emajmagazine.com/2012/04/01/the-kony-kunundrum/

Postponing the SOPA did nothing in postponing the US government from doing part of what the act set out to do: blocking access to certain sites while unilaterally shutting down others without due process. Arin de Hoog about RIAA, PIPA, ACTA and all the other heads of the “anti-piracy”-hydra trying to cut Internet freedom – and why he as a fan of hockey thinks it’s not fair play.

Trying to watch American sports in Europe, ice hockey in my case, can be a tricky thing when living in Europe. One problem is that, with repeated commercial breaks, a game can go for three and a half hours. Which is fine, except that they tend to start between 1 and 3 in the morning depending on where on the North American continent they are being played. This means that by the time the final period rolls around you’re not even sure who you’re cheering for anymore.

If the game then goes into overtime you’re not even sure if it’s hockey you’re watching or The Lion King on Ice. Did Poomba just get cross-checked by Scar, or did I dream that?

Regardless, with modern technology, and tweaked connectivity you can watch a game live even if you don’t own a television with an 800 channel cable package or a satellite dish, which I don’t, nor can afford. Helpfully there are sites that provide live streaming of games, and although the quality of the picture is about as good as an 80s tube-driven Sanyo, you’re able to make out the pixelated players doing something that looks vaguely hockey-like.

This is why I wasn’t too bothered when the Superbowl happened last Sunday. I figured I could call up any one of the fifteen sites, which I know stream sports, and watch large men with no necks collide at lumbering speeds.

Except, I couldn’t.

It turns out that the US government had seized as many of the streaming sites they could get their hands on and shut them down. In hockey terminology this is what’s known as the exercising of ‘structural power which determines globally, not only the way nation states relate to the power-holder, but how nation states relate to corporate entities and the individual, because the power-holder is the creator if the existing framework in which the corporation, the state, and the individual operate.’ Clearly hockey is a thinking man’s game, therefore the terminology can be quite complex.

Basically what this means is that, because the US sets and guides the environment in which the internet operates, it can also affect how its being used regardless of international borders.

What is telling about the Superbowl streaming site seizures is not how the US was able to do it, but the fact that they simply just did it.

Now hang on a second. What about the widely-known SOPA protest that left many people with cubicle jobs with nothing to do that day? We all remember the 18th of January when hundreds of popular websites went black, including reddit, boingboing, MoveOn.org , MineCraft, and WordPress.org. The most terrifying for students across the world was, of course, Wikipedia disappearing for an entire day. Doubtless the offices of professors were filled with hysterical laughter the following week, and for several weeks after.

This was a popular uprising on- and offline, which was designed to scare congress and the SOPA purveyors into backing down (although, in my personal opinion, if twitter, facebook, and all porn sites shut down that day, it would have really put the fear in them). And it did. On the 20th US Congress postponed ratifying the bill.

However, since then, 23-year-old Richard O’Dwyer, a British national and website operator, was targeted by the US Justice Department, and the British government okayed his extradition off of England’s soil. On the 20th of last month the US shut down megaupload, a Hong Kong-based file sharing company, and nabbed it’s CEO in New Zealand, replacing the site with the increasingly familiar FBI anti-piracy warning depicting official-looking badges of eagles looking stern. When megaupload was sniped many other filesharing sites — including filesonic, BTjunkie, and filserve — fled like a pack of puppies when the vacuum cleaner is turned on.

And, of course, you couldn’t watch the Superbowl outside of the US unless you snuck into the NBC website — which involved some dubious internet trickery — or managed to have access to BBC One online.

Basically postponing the Stop Online Piracy Act did nothing in postponing the US from doing part of what the act set out to do: blocking access to certain sites while unilaterally shutting down others without due process. That last sentence was a tough one to write because I don’t want to take the clichéd anti-‘US Imperialist agenda’ stance which has been popular for, say, the last hundred years or so. Unfortunately, however, trying to describe aggravating behaviour without an advocacy slant is like trying to describe how much internet policy-makers know about the internet without using the word ‘none’.

A main driver behind SOPA and PIPA (once a nice name for a pretty British girl, now the ‘Protect IP Act’) are the RIAA (Recording Industry Artists of America), and the record companies which continue to delight us with auto-tuned pre-pubescents howling single-word song lyrics about each others’ asses. Another is the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), which is famous for showing us automobiles exploding since 1922, now in 3D. They feel that they’re taking a hit by people copying their profound creative endeavours and being entertained by it for free.

In fact, the MPAA is behind ACTA, the Rambo: European Blood version of SOPA and PIPA. ACTA (The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is a beast of a multi-lateral agreement which basically allows your internet service provider to be bullied into watching everything you do online and reporting it to authorities if you are “suspected of infringement activities”. It is so beastly that it spooked European Minister Kader Arif, the EU Parliament’s independent monitor for ACTA, into resigning. He cited: “no consultation of the civil society, lack of transparency since the beginning of negotiations, repeated delays of the signature of the text without any explanation given, reject[ion] of Parliament’s recommendations as given in several resolutions of our assembly” as reasons he thought the bill smelled funny.

On Saturday world-wide protests were happening against this new incarnation of SOPA. The fear here is that this multi-lateral agreement will actually work a lot better than the ones having to do with curbing global warming, and peace in the Middle East.

It also, again, raises the question of corporate interest groups doing what they want regardless of how many people stand against it, even if the ACTA head of the anti-piracy hydra is lopped off… which, by the way, is called ‘goalie interference’ in hockey terms.

http://emajmagazine.com/2012/02/12/anti-piracy-hydra/

“So, a protest about a protest about a riot. There should be some kind of prize for this.” That was the Facebook status of Arin de Hoog, Dutch-Canadian journalism student in London, after he had heard what happened in Port Said this week. In this opinion piece he tries to explain his disappointment with the situation in Egypt.

In a discussion about familial heritage and national pride a childhood friend of mine once declared to me, “I’m from ancient Egypt, man.”

Never mind the fact that he was born in Canada, had maybe visited Egypt three times in his life, and he didn’t speak a word of any dialect of Arabic, he didn’t say he was from Egypt, he said ancient Egypt.

Which you can do with Egypt, I guess. Being from ancient Netherlands doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, and saying you’re from ancient Canada will earn you a condescending ‘there-there’ pat on the head. Egypt, however, is ancient, and saying you’re from the ancient part — which is idiotic without time-travel — brings to mind a staggering history and the birth of civilization.

Like Paris in the 20s, and California now, Egypt was the place to be 5000 years ago. You don’t have to look far to figure that out. In fact, you don’t really have to look past your computer screen. The website love-egypt.com helpfully educates the interested with the heading, ‘Egypt Civilization invention of: [sic]’ and the following bullet-points beneath it: Glass, Linen, Paper and ink (sort of embarrassing to invent one and not the other), the calendar, the clock, Geometry (now my 13-year-old self knows who to blame), The Refinement of dress and ornament (which basically means “adding gold”), and Furniture and dwellings (after centuries of standing, finally humans could comfortably sit down). The last bullet-point, which negates all the previous bullet-points, is ‘Society and life’. Egypt invented that.

Facetiousness aside, you get the idea. Egypt was the center of beauty, glory, and human history. From Tutankhamun, to Alexander the Great, to the tale of tragic love between Antony and Cleopatra. The pyramids, the sphinx, and the Suez Canal all represent monolithic human endeavours which occurred centuries before humans were commonly engaging in monolithic human endeavours. The English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1818 wrote, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’” in reference to the amazing structures which dot the country’s landscape. And the people; dressed in the finest linens, draped with the most beautiful jewellery, flowing black hair oiled to a sheen, lithe strong bodies tanned golden by the sun, proud handsome faces, eyes darkened and made startling by kohl, and an upright dignity illustrated by their carvings on tablets and stone.

People, who today, are forced to secure various baked goods to their heads with tape by way of protecting themselves from being bludgeoned to death by their own police and military. In my mind, as an ignorant occidental, this is the lingering image I have of Egypt when I think of its people; photographs of angry men wearing buckets and cooking pots as helmets, and wielding mops and brooms as weapons. Janitors gone wild.

Which is totally unfair and denigrates a civil uprising against an oppressive regime fronted for 30 years by Hosni Mubarak.

By who?

Let’s face it, Egypt hasn’t really been the focus of deep international scrutiny since they started trading slaps with Israel in the 50s and the international media had the capacity to cover it. In the early 70s Anwar Sadat, the previous Egyptian President, waged a six day war to retrieve land from the Israelis. Then, spotty coverage by ill-placed reporters tried to colour commentate the conflict without the relative benefit of a 24-hour news cycle. Anyway, the war was mostly of interest to diplomats, and news-junkies. In ’77, intrepid American über-reporter, Barbara Walters, managed to get Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, to sit in the same room without spitting on each other, thus bringing Egypt briefly into Western popular culture. Then came the assassination of Sadat in ’81. We heard he was replaced by Hosni Mubarak and everything seemed to by honky-dory in Egypt for the next 30 years. At least Honky-dory enough to not warrant popular western examination by people peripherally aware of international issues.

Lately, as it turns out however, it’s come to light that Mubarak was widely considered in Egypt to be a jerk. Caught in the riptide of the civil revolt tsunami that raced across the Middle-East in 2010/2011 the people of Egypt started loudly voicing their dislike towards their President. Using social networking tools, like blogs, and facebook, they organized demonstrations, rallies, and protests and became part of pop-culture by symbolizing the heart-warming and highly sellable rise of ‘The will of the people’. This is somewhat poetic because back when they were ancient Egyptians they weren’t part of pop-culture, they were pop-culture. It also seems like they’ve gotten so good at demonstrations, rallies, and protests that they can’t stop, despite managing to oust Mubarak and send him into lockdown in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Today Al-Jazeera — the Qatar-based news organization which has gained a firm foothold in terms of journalistic credibility because of their coverage of Egypt and the ‘Arab Spring’— reported that, “At least two people have been shot and killed in the Egyptian city of Suez, as police used live rounds to hold back crowds during a protest… Earlier, hundreds of people were injured in the capital, Cairo, after police fired tear gas at protesters who accused the ruling military council of mismanaging the country.” This mismanagement seemed to have to do with the country’s, “security forces’ failure to prevent a deadly football riot.”

Really? A riot over football? Dubious reasons to riot aside, what we have here is a protest about a protest about a riot. Sort of a Russian nesting doll of violent civil unrest.

The complaint seems to be that, although Egypt’s security forces do a lousy job of protecting people from Egypt’s security forces, they do an even worse job of protecting Egyptians from each other.

A fair complaint, but rather like saying, “You know we’re totally irresponsible and loopy about football, you should have stopped us from doing irresponsible and loopy things while football was on.”

Ironically, the Emergency Law — an Orwellian law activated by Egypt’s first President, Gamal Nasser, in ’67, which smothers constitutional rights, gives the police excess power, and is understandably the source of much grief for the civilian population —would have been useful on Wednesday when the football riots happened. Unfortunately the law had been rolled back a week before by the current military head, Hussein Tantawi. Well, mostly rolled back. There is still one minor caveat; police have total discretion in situations of perceived ‘thuggery’. I’m not sure what his definition of ‘thuggery’ is, but if deadly football hooliganism isn’t it, I don’t know what is.

Regardless, it’s probably not fair to target one incident from a particular group of people, namely football fans. And I understand (understand, not agree with, or find intelligent) the political and cultural implications behind a football match. Lord knows I get pretty excited about some sports, but I don’t then storm my flat and kill my roommates if my team doesn’t win. This sort of thing makes me think Egyptians can’t take care of themselves. It also makes me wonder: If this is the situation in Egypt now, how bad was it under Mubarak?

The very idea of a pro-democratic revolution makes the western world giddy with romantic thoughts about the strength of human will against the forces of tyranny: Good versus evil, the ninety-nine percenters against the despotic one percent, the right to be ruled by electoral representation in opposition to a cockeyed and corrupt political system. It all seems very worthwhile. And it is. It also all seems very black and white. If you’re a good person you back the underdog — the seekers of social justice. In this case, at least to me, it’s not really clear who the underdog is. I know it’s supposed to be the people without the guns, the people that wear baguettes on their heads instead of helmets, but 47 dead after a game of football makes you wonder where people’s priorities are.

No revolution is as rosy as the history books describe it for two reasons. One, the convergence, overlapping, and opposition of the hundreds of interests and personal politics that go into an uprising is so convoluted you risk and aneurism trying to make sense of it. The second is that ‘the good guys’ are relative to who wrote the history. In all cases it’s the winners that set the tone.

With the proliferation of social media, combined with up-to-the-second reports from newscasters and unfiltered tweets by civilians the audience is so intimately aware of what’s going on they are practically childhood mates with its participants. This is an uncomfortable place to be if the ‘good guys’ are acting like. . well. . . overzealous fans at a football match.

So you hope the underdogs know what they want, and they’re not rioting for the sake of rioting like London last year, and Vancouver the year before. You hope that there is a goal they’re aspiring to, and even if it’s not evident to them now, they’ll recognize a good thing when they finally have it.

Going back to Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the next lines in the poem following ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ are “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The hope, also, is that when the dust settles, and this second attempt at the casino slot-machine is finished, this won’t be the fate of the Egyptian people. The hope is that they get what they want. Whatever that is.

http://emajmagazine.com/2012/02/06/a-yellow-card-for-egypt/