Rugby football is a game [in which] each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in 14 days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench. (P G Wodehouse, 1930)
It seems that over the weekend there was an important game in the other code, League, which featured a major brawl. Two players sent off resumed their dispute beyond the sideline, “back in civilized territory” as one writer put it, and were joined by many others.
I find all this seriously unedifying. Neither I nor people I associate with ever raise their fists, or imagine any issue is properly dealt with that way. Yet on or off the rugby field, or league, it becomes what the sports writers call a little bit of biffo. Sometimes it is the way blokes handle things. Never mind that it’s illegal, even in League. It happens, it is understood evidently in the male sporting psyche, and a good referee is one who is not too scrupulous about common assault.
Well OK, but it’s lost on me.
. . . . . . . . . .
Michele Bachmann, one of the Republican candidates for the US presidency, heaven help us all, has claimed that the recent earthquake and the hurricane that shook the eastern seaboard of the USA were messages from God. What was the message? We've got to rein in the spending, she said. God arranged a mediocre kind of earthquake, and a somewhat serious storm, to get the attention of the politicians, says Michele.
This woman seriously hopes to be President of the United States of America. She gets messages from God. It’s early days yet, of course, and she has to beat down the candidacy of the Governor of the State of Texas, Rick Perry, who seems to be a really toxic religious fruitcake. As governor, Rick has consented to hundreds of judicial executions as a righteous thing. He wouldn't have got elected if he hadn't vowed to kill condemned people. Rick proclaimed his presidential candidacy at some major fundamentalist religious rally. Incidentally, what happened to the constitutional separation of church and state in the USA? I only ask...
Sarah Palin is also a candidate evidently, in a wide choice which includes Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich… It is as though God is saying to the Democrat Party, your sacred role is to protect my people, my world, from such a fate. Anyway, that’s what I think God is saying.
. . . . . . . . . . .
The Rugby World Cup starts here at the end of next week. The Fiji team arrived yesterday. At Auckland airport the visiting rugby teams emerge via a separate, special gateway which leads onto a stage, rather in the manner of returning astronauts. They stand there while hakas are endured and the media get their fill of them. The rest of us, hoi polloi, emerge from our flights in the usual way.
The land has gone curiously silent on the fact that the All Blacks have just had two consecutive serious losses in the TriNations tournament, first to South Africa, and then to Australia. I have no idea what this means, although I was under the impression that these were the All Blacks' two major foes. Well they each just beat us. Senior All Blacks, heroes, icons, role models as they are, have been getting “rested”. It’s like the lull before Waterloo. A frisson of fear quivers through some of the faithful.
Meanwhile I have set myself, at this late stage of life, to discover and learn what the game of Rugby is actually for and about. I consulted the rules, on Wikipedia and other sites. Do not go there -- it is terminally boring. I printed out a 2-page article on "Offside", and find I understand, maybe, the first sentence. The first sentence reads: Offside rules in rugby union are complex.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Saturday, August 13, 2011
The blooming looming rugby world cup
The blooming looming Rugby World Cup is now fewer than 28 days away. It’s unstoppable. NZ Post Philatelic has just announced its first ever 3-dimensional stamp at $15 a lick. The image is a closeup of the Cup itself in all its glory, and in 3 dimensions. Oh, joy. You can also have a solid silver commemorative coin for about $135. This depicts a few beefy All Blacks in their haka.
Some Aussie rugby writer, pathetic and peeved witless at the All Blacks’ latest 30-14 defeat of the Wallabies, says the haka immediately prior to an All Black game should be disallowed, as it gives them an “unfair physical advantage”. The whole game of rugby is about male dominance over another man, and they're yelling and screaming and threatening and you've to sit there and go: 'Umm, this'll be finished soon’, said this bloke. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
It seems that we are sending less than the All Blacks full strength to South Africa next weekend, so as to conserve some of the top players. (I had to do a little research to find out what is happening in South Africa -- something called the Tri Nations.) We are constantly updated on the players’ joints and groins and other important places, and I entirely agree that wherever possible they should reduce the tearing of tendons, rippage of nerves, fracture of bones. The sight of one of these hulks, in clear agony, being helped off the paddock is less than edifying. Of course they are in a tradition which tells of one historic rugby icon, injured in the game, who refused help, insisted on playing on, and it was only at the end it was discovered he had dislocated his shoulder. This sort of stuff is admired.
Down at the Viaduct in Auckland they have installed a couple of immense TV screens in The Cloud, the strange sluglike edifice that seems to have beached itself like some slow primeval amphibian vertebrate. These screens are the size of half a footy paddock, presumably in case any of the devotees are short sighted. They cost about a million dollars we are told.
We are now emerging, everyone hopes, from the latest pre-tournament crisis. Adidas was charging a truly extortionate $220 for the official RWC All Black jersey. Some Whakatane retailer realised that customers could buy the jersey on line for much less, and promptly dropped his price. He said, it was not only to achieve sales, but also in defiance of the greed of Adidas, in which cause he was prepared to take a loss.
The question then was whether Adidas would drop their price or tyrannize the retailers -- and they blundered straight into a stunning PR disaster which surely has their American bosses incandescent. I don’t personally care about any of this, but it’s delicious to watch. The Rugby Union bosses, caught between their indignant fans on the one hand, already having paid through their bleeding noses for seats at the games, and Adidas’s serious sponsorship money, simply gibbered. Not what you want, less than a month out from the RWC.
It’s interesting to me from listening to the Adidas bosses, that their generous sponsorship of rugby year by year was always actually dependent on Adidas making money from rugby sales of their gear. So it was never altruistic, and I was simply naïve to assume it was. Of course, Adidas’s donated millions are an investment to make money for their shareholders. How silly of me. These gents will pull the plug whenever it suits them.
However, none of this solves my problem -- how to escape the hype, the hysteria, the rivers of booze, the excruciating “values” of professional contact sport and machoism, the endless mindless prognostications about imminent games, the hassles about public transport, the huge demands on the police and others, the endless environmental consequences of all the world travel, the bondage and obsequiousness of the media and its sports writers, the relentless dumbing down of our culture…
And the sheer noise. It may be only faintly audible here at Algies Bay, except on radio and TV. I can get the Concert Programme on Sky much better than by radio, so that’s good. I have plenty of books. For food we need go no further than Warkworth.
The best thing would be to go to Niue for maybe 4 weeks -- but of course, that’s not going to happen, idyllic and all as it would be. Yesterday morning the Concert Programme suddenly and delightfully played Eric Coates’s By a Sleepy Lagoon, a Tropical Moon… I do have a couple of commitments here. Anyway, in Niue they would probably all be sitting around a kava bowl in front of a giant TV screen generously supplied by the Chinese consulate…
Some Aussie rugby writer, pathetic and peeved witless at the All Blacks’ latest 30-14 defeat of the Wallabies, says the haka immediately prior to an All Black game should be disallowed, as it gives them an “unfair physical advantage”. The whole game of rugby is about male dominance over another man, and they're yelling and screaming and threatening and you've to sit there and go: 'Umm, this'll be finished soon’, said this bloke. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
It seems that we are sending less than the All Blacks full strength to South Africa next weekend, so as to conserve some of the top players. (I had to do a little research to find out what is happening in South Africa -- something called the Tri Nations.) We are constantly updated on the players’ joints and groins and other important places, and I entirely agree that wherever possible they should reduce the tearing of tendons, rippage of nerves, fracture of bones. The sight of one of these hulks, in clear agony, being helped off the paddock is less than edifying. Of course they are in a tradition which tells of one historic rugby icon, injured in the game, who refused help, insisted on playing on, and it was only at the end it was discovered he had dislocated his shoulder. This sort of stuff is admired.
Down at the Viaduct in Auckland they have installed a couple of immense TV screens in The Cloud, the strange sluglike edifice that seems to have beached itself like some slow primeval amphibian vertebrate. These screens are the size of half a footy paddock, presumably in case any of the devotees are short sighted. They cost about a million dollars we are told.
We are now emerging, everyone hopes, from the latest pre-tournament crisis. Adidas was charging a truly extortionate $220 for the official RWC All Black jersey. Some Whakatane retailer realised that customers could buy the jersey on line for much less, and promptly dropped his price. He said, it was not only to achieve sales, but also in defiance of the greed of Adidas, in which cause he was prepared to take a loss.
The question then was whether Adidas would drop their price or tyrannize the retailers -- and they blundered straight into a stunning PR disaster which surely has their American bosses incandescent. I don’t personally care about any of this, but it’s delicious to watch. The Rugby Union bosses, caught between their indignant fans on the one hand, already having paid through their bleeding noses for seats at the games, and Adidas’s serious sponsorship money, simply gibbered. Not what you want, less than a month out from the RWC.
It’s interesting to me from listening to the Adidas bosses, that their generous sponsorship of rugby year by year was always actually dependent on Adidas making money from rugby sales of their gear. So it was never altruistic, and I was simply naïve to assume it was. Of course, Adidas’s donated millions are an investment to make money for their shareholders. How silly of me. These gents will pull the plug whenever it suits them.
However, none of this solves my problem -- how to escape the hype, the hysteria, the rivers of booze, the excruciating “values” of professional contact sport and machoism, the endless mindless prognostications about imminent games, the hassles about public transport, the huge demands on the police and others, the endless environmental consequences of all the world travel, the bondage and obsequiousness of the media and its sports writers, the relentless dumbing down of our culture…
And the sheer noise. It may be only faintly audible here at Algies Bay, except on radio and TV. I can get the Concert Programme on Sky much better than by radio, so that’s good. I have plenty of books. For food we need go no further than Warkworth.
The best thing would be to go to Niue for maybe 4 weeks -- but of course, that’s not going to happen, idyllic and all as it would be. Yesterday morning the Concert Programme suddenly and delightfully played Eric Coates’s By a Sleepy Lagoon, a Tropical Moon… I do have a couple of commitments here. Anyway, in Niue they would probably all be sitting around a kava bowl in front of a giant TV screen generously supplied by the Chinese consulate…
Friday, August 05, 2011
Miscellany 4 - The American People, etc
The American People... It is apparently compulsory that any politician or public figure making a statement in the USA must make explicit and devoted reference to The American People. The Canadian People, for instance, or the Australian People, simply does not have the same resonance, although I suspect The German People once did. The American People is an entity surrounded and held together by powerful mythologies such as The American Dream, whatever that is.
It seems to be an amalgam of what they call democracy and the posturing and fraud Americans call the political process, the more sanitised versions of their history since Plymouth Rock, Hollywood, Davy Crockett and steamboats on the Mississippi, the flag and misty-eyed celebrations, and American Lives being lost at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal and Tarawa, their rationalisations of the horrors of slavery and racism and attitudes thereby that persist to this day... Every people’s history, as told, is a little dishonest in places.
Americans rarely seem to realise that the rest of the world winces when they talk as though an American Life lost is somehow more costly than anyone else’s life lost.
It is apparently just and right that other nationalities should submit to the demands of international justice and the courts of The Hague, but no American Boy will be subjected to any foreign court.
Well ain’t it a goddamn shame.
......................................
One day, in Paris, in a tour bus, we were swinging around into the square in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. In the seat behind us were an American couple maybe in their 70s.
Elmer, is that that Noeter Dayme...?
You got it, Gloria.
......................................
I went to a family funeral this week. I got to speak at it. It was the funeral of my brother-in-law, as fine and gentle an Aussie man as you would ever hope to meet. He was an unassuming Christian believer, and he was always very active in his church and far beyond.
So, we had a Christian funeral. That is to say, the point of the service was the Word of God about life and death, comfort and hope. We heard words from the Bible, words from people of faith. We sang Christian hymns -- we did not play horrors from the current pop catalogue or what someone thought was trendy. It was in a Christian church, not in some football club rooms or school hall.
Above all, we did not have a string of people getting up to make scarcely articulate speeches about his life, their selective memories of him, telling silly inaccurate and sometime offensive stories and jokes, desecrating the place with their total inattention to the demanding challenges of life and death. In our sickeningly superficial culture, most people now become surprising heroes after they have died. We think somehow we owe it to them. We don’t. What we owe them is the truth.
Those of us who organised my brother-in-law’s funeral decided early on that we would not have a string of testimonies to someone who everyone already knew had been a good, even exceptional, person.
So it was a Christian service, and that was a huge relief. It paid attention to the facts of life and death, of love and hope. It paid tribute to my brother-in-law’s life, and his final illness. It marked his service as a Christian man, which was considerable.
It was all that needed to be done.
It seems to be an amalgam of what they call democracy and the posturing and fraud Americans call the political process, the more sanitised versions of their history since Plymouth Rock, Hollywood, Davy Crockett and steamboats on the Mississippi, the flag and misty-eyed celebrations, and American Lives being lost at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal and Tarawa, their rationalisations of the horrors of slavery and racism and attitudes thereby that persist to this day... Every people’s history, as told, is a little dishonest in places.
Americans rarely seem to realise that the rest of the world winces when they talk as though an American Life lost is somehow more costly than anyone else’s life lost.
It is apparently just and right that other nationalities should submit to the demands of international justice and the courts of The Hague, but no American Boy will be subjected to any foreign court.
Well ain’t it a goddamn shame.
......................................
One day, in Paris, in a tour bus, we were swinging around into the square in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. In the seat behind us were an American couple maybe in their 70s.
Elmer, is that that Noeter Dayme...?
You got it, Gloria.
......................................
I went to a family funeral this week. I got to speak at it. It was the funeral of my brother-in-law, as fine and gentle an Aussie man as you would ever hope to meet. He was an unassuming Christian believer, and he was always very active in his church and far beyond.
So, we had a Christian funeral. That is to say, the point of the service was the Word of God about life and death, comfort and hope. We heard words from the Bible, words from people of faith. We sang Christian hymns -- we did not play horrors from the current pop catalogue or what someone thought was trendy. It was in a Christian church, not in some football club rooms or school hall.
Above all, we did not have a string of people getting up to make scarcely articulate speeches about his life, their selective memories of him, telling silly inaccurate and sometime offensive stories and jokes, desecrating the place with their total inattention to the demanding challenges of life and death. In our sickeningly superficial culture, most people now become surprising heroes after they have died. We think somehow we owe it to them. We don’t. What we owe them is the truth.
Those of us who organised my brother-in-law’s funeral decided early on that we would not have a string of testimonies to someone who everyone already knew had been a good, even exceptional, person.
So it was a Christian service, and that was a huge relief. It paid attention to the facts of life and death, of love and hope. It paid tribute to my brother-in-law’s life, and his final illness. It marked his service as a Christian man, which was considerable.
It was all that needed to be done.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)