why not to watch

a few blocks from my house, a graffiti mural shows sérgio cabral jr, the former governor of rio de janeiro state, bulldozing houses in order to clear the path for a soccer field.  in big letters over his head, there’s a caption: “how many evictions does it take to make a world cup?”

by now, you’ve probably seen the brilliant john oliver video where he takes apart fifa for the shady, fraudulent, power-hungry cabal that it is.  he briefly talks about the way that government here has capitulated to all of fifa’s demands, which has effected public safety in much more violent and direct ways than the beer sales that he mentions.  he also closes by admitting that he’s a huge soccer fan, and that even knowing how unabashedly awful fifa is, he’ll still be watching the cup.

it’s tuesday morning here, and the opening game is scheduled to start in são paulo in a little more than 48 hours. the big question nationally is just how much of a shitshow são paulo will be on thursday:  workers have been on strike for a couple of weeks already, and the powers that be are getting increasingly desperate to try and figure out a way to make everything run smoothly.  in rio, facebook events for protests keep popping up and the security apparatus gets increasingly heavily armed and bizarre (and this is a city where we’re used to seeing ordinary patrol cops with ar-15s). last night, a group of indigenous folks held a dancing protest surrounded by dozens of riot cops outside a colonial era building that they were expelled from twice over the past year and a half in order to clear space for game-day parking.

in the midst of all the tension, though, there’s also a stubborn little question that keeps popping up:  what’s a politically conscientious diehard soccer fan to do?  plenty of the people who have been in the streets for most of the past year chanting that there won’t be a world cup have never missed a game before.  they don’t want to the protests to die out, but they also would love to be able to take a few couple off from thinking about all the repression and social engineering that have gone into making this thing happen, and just focus on soccer.

last week, a very visible, diverse, and well-respected local coalition of activists gave a two-part “protest party” that began with the public launch of a major study of world cup-related forced evictions and police brutality, and then switched gears – a better word might be “devolved” – into watching the final friendly match between brasil and serbia on a giant screen. organizers explained that it was a pirated broadcast, so fifa wouldn’t be making any money off of it, and that they wanted to protest the structures of power behind the world cup, and not the games themselves.  still, a lot of us were (and continue to be) appalled:  as the graffiti in my neighborhood points out, the world cup can’t happen without thousands of houses being bulldozed before any teams take the field.  also, the idea that we can put aside protests to come together for the beautiful game plays directly into fifa’s hands and the idea of a transcendent world cup somehow untouched by all the dirty work that makes it happen.  watching the games, especially in public, is an insult to the over 250,000 people throughout brasil who have been displaced to make the world cup happen, and a desecration of the memory of the countless people (mostly favela residents of color, like amarildo and dg) who have been killed or disappeared in the military police’s twisted – and officially sanctioned – vision of how to implement public safety.

i’m not much of a soccer fan, but i understand something about the allure of the world cup.  i landed in rio for the first time on june 30, 2002, about 15 minutes before brasil scored the first of three goals against germany to win the world cup final.  by the time i had gathered my bags, duty free store salespeople and customs agents had formed a conga line and were scream-chanting euphorically.  the party lasted for days, and seemed to me to blur all social divisions:  my first vision of brasil was of a country where the beautiful game brought everyone together and out into the streets.

twelve years later, though, i’ve had the opportunity to see people come together in the streets for a lot of other reasons.  most recently, even as protests have become pretty sparsely attended, i’ve been struck by people’s courage and resilience in questioning a status quo that pours billions in refurbishing public stadiums (that are then sold at bargain prices to coalitions of major real estate developers) while refusing to make the necessary investments in public hospitals, or to pay public school teachers a living wage.  the pro-cup faction in brasil has been arguing that world cup investments are only a small fraction of public spending compared to areas like education and public health.  this strikes me as an egregiously stupid argument:  if you break into my house to steal my several boxes of books, i’m not going to brush it off just because you left my computer behind.  in any event, reducing the world cup to a question of spending overlooks all of the official violence (see above) that fifa expects, and that public authorities here have been only too happy to implement.

the world cup is essentially one big, celebratory, multicolored mugging.  it’s impossible to separate the manicured soccer fields from all of the bulldozers that toppled the houses around them, or from the hospitals down the street that don’t have essential machinery or even enough beds.  i’m not planning on watching any of the cup, but i also know that we all do things that we’re not exactly proud of when we’re alone.  the world cup is sort of like bad porn:  if you're going to tune in, fine, but don't throw a party to advertise the fact that you're watching it.  there are more important things going on in the streets, and fifa doesn’t deserve to win.

you choose whether there will be a cup, and which side you play for.