Brazil Plays, Ukraine Fights

What this episode covers

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, JOE DIMAGGIO? A NATION LIFTS ITS LONELY EYES TO YOU… The USA lost the battle — to Belgium in the World Cup — but soccer won the war. America is now officially smitten. More of us watched the USA’s final match in the World Cup than watched last year’s World Series, the championship of the great, all-American sport of baseball. Soccer integrates the red altitude impulse to fight and win, civilized by amber rules, produced by orange business and expressing a green world-cultural identity. It is helping Americans become better world citizens (and not all conservatives like it). Yet soccer presents a challenge for Americans because it is so, well, foreign. The arcane ranking system, the low scores, the theatrics (as Rachel Maddow points out, the only arena where Americans feign injury in order to manipulate the game is politics) — all these require us to take new perspectives, which of course is an engine of evolution. The World Cup is explicitly un-American, since it has the word ‘world’ in it and we have zero chance of winning. If I wanted to spend ninety minutes watching foreigners beating us up embarrassingly, I would just leaf very slowly through our students’ international math and science test results. — Alexandra Petri in The Washington Post Which brings me to our lovely host country, Brazil. Or is it a dystopia, I forget. What happened to all the stories about how bad Brazil had screwed things up, about the stadiums being unfinished, the transportation system broken down, rampant criminality, the people up in arms? In the weeks leading up to the games I would’ve thought that they were going to be called off, or played in the midst of rubble. Then suddenly the story of Brazilian apocalypse shifted to…let’s play ball! This points to a polarity that host countries have to navigate. They fight hard to win the privilege of hosting a huge event like the World Cup or the Olympics. After all, it’s a chance to get the attention and respect of the world. The downside is that in our contemporary media environment the host country’s flaws get highlighted as much – if not more so – than their achievements. We can blame the media — as long as we remember that the media is us. We tend to think that the media is conveying information, that it’s factual and logical. (We tend to think this about ourselves too.) But actually what reporters do best is tell stories, morality tales about good people and bad people, involved in some drama that stimulates our thinking and emotional systems. And like good storytellers of all times and places they spin the “facts” to make the story more vivid and meaningful. For months, the story they/we have been telling of Brazil is of a country that has fundamentally entered the stage of modernity, with all its attendant goodies but without sufficient regard for their poor. Hundreds of thousands of people rose up in a series of large demonstrations, critics railed against the government, experts predicted failure. And though the protests have dwindled since the games began (it seems that the disaffected have World Cup fever, too) the point has been made. Brazil and the rest of the world have all seen something that cannot be unseen. To see is to care, and to care is to act. That’s why integral theory stresses the idea that the leading line of human development is the cognitive line, with cognition defined very simply: what are you able to see? In the case of Brazil are you able first of all to see the poor?

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