Kong Fuzi says: Strange these days we live in are
Football (soccer) madness
Ahh… the FIFA World Cup 2006 is coming closer. I can already feel it.
I like playing soccer, and enjoy watching good matches, but sometimes it gets a bit too far. Don’t get me started on hooligans and racist chants, let’s just stay in the field of ‘normal’ soccer, and leave out the fact that it’s unbelievable how much clubs pay (1 GBP = 1.87 USD / 1.45 EUR) for their players anyway. I’m speaking of the unconditional loyalty of some fans for their clubs. Encouraging a team is fine, especially when it plays well. But making a matter of live and death out of it isn’t. Nor is it fair to boo the players of the other team, or the referee.
To be honest, being in a soccer stadium always freaks me out. There’s this huge mass, dressed and behaving so as to express affiliation to a certain team. And then everyone starts to chant rhythmically, the individual disappearing and merging with the mass for a Mexican wave (No, this has nothing to do with immigrants, period! In German, it’s called ‘La-Ola-Welle’, btw) or some other kind of mass activity. It’s of course not fascism, but as I’m reading ‘Escape from Freedom‘ by Erich Fromm at the moment, I can’t help but notice the similarity between the mechanisms at work.
Fitting to that picture (taken literally from the German ‘ins Bild passen’ [to fit in]) are the messages displayed on the team buses. ‘Bound for glory’, ‘With fire in our hearts’, ‘One Nation’, ‘With a flag in the window’, come on, my heart is bleeding. At least Serbia and Montenegro has a decent one: ‘For the love of the game’.
Of course, the fight against terrorism doesn’t stop short of soccer. And so the United States of America’s (read more about that special country) soccer team has put the slogan ‘United we play, united we win’ on their team bus, but, over security concerns, refrain from displaying a flag on it. Culture of fear, anyone?
On Supply and Demand
The mechanism of supply and demand is easy to understand. Applied to shadow markets, even absurd news (in German; from Google cache) make somewhat sense.
Note: That was the only website I’ve found. My original source for that story is a Swiss radio station. For all you no German speaking folks out there (I’ve heard some rumours): In Italy, olive trees get stolen and are then sold for up to 10′000 EUR (approx. 13,000 USD) each, probably on the olive tree black market…
