On His Heads A Blasphemous Name
The other day, while I was inevitably filling my free time with reading about the World Cup, I had a bizarre creative vision of a distopian world wherein Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, was actually the antichrist. Wouldn’t that put an interesting spin on the book of Revelations? Instead of warning us about a coming period of global persecution and war, God could really have been warning us about a corrupt and ineffectual leader in the realm of global football.
It hardly seems a stretch as I sit here stewing in my own creative and paranoid delusions. After all, no matter how many morally wounding scandals Blatter and his cronies seem at the center of, we can’t seem to get rid of him. No matter how many stupid and ineffective resolutions come flowing from the FIFA fountainhead, the man just seems untouchable. No matter how he sells out the world’s most exciting sporting event to the corporate advertising machine, nothing happens beyond a sharp increase in the size of FIFA budget with money that won’t end up in the hands of soccer federations in the developing countries that need the most help.
Does anyone actually like Sepp Blatter? I haven’t found anyone yet, but I do admittedly live in the United States of Doesn’t Give a Toss About Football, a land where we resent pretty much every authority figure we encounter. As a people, we distrust global cooperation when someone has the authority to enforce what happens here on American soil. Some doofus in Zurich can tell us how to run our game? Screw him then! Burn the witch! Spread democracy to FIFA already! I’m too busy eating McDonald’s and watching re-runs of Deal or No Deal to care about this, kid.
If only we could convince W that Blatter is actually the head of a terrorist regime, then we might be able to fill the leadership vacuum with a fan collective insurgency. Of course, pretty much any revolution would be doomed to failure. The Italians would fall over as soon as the wind blew, and the Portuguese would run over to the generals from miles away to demand nuclear strikes against God himself for allowing the wind to knock over their allies.
Return of Jesus to set up the Millennial Kingdom or just a prediction that Zizou would come back and win the World Cup? We’ll find out on Saturday.
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