Medium-Endurance Qatar

I mentioned it last week, but I haven't really spent any real time in this space talking about how I've surrendered large parts of my psyche and my emotional present to the World Cup. Look, it only happens every four years, a built-in scarcity to the marketing that only becomes more acute as I start to age out of this whole "being alive" business. I'm not being melodramatic or morbid, it's just at 48, I'm on the verge of knowing with increasing mathematical certainty that there are more yesterdays than tomorrows. I want to take in as much as I can.

Unlike everything else in my generational experience, this specific cultural happening isn't going to be repackaged as a reboot series on a streaming service in 20 years to soothe me with nostalgia and product placement ads for Pepsi Zero Sugar. Another World Cup will happen, but these games with these players right now are ephemeral one-off happenings. It's the unique instancing sport creates that no other type of entertainment really can. I've got to get them imprinted on my eyeballs, now or never. An entire monthlong event built out of FOMO. Like Instagram reels about secret beaches on Greek islands, except the watching of it on a screen is the same experience as being there, to a degree. In order to scratch the FOMO itch, you don't have to go find the strip of Greek island beach and risk being violently disillusioned by the expense, the Insta-created crowd, the trash, the sullen Greek teenagers and the vendor kiosks selling roofies, iPhone charger cables and Pepsi Zero Sugar.

Of course this is a complicated World Cup as it's being held in Qatar. The first instance of outrage should really be the obvious bribery inherent in awarding a world-important nation-spanning event to a country smaller than the county I live in, containing exactly one (1) actual city. But this is FIFA, whose headquarters are built from stacked bags of specie from various international mints, like a bunker against the encroaching forces of decency and human dignity. Being surprised about FIFA taking bribes is like being surprised this sentence was going to end in a simile. In the end, all you can do is shake your head.

No amount of head-shaking chases away the lingering stink of death and exploitation regarding the migrant workers thrown into the cement mixer to undergird the crash building program to turn a one-stoplight oil outpost into a World Football City in the scope of 12 years. There's obviously a lot more to the growth of Doha than just the World Cup (being the headquarters for U.S. Central Command as it operated two wars in the region for almost two decades almost certainly helped keep that sweet growth curve nice and steady), but the mix of capitalist-style insatiable expansion with an indifferent authoritarianism ended up just as it sounds like it should have, in a lot of human tragedy.

The World Cup is my favorite cultural thing. I get more excited about a World Cup than I do a Star Wars thing or a Lord of the Rings thing* or YouTube videos where they have captions so it seems like cats are having human thoughts. There was a lot of talk about "ethical consumption" at this World Cup, but I had to accept that this time around, there was really no such thing. In the past I might even have been able to convince myself that as a non-Nielsen household, there wouldn't be any trace of my viewership that Fox and FIFA could use to monetize into advertising, but this is 2022. I have a Spectrum streaming cable package and a Fox Sports app that I'm using to take these games in. Every view requires a measurable click and every click is presentable in the advertising pitch deck to set the prices for this and subsequent World Cups. I'm not going to be quite so melodramatic as to say there's blood on my hands, but there's certainly some in the areas where my hands can reach.

As of now, the USA is playing in the second round, Saturday morning at 7 am local time, with a real chance to compete against a so-far underwhelming Netherlands side that feels gettable. This is after 8 years of no USA World Cup since we failed to qualify for the last Sportswashing World's Fair in Russia 2018. So I'll set my alarm to specifically not boycott that game either. I don't really want to be excited, but I also really really want to be excited. So I am. This is all too dark and too glib at the same time, but if it makes you feel any better, the tension of watching a team I'm invested in play is actually fairly excruciating, though definitely in a recoverably trivial way. I feel like as long as the guys are going to be out there trying to score with their dicks, the least I can do is look.

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*God bless you, Rings of Power, you really tried!