Travis
> Wall Street Journal - July 11, 2006
>
> Zidane
> By BERNARD-HENRI LEVY
>
> PARIS -- Here is one of the greatest players of all time, a legend, a
> myth for the entire planet, and universally acclaimed. Here is a
> champion who, in front of two billion people, was putting the final
> touches on one of the most extraordinary sagas in soccer's history.
>
> Here is a man of providence, a savior, who was sought out, like
> Achilles in his tent of grudge and rage, because he was believed to
> be the only one who could avert his countrymen's fated decline.
> Better yet, he's a super-Achilles who -- unlike Homer's -- did not
> wait for an Agamemnon (in the guise of coach Raymond Domenech) to
> come begging him to re-enlist; rather, he decided himself,
> spontaneously, after having "heard" a voice calling him, to come back
> from his Spanish exile and -- putting his luminous armor back on, and
> flanked by his faithful Myrmidons (Makelele, Vieira, Thuram) --
> reverse the new Achaeans' ill fortune and allow them to successfully
> pull together.
>
> And then this valiant knight who is a hair's breadth from victory and
> just minutes from the end of a historic match (and of a career that
> will carry him into the Pantheon of stadium-gods after Pelé, Platini
> and Maradona); this giant who, like the Titans of the ancient world,
> has known Glory, then Exile, then Return and Redemption; this
> redeemer, this blue angel dressed in white, who had only the very
> last steps to scale to enter Olympus for good, commits a crazy
> incomprehensible act that amounts to disqualification from the soccer
> ritual -- the final image of him that will go down in history and, in
> lieu of apotheosis, will cast him into hell.
>
> No one knows, as I write, what actually happened on the field of
> Berlin's Olympic Stadium.
>
> No one knows what the Italian, Marco Materazzi, did or said (in the
> 111th minute of a match that this hero had dominated with all his
> grace) to reawaken in him those old demons of a kid from the streets
> of Marseilles, the very demons that soccer's code of honor, its
> ethic, its aesthetic, are made to quell.
>
> Even if we knew why; even if we knew for certain that the Italian
> insulted him, or cursed his mother, father, brothers, sister; even if
> we got hold of the black box of those 20 seconds that saw the
> champion destroy in a flash his legend that is a mix of secret king,
> a Dostoyevskian sweet man, the ideal Beur son-in-law, future mayor of
> Marseilles and, last but not least, the charismatic captain leading
> his troops to consecration; even if we knew the whole story, this
> suicide would be as all ordinary suicides are; no reason in the world
> explains the desperate act of a man -- no provocation, no nasty
> remark, will ever tell us why the planetary icon that Zinedine Zidane
> had become, a man more admired than the Pope, the Dalai Lama and
> Nelson Mandela put together, a demigod, a chosen one, this great
> priest-by-consensus of the new religion and the new empire in the
> making, chose to explode right there, rather than wait a few minutes
> to settle the quarrel on the sidelines.
>
> No. The truth is that it is perhaps not so easy to stay in the skin
> of an icon, demigod, hero, legend.
>
> The only plausible explanation for so bizarrely scuttling everything
> -- which, remember, let a lot of time go by (the 20 long seconds
> following the Italian Machiavelli's undoubtedly calculated outrage)
> in order to concentrate itself into the outburst of a player who was
> out of breath and stupidly losing control of his nerves -- the only
> explanation is that there was in this man a kind of recoil, an
> ultimate inner revolt, against the living parabola, the stupid
> statue, the beatified monument, that the era had transformed him into
> over these past few months.
>
> The man's insurrection against the saint. A refusal of the halo that
> had been put on his head and that he then, quite logically,
> pulverized with a head-butt, as though saying: I am a living being
> not a fetish; a man of flesh and blood and passion, not this idiotic
> empty hologram, this guru, this universal psychoanalyst, natural
> child of Abbé Pierre and Sister Emanuelle, which soccer-mania was
> trying to turn me into.
>
> It was as though he were repeating, in parody, the title of one of
> the very great books of the last century, before the triumph of this
> liturgy of the body, performance and commodity: Ecce Homo, This is a
> Man. Yes, a man, a true man, not one of these absurd monsters or
> synthetic stars who are made by the money of brand names in
> combination with the sighs of the globalized crowd.
>
> Achilles had his heel. Zidane will have had his -- this magnificent
> and rebellious head that brought him, suddenly, back into the ranks
> of his human brothers.
>
> ---
>
> Mr. Lévy is the author of "American Vertigo" (Random House, 2006).
> This piece was translated from the original French by Hélène Brenkman.
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>