> > Speaking of lefties and soccer, anybody read blowhard Terry Eagleton's
> > stupid, moralizing article entitled "Football: a dear friend to
> > capitalsim" in the Guardian recently? What a maroon.
>
>Yeah, it's cringeworthy. I'm a big Eagleton fan generally, but he is
>way too prolific for his own good. I wish folks would stay away from
>the op-ed pages.
Noam Chomsky's take is the same as Eagleton's, almost word for word:
Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way--so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they're in the hands of the rich folk. So what's left? Well, one thing that's left is sports--so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that's part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions.