Any newspaper around the world (even in China) would seem to offer us a convenient answer, an answer that is, in my opinion, way too convenient: the association between the Beijing government and the violence in Tibet and the War in Darfur. In this sense, what is going on in Tibet and Darfur have been technically treated by both the Euro-American and the Chinese presses as international eyesores, incidents that the discourse on the Olympics ever since the opening ceremony has been trying to erase momentarily; but if they are consciously erased by the media discourse, they are then by definition not “missing” from the big picture. Rather, they are merely hidden from our sight. What is truly absent from the Olympics is perhaps not Tibet and Dafur, but something even more disturbing than what appears to be a tension between harmony and disharmony, a trope that the Anglo-American press has constructed upon the theme of he (harmony) showcased by director Zhang Yimou’s opening extravaganza, i.e. something that is more deeply rooted in humanity.

Perhaps we should begin by asking: What is present in the international discourse on the Olympics in “mainstream” media? Since the morning of 8th August 2008 (Beijing Standard Time), the “mainstream” media have been cautious against any “misbehaviour,” i.e. as long as nobody mentions anything about politics, the “world” can enjoy a relatively “peaceful” tournament. The NBC has been trying to maintain a seemingly “objective,” or even close to euphoric position towards the games. Its reporters hailed the opening ceremony as a memorable artistic achievement that surpassed political boundaries. Major events are often portrayed as “fair plays” between the United States, a “World Power” in sports, versus China as a “Rising Power,” a “friendly competition” between two “nations” that the sports pundits consider as a “League on Their Own.” Team USA is allegedly supported by a “generous Chinese audience,” who welcome the American sports stars the way they would be received at home, a civil diplomatic success comparable to the Ping Pong Diplomacy. In a way, this claim seems to be further substantiated by an obsession about poster-boy Kobe Bryant among the young Chinese fans of the NBA, and about the token all-American male Michael Phelps, whose lust-inspiring semi-nude body has graced the front page of the official Olympics website more often than the Chinese national gold medallists. The New York Times and the BBC have reduced their journalistic distance to a level of “critical forgiveness.” For example, while the New York Times criticises the superficiality of youth and harmony that have impressed the visitors to Beijing, its writers are quick to point out that America had once created a similar euphoria at Salt Lake City. The BBC almost expresses gratefulness that the knifing to death of the relatives of an American coach at the Gulou (Drum Tower) has been “comfortably” overshadowed by the brutal murder of a young Chinese couple in Newcastle, so that “China” and the “West” have now evened their scores in the area of self-perceived victimisation. In addition, the violence at Xinjiang has been downplayed as isolated incidents by the world media, events that are still considered as relatively unrelated to the Uyghur independent movement.

With President Bush and Prime Minister Putin being seen on television discussing what most people presume to be issues related to the Russo-Georgian conflict, the Olympics and their mediated image have thus far made a visual statement that President Hu Jintao has been trying to pound into the heads of the journalistic community: “Violence happens everywhere, why should we focus on China? Political violence is, after all, a ‘fair game.’”

Perhaps the question we should ask is: Why must violence be everywhere, and is “China” such a “modern” participant (as “modernity” is another trope repeated over and over again in both the media reporting of the games, and the commercial sponsors that support them), both aggressively and passively, in relation to what the international community imagines as the “world outside China?“ Has China's role in ”world“ politics been so much different or ”behind“ the ”rest of the world?“

One of the most poignant performances in the opening ceremony, for billions of spectators of Chinese descent, is the representation of the maritime expeditions of Zheng He (1371-1433) to South Asia, India and, possibly, Africa. In one register, Zheng He’s sea voyages represent to the “world” not only the colonial ambition of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), they offer a glimpse of what could have been an alternative nomos, an order of land appropriation that could have competed with that established by Spain and Portugal under papal authority, or an omnipresence on the free sea that could have challenged the maritime domination of Great Britain. For many Chinese viewers, regardless of their political positions, this part of the performance in the Bird Nest created a prosthetic memory that the Amity Line (or at least one of them) once oriented towards the Ming captial (Nanjing, 1368-1421; Beijing, 1421-1644).

In another register, the featuring of Zheng He as the “Columbus of the 'Orient'” is symptomatic of a much deeper tension in the way Chinese historians imagine this alternative nomos. Zheng He is, after all, a eunuch enslaved by the Ming emperor, and possibly, a Muslim whose maritime conquest might be more appropriately understood as part of the process of “global Islamic expansion” (in the Eurocentric sense of “global history”) than an “indigenous Chinese” imperial and cultural triumph. Can the people of China locate a historical figure better than a “Muslim eunuch” to represent a juridical alternative?

In order to understand what underlies Zheng He as a figure of historical mythology, we should first examine his wound of castration. Zheng He was castrated as a result of the Ming’s re-conquest of Yunan in 1381, a region that remained loyal to the Mongolian empire, whose representative monarch in Beijing (known during the Mongolian era as Dadu) was overthrown by the Ming in 1368. Castration, together with genocide and mutilation of female genitalia, had been considered as punishments (xing), necessary forms of violence that were implemented by a new ruler in order to “rectify” (zheng) the disorder that the conquered people had once caused to the nomos of the “world.” Meanwhile, the xing themselves would be formalised as the law (fa) that would stand for the authority of the new power. In the “Lü xing” (Punishments According to the Marquis of Lü) chapter of the Shang shu (Book of Documents, 1000 BCE and 200 CE), the legendary sage king Yao (c. 3rd century BCE, if he existed) conquered the descendents of the “disorderly” legendary minister Chi You, the Miao people. According to the chapter, while Yao accused the Miao of using unnecessary violence (namely, genocide and genital mutilation) against their enemies, Yao himself implemented the same punishments upon the Miao for their violation of what Yao perceived as the world order. The castration wound of Zheng He therefore bore the trace of a punishment that was considered by the Ming emperor as a necessary violence that would eventually become the foundation of his law and the new world order, within which Zheng He’s “manhood” (in this case, his political life and humanity) could be restored for the purpose of instantiating this new order.

The ”Zheng He“ (or officially known as the ”Maritime Silkroad“) number in the opening ceremony was therefore a spectacle for both what the “world” perceives as the “Rising Power” (China), and the “World Power” (America; in the stadium, instantiated by President Bush) as a contract between the two countries. It acknowledges precisely that violence is not only everywhere, it is a necessary state of exception that constitutes a new order that the “world” hopes to see between the US and China. Furthermore, this state of exception is, as it has always been, imagined as a process of excepting the “Islamic world” as a piece from the Real, a constitutive element of both the ”Euro-American“ version, and the “Chinese” version of the nomos made concrete and tangible by its exclusion from the law, and its imaginary restoration under the new constitutive order. This new constitutive order was perfectly sanctioned by Bush’s applause for the Iraqi national team, an applause that was initiated by the “Chinese” audience. However, while the “Chinese” audience applauded the Iraqi team as an “underdog,” Bush applauded them as their new Caeser. In other words, it does not matter whether the Islamic “nation” is sympathised as an underdog or hailed as a new subject, a new harmony can only be peacefully achieved (he), in the imagination of the newly combined Sino-American effort, as long as Islam’s political participation in the new order can be carefully managed by the new law.

In this light, we can re-examine what the “mainstream” media hail as “modern China’s re-entry into the World” and the so-called “gracefully apolitical Olympics.” The underlying assumption of these praises is that the Olympics are expected to have the therapeutic power to restore the potency of “modern China” after a century of “imperialist abuse” (a trope that the Athens games have materialised by designing a cauldron that erected like a giant penis for “modern Greece,” a fertile soil for a discussion on “modern Europe,” and its “apolitical” demonstration against its “bastard child” Turkey). However, if “China” truly submits “itself” to therapy (like what ”it“ has been doing in the past fifty years), what we should see in the Bird Nest ought to be a restaging of the ”suffering“ of “modern China” (as understood by historians for over a century) from the Opium War until the Japanese invasion, and the traumatic experiences of the Cultural Revolution (once being hailed and hated precisely because of its “radical modernity,” an effort to build a “modern China” by reworking all the “national traumas” through a Maoist discourse). BBC’s comment that “modern China” was missing in the open ceremony is therefore a blatant parapraxis (a Freudian slip that both “China” and the “world” acknowledge as a missing element that is necessary to maintain their ontological consistency), for officially, half of the ceremony was supposed to have showcased “modern China,” though it is a different version of “modern China.”

What is this “new” kind of “modern China” then? What Zhang Yimou has skilfully avoided is precisely the “modern China” as an over-traumatised subject, a notion of “modernity” that has defined “China” as we have known of it according to the canonical historical discourse, the very “traumatic past” that forms the basis of all the celebrations on the street of Beijing. The underlying assumption of “apolitical Olympics” is none other than the new political order that the “world” is eager to imagine, i.e. “China” is only “allowed by the 'world'” to become “modern” as long as it stops going through therapy. This is a principle in Hollywood cinema: the opening ceremony, which is produced and directed as a “live” cinematic extravaganza à la mode Hollywoodienne, offers imaginary resolutions for a “nation’s” traumatised subjectivity as long as the traumatic scenes remain untouched and unmentioned (a reading of Hollywood cinema first proposed by Thomas Elsaesser). What “China and the World” can ultimately accept as “China’s” ticket into the “world stage” is precisely a conscious erasure of what has always constituted “China’s modernity.” In this sense, “China” can join “America” to “lead the world” precisely by a common amnesia—as long as “China” only remembers its history in the form of ancient and medieval glory, and as long as “America” remembers only the inalienability of its freedom and democracy its Constitutive moment aimed to preserve, “modernity” can remain as an empty signifier that the new world order can purloin (in Lacanese, to put aside for future rhetorical use), and nobody would be shocked (in the sense proposed by our friend Walter Benjamin) by modernity’s impotence, traumatic memories, and ontological inconsistency.

After all, what was the purpose of the Olympics in Ancient Greece? One of the many highlights of the ancient games was drama. An award would be given for those who could successfully help the spectators, who were temporarily released from being bound to their poleis, achieve catharsis, i.e. a release from being bound by the human praxis, or an es-tasis outside the purposiveness of humanity and animality, political life and biological life. What is missing in the Beijing Olympics, and in fact, the modern Olympics in general, is rooted in the re-interpretation of such release as a form of “peace” that is achieved by the bracketing of wars, and the effective global management of life, a re-interpretation quite parallel to another highlight in the opening ceremony: the transformation of Confucius's and the Legalist ideas of a suspension of the need of wars (meta-violence), to the management and bracketing of wars by means of a mega-War that constituted what we now imagine as the “Chinese Empire.” As long as we continue to imagine that “man is a wolf to man” (homo homini lupus), political violence would continue to be a “fair game” found everywhere, and the Olympics would always be, regardless of the host and its relationship with the “world,” a bracketed war conducted in the name of peace.

There is no denying that the film provides an unusually, perhaps uniquely rich set of images of contemporary North Korea. While the voice-over and narrative perspective are not entirely uncritical, the film’s effort to remain apolitical backfires for me. By not being “political” and simply representing things “as they are,” the film’s perspective largely becomes that of the girls: in love with the general, awed by the games, and allowing to stand the constant refrain that all the nation’s problems are caused by foreign imperialists. This becomes most apparent during the girls’ field trip to Mount Paekdu which, with its lilting music and shimmering nature photography, is all but indistinguishable from a propaganda film, not because if is “political,” but because it adopts the girls’ perspective. As if a child’s perspective –the spontaneous (i.e. carefully engineered) emotional responses of a select group of pre-adolescents who emerge from the trip vowing to become “daughters of the general and of Mount Paekdu”— were somehow untainted. As if, as the director says during an interview, “You can drop the politics and people can be people.” The humanistic effects of the film are occasionally powerful, and I wouldn’t dismiss them entirely: it is indeed difficult to avoid the feeling of people being people, and to take some satisfaction in it. But precisely in these most “human” moments we find –if not everywhere and always, then at least in North Korea—the intimacy of the intimate and the national, the private and the public. As one of the gymnast’s families sits around the television, snacking, joking, and expressing affection through casual touches, someone proclaims: “No wonder even the arrogant Americans tremble in fear when they see this!”

As many printculture readers no doubt already know, the “mass games” are not so much “games,” in the sense of competitive athletic events, as they are an organized blend of dance, theater, and spectacle on a grand scale. Less a game, then, than the production of a series of “mass ornaments.” No matter how much Busby Berkeley or Nuremberg you’ve seen, they are occasionally jaw-dropping.

A lot of the commentary on this spectacular enactment of the individual’s incorporation into the collective tends to draw on a reservoir of clichés about not just communism but also about Asian character more generally. Yet the mass ornament is far more an import of Western-style modernity than it is the expression of some long-duration cultural tendency toward collective harmony. Nor is the mass ornament the expression of “totalitarianism” in any narrow sense, but rather, it seems to me, the overt manifestation of a conception of mass politics that might now seem naïve or dated, but that in the first half of the twentieth century could be found left, right, and center:

In many ways, then, the sight of the games produced, for me, a kind of illusory time travel effect similar to the sight of all those vintage American cars driving around in Cuba. But of course no nation is “outside” or even “behind” the times, and in A State of Mind we see plenty of evidence that North Korea is hardly unaware of or impervious to the outside world, most obviously in the references to the American invasion of Iraq (with the sense that the DPRK might be next), and in the postponement of mass games themselves because of the SARS outbreak.

(The DVD includes a CNN piece on the film, including the “crawl” from the original broadcast: an interesting if accidental historicization of 2003, with nothing to make the American breast swell with pride: Lynndie England pleads guilty; car bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan; a hospital worker’s strike; and oh yes, the runaway bride. The spectacle of the Vaseline-lensed reporter earnestly asking the director whether the games aren’t just propaganda is ripe for a Mythologies-style take-down.)

For me the most conceptually interesting questions raised by the film had to do with the relationship between spectatorship and participation, between collective observation and collective experience. The number of participants in the games is so great that throws out of whack the implicit quantitative sense of a performer/spectator ratio. If five people watch a dance performed by five hundred, it upsets what I think is our normative sense of what performance is “for” or “about.” In some ways the issue is mooted here by the fact that the mass games are routinely rebroadcast on the country’s one television channel, so all the participants get to be spectators anyway.

The implicit ratio of participant/audience I have is, of course, bourgeois and, broadly speaking, modern: mass observation of a skilled minority. With the mass games we have something like an effort to put the masses equally on both sides of the equation. The way in which this plays out is, however, unexpected. The predictable critique here would be to say that what is ostensibly for “the people” is in fact for the dictator, reenacting on an industrial scale the logic of kingly spectatorship. So: not the masses watching the artistic elite, but the masses performing for the one. As it happens, however, the performance for the one is, precisely, the official discourse, while the performance for the many is the reality. The girls interviewed in the film do not speak of mastering an art, of making their parents proud, or even of serving their nation or advancing the cause of socialism. They speak always and only of performing for the General. But when the time comes Kim Jong Il is “unable to attend” any over the forty performances that take place over twenty days.

No grand syntheses offered here, but the occasion of the Beijing Olympics has me scratching my head about some basic and, to my mind, not yet resolved questions about the relationships among sport, politics, and spectacle. The mainstream media routinely phrases the matter in terms of “keeping politics out of the Olympics” (for or against), but mass games seem to me one of the essential forms of political life, in the sense of the polis gathering and representing itself to other political entities and, perhaps above all, to itself. That is, regardless of any specific content (Darfur, Tibet, or a Black Power salute), the event itself is irreducibly, even primally political. (This would apply just as much to a high school soccer game or the Super Bowl as well as to events that are more overtly marked as national in character).

I had planned to conclude these scattered reflections by predicting that the Beijing Olympics could not do what China hopes because the Olympics themselves are now something of an atavism. This is no doubt an American or at least Western perspective (akin to declaring the death of the novel or the author), but I suspect something much broader than that. Steroids, judging scandals, the general surplus of spectacle in contemporary life, and not least the intense popularity of non-Olympic sports can all make the Olympics seem irrelevant or, worse still, quaint. Handball, dressage, and the modern pentathlon (running, swimming, pistol shooting, show-jumping on horseback, and epee fencing –in case you were wondering) are no doubt of intense interest to those directly involved, but they don’t sell a lot of jerseys or cereal. This says nothing about their intrinsic worth or interest; the point is simply that I’m not sure how charged or global in reach the symbolic force of Olympic athletics is these days. The function of any given form can be surprisingly flexible over time, but it does seem possible that a Chinese Olympics might be less the announcement of a Chinese twenty-first century than a reenactment of early-to-mid-twentieth century rituals of international legitimation.

Such was my original concluding question. But the bits of the opening ceremonies I was able to catch were genuinely impressive, even beautiful. Perhaps the Olympics, like the once dead-seeming novel (or author), are a form that has possibilities its creators never imagined. By thinking of “the Olympics” as outdated, perhaps I was falling into precisely the “time machine” illusion I described above. And if there is anything to the idea that there is something primally political about the form of athletic spectacle, perhaps China is also reinventing the political.

When I think about tippling, various kinds of uncertainty come to mind, but my ancestor had a serious purpose.

A lot of pernicious nonsense has been circulated in the last few decades about the Founders' determination to create a Christian commonwealth. On questioning, advocates of this legal philosophy usually shrink back to the position that, well, their moral and ethical ideas were characteristic of the Christian tradition, and the domination of Christianity at the time was undoubted-- a weak enough position for anyone who reads around in the eighteenth century or knows the Sunday morning habits of George Washington. This old legal diary startled and delighted me for its proof that pragmatic secularism and awareness of religious difference were alive and well in Savannah circa 1900, not the first place I would go looking for evidence of such tendencies. (Ours is anything but a red-diaper family.) In particular, I appreciated the thought that went into this little argument about a not very momentous issue (the right to sell liquor by the drink on Sunday): the distinction between “Sunday” and “Sabbath,” which reminds us that there are people, Jews and Adventists for example, for whom the words are not synonymous; the reference to the Constitutional separation of church and state, which implies that religious calendrics have no role in determining civil obligations; and the “law of the land” argument which takes us back to 1796 and the United States' first experience in negotiating with a religious “other,” the Bey of Algiers. The Treaty of Tripoli engages our diplomacy on a firm secular footing:

And that's as it should be, because when people don't agree about the ultimate basis of right or the ultimate grounding of authority, and they think it matters, they have no business dealing with each other because sooner or later they will feel duty-bound to destroy each other. The incapacity to negotiate which the Treaty of Tripoli brushed to the side is reflected in miniature in the city of Savannah's fumbling with the term “Sabbath.” I don't know if Mr. Hussey won his claim, or if my ancestor was his attorney, but his willingness to test the boundaries of the law brought something good to everybody's sabbath day. Worth lifting a glass to, I think.

I had uncovered artifacts of the expectations I had when I moved to Korea. Or perhaps these are remnants of a previous life in which we threw parties, collected wine, and had an expandable kitchen table. My instinct (itself bred by five years of a more streamlined, humble lifestyle) was to donate these to charity. But then I thought: maybe my life in Shanghai won’t be like it is here. We will, after all, have an actual table with chairs. How can I know in advance the shape of the next stage?

2. I tend to obsess about categories of things — books, clothes, and toys mostly — but when I dig into the job at hand I realize (again) that half of what we own isn’t categorizable. The bits and pieces are what take the most time — the random pieces of fabric or paper I’ve collected, the electronic gadgets, the drawer of stickers, the lost puzzle pieces. Packing makes me believe I can put my life into a better, more efficient order, and then quickly makes me desperate for the less efficient but serviceable order I left behind by dumping everything out.

To escape the clutter I obsess about other things. I felt compelled to separate the Lego pieces by color before packing them. This took over a day and I ended up with in a nervous tic, but it was awfully satisfying to see order prevail in that microcosm of my life. The last time my friend Emily was faced with a move her form of denial took the form of the search for a perfect runner for her hall. She’d wake up in the middle of the night to look at candidates online. If I can just get this runner, everything will be fine. If I can just put these Lego pieces in order the rest of it will all follow.

The story goes like this. There were rumours before the Euro 2008 that the Spanish club Real Madrid was courting the Manchester United poster boy, and the tabloid press claimed that the 23 year-old winger refused to answer the calls from his manager Sir Alex Ferguson. Ferguson, having trained generations of star players in Man United, and fired such prominent figures like Éric Cantona, Roy Keane and David Beckham simply because he believed that they were old enough to “move on,” considered Ronaldo’s act as the ultimate patricide (as he is the only “child” who dares say, “Papa, you are old enough to move on”). Man United went so far as to file a complaint to FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), and expressed that they felt annoyed by Madrid’s constant flirtation with their contracted player. During the tournament, Ronaldo finally hinted to the press that he would prefer being transferred to Madrid. Meanwhile, the castrated father continued to refuse. The president of FIFA Sepp Blatter finally made a statement on 10 July 2008 in support of Ronaldo, “I think in football there's too much modern slavery in transferring players or buying players here and there, and putting them somewhere” (BBC, 10 July 2008).

Blatter’s babble met with quite a huge response from the entire industry. Two days later, Pelé retorted, “You are a slave if you work without a contract or you don't get paid…. If you have a contract then in any job you have to finish the contract” (BBC, 12 July 2008). The father of football advised the prodigal son to finish fulfilling his contract. In fact, football pundits literally consider Ronaldo as a prodigal son of Man United. As Steven Cohen and Kenny Hassan (hosts of North America’s most popular satellite radio and webcast football show ”World Soccer Daily“) claim, how can a player who earns £119,000 a week, squanders his money on famous orgies and has at least another seven years of football career be considered a “modern slave?”

Steven and Kenny’s objection to Blatter’s comment comes down to the incommensurability between the word “slavery” and its metaphoric or literal use in our contemporary “world” marketplace. Can we imagine that a slave being rich, free of his chain and ragged clothes? Can a slave, if Ronaldo were indeed one, fully participate and enjoy the very machinery that is supposed to enslave him (his club, the football institution, its fandom, fame and glory)? More important, is it conceivable that as a slave, he “enslaves” other “players” in the marketplace (e.g. the sex workers he hired, and the opportunity of someone who could have earned £119,000 a week instead of him)?

A slave can of course be rich. In Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds, André Téchiné, 1994), Madame Alvarez, a lycée teacher, fails the essay of the French Algerian student Henri Mariani for promoting imperialism. Mariani argues that the Algerians were well-fed, that their economic and social successes were dependent on France. Alvarez answers, “But slaves are always fed.” One lesson that the Raj gave to all the imperial powers was that wealth, not open punishment, builds the strongest tie between a master and a slave. Doesn’t the idea of “sharing wealth” under the auspices of the “mother country” forms the basis of the British “Commonwealth?”

In other words, despite his wealth, Ronaldo can still be considered enslaved by the football institution. In fact, feeding him well could be part of a successful master-slave releationship ”designed“ by Man United. However, in what way is he enslaved? In the press conference, Blatter refers to the Bosman ruling in September 1995, which, according to Articles 48, 85 and 86 of the Treaty of Rome, allows players to accept or refuse transfers that their clubs proposed to them. Blatter argues that in order for the club to ensure that the players would stay, they “impose” unreasonably long-term contracts upon these players, a measure that, in Blatter’s reasoning, has enslaved these talents. Steven and Kenny argue that the contract is only an overblown autograph, which I wholeheartedly agree. However, there is a deeper relationship between the institution of football and slavery.

The Bosman ruling is intimately related to the establishment of professionalism in 1895. Football historian Tony Mason has shown us that football players and spectators in the late 19th century were primarily from the working class, while the “old boys” from the public schools imagined that they were the ones who invented the game, and finally institutionalised it in 1863. Middle-class players at that time insisted that one should only play football for the love of the game without payment. However, as early as the 1870s, there were rumours and evidence that skilled players from the working class accepted payments and played for rich clubs in their crucial matches. The “old boys” considered this rise of “professionalism” as a threat to the integrity of the game, sportsmanship and a sportsman’s proper loyalty to the club, a barbarian invasion of the middle-class ethical values. Of course, professionalism also meant that wealthier clubs could now hire skilled players to dominate the leagues. In 1895, the FA (Football Association) legalised professionalism with a price tag on the players. Under the law, which still applies today, a player must remain in the club for at least one season (unless the club decides to loan him out to another club), and can only be traded between clubs during the transfer windows (summer and January). The club to which the player is transferred would need to pay a transfer fee to his former club as compensation. The law ensures that the owners would be the only agents who could control the buying and selling of the players, a notion that the Bosman ruling aimed to relax, not to resolve, because in order to dismantle this transfer system, the FA must abolish the transfer fee. The transfer fee, which can be an astronomical sum of money nowadays, requires the buying club to think twice before they make the purchase, for the fee reflects not only how competent the player is at the moment of the transaction; it reflects the anticipated value of the player during the period of time he will serve the new club. Hence, even though a player is given the right to accept or refuse a transfer, the decision to initiate a transfer is still made by the club administration, based on the anticipated value of the player. In other words, the legislation in 1895 has in effect set up a market of exchange, in which able-bodied men are bought and sold for the anticipated values of their biological or animal lives, a future commodity like sugar, coffee, cotton and opium.

Moreover, Blatter’s objection stems from another area of the Bosman ruling, which guarantees the free mobility of labour within the European Union, and in fact, on a global basis. The Bosman ruling abrogates the pre-1995 rule that each club could only have three foreign players, thus opening the door for clubs to form their best teams by hiring players in the global market. Clubs in the Premier League (England) have benefited immensely from this ruling, under which rich clubs could purchase players from continental Europe and Africa. In this sense, like sugar, coffee, cotton and opium, players are now grown in other parts of Europe and in the former colonies, and imported into the ”empire.“

The Bosman ruling seems to have given players their freedom to be hired globally, but as Blatter claims, it simply gives the clubs the right to trade them ”here and there, and putting them somewhere.“ Kenny is correct that Blatter’s comment has everything to do with British imperialism, but it is not about the historical trauma of British imperialism. Rather, Man United exemplifies a form of “English” dominance of the world, whose mode of operation is based on the ”old“ economic machinery of the post-Raj empire, or the “Commonwealth,” but its impact on how we perceive this machinery in football is not fully materialised until the Bosman ruling.

Having said this, Man United’s success with Ronaldo is one of the best examples of how the Bosman ruling has opened up a new kind of world market, which has significantly challenged the ”traditional“ concept of “national” and “class” imagination. Man United is undoubtedly the first and largest “global” club in the world (if you love United—not me, I am a Chelsea fan, by the way—you don’t live in Manchester). This “new” mode of cultural dominance also allows over a million fans around the world to develop their own windows of resistance, their own lines of escape, by reconfiguring an “English” club as their own personalised commodity. Through Man United, ”England“ or ”Europe“ is now open to be bought and sold ”everywhere“ for consumers' pleasure. Finally, while being ”enslaved“ as an animal life and being traded in the world market, Ronaldo can fully use this buying-and-selling machinery to turn around the master-and-slave relationship, castrating the very father who brought him up as a slave. In other words, what trouble us are the co-existence of this essentially old mode of dominance and a new sense of imaginary freedom, and a total disintegration of the boundary between master and slave, the empire and the colonised, Europe and the ”world.“

Is Ronaldo a “modern slave” after all? Historically, I would say yes, but such slavery is as “modern” and as “old” as the Enlightenment project itself, and his impasse is just a symptom of a much larger question related to how the game was institutionalised at the first place in the late 19th century. However, Blatter's anxiety goes deeper than that. His anxiety, and the anxiety of those who critique him, is this “strange” co-existence of an increasingly controlling and exploitative “world” (“global”) market dominated by old empires with a different set of relationships (producers: England, France; consumers: China and India), a new sense of freedom that disintegrates regional and national boundaries, and the relationship between master and slave. In some sense, Ronaldo is the objet petit a of a system of pleasure, a piece of the real that reminds us the inexistence of the anal father once he is removed from the imaginary; by the same token, his powerful Antigone's ”No" suspends and disintegrates our established boundaries and social relations. Nevertheless, as long as he stays within the system, this little piece of the real continues to enjoy its symptom, and he continues to act as the symptom for consumers to enjoy.

Slavery is perhaps not a bad thing with £119,000 a week. I will consider it (if I have the freedom to choose).

A contest, of sorts:

1. What did the grass say to the cow?

2. What did the beef say to the chef?

3. What did the 2008 Olympics say to the air quality of the city of Beijing?

4. What did Elian Gonzalez say to his putative adoptive father?

5. What did Lazarus say to Jesus?

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6. What did the donut say to the baker, the pot to the potter, the window to the glassmaker, and the eyes to the barbituate?

7. What did the walls of Jericho say to the righteous power of the Lord?

8. What did Laura Mulvey say to narrative cinema?

9. What did the Klingon say to his human enemy?

10. What did the lounge say to the upholsterer?

11. What did God say to the overzealous parishoner?

12. What did the Minotaur say to the King of Crete?

13. What did the winner of the most recent season of Top Chef say to one of the runners-up?

14. What did the recliner say to the large furniture corporation?

15. What did the wildflowers say to the home decorater?

16. What did the trail say to Lewis and Clark?

17. What did the Democratic Party say to Connecticut's 4th Congressional District voters, and the guards at the Springfield, Massaschusetts armory to the angry mob outside its doors?

18. What did the Defense of Marriage Act say to the California Supreme Court?

19. What did the oral stage say to the anal stage?

20. What did the recovering soap opera addict say to the executives of NBC?

21. What did Samuel J. Tilden say to the American electorate in 1876?

22. What did Nurse Ratchett say to McMurphy?

23. What did a very high prime number say to the array of supercomputers?

24. What did OPEC say to the biofuels producer?

25. What did the sequence of words “don't tase me, bro!” say to the American public shortly after September 17, 2007.

Fellow citizens, pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence?

Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you, that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation (Babylon) whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin.

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!”
To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.

My subject, then, fellow citizens, is “American Slavery.” I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing here, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July.

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate - I will not excuse.” I will use the severest language I can command, and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slave-holder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some of my audience say it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother Abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more and denounce less, would you persuade more and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slave-holders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of these same crimes will subject a white man to like punishment.

What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments, forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read and write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then I will argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver, and gold; that while we are reading, writing, and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; that we are engaged in all the enterprises common to other men — digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave — we are called upon to prove that we are men?
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to understand? How should I look today in the presence of Americans, dividing and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively? To do so would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
What! Am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? No - I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman cannot be divine. Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may - I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.
Go search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

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Ladies and gentlemen, let's have a big hand for:
Frederick Douglass - July 4, 1852.

Why am I a fan of the Azzurri? If you were a gay man or a straight woman, you probably wouldn’t need any further explanation: we love them for precisely the same reason why the French hate them. Each performance of the eleven young men handpicked by their manager is a pure exquisite sexual fantasy “corporealised” on your TV screen (Dolce & Gabbana was very open about it as they capitalised on their World Cup championship in 2006 with ads featuring all the lads in their national “briefs”).

My “Italian connection” in football went back to 1994. I spent my summer in Hong Kong with my insomniac family, and my father and I spent the wee hours in front of the television watching the World Cup USA. Of course, Hong Kong has a “national” team; but our dream of being qualified in the World Cup only lasted briefly in 1985, when our team beat the PRC team in their final qualifying match (the famous “5.19 Incident” that has “eternally traumatised China”). As a result, the PRC team has considered us as their rival and vice versa. Before the Premier League became a global phenomenon as it is, “England” and its fandom, who always basked themselves in the glory back in 1966, were never taken seriously by their not-quite-faithful colonial subjects (us). Hence, the city is usually divided into two camps: Brazil and Italy. If you like entertaining football, you would become a Brazilian for a few weeks during the tournament; if you wouldn’t mind watching ninety minutes of defence and hoping that the Italians would get their job done in the good old European fashion, you would wear your blue jersey and learn how to chant “Italia! Italia!” in perfect Italian.
“Nationals” of football “powers” like England, France, Italy and Brazil, especially with some of their colonial pasts, know very well that their “national” teams are always marketable global commodities, that they all have their international followings. The question is: Are “we” (the international following) “real” or “bandwagoners?” Watching a football match of England in Nevada Smiths (the Mecca of European football in New York City) is like seeing the British Empire reconvening in an American Irish pub, and a performance of Les Bleus on the TV screens there would remind you that France used to own more than half of Africa (and in a way, it still does). In World Cup 2002 (Japan/S. Korea), Juventus fans of Japanese descent overwhelmed the cameras with their chants for Alex Del Piero, whose passion graced some newspaper pages in Japan about what they called petit nationalisme. Are “traditional” labels such as “colonisers,” “subalterns,” and “global consumers” applicable as “authenticity tests?”

Watching games in public spaces are always a matter of passing these “authenticity tests,” and the lines that demarcate the differences between “colonisers,” “subalterns,” and “global consumers” are far from simply biologically, linguistically or historically predetermined. For example, my favourite Italian pizza restaurant, No. 28, whose owners have known me as an “Italian fan” for seven years, always reserved for me and my friends the best seats in front of the TV screens, until the day of the World Cup Final in 2006 on which they decided that I was not “Italian enough.” During the last England game in the same tournament, I happened to stand in front of a group of fellow East Asians (some of my friends included) in Nevada Smiths. I was in my “Three Lions” jersey and digging out all the “authentic curses” from my days in England to “show off” my “Englishness”; at the same time, we all sing together “England Till I Die.” During half-time, the lad in front of me turned around and asked, “What are these Asians doing here?” Instinctively, I answered, “We are all England’s supporters.” The lad said, “You are one of us, but I don’t know about them.”
How about “China?” My friend Alex and I (Alex is also from Hong Kong, who is much younger than me) both consider ourselves as “authentic” “Italian” fans. In 2002, when the PRC was qualified for the World Cup for the first time, we thought, “Can you imagine yourself standing in Nevada Smiths singing ‘March of the Volunteers?’” For us, watching eleven blond Chinese teenagers (of course, seeing Chinese teenagers being “blond” generated a series of articles on newspapers during that tournament, another field of “authenticity” to plough) defending “their nation” was a matter of indifference and shame. We were indifferent, because for ninety minutes, “China” was “their nation” as long as the team stayed in the pitch. We were shameful, because we were quite educated by our secondary-school history textbooks (authenticated by Qian Mu, of course) to see this game as an instantiation of “China” and its “history”: a “disintegrated nation” “humped” by the “world powers.”

Perhaps not everyone understands this gliding, shifting, and highly unstable thing called “football nationality.” Watching these games, one slips from “acting as” a fan of an “alien” country to “being” a fan of “my” country, and vice versa, a process that keeps helping us load and unload, configure and reconfigure what doesn’t quite “work” in our consciousness of history and being in the world, and for that matter, our sense of inclusion and exclusion in the world that marches on in time (a scenario in which “China” never quite fits even “in” a football match).

On Sunday the 22nd, after Italy’s defeat by the Spaniards in the Euro 2008 tournament, Alex and I sat down in Nevada Smiths to wait for the thunderstorm to pass. Two drunken Spaniards approached me. They assumed that I was a “bandwagoner” who donned the Italian jersey in order to be basked in their World Cup glory. One of them said, “Look at these Asians, you will see them this Thursday wearing our red shirts supporting us.” Later on, at dinner, Alex and I talked about how humiliated we felt, because we considered ourselves as “real Italians.” By the time we got the check, Alex asked me, “Which team would you support next?” I said to him, “For me, the tournament is over. Italy is gone and England was never qualified.” Alex thought for a few seconds; he then said, “I will support the Spaniards.” At that time, I was flabbergasted by his reaction. Nevertheless, as I went home, I finally realised, perhaps I am the person who has failed to understand the true meaning of the shiftable notion between “acting as” and “being.” Let those people have migraine over their “real nations,” we never have one, and we never care to have one. It is in this total disintegration of the political community that Gramsci’s ideal is realised: “Football is the open-air kingdom of human loyalty.”