J'en suis dévastée

Putain d'équipe italienne de mes couilles; sacrés bâtards d'enculés italiens maudîts; salauds d'espèces de chiennâsses corrompues jusqu'à leurs sales cous merdiques.

Putain de chiâsse, cela m'enmerde!

La France avait l'avantage pendant tout le match; Viera a été fauté dans la boîte pendant la deuxième moitié, à aucune siffle; et les italiens jouaient mal, mais mal.

Oui, évidemment, Zidane n'aurait pas dû butté cet ignoble salaud là--pourtant, je ne le faute point; il a été clairement provoqué. Je suis partisane, j'excuse, peut-être, mais il y a évidemment une histoire derrière cette violence qui ne pourrait s'expliquer autrement que comme une espèce d'acte suicidaire. Je lirai les journaux françses demain...

Autres joueurs: aujourd'hui j'ai vu, enfin, pourquoi Thierry Henry est célèbre comme attaqueur créatif, pourquoi Thuram (à, combien? 34 ans) a ses accolades de défendeur.

Et j'ai été confirmée dans mon opinion envers le jeune Ribéry: il joue avec de l'esprit, merde! Quelle touche qu'il a! Qu'est-ce qu'il est doué! Je me pose la question, pourtant: dans la deuxième moitié, est-ce que la tactique s'est changée pour donner des opportunités au but à un Ribéry pas exactamment prêt? Si c'est vrai, s'il ait râté les chances qu'une équipe reconnaissante de son talente lui a données, ach, quand même, j'en reste très fan.

Et ce qui me plairait serai que l'équippe nationale italienne ne regagne la Coupe avant l'an 2028--celà ne serait qu'une Coupe perdue d'en plus depuis leur dernière suite de pertes, disons. De toute façon, moi, je ne l'oublierai point, cette sale gagnée, et je ne le pardonnerai jamais.

(Um, had I made sufficientally clear to readers earlier in the Cup that I was rather biassed?)

[Update: Here's a very interesting Guardian UK profile of Zidane from 2002 (link). Here's a YouTube highlights track (link): it's been getting hammered with hits, so I'd wait to try to see it tomorrow. The former link via this good Crooked Timber discussion, the second via Tony Karon, whose commentary has been if general, superb.]

[Update 2: Okay, I'd call this Guardian article a fairly balanced account of the game (link).

[Update3: Le Monde interview with various France team players.

Dating Dilemma: Update

So, my friend J. contacted the feral apostrophe guy--without addressing why she'd not responded earlier--and, she reports, they went out for lunch. She really enjoyed his company; he was funny, relaxing to be around, smart.

Then, at parting, he said something like "Well, I go out to lunch a lot; email me if you're available some time." Which she did not understand as expressing real interest--although, now that I think about it, the disinterested posture might have been a way for him to salvage pride. Anyway, strike one.

A couple of days later, he sent her a short email: "Hi, how r u?"

I don't have the feeling that this is really going to work out for her.

Ye Olde Racisme

I watched the World Cup game yesterday between Germany and Italy with a very silly woman. She happened to have been from Spain, but that's only important inasfar as it explained her accent, gave an excuse for some of her conversational cluelessness, and provides some insight into the genesis of her more appalling ideas. She's lived in New York City for some ten years, though. Once she left our party, once I stopped feeling as though I had to try to find a way to be hospitable to her, my temporary buttressing of justifications for her opinions lost all appeal.

What set me off initially was her complaint against the French national team, who wasn't even playing at the time, mind you. "Look at them! They're not French; they're African!" To which, I instantly responded: "The darker-skinned players are second-generation French, I think." "But look at their complexions! It's the Africa-continent team!" she replied. I don't think she was even conscious of what she was saying. Every time she repeated this idea about the French team's being some stealth African team, I repeated my counterpoint: "it's the passport they hold, not the color of their skin." Maybe, if she hadn't been so atavistic and incoherent, we could have entered into a discussion about hyphenated identities.

As it was, however, and as she was an invited friend of a very kind person invited by my honey, I resorting to calling up the kind of patience that one uses with children and the mentally disabled.

Yes, at one point lateish in the afternoon, she asked me if I was "a Jew." I hesitated a long time before responding, but then decided that lying to her wouldn't fix anything. (I admitted much later, and rather reluctantly, that I was raised Mormon, and she asked me whether Mormons sucked snake venom.)

But back to my point, if I had one. I think that the French team, with its multi-racial players holding French citizenship, is one of more beautiful incarnations of globalism. I don't fool myself: Zidane's family was Kabyle Algerian, and they ended up in Marseilles to give birth to le Zizou for either political or economic reasons that have everything to do with the former French Empire.

Still, any version of nationalism that wouldn't embrace a born-citizen like Zidane seems very wrong to me. Or a Thierry Henry, or a Claude Makélélé. Sure, they don't "look French," or as the French themselves euphemistically put it, they're not "français-français."

You know what this Danish-Canadian-Scottish-Irish-Welsh-German-Presbyterian-Anglican-Mormon-American always wants to say to this sort of racializing European, who wants to put people into neat categories to be contemned or exoticized?

Get the fuck over it.