Guilty as charged. I failed to post yesterday. Can I use the impossibly fortuitous (if not quite glorious) Italian win of the world cup as my get out of jail free card? You gotta understand, the first cup I paid attention to was 1994, and I was LIVING in Italy, when Roberto Baggio missed a penalty shot to shut down Italy’s hopes. I have never lived in such an unhappy country in my life.
And again in 1998 (and against FRANCE, no less) the no-relation Di Bagio missed HIS shot in the semifinals to exit the Azzuri. So when Italy finally overcame the curse, I jumped up and down.
And I marvelled the next morning when some clever flash animator had created, in less than 24 hours, the Zidane head-butt game. This is the kind of things we folks in the activism community suck at: rapid reaction to popular culture. Now here was something the entire world was paying attention to. Many of us tried to ride the interest wave with stories of how much of the ocean bottom had been denuded since the world cup kickoff or strained football metaphors for environmental destructions of various ilk. But almost everything I saw could be dismissed with a “Shut up, I’m watching the game” by anyone with a real interest in the game. The football activism I saw wasn’t informed by the event, none of it had the inside jokes or used the story value of what actually happened in the cup to draw in that audience. And Football is all about those stories. They’re what make people passionate about football.
So some guy creates a game in 20 minutes in which Zidane head butts an endless incoming row of Materazzis and he’s got so much traffic his server shuts him down. Was there an angle there we missed? Could we have turned Zidane’s head butt into a comment on violence, or a message about war that we could have saddled onto that moment?
Maybe not, (have I come up with a winner idea talking about it?? Noperoo) but I do know that we activists can get so focussed on what we think the message might be, and we get so wrapped up in what we consider the important information to convey, that we forget to pay attention to the Zeitgeist and what the public is *already* interested in as a viral vector.
Be nice if Climate Change was considered as important as the Worldcup, but it ain’t. In a world in which people are happy as long as civilization gives them Bread and Circus, we gotta find a way to use the circus to sound the alarm about the future of bread.
Here’s a 
I used to have a pet theory that in a truly civilized country, the phone system doesn’t work. I’m updating that to “there’s no broadband in paradise.”
