Christmas, when you have children, can make you feel like a big kid again. Similarly, certain men delight in the magic that the World Cup can invoke in their kids. My two boys and I have watched the coverage together and gasped at screaming goals, booed at bad refereeing decisions and hurled abuse at the pantomime villainy of Paraguay, who played like I’d imagine the Isareli team to play ie. waging dastardly psychological warfare by constantly fouling, verbally attacking their opponents, and trying to sabotage a penalty by sneakily making a hole on the penalty spot behind the referee’s back. My son and I consoled my son’s Egyptian friend by wiping away the tears when they lost to Argentina in a game that set conspiracists’ tongues wagging about whether the whole tournament has been rigged.
When I see my kids’ excitement, I’m vicariously transported to 1986, Portadown, County Armagh, a protestant stronghold in the protestant supremacist occupied North of Ireland, a part of the world that the first military governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronal Storrs, in 1937, saw as a model for a future Israel, which he imagined as “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”. Although noone said “Catholic ghetto” at the time, I now realise that that is what I was living in. It was also a flashpoint for extreme political violence: a particularly prolific UVF death squad, under the command of the notorious Billy Wright, was killing Catholics with the collusion of British State forces. And of coursed there was The Orange Order, a precusor to the Ku Klux Clan, whose founding Grand Wizard, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s family roots were in county Armagh. The Orange Order was founded 5 miles up the road, and had been terrorising local Catholics since 1795. The World Cup was bang in the middle of the Orange Order’s “marching season”, which commemorated the defeat of the Catholic King James by the protestant King William of Orange, and involved Orangemen – men in orange sashes and bowler hats, accompanied by military flute bands- marching through Catholic areas, their supporters waving British flags. They also burn huge bonfires which they decorate with Irish flags and effigies of the Pope and other symbols that they deem worthy of screaming invective at while they burn. That summer, during the World Cup, there was 6 days of rioting sparked by protests related to Orange parades, reulting in hundreds of injuries, many as a result of the police firing 186 plastic bullet rounds.
As a child, I didn’t appreciate how abnormal this was; it was background noise that I wasn’t particularly interested in the way older people were. I was more interested in swapping football stickers, pretending to be Diego Maradona and talking about Josimar’s rocket for Brasil against Northern Ireland. Admittedly, I was ambivalent about the Northern Ireland football team. Despite technically living in “Northern Ireland”, I felt something was off about the team that was supposed to represent me: they lined up and sang God Save the Queen before games and the fans sang “do you want a sausage supper Bobby Sands”. Even at that age, I sensed the Northern Ireland football team was a bit like the Orange Order. My aunties told me about dramatic penalty shoot-outs in games that were on too late for me to stay up for. I took my ball onto the street and tried to create the second goal Maradona scored for Argentina against England, when he skipped through the mid-field and defense like a barrel-chested ballet dancer, leaving them gawking and dumb-founded at the majesty of it.
The local priest had organised a football tournament for the kids of the area called “The Mini World Cup”. The various countries competing were assigned to different housing estates eg. Garvaghy Park was Argentina, Brankin’s Hill was Spain, and so on. I don’t think anyone was Northern Ireland (or England). There was a politically active group of Jesuit priests who had been sent into the area. 10 yeas later they organised protests aginst the Orange prades marching through the area which led to their permanent banning. One of the visiting Jesuit priests was, I think, from South America. He had that look about him anyway. Our local local priest, the organiser of the mini World Cup, had the South American Jesuit award the trophy. He introuduced him as “Maradona’s cousin”.
That’s a particularly Irish sort of lie. But I know what he was trying to do. He was trying to do what Mohammed Al Wahidi, an official of the Egyptian Relief Committee in Gaza who had been organising World Cup watch parties for kids, was trying to do. Which is why Israel assassinated Mohammed Al Wahidi. When I read about this, for any cinephiles amongst you, it freminded me of the story in Apocalypse Now where Kurtz recounts the hacking off of the childrens’ innoculated arms. The sheer cruelty. The horror. I wonder how long we, as the human family, can afford to do nothing about the unbribled evil in our midst, running amok. How long can we afford not to stop this evil. I thank God that my own kids are safe to run about the park pretending to be Haaland. I see myself as a little boy, running around, pretending to be Maradona, scoring for Argentina against England, and I thank God I grew up in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles in an area sometimes called “the murder triangle”, and not as a child in Palestine.
jackhairbrain 