Zidane, Ci Vediamo Domani!!

Trying to find another French supporter for yesterday’s World Cup Final was about as fruitful as searching for a plate of foie gras at a PETA conference. The huge majority of spectators in the Upper East Side bars where the game was being shown, having no dog of their own in that fight, were rooting for Italy because, as they unanimously confided to me, “I don’t like France.”


Years of being brainwashed by the Republican majority has had that effect, the same as any totalitarian brainwashing campaign, like the people in 1984 who sit in the movie theater screaming at some guy they don’t know without ever knowing why, just finding it easier to go along with the majority opinion, their eyes glazing over with confusion when you inquire (as I rarely do) the reason for their aversion to all things French. “They’re anti-semitic” averred one woman, dragging out that moth-eaten canard, one so hackneyed as to induce a retching reaction.


“Hey, lady,” I was tempted to scream, “The Dreyfus Affair was a hundred years ago, right around the time the U.S. Congress introduced immigration quotas to keep the Jews out of the U.S.”


Not that some Frenchmen don’t hate Jews, but you got plenty of pinhead anti-Semitic pricks right here too.


The Italians played a great game, and they unlocked the secret of getting Zidane to lose his cool. Years ago I saw a boxing match between a very tough Italian-American middleweight from Providence named Vinnie Pazienza and a Jewish fighter from Brockton, MA named Leslie something. The Jewish fighter, who had great conditioning and intelligence, was making a monkey out of Pazienza, going so far as to mimic and mock him during the fight. After receiving a good pounding in one of the middle rounds, Pazienza went down on one knee. The Jewish kid turned to go to a neutral corner, and the minute he did so, Pazienza jumped up, ran up behind the guy and gave him a goddamm jackhammer blast from behind!


The ref didn’t even call it a foul because one of the cardinal rules of boxing is that you never turn your back on an opponent. Not only did the Jewish guy never recover enough to win the fight, but he also retired from boxing. After the fight Pazienza crowed, “That college kid just graduated from Pazienza University!”


No less an authority that French striker Thierry Henry gave an interview before the match wherein he asserted, “The Italians are scorpions.” People have got a tendency to think in terms of simplistic stereotypes and they get a lot of their concepts from idiotic cartoons like “Lady and the Tramp,” with dumbass little cartoon doggies slurping spaghetti in old world Italian restaurants, or Giapetto the kindly old guy in Pinocchio. The true history of Italy is the Emperor Vespasian, who looted the Hebrews and brought 12,000 of them over to break their backs to build the Coliseum that he constructed using their stolen wealth, where thousands were slaughtered for centuries while the Italians in the cheap seats screamed for more blood.


Never underestimate the sneaky slyness of the Italians, the race that gave birth to Lucrezia Borgia and made a high art out of poison and mayhem. Compared to the Italians, the French are babes in the wood. The Italian sports papers the day before the match warned, “Zidane ci vediamo domani,” we’ll see you tomorrow, and I guarantee you they weren’t making a date to eat spumoni

The World Cup represents more than just a cheesy hood ornament. The rights to four years of being a World Cup champion run into the hundreds of millions and billions of euros. With so much at stake, any Italian concept of fair play or sportsmanship is as illusory as the puff of smoke escaping from the roof of the Vatican.

Zidane was playing a match of football, but he was not equal to a culture where larceny, deceit and crooked politics find their paradigm in the modern gladiatorial arena.


Remember, all of Italian football is under indictment, and the coach of Juventus took a flying leap out of a third floor window (at least they say he jumped). The Italian national team, in the spirit of their ancestors, devoted the same kind of precise application to composing an insult guaranteed to drive Zidane nuts that Rossini put into composing “La Gazza Ladra” and they appointed Materazzi deliver the line. Maybe it was about Zidane’s mother or sister, or about Arabs.


Zidane fell for it, and it achieved what the Italians wanted, to get him out of the game.


Anyway, it was a beautiful head butt, and that’s some consolation.

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Posted on 7/11/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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