Letters to the Editor
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Italian soccer and ending it rough (sassy!)
Calcio news is Italian news of late. Unlike English thugs of years gone by, the so-called ultras and their tortured relationship with the clubs (commerce) and the state (government) are indicative of some of the challenges facing contemporary Italy.
Hell, Paglia could even have made hay of recent events for some her preferred themes: the poverty of modern life, social channels for male violence, the social crisis of the absence of the strong leader (for the fascist supporters of Lazio), and so on and so forth.
It wouldn't have been any sillier than her proposal that male hormones in urine were the cause of riots in terraced stadia.
As for the usual huffing about how man is not more powerful than nature, epitomized by the eruption of an Italian volcano: never mind a slow choking in a warmed world, try detonating the existing stocks of nuclear weapons and see what's left. Humans can wreak all manner of havoc upon nature.
Or, to put it into the cod-literary and pop culture idioms that Paglia prefers, from Shelley and then Turner:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away
and:
Y’ know, every now and then
I think you might like to hear something from us
Nice and easy
But there’s just one thing
You see we never ever do nothing
Nice and easy
We always do it nice and rough
So we’re gonna take the beginning of this song
And do it easy
Then we’re gonna do the finish rough
We can end it all easy, or we can end it all rough - humanity has the potential to do both; it's just a question of how much of the rest of life we take with us. Wibbling on about geological events is to miss the point.