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Japanese: all bowing and tea ceremo nies on top, but capable of metamor phosing instantly into crazed, banzai shouting killers. It probably isn’t so bad as all that, but the English would be well advised to modify their self-image a bit in the direction of realism. Those Liverpool soccer fans are no doubt a pretty rough crowd, but they aren’t all that far from the modern English norm. Granted, most of them were probably at least a little drunk. (It took that quintessence of liberalism, The Wash ington Post, to blame their behavior on “bleak industrial cities’’ where “wages are low” and “unemployment is extremely high.” One of the reasons unemployment is so high in Britian is that unemployment compensation is so generous. These lads, after all, had no trouble making it from Liverpool to Brussels for the match.) But vio lence is never far below the surface in any large human population. As a matter of fact, that is one function — and arguably the most important function — of organized sports: to sublimate aggressive impulses that would otherwise over flow into socially less convenient channels. The football team that sub dues its foe, no less than the boxer who knocks his opponent out cold, is the vector of powerful forces among the viewers. This has been recognized ever since the days of ancient Rome when leading politicians of the Republic, and later the emperors themselves, thoughtfully provided “bread and circuses” for the unruly Roman mob. The circuses in question included brutal gladiatorial combats to the death, the slaughter of wild ani mals (the more exotic the better), and of course the feeding of selected Christians to ravenously hungry lions. In soccer today, the dangerous hab it seems to have been growing to allow the fans to participate margin ally in the “action.” And not just in England, witness the recent riot in China, where Peking soccer fans lit erally attacked supporters of a visit ing Hong Kong team. This sort of thing, at least, can be nipped in the bud, and Mrs. Thatcher is moving swiftly to nip it, barring all alcohol at or even en route to soccer matches calling for stiffer sentences for hooli ganism, supporting tighter crowd control measures, etc. Meanwhile, England nurses her shame
Newspaper Details
Key West Citizen
Key West, Florida, US
Tue, Jun 11, 1985
Page 4
Full Page
Clipped by
Roger M.
USA 01 Jul 2026
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