Sod the football - let's beat the shit out of someone

This has little to do with marketing and not much to do with football, and is prompted by something I saw last night and something else I read this morning.

Anyhow, what with my partner being Italian and me being English we have had the dubious pleasure of first watching England who despite having most of the possession drew against the U. S. and then Italy, who had about 75% of the ball and played beautifully - but drew against Paraguay.

In both cases this was because the teams that should have won failed to finish - which reminds me of those vapid letters that end with the anodyne phrase "We look forward to hearing from you" - to which the response is "Don't hold your breath, pal."

Moving quickly on, we were watching Italy-Paraguay game in Signor Zilli on quaint old Dean Street, Soho, when across the road I saw three black men kick and beat a white man with no interference from anyone. It looked as though it was a dispute about stimulating substances, and eventually after the culprits had sauntered off at their leisure, the police arrived too late to do anything. Probably too busy filling in forms about racial quotas.

I was reminded of two things.

First, Mad Angie, my partner in the late 60's, a retired "party girl" who had been a methedrine addict told me that making drugs illegal (you could get them on prescription at that time) would lead to enormous growth in addiction and crime. She was right.

And second, I recalled something from a book I am reading about the years between the two world wars called The Morbid Age. In those days Adolph Hitler was not the only one keen on large scale euthanasia; many distinguished British and American thinkers thought the subnormal should not be allowed to breed or killed off at birth.

One phrase I read summed up what people saw as the consequences of letting the wrong people fuck: "We are getting larger and larger dregs at the bottom of our national vat". You can see lots of those dregs any night in Soho, though rarely demonstrating their character quite as vigorously as the group I saw.

Another bit I liked in the book was a classification of the congenitally subnormal as idiots (unable to look after themselves); imbeciles (unable to manage their affairs unaided); feeble-minded (requiring care and supervision); and moral defectives (deficient, but also vicious).

What baffles me is how so many of them end up in politics.