Monday 6 February 2012

The Super Bowl and The Diamond Jubilee

In stark contrast to our own Premier League, the National Football League maintains the equal sharing out of ticket and television revenue, and there is still the hard salary cap for players, as well as the very extensive welfare provision.

The 2011 Super Bowl champions, the Green Bay Packers, have a not-for-profit model of community ownership which has had to be banned from spreading for fear that it would otherwise prove so popular. The Packers have never moved out of a Midwestern city of only 102,313 people as of the 2000 census.

The National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball more than do their bit, too. In all three cases, displaying the name or logo of a commercial sponsor on the kit would be considered the very height, or depth, of sacrilege.

America still had enough Faith, Flag and Family by the 1980s to restrain neoliberal economics then and subsequently. We did not, so we could not. Comparing their giant sporting interests to ours makes the point. God Bless America.

Games that still begin commonly with the Lord's Prayer and invariably with the National Anthem could never become what their counterparts have become here in a country where many people probably no longer know the words to the Lord's Prayer and where most people now alive have probably never known all of the words to the National Anthem.

But both an institutional and a personal link with the old civilisation remains in place. God Save The Queen. There is no other way of saving ourselves.

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