England has been eliminated from participating in the 2008 European Football Championship. Some British Lefties cheered the defeat. Mark Perryman, a member of socialist Respect Renewal and major football fan and supporter rips them a new one.
As for those sour-faced leftists ‘celebrating’ England’s defeat, and you have the blessed audacity to claim the mantle of understanding working class politics? Just try explaining your revolutionary defeatism in public and see what that does for your politics. It sickens me at times like this that a group as marginal as the Left pretends it knows whats best for the rest of us, surrendering its credibility as it once again dumps on the progressive, inclusive potential of our national identity.
Last Wednesday I was at Wembley with Hajra and Nadeen, England fans wearing the Hijab, that’s the England I’m proud to be a part of and the Left will never engage with, thanks to its inability to understand why.
You hear that same kind of thing here in the States too. Lefties who assume people who live in the country are untutored rubes. Or that NASCAR fans must be moronic beer-drinking right wingers. Their class contempt and condescension are obvious to all except themselves. Iowans certainly got it that Obama thinks they’re ignorant, betcha they didn’t like it much either.
“One of the great pleasures of running for president is to go to some tiny town in Iowa and you’ve got some guy in overalls and a seahat to say what do you think about the situation in Burma, and you’re thinking that he’s going to ask you about corn, and he asks you about Burma.” – Barack Obama
This is precisely what Joe Bageant talks about in his book “Deer Hunting with Jesus. Dispatches from America’s Class War,” that too often liberals, progressives and the Left are beyond clueless in dealing with working class people (especially if they’re white working class, seems to me.) The Right may exploit the white working class, but unlike the Left, it does not insult them. Maybe that’s one reason the Right often gets their votes. Something to think about.
Somewhere there’s a huge swath of Americans who think that Iraq was behind 9/11, that our troops are fighting for our freedom, that tax cuts raise revenue, and that the media is liberal. However we should handle them politically, the fact remains that such people are grotesquely uninformed, and the real insult comes from the politicians who feed them such nonsense under the assumption that it won’t be questioned.
No-one on “the left” is “celebrating England’s defeat”, at most they realise that we had a crap manager (Steve McClaren) who was unable to get decent performances out of the players.
Compare this to the reactions to the possible appointment of a Portuguese manager (Jose Mourinho) and how respected the previous manager (Sven Goran Eriksson) was (and still is) despite also being foreign.