The World Cup has to be the most corrupt sporting event ever created. Qatar has to be the pinnacle of it. So far.
Qatar, a very small country on the Arabian Peninsula, has an incredible amount of oil and natural gas resources and the money to show for it. It would be natural, then, for it to host the world's biggest showcase, the World Cup of football (we call it soccer). There were all kinds of intrastructure issues, but the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) was assured that they would be overcome, given enough time to get prepared.
Work began in 2012. Qatar didn't have nearly the number of workers to build the necessary structures--a freeway and eight separate stadiums, for instance--so it had to import them from other lands, usually in South Asia, from places like Nepal, itself very poor. So they were. But the treatment they had to endure--and endure is the only word that can be used--mirrors the kind of slave labor that we forced captives to undergo in the years before the Civil War, perhaps even worse.
I learned this by watching an excerpt from the HBO show "Real Sports," still the pinnacle of sports journalism in this country. It completely disgusted me.
Besides the incredibly stifling heat, equalling anything Death Valley could offer--the summer temperatures getting regularly to 120 degrees--the workers were forced to live in conditions that soon became ridiculously squalid and filthy, without showers and few toilets. The men washed themselves with the water from the toilets. They may still be doing so.
They are prevented from going home, too. They can't quit. That's the definition of slavery. In was pointed out in the "Real Sports" report that they were paid, so technically, it's not slavery. Not true: In antebellum America, in our own slave times, a few of the slaves did earn some money. They tried to save it to buy their freedom. So no, the horrible wages the men earn does not excuse Qatar from imposing slavery upon them, not if they lack the freedom to spend whatever small amount of free time (they usually work 12 hours a day) they have.
Knowing that, I can't watch this display of taking advantage of thousands of others. If there was ever a reason to form labor unions, that's one right there. But who's going to have any energy to do so, working 12 hours a day for wages no better than the dirt they've overturned? Who's going to attempt to enter what seems to be a slickly-run society, but is in fact horribly repressive?
It's on now. The field has been trimmed to 16, including the U.S. All the news is about its advance, and the athletes, and the competition. Nobody else is reporting on the price paid by thousands to put this on. Qatar has done its best rope-a-dope in taking shots from inquiring media and dispensing them amidst the other outrages we have to put up with. No one will be prosecuted for any of these abuses. No one will absorb any responsibility.
To me, Qatar may be trying to blend into the vestiges of Western hospitality, but it's really all about displaying its decadence and massive neglect, which you can do when you have more money than you know what to do with. It's not worth it. I won't watch the world's greatest sporting event. I don't care.
It's another example of the vacuum of any kind of ethics that takes place when the show becomes of higher value than the effort it took to put it on. Qatar, to me, joins Saudi Arabia (in its subterfuge of the PGA Tour by massively financing the LIV Tour) in its enormous deception of hooking up with Western culture. It's trying to gain acceptance, leading to some form of tolerance for its brutal justice system which, by now and if it really meant to get "western," should be obsolete. Maybe it will by others, but not with me.
I spent last weekend binge-watching "The West Wing" reruns, propelling myself back into a world I thought was also once possible. Got a lot more out of it.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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