I don’t wish to overstate this.
I don’t wish to say that by watching World Cup 2022,
held in Qatar, in your private leisure gadget,
you’re stepping over the our bodies of useless migrant employees,
standing on the heads of incarcerated queer folks,
and bankrolling, in a tiny however important manner, the worldwide grift.
Because we’re all compromised, proper?
We’re all implicated. We all stay in webs of capital.
We’re all caught within the mesh of consequence.
And oh the conundrums, and oh the dilemmas,
and oh the great thing about soccer, et cetera.
But this—
a cooling fan the scale of Lake Geneva
can’t blow the stink off this one.
This is an occasion of such planetary absurdity,
such gleaming and sharp-edged corruption,
such astoundingly apparent wrongness,
and such dependence on you, the viewer,
that—for as soon as—the correct factor is simple.
So hear:
These video games are an ethical botch.
How onerous is it to not watch?
This time solely, you win the prize
by averting your eyes.