For the Likes of Us.

Meta-point, to get it over with:

"I've started and almost finished this piece half a dozen times, before changing my mind and going right back to the beginning. Although you wouldn't, admittedly, be too far wrong if you concluded that I'm just bone idle."

- Matt Merrit

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So, the EDL are changin' things. And it's scaring the shit out of me.

I'm going to start that again.

"If cathedrals are designed to inspire awe, then this.... uh..."

- George Ttoouli on St Michael's Coventry.

I was at Wembly to see Muse a few weeks ago, an event which did much to highlight the curious nature of stadiums. Coliseums of petty human grandeur, demanding spectacle. Heaving to be part of many in raked seating, ranked standing, desperate for the staged, be they long haired ball-kickers, media-shined personalities (smoothed, like pebbles in a river), revolutionary generals, condemned guerilla warriors, or just a couple of guys with expensive instruments on. Parabolic, the stands reflect our [otherwise indirect?] ardour stagewards - whoever we came with, wherever we are, we turn as one, pump our arms in unison.

Speer's 'Cathedral of Light', a design tribute to the Pergamon Altar, Nuremburg 1936

That the climactic, Orwellian tirade of United States of Eurasia borrows gratuitously from Queen - the familiar, the unquestioned, the stadium forebears - can hardly be treated as a mistake, and makes only too much sense in the context. Successful nationalist movements (if not extremist in general) always draw principally on within, on the particularly OURS. It's well noted by enough historians that Hitler did look like a strange little man with a funny moustache to the anglophonic west, but it was something quintessentially Germanic about him (or rather, his movement) that captured the imagination of Nuremberg ralliers.

Which is why - now I've found that horse - the EDL are scary.
They've got football.