Monday, October 29, 2012

Borderdash

I just saw a television ad for a sports programme in which one of the presenters rhapsodised "Sport defies borders!".

I don't understand this kind of thing. How could anyone's imagination be stirred, today, by the idea of transcending borders?

In our age of the internet, Starbucks, McDonalds, the increasing use of English as a worldwide lingua franca, the euro, international soccer, Hollywood movies, Facebook, international hedge funds, the UN, and cross-continental Muslim resurgence...how can we become excited about anything simply because it bypasses national boundaries? What is unusual or exciting about that?

Surely, today, what should excite us are rather those things that remain confined to a particular place or culture, those things that defy the harrowing winds of globalisation?

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