Panem et Circenses—or World Cup
In ancient Rome, politicians knew how to keep the people satisfied and quiet. There is a famous slogan for their method known as PANEM ET CIRCENSES meaning “bread and games”. This saying implies that the Roman people was held silent with free corn and free games. Nowadays, the slogan seems out-of-date and people think they can watch politics all the time, but when important sport events begin, we see how wrong this assumption is.
This week the G8 and G20 summit (G20 of the most important industrial countries, not the G20 of development countries) take place and the Canadian government spends 1.1 billion dollars for it. Most of the money goes into security for the politicians: 933 million dollars. Another part will be used for artificial nature, even though there is enough nature in Canada outside. — Yet, maybe politicians need to see how nice the world can be rebuilt even if we destroy the real nature.
Politics below soccer
However, instead of criticizing these high costs in times of crisis, many news papers rather care about soccer and how the German team will play against England on Sunday. In my own news paper, the G20 summit of Toronto has been mentioned in a small article of two columns and about ten lines. No word about the heavy demonstration when G8 summit took place in Germany, no word about the demonstrations in Canada, no word about the investments into artificial nature and no word about this year’s investments being 10 times as high as last years in the US.
News papers are not able to care about politics, they need to deal with soccer and thus it is no wonder that polticians are having a debate about financial cuts at exactly this moment. Of course, there has been a small debate before, but this was the beginning, when everybody mentioned his ideas. The important discussions are going on now, the final proposals for law are written now and the law will be passed soon. Thus, politics can be glad to see that the German soccer team has won against Ghana and the reporting will go on.
…and anything else
Of course it is not only the World Cup that leads to such situations. Events like the Eurovision song contest can also help politics as many news papers rather want to report about our winner Lena (even though she does not talk with these news papers) instead of political discussions. These news papers are the bad ones anyway, but they have a huge audience and big impact on politics. When many politicians of the SPD agreed to critical laws in the last election period, one of their most important members said that they had been afraid of a famous—and very bad—news paper.
So, we will always see politicians trying to have important debates at times when there are popular events and as World Cup or Olympics take much longer than the Eurovision Songcontest, they are predestined.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
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