The Rajpal Abeynayake Column:

Welcome to the Adidas version of the global community

Three weeks of soccer would come to a close shortly, and Iran will go back to being a global pariah at the end of all that. It's too bad that the closest thing to a global paradise arises from a very basic affair - a kick in the grass.

But, it's worth asking, while it lasts, why a kick in the grass serves to cement the bonds of brotherhood between nations which are biting enemies outside the confines of a soccer stadium.

The sissy answer to that would be that there is something noble about kicking a ball around. They'd say it's such a basic exercise that brings out the less aggressive qualities in normally quarrelsome people.

For a real answer, however, you would need to put the scholarly treatise in the trashcan, and begin watching an Adidas commercial. This is the three weeks of unbridled greed. Greed, of course, unites like no other force. Kick a football? People would contrive to do the unthinkable -- such as play five days of cricket in sweaters - if there is a prize that goes to Adidas or Coke at the end of it, as the case may be.

It can therefore be said reverentially that the globe's most unifying force is the force that makes Adidas or Coke richer. It is ironic, that most people who watch soccer would probably swear that the last thing they wanted to do was to make a rich man even richer.

Football is the poor man's sport, and it is the working class's narcotic.

According to history, the rules were set by English public school kids, which begins to explain why football rules never really made any proper sense to me -- especially the Offside rule.

But, the public school game was taken over by the working classes who could afford a two-hour thrill compared to five days hard labour at a match of cricket.

It was also a wholesome kick in the grass, for which any brawling man could also take his girlfriend as this game had none of the notoriety associated with racing horses or beating a man to a pulp on an elevated platform.

My question is however of a practical kind. If a simple working class pursuit could be hijacked and taken over for enriching Adidas and Coke and a dozen other rich multi national heavies, why is it not conceivable that the world's conflicts are not made into spectator sports sponsored by Coca Cola, instead of being made into operas that are mediated by Norway and overseen by the United States of America? There is not even the slightest doubt about it.

The world's people are all united in greed, even though they might not take notice of it. Make sure that you understand that the greed that drives the World Soccer Cup is not the greed of the average Santos who saves for a ticket to get away from the dirt poor streets of Sao Paulo to be able to fly to Munich to see Ronaldino write poetry with his feet.

Santos's greed is escapist, but his contribution to global greed is epic.

But if he is bamboozled by the greed of a Cola producing multi national, and if that makes Iran something other than a pariah state for one brief moment of conciliation, then isn't it rational -- or even logical - that all the world's conflicts be sponsored by Coca Cola, and managed by their promotional wizards for the interests of lasting global peace?

It's fairly acceptable that football has not lost much of its innocence compared and contrasted to golf, or cricket or yatching. It's a form of ballplay that has the power of reducing grown men to tears and grown women into arm candy for soccer boors. (....and you thought rugger-bugger types were bad....)

It's also the ultimate back alley sport, which is escapist by nature, being played with the minimum of equipment in a minimum of time it takes to play anything properly at all. Hence its quality of making Princes out of the frog-like. Maradonna or Pele for instance, would have amounted to nothing in any other kind of show business.

Buying into football was therefore for the sponsors a foray into the entire mass market of the poor and the unwashed. Bread and circuses therefore became football and Coca Cola. Give the masses these, and revolution rebellion and any form of challenge to the capitalist social order could be kept at bay.

But, what's suppressing a little dissent, when entire countries could be kept from working towards mutual annihilation for two weeks? One could arguably say that this is crass commercialism - or plain greed - harnessed for the greater global good. If it can be done with sport, it could be done with conflict.

So, bring on Nike and Pepsi instead of Norway. They will regulate the bloodsport of conflict. Kebbilithigollewa had a sudden fifteen or so minutes in the glare of the international spotlight. The scenes were so gory it made us retch. This is the wretched face of conflict, which Norway could do noting about. Bring crass capitalism into it, and Coca Cola will make conflict a regulated bloodsport. Claymore mines will be allowed just once every four years, and Coke will stand by it.

Everybody will live happily ever after.