This is getting ridiculous...

I’m watching handball right now. Next to curling, it’s probably the stupidest sport ever. How do you play? Well, there are two teams, and they run and try to throw a ball into the other team’s net. In that sense, it’s not that much different from soccer and hockey. The thing is, with those sports, you need to master a basic set of skills before you can even start to play the game: dribbling a ball with your feet is unnatural and difficult, as is handling a puck with a stick. I wouldn’t last a second against Ronaldinho or Peter Forsberg but I’m pretty sure I could play handball at a world-class level.

So why am I watching? Well… because Germany is in the world championship game and I can’t get away from it. Germans have rediscovered their sense of nationalism. Not patriotism, nationalism. It’s the same shitty phenomenon I wrote about during the World Cup when you had dipshits that couldn’t tell you a single player’s name or a single rule but they painted their faces and waved their flags with all their might. At least that was the world’s most popular sport though; this is a complete fucking farce of a sport and the hysteria here is at a ridiculous pitch. “Our Handball Heroes!!,” read the headlines in the paper. Hey Germany, IT’S FUCKING HANDBALL – NO ONE CARES.

I’ve thought about how Americans would react if the US was playing in the world championship game of handball and I can’t envision a scenario when one single person would give a monkey’s ass. We cheer for our national teams regardless of how ridiculous the sport is but don’t get swept up in the type of mania that’s surrounded this event. You would think the fate of nations rested on this game and if they lose, I guarantee the papers would have pictures of crying Germans and headlines like, “you’re our world champions of the heart” or some dumb bullshit like that.

So why do I even care at all? Because I fucking hate hypocrisy and I’m in the middle of a giant display of it. You see, Germany has had to live with the shame of what they did last time they felt proud to be German, namely: declaring themselves the master race and then putting 11 million people (give or take – genocide is kinda inexact like that) in ovens. Since then, they’ve held their noses in the air and shit on anyone else who’s proud of their country, calling them nationalist pigs and that kind of stuff. The French are nationalists, but they always have been so there’s a consistency there. Americans are patriotic bordering on nationalist but, again, we don’t crap all over other people that are proud of coming from wherever it is they come from. Germans do. But they’ve found an outlet for their nationalism, which is to say that it never went away in the first place. They call everyone else pigs while waiting for the German team to get good in soccer, handball, badminton, competitive pie eating or what the fuck ever, and then they break out the black, red and gold face paint and the flags and once again sing, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!!” Not since they wore swastika armbands have Germans been so proud of being German. If ten percent of the people watching this game could name two handball team players, I’d take it a little easier. But since that’s not the case, fuck it, a spade is a spade and a nationalist hypocrite is a nationalist hypocrite.