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North America on my mind

Stuart Butler

4th March 2002

A quick update on news – schools in Vancouver gave me lots of food for thought and next week I visit the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, so North America is on my mind rather a lot at the moment. There is therefore something more than satisfactory in hearing that the North American site www.FootyMundo.com is making us “fantastic site” of the month for March. This site aims to be the definitive index to all football websites in the world – so we can feel pretty pleased with ourselves, folks. Thanks and well done to you all – and keep writing!

The Banality of Evil and the Evil of Banality

I’d forgotten we were playing away tonight,
You get thrown by Friday night games, don’t you?
And what with work and food and drink and books,
I’d forgotten all about it, until I was shaken and stirred
By who knows what with about 15 minutes to go;
So I absent-mindedly turned on the telly to BBC 2,
With teletext 307 on top of whatever irrelevance happened to be on,
And there was Tranmere 0 Swindon 0,
(Promising, can we hold out for an away draw?)
Merging in with a ledger containing lots of zeros,
A Final Solution death list;
And then there was the smiling face of Adolf Eichmann, 1942,
And the 1961 archive footage of his trial,
Where he says he was only obeying orders and was therefore innocent,
And as the trains rolled across the screen to Auschwitz,
Beneath a score-line heading for its final whistle,
There could be no pleasure in a second clean sheet
And the customary invaluable away point,
And the customary phrase “the banality of evil” leaped to mind,
Or should it be the evil of banality?

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Butler's Bench

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Source: https://footballpoets.org/news/2002/03/04/north-america-on-my-mind/