Amid the relentless churn of World Cup fever, the British tourism board has set its sights on Niagara Falls as a prime location for watching the beautiful game. One might ask: is this a stroke of marketing brilliance, or the final symptom of a civilisation that has lost all sense of proportion? I am inclined to the latter.
The idea that a natural wonder, a symbol of sublime power and indifferent nature, should be reduced to a backdrop for beer-swilling spectators in replica kits is, frankly, decadent. It echoes the Victorian excess of building a railway to the base of Mount Everest or, more precisely, the transformation of the sublime into a theme park. The British, with their peculiar genius for mixing tourism with a pint, seem determined to drag even the most majestic of landscapes into the maw of mass entertainment.
But let us not be too harsh: perhaps this is merely the natural end point of a culture that has commodified everything. After all, if you can sit in a pub watching football on a screen, why not do so beside a real wonder of the world? The distinction between the mediated and the real has collapsed.
I suspect the ancient Romans would have approved, though they would have built a few more aqueducts. In the meantime, I shall watch the cultural decline with a stiff upper lip, though I might be tempted to make a pilgrimage to Niagara Falls myself, if only to remind what genuine grandeur looks like before it is swallowed by the World Cup.
