Sparks: 'Less than human': how unhoused people in Atlanta are being treated during the World Cup - video
Modern stadiums rise upon the ruins of the parish, for the concentration of capital requires the absolute clearance of the inconvenient, demonstrating that power is never more absolute than when it acts in the name of a spectacle.
Our cities remain battlefields where the flags of international commerce replace the old colonial banners, yet the poor are still treated as an enemy population to be cleared before the triumphal entry of the new masters.
The Dynamo of global sport demands a frictionless surface for its rotation, and if a thousand human lives must be swept into the gears to ensure the aesthetic purity of the machine, the machine will not hesitate.
The claim is that the city is being improved, yet this improvement depends entirely upon the disappearance of the very citizens whose presence would reveal the emptiness of the prosperity being celebrated.
Does a city exist for the sake of the games it hosts, or do the games exist for the sake of the citizens, and if the latter, why must the citizens be hidden for the games to begin?
By trying to make the city beautiful through force, the planners only manifest its inner ugliness, for the vessel that is emptied by violence cannot hold the spirit of true hospitality.
This grand tournament is a creature of our own making, yet we recoil from the suffering it inflicts upon the vulnerable as if we were not the ones who breathed life into such a heartless mechanical god.
When the greening power of the community is sacrificed for the cold glint of gold, the body of the city becomes fevered, casting out its own limbs as though they were poison rather than the very life it requires.
We are told this displacement is a necessary civic evolution, yet it is merely the pressure of a predatory economic environment selecting for those who can pay, while the unadapted are driven into the shadows to perish.
They have painted the outside of the iron house to look like a festival, but the people inside are still suffocating, and the only change is that the screams must now be timed to match the cheers of the crowd.
Your celebrations of liberty and sport are a hollow mockery when the foot of progress is planted firmly on the neck of the man who has no roof but the sky you claim is free for all.
It is a marvel of modern reason that we spend billions to watch men kick a ball, while simultaneously discovering that the most efficient way to maintain public order is to pretend the poor do not exist.
In all my travels from Tangier to China, I have seen many strange customs, but none so peculiar as a city that invites the whole world to a feast while driving its own neighbors into the wilderness.