Two Peas In A Pod

The pot was good, uh?

 

 

Diego Maradona has met the Pope. Again. 

Maradona is known to football (soccer) fans as one of the most arrogant, stupid, and entitled football players ever to squander his (enormous) football talent with endless ways to make an ass of himself.

He played in Italy for several years. Pretty much no one liked him besides those who rooted for the team he played for, Napoli. He managed a string of controversies without precedents in Italian football, from the illegitimate child to the tax evasion trial to the unjustified (and never really punished) absences from the team, to the gaudiest, most tasteless marriage ever organised by a “son of the peripheries”. His ability to lie with the journalists in the most obvious way was a shock for Italy, a Country where lies are at least expected to be believable.

Maradona never had this attitude. He lied because he was able to. He either didn’t care, or was too stupid to notice, that everyone saw through his lies. His arrogance was possibly surpassed only by his stupidity, and both dwarfed his huge talent. He even got in the habit of speaking of himself in the third person with journalists. Ah, he was also on cocaine.

When Argentina won the Football World Championship in 1986, through a hand goal of him in the semi-final, only a Maradona could have had the arrogance of calling his cheating feat “the hand of God”. It truly tells you all you need to know about the man. It reminds me of that Pope who implied that Jesus deceived His Apostles, and found it good.  

 

There was the joke in Italy that God had started making Maradona from the feet; and once He saw what feet he had given him he had compensated when making the rest of him. 

Let us, then, compare the Unholy Father with his “greatest fan”, Diego Maradona. 

Arrogant? Check. 

Ignorant? Check 

Drug use? Check 

Full of himself? Check 

Full of sh!t? Double check. 

Like Maradona, who in those years shocked Italians so much with the brazenness of his entire persona, Francis lies simply because he can. The same arrogance, the same boorishness, the same utter disregard for decency or reality we saw once in Maradona we see now replicated in another son of his country. 

I remember Maradona, and observe Bergoglio. Not for the first time, I seem to notice that these two are two peas in a pod; not only because they share elementary character traits, but also because they seem to come from a country where such brazenness is certainly not condemned or ridiculed as it would be elsewhere, and it is probably even  – more or less secretly – appreciated as a sign of self-confidence, or derring-do. But it isn’t. To behave like Maradona or Bergoglio you don’t need to be brave, merely lacking in integrity and shame.  

I see these two, and I know that they are two peas in a pod.

Pope Francis The-Pot-Smoker, The Hand of Satan. 

How deep have we fallen.

M