The World Cup's Abu Ghraib moment? It's not even a World Cup image

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/17/world-cup-abu-ghraib-moment-woman-bin-brazil

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The photographer has caught an empty plastic bottle in mid flight. It has been casually aimed by a man in a Brazil football shirt who may or may not be aware that a woman is rooting in the rubbish at the bottom of the bin into which his bottle is bound.

It falls like a missile heading straight for her, the nose cone about to strike her body. The message, intentional or not, is clear enough: this woman is human rubbish. Not only is she scavenging for scraps tossed away by football fans who are leaving the stadium after a match in Brazil, but rubbish is also being dropped on to her, reducing her to detritus.

Haves and have-nots are starkly contrasted – the ticket-holding, fully enfranchised members of society, entranced by sport, utterly divided from the woman in the bin who represents Brazil's powerless and discarded poor.

The picture comes from a sequence taken after a match in 2013, but has now gone viral, with some reports mistakenly believing it was taken at the opening match of the World Cup. After all the reports on social tension and crisis in Brazil, the picture of course resonates as an image of "the truth" behind this massive sporting event.

So – it's a shocking photograph.

So what?

The World Cup is a lesson in what the French situationist Guy Debord called the Society of the Spectacle. With world television stations focused on the matches in Brazil, with every participant nation absorbed in its own patriotic sporting drama, with aficionados of skilled football satiated by the world's best teams playing for high stakes, what are the chances of this photograph's truth somehow cutting through the colour and noise and tension of the tournament?

One website calls this picture "The shocking photograph that should REALLY define the opening day". But can it? Never mind that it was not even taken on the opening day, or indeed this year. In the age of immediate communication, it is not impossible for images to make instant history. Photographs from Abu Ghraib prison redefined the Iraq war. The Egyptian government is trying to get a video of a sexual assault at a rally in Tahrir Square removed from YouTube. There is evidence that images can matter, and even more evidence that people believe they matter.

The situationists, utopian optimists of the 1968 revolution that they were, might see in this photograph from Brazil the kind of hand grenade of truth that can explode the spectacle and shatter the order it upholds. Uh huh. Fans of situationist theory have also seen a true revolutionary moment in the Sex Pistols swearing at Bill Grundy in 1977, so perhaps it is time to retire this particular radical hope.

Part of the problem with trying to overturn the official joyful soccer stories and pictures now coming out of Brazil is that a lot of people do actually love football. There is a self-evident problem in comparing the World Cup with the examples I gave above of torture in Iraq or sexual assault in Egypt. The game is not a system of oppression. It has not in itself caused Brazil's inequalities. While the lavish expense of the World Cup is grotesque when there are people, as we see here, scavenging its very waste products for food, it still does not ring true to demonise the pleasure football fans – including the ones in this photograph – are taking in their sporting epic.

I do not say this as someone who is absorbed in watching the games. As it happens I would rather look at a Mark Rothko painting than football. In fact, that's what I was doing at the weekend. But for many people, not least in Brazil, football truly is the beautiful game. Of all the spectacles to try to overturn, of all the distractions to try and answer with The Truth, this is the most impervious, the most impossible to damage. Football is unsinkable.

So to say that this photograph should REALLY be the defining image of the Brazil World Cup does not really mean anything.

The Roman empire's use of "bread and circuses" to pacify the populace is often casually cited as an image of how events like the World Cup silence dissent. In the popular film series The Hunger Games, a science fiction empire uses similar methods – but they go wrong and the games themselves spark resistance.

This is naive. The real lesson of ancient Rome is that bread and circuses work. There never was a Maximus who avenged his family (à la Russell Crowe) and brought down an evil empire in the arena. In reality, Rome's gladiatorial shows, as popular as football, helped maintain the Roman social order for centuries. The analogy with Brazil is telling. Rome was a vast city of extreme contrasts between rich and poor. Yet it took invaders from without to bring its way of life crashing down. Otherwise the games might have gone on for ever.

The woman in the bin is a terrible truth. But how many times do we need to be forced to acknowledge that lies rule the world?