Location, location, location

 So we're a week out now from the start of the World Cup, and I am getting ready by watching a man do wondrous things with his feet. He's from Croatia, and his name is Luka Modric, and GOOD GOD DID YOU SEE THAT??

Sorry. I'm watching this highlight tape, and Luka Modric just made a touch pass that OH MY GOD LOOK AT THAT THROUGH BALL!!

Can't wait to see Luka Modric perform this abracadabra in real time, all these deft touches and thread-the-needle passes and no-look heel balls that seem guided by lasers. Can't wait to see if Modric can help duplicate Croatia's fairy-tale run in 2018, when the Checkered Shirts reached the World Cup final before losing to France.

What I could have waited to see, forever and ever, is all of this unfolding in a hellhole like Qatar.

OK, so it's not a hellhole; it's actually a sparkling air-conditioned nation built with oil money, large sums of which it threw at FIFA to get the 2022 World Cup to begin with. It's only a hellhole if you happen to be a woman or gay or the all-but-slave labor that built the venues in the searing desert heat.

They died like flies, if you must know. 

According to the BBC, more than 6,000 workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka have died in the decade since Qatar bribed its way to the World Cup bid. Qatar, of course, says that's ridiculous, claiming only 37 workers died during construction of the facilities, and only three were work-related.

Some of the deaths, it claims, might have been from old age or other, ahem, "natural causes."

Nonetheless ...

What do they say in the real estate biz? Location, location, location?

Well, this location sucks. 

And so on to the World Cup, beautiful people, and here's hoping the ghosts of dead construction workers walk among you along the gleaming stadium concourses and opulent hotel corridors. Here's hoping they disturb the comfortable sleep of the organizers, coming to them gaunt and hollow-eyed like the risen Great War dead at the end of the silent French film classic "J'Accuse."

"Oh, please," you're saying now. "Don't be so melodramatic. You just sound silly. And besides, you'll be watching, too, you hypocrite."

You're right. I will be.

And that does make me a hypocrite.

Damn you, Qatar. Damn you.