IT was ridiculous. For a month the world was obsessed with groups of uneducated young men kicking around an air-filled bladder. Some 40 million are estimated to have watched part of the spectacle, which amounts to over 60 billion manhours wasted. Spent productively, this would have added more than US$100 billion to the world economy. How many millions of starving children could have been fed!

And it was pathetic really to watch bleary-eyed men practically weep over a team from some country they knew nothing about other than their footballer's names. Really, why should I care if a team of millionaire strangers won or lost? These spoilt, cheating playacters certainly didn't warrant any lost sleep on my part, much less tears.

On the other hand it was magnificent. For here on display were the elite representatives of 32 countries giving their passionate best to make their homeland proud. It was naked, braying, gut-belly nationalism in its rawest form, and yet nobody died or was even seriously injured. The most thought-provoking score during June 2002 was no doubt South Korea 30, North Korea 4 -- the number of men killed on each side in a naval clash the very day before the final between Brazil and Germany. My first thought on hearing of it was why couldn't they have simply played a football match to settle things? And when you think of it, a World Cup game between Israel and Palestine would certainly have done wonders for peace in the Middle East.

You also couldn't help being impressed by how much knowledge normally insular Jamaicans have gained about the world in one month. What else but the World Cup could ever have made anyone here even discuss countries like Poland, Paraguay, or Turkey? And how can anything that makes strange lands and people familiar be anything but good?

Such in a nutshell were my reactions to the World Cup. Now, I didn't think much of it as an athletic spectacle. The few patches I watched were rather boring, as teams concentrated more on not making mistakes than doing anything positive. Not that you could blame coaches for being cautious, when the team that scored first won over 80 per cent of its matches. Indeed, an objective viewer would have to agree with the Americans that for consistent and continuous excitement, soccer -- as they call it -- lags behind gridiron football and basketball.

Yet, at least to me, unrelenting excitement quickly becomes even more boring than no excitement at all -- look at heavy metal rock or NBA basketball, for instance. When every note is sonic pulsing and nearly every play is a wildly cheered score, you quickly lose interest in all notes and plays. For, like everything else, music and sports need context and harmony to remain interesting. As the old saying goes, if everybody is somebody then nobody is anybody. And while football contains a lot of yawningly tedious moments, the anticipation of the totally unexpected always remains. Look away for a moment and you may well miss an unforgettable move that decides the game.

Personally, I think it was condescending navel-gazing America that missed the point. Only a disturbingly solipsistic country -- North Korea was probably the only other one -- could pretend that what the rest of the world found so engrossing wasn't happening. I myself didn't watch a complete match, missing even the final -- at my age it's going to take a lot more than a football game to get me up at 6:30 on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night spent drinking white rum and ting. But I avidly followed the reactions to various matches around the world on the BBC internet. Because, whatever one's feeling about the actual games, last month more than ever before in human history all the world truly became a common stage -- from Russians rioting, to Africans exulting, to Bangladeshi, Brazilian and Argentinian fans waging mini civil wars.

Japan and Korea 2002 then proved once again George Orwell's definition of sport as war without the shooting. And while football's blatant gamesmanship and lack of sportsmanship used to disturb me, I now find it kind of amusing and intriguing to see just how far players can go about bending the rules without breaking them. Because this is the most fascinating and significant aspect of the whole thing, the fact that the whole world really has accepted a uniform set of laws to settle boasts of national prowess. Yes, in a larger context, it is all mindless and meaningless, but then the same could be said of nearly all wars in human history. And it is surely infinitely preferable to see countries batter each other into submission with penalty kicks than bombs. Give me England and Argentina on the football field any day rather than a Falklands war.

TO be sure, it is a bit of a sad commentary on human nature that an essentially juvenile pastime should perhaps have done more than all of our great champions of peace to draw mankind into a common fold. For it is rather depressing to contemplate the reality that an unprincipled drug addicted imbecile like Diego Maradona truly might, in practical terms, have done more to unite the world than Plato, Kant, Einstein, Gandhi and Mandela combined.

But even if those who think the human mind unique might find this rather humbling, surely any advance in the cause of peace must be celebrated.

In a way, the World Cup reminded me of Russian journalist Vitali Vitaliev's story about his first visit to Prague after the fall of communism, when he saw the former 30-metre-high statue of Stalin replaced by an equally tall rubber figure of the visiting Michael Jackson. Caught in a rabid mob anxious to get a glimpse of the "king of pop" and disgusted at the way in which the "Great Friend of Children (especially boys)" manipulated his young fans, Vitaliev had these mixed thoughts.

"No matter how weird and shallow the adoration of Michael Jackson might be, it was still incomparably better than the personality cult of Stalin which had cost humankind many millions of innocent lives ... It was wonderful to realise that Big Brother was no longer watching anyone ... 'Be it as it may, but Jackson is preferable to Stalin' decided I, and headed for a nearby pub. For the first time in years, I was desperate for a beer."