Robert:
Below is a fine column by
Salon's Andrew Leonard about the USA's sudden appreciation of, and interest in, the World Cup.
Here's the direct link to the Salon article, also pasted below:
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/29/the_rights_absurd_world_cup_paranoia_explained/
"With
her recent column
explaining how the rise of American interest in the World Cup is “a
sign of the nation’s moral decay,” Ann Coulter successfully sent readers
around the world into gales of horrified laughter and generated god
only knows how many hate-clicks.
Whether she actually believed what she was writing is moot. Coulter’s provocations are
best treated as performance art.
But there’s also no doubt that she was playing on conservative
insecurities about change and globalization and multiculturalism that
are quite real. A generation of Americans feels its cultural-superpower
primacy slipping away, replaced by something it would rather mock than
understand or celebrate.
It’s scary stuff! We’ve got a black
president and our neighbors are hooting and hollering about the World
Cup. You can practically hear the pearl-clutching:
What’s happened
to our once great nation!? And why the hell won’t all these obnoxious
people on Twitter just stop going on and on and on about it?
Reuters columnist and confirmed curmudgeon Jack Shafer got so fed up
with all the World Cup chatter that he devoted an entire column on
Friday
to explaining why he was unfollowing everyone who committed the sin of so much as retweeting a single Cup-obsessed comment.
It’s
mean and unfair to lump Shafer and Coulter in the same paragraph, but
there is a connecting thread linking their disdain. Once every four
years, the entire world explodes into an obsessive conversation about
sports that incorporates and is inseparable from historical narratives
of race and culture and nationalism. In many countries, soccer
is politics. When the World Cup crests, it’s the biggest thing happening on the planet.
Shafer
doesn’t want to hear that conversation. Coulter and her ilk are
actively terrified of it. Because the fact that the U.S. is finally
joining in is a sign that we are gradually becoming part of this world
rather than lording over it or building walls to keep it out. On the
pitch, Mexico is our equal, instead of a source of cheap labor and
cheaper thrills. Our stars are neither the biggest nor the brightest. We
can’t samba like the Brazilians or pass with the crisp efficiency of
the Germans.
But
it’s really cool that we’re in the mix. Now is the worst possible time
to turn down the Twitter volume. Turn it up! The jokes; the political
resentments, the exultation — it’s not just the sound of a truly global
culture. It’s the sound of the future.
* * *
In
the summer of 1990, I stood in Hong Kong’s Central Station, staring at
something I didn’t understand. A live soccer game was being projected on
a station wall — and hundreds of commuters had stopped to watch a
couple of South American teams kick a ball around in Italy.
I had been in Hong Kong for several weeks, interning at a magazine, and this was the first time I’d seen
anyone
dawdle or linger about. There were no moments to waste in East Asia in
the early ’90s. My clearest memory from those days was of young men
galloping up the escalators from the bottom of Central Station to the
point where they could get reception for their brand-new (and very
bulky) cellphones, and start cutting deals. Back in the States we were
still figuring out fax machines.
Yet here was a crowd, watching
Diego Maradona work his wiles against the mighty Brazil. South Korea,
the only East Asian team that managed to qualify for the 1990 Cup, had
already been ignominiously eliminated, manhandled with ease by Belgium,
Spain and Uruguay. The cultural connection between Hong Kong and the
screaming crowds 6,000 miles away seemed tenuous, at best.
Whoa, I realized, as I watched the watchers. I guess that’s why they call it the
World Cup.
Yes,
once upon a time, you had to physically leave the United States to
appreciate that every four years the entire rest of the world convulsed
in a month-long frenzy of passionate fandom. But that’s all changed. Now
that the U.S. has reached the knockout round twice in a row, and a
couple of generations of soccer moms have done their work providing
logistical support for young Americans to master the game of
futbol, and globalization and the Internet have collapsed the borders that used to separate us, it’s a quite different story.
More Americans watched
the U.S. tie Portugal than the World Series or NBA Finals. Massive
crowds gather in public spaces to watch the games. We’re all in,
finally.
The
clamor on Twitter marks a clear sea change. It was nothing like this
last time around. It’s easy to see why people like Coulter are upset. If
she really believes, as she claimed in her column, that American love
for soccer is a result of immigration over the last four years, then
Twitter is a place where the border fences have permanently collapsed
and no one is checking passports. Social media has been overrun! There’s
nowhere to hide and immigration reform won’t make it go away!
It’s a little harder to understand Jack Shafer’s decision to be so public about his desire to check out.
As a soccer agnostic, with no hatred for or interest in the game, these many tweets hold a negative value for me….
My
opposition to sporting tweets, while deep, is not absolute. You’ve got
to expect a Twitter din during college football bowl season, the World
Series, Wimbledon, the Masters, the Triple Crown, the Stanley Cup, the
Super Bowl, and other events. But none of these spectacles run on for a
month like the World Cup.
I can understand why
someone with no interest in soccer would be bored by the World Cup. But
there’s a peculiar defensiveness to Shafer’s public posturing, to his
need to explain why the rest of the world’s delight holds a “negative
value” for him. He’ll accept sporting tweets for the World Series and
the Triple Crown, but not for a phenomenon that, frankly, makes the
World Series look like a Little League competition in Poughkeepsie.
Sorry, Jack, but I think
you’ve got to expect that the biggest
sporting event in the world is going to dominate the conversation every
four years. Publicly trumpeting how you are cutting yourself off from
this dialogue is an unworthy form of American isolationism.
But at
least Shafer is resisting the tide based on little more than sheer
annoyance. Whether she’s pretending or not, Coulter is giving voice to
those who see soccer as a threat to American exceptionalism and
preeminence.
Their deprecation is rooted in fear and ugly
xenophobia, and that’s just sad. Because there’s nothing to fear here.
One of the things you begin to understand as you fall deeper under the
spell of the World Cup is that soccer on this grand stage is the closest
thing we have on this planet to a language that everyone can
understand; whether they are Cantonese speakers in a Hong Kong subway
station or favela-dwellers in Rio or corn-fed Iowans in a bar in Sioux
City. It’s an irresistible new world order. Next time around, the volume
will be even more deafening."
Andrew Leonard, for Salon
