So what do these soccer arguments tell us about the foreign mindset? They're all false arguments, but they keep getting used, which tells me that there must be something in them which has great appeal to those making the arguments. You'll remember that the string running through them is the idea that Americans are uncultured, violent, brash, blindered, simplistic, and so on--in regard to soccer, they'll always add, but you feel like their argument is really a general one, and not specific to one little game. Is this just disinterested, unbiased academic commentary? No, of course not--foreigners are personally and nationalistically interested in America being weak and their country or region being strong. Did Red Sox fans hate the Yankees and their fans for all those years (calling them brash, violent, blindered, simplistic, and so on) in a disinterested way, or is it because they wanted the Yankees to go down and their Red Sox to go up?
George Orwell's article about nationalism hits the nail on the head here (and if you haven't read it, it's a beautiful piece of political thought):
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat
A salient excerpt:
"A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade."
Cribbing from Orwell, I say that often, when you see people who harbor a violent anti-nationalist (in this case, anti-American) sentiment, it's pro-nationalist sentiment for some other country in disguise. I've talked to Venezuelans who say that America is the devil (which isn't surprising, because I think Hugo Chavez says that all the time). But it's not disinterested criticism of America; they have their own priorities. If you dig deep enough, you'll find that they think Chavez is building a Socialist paradise in Venezuela, or that South America will rise up to become a new global power when America falls. (No mention of how important South America and America are to each other, and that a true American depression would likely throw South America into one as well).
The inherent contradiction is this: while these folks pretend to be disinterested people who hate the imperialist asshole America has become, they actually want to be the imperialist assholes. In the same conversation, a European might denigrate America's economic imperialism, and brag about the economic clout now wielded by the European community. Europeans would love to exercise their former dominance over the rest of the world, but because they can't, they put on anti-imperialist airs. This reminds me of World Cup 2002, where the French feigned indifference to the silly sport of soccer (more a thing for those raucous Germans, really, or those hooligan English)--until their team started playing really well, and won the entire tournament, at which point the French were instantly rabid soccer fans. In the same way, Europeans will claim that they don't care about things as shallow and American as the singleminded pursuit of economic development; a true measure of a country is its culture, not its economy, they'll say. That is, until the American economy is crappy--now, Europeans can hardly conceal their glee when talking about the struggling dollar, the mortgage crisis, and so on (despite the fact that a bad American economy is bad for everyone, and has sparked economic trouble in Europe), all the time raving about the Euro, and the European community, and Europe as the new economic powerhouse of the world. Orwell: "Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception."
One last example of the contradictory anti-American-at-all-costs mindset of these people: if you try to point out, when having that standard "Americans don't like soccer" discussion, that American women have embraced soccer, and play it in greater numbers than women in any other country, and that the American women's soccer team has been the most dominant in history, they'll mutter something about women's soccer not counting. Beliefs are that flexible for these types of people: they'll go from denigrating Americans for their lack of broadmindedness and culture to being out-and-out sexists, taking on whatever beliefs necessary to serve their pro-European or pro-South American aims.
Soccer is a convenient subject for these nationalists, because it's one of the few things they can flaunt as superior in their own countries; while looking down from their great heights of soccer culture on the unwashed masses, they can make ridiculously generalized statements about hundreds of millions of American people while seeming to be chatting disinterestedly about a mere sport. Soccer is a receptacle for near-racist beliefs, that disguises them just enough as dispassionate views about sport to let them slip by, unseen for what they are. (Unlike the Europeans, the Mexicans are more open about their racism; tens of thousands of them happily chanted "Osama" when the American soccer team played in Mexico City after the events of September 11.)
I'm being hard on foreigners here, but I don't mean to generalize; it's just one kind of foreign mindset that I've seen a lot of here in New York, a city full of people from other countries. I also know lots of foreigners who have no such nationalistic illusions. Anyway, in the interest of fairness, I'll end this discussion by bashing Americans a bit. Orwell accurately notes that a lot of intellectuals unhappy with their own country (and there are quite a few of us in America today), but needing an outlet for their natural human nationalistic sentiments, will desperately search for, and eventually locate, another region or country to serve as a paragon of virtue. Thus the phenomenon of intellectual American soccer fans (of whom I've seen plenty, during the Euro). Distaste with America gets transformed into love of European sport. It's very fashionable among New York intellectuals to be a knowledgeable and passionate European soccer fan; these intellectuals, sadly, end up using the same false arguments that Europeans use to explain to their friends why America's boorish working and/or middle classes don't like soccer. But they're worse than the Europeans, because unlike them, they come from America, and know its people well, and they should know better.
Now that I've looked at the nationalistic urges that drive foreigners' explanations of why Americans don't like soccer, I'll turn to Americans and a more detailed discussion of the game of soccer itself in Part III. Why don't we love soccer, really? For lots of reasons, but nothing that fits neatly into a facile nationalistic narrative.
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