Obligatory World Cup Post

Being an American living in a Foreign Land where soccer (or "football" as some people call it for indiscernible reasons) is a big deal, it is mandatory that one writes a post on the World Cup, should it happen while you are in town. The reason for this is, I think, that we as Americans really only have limited reference for just how big a deal this is in other countries. It's sort of like ((Super Bowl - commercials)(Olympics + poor people))^3.

And I'm not even sure you can really equate it. It's like trying to convert apples to oranges, or kilograms to pounds. You just can't do it! Also, I'm pretty skittish around "math" so you're going to have to cut me some slack here.

Anyway, since it IS World Cup time, you should probably know that, yes, I will be watching at least one of the games in a crowded area filled with crazed South Koreans shouting "Daehan Minguk!" And I will post pictures once this happens. I have my Red Devils shirt all ready to go and everything!

One of the other things that inevitably happens anytime Americans get even remotely involved in soccer is that certain wingnuts tend to write intellectually void articles proclaimint soccer to be "fundamentally un-American" or "something Real AmericansTM could never get behind" or even "socialist." Yes, this last one somehow happens. I won't link to the articles themselves (because really all they are is link bait to generate traffic to their respective sites), but if you want read through the Gawker article. The links are there, and they check out.

Perhaps the most "coherent" of the Rube Goldberg arguments I have heard came from author Chuck Klosterman, who claimed that soccer, at its heart, was fundamentally a team sport, while beloved American pastimes such as baseball and football were far more individualist - and therefore, in line with the American mode of thought. His reasoning goes, you can envision a single player winning a baseball or football game, but this is somehow not possible in soccer. I can't even begin to tell you where that goes wrong...is it his willful ignorance of the cooperation amongst players in baseball in football? Or the fact that a single person could win a soccer match in the exact same way that someone could win a football game on his own (which, by the way, would be INFINITELY easier than one person winning a baseball game)? Suffice it to say, his intellectual train jumped the track several stops back.

(PS for my non-American readers, should any of you be actual, live humans, football here refers to American football. Not soccer, or Aussie rules, or whatever else you might have)

Look, ultimately these articles that get written every four years are only put out there so the author can generate some name traffic - even if people are talking about how ridiculous it is, they are still talking. But still. These days, when it's fashionable to call every bogeyman a socialist (a term which has lost all political meaning, thanks TEA PARTY), it's worth expending just the tiniest bit of critical thought to understand just how ridiculous those claims are.

And anyway, I hope that wherever you are, be it America, South Korea, or the Socialist Colony of Moon, you will join the other 7 billion humans on the planet and I in participating in this most socialist of events, the FIFA World Cup. Let's Go Reds!