I Hope Team USA Loses

I’m getting a little tired of all this World Cup B.S. Team USA is competing so now everyone is a soccer fan. Uh-huh. It’s getting so bad I expect to hear a couple affluent white suburbanites refer to it as futbol, at which point I’ll seriously question my commitment to non-violence.

Last week I heard David Gregory and a panel of smug Romans chirping about it on Meet the Press. Conspicuous among them was famed pundit, sociologist and moral philosopher David Brooks. He conspicuously failed to mention all the poor Brazilians who were booted out of their homes and whose neighborhoods were destroyed so that the world’s one-percent can watch soccer games at a level of comfort they’re accustomed to. No doubt our illustrious pundits discussed this dicey moral conundrum on the back nine at the Chevy Chase Country Club later that afternoon.

But who cares about that? Certainly not Americans. About one half of the electorate would shrug their shoulders and say it was their own damn fault for being poor in the first place. The other half, the ‘liberal’ half, would concede the point, but then sheepishly add that those who were impoverished “through no fault of their own” kinda sorta maybe deserve a little help.

I’m getting that queasy feeling that overcomes me when the vast corporate combine that shapes our culture is attempting to get me to care about something I don’t care about or believe something that isn’t true. It’s a form of peer pressure, but the cool kids are giant media corporations and the school yard is the entire country. It tried to convince me that Princess Diana was a saint who could walk on water and cure lepers when she quite obviously wasn’t and couldn’t. It told me Steve Jobs was the biggest, bestest, most awesomest creative genius in the universe, a man more visionary than Christ, Jefferson, Henry Ford and the guy who thought of putting plus and minus sign on batteries, when to my mind he was just another successful business asshole. His company uses sweatshop labor and his contribution to humanity — the iPhone — is a glorified toy gadget that enables adults to act like rude and distracted teenagers; it has made it socially acceptable for full grown human beings to say things like “check out this cool new app” and think that ringtones are an interesting thing to talk about. It has helped create a culture where nobody sees anything wrong with this.

It’s the same cultural force that bullies me to automatically root for team USA every four years in the Olympics. Well, why should I? Our athletes have the most money, the best facilities, the wealthiest sponsors and the most coddling of any athletes in the world. Rooting for them is like rooting for a bank or an insurance company. It’s like rooting for the spoiled girl in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The fact that so many of them are unsympathetic whiners just makes it all the more unseemly. Fuck that. I’ll cheer for the poor Nigerian kid over commercialized hipster twits like Apollo Ohno any day.

Now the same process is under way with soccer. I guess our corporate masters have decreed that we need yet another sports spectacle. We need one more gaudy venue where we can be swamped with with Budweiser and Subway commercials. We need one more group of clay-footed multimillionaire heroes to gawk at on talk shows and reality TeeVee — tattoos, goatees and ten pound diamond earrings a plus! One more tribal competition to rekindle our dying national pride. One more source of cheap, superficial nationalism to artificially pump us up on our shameful slide to the bottom.