We aren't the world.

Let's get a couple of things straight, here:

1) I don't currently have a single dream that the entire nation of Ghana could crush, even if they all tried at once.

2) I have never had a dream related in any way to soccer.

There have always been Americans that loved them some soccer, and that's fine. It's still mostly a free country, and if you want to get all interested in curling or cricket or bocce ball or whatever, then get down with your bad self.

But as far back as the Carter years, when I was in elementary school, a certain political overtone crept into the whole soccer thing. Soccer gradually became more than a game; it became, in certain circles, a badge of something; a sign that one was trying to separate one's self from the dull proletarian American herd and show one's almost... almost... European sophistication by embracing this pastime.

Mariatheproblem comments in an excellent post:

The soccer scolds don’t understand that American football is something that grew up organically, out of a specific culture, at a specific time and place. That doesn’t make it either superior or inferior to soccer, it just makes it our game. Those hundred-year-old chants and ancient rivalries serve the same purpose as all other cultural traditions: they build valuable social capital.

Or maybe the soccer scolds do understand. Maybe it’s just one other aspect of the Kulturkampf attack on American exceptionalism. No wonder NPR has taken up the desparate cry that football must be replaced by soccer.

Personally, I'm not as much of a football fan as Maria; with me, it's baseball. But before the soccer scolds try to come for my baseball, they'd do well to be reminded that it's played with a handy ash wood club.


(H/T to Dustbury.)