Sailer on Soccer---Anatomy of a Head/Eye/Foot Fetish

James Pinkerton on a Fox Watch program watching the media mentioned Steve Sailer and his bravura brilliance describing soccer in One World Cup in the American Conservative. Sailer's article is a coup de pouce that deflates many of the pretensions the Chardonnay/Volvo/Brie set in suburban America exhibit----not to mention the hilariously pretentious Franklin Foer whose exhalations on the subject in the New Republic make for thigh-slapping belly-laughs.

Plus my daughter, like Sailer's kids, played in Chicago's AYSO leagues. If you enjoy sports, you will recognize that Sailer skewer-kebobs most of the self-absorbed US Globalist Illuminati in these two paragraphs:

Lately, though, a soccer-crazed fraction of our post-nationalist verbal elite has switched tactics and now implies that Americans will never get excited about soccer as a spectator sport because we just don’t deserve “the beautiful game.” In the new anthology The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, novelist Dave Eggers contends that watching soccer on TV hasn’t caught on here because "people of influence in America long believed that soccer was the chosen sport of Communists. … If you were soccer, the sport of kings, would you want the adulation of a people who elected Bush and Cheney, not once but twice?"

This World Cup in Germany offers the soccerati the opportunity to flaunt their cosmopolitanism as they elucidate the exhilarating subtleties you likely missed in that Croatia-Japan nil-nil draw because you prefer native pastimes such as baseball, basketball, or, God forbid, NASCAR. The "celebrate diversity" folk want America to become athletically homogeneous with the rest of the world. To them, the tepid American response to the World Cup is evidence of our bigotry, our xenophobic failure to get with the global program. As Kevin Michael Grace says, their slogan would be "One people, one world, one sport," if they weren’t so freaked out by all the host-country fans waving German flags. Ironically, while the World Cup is an occasion for globalist preening in the U.S., in the rest of the world it’s a prime locus for jingoism.

Read the whole article for more humor couched as Deep Thoughts.

I watched the Switzerland/Ukraine Quarterfinal, which a Financial Times sportsman called the "worst match ever played" in World Cup soccer. Since the writer could not have seen all World Cup matches, this may be an exaggeration, but unless you are an aficionado of endless foreplay, the Swiss/Ukraine 120 minutes was watching paint dry. Yet I sat through the whole match because....I was in the mood to watch paint dry, I guess.

I wonder what the wondrous Theodore Dalyrymple would say about the World Cup? His life with yobbos in the British slums could explain why soccer, "a gentleman's game played by thugs," is more popular than rugby, which I played in Ann Arbor and France and which Sailer calls "a thug's game played by gentlemen." Gotta check out the New Criterion for Dr. D's apercus, perhaps.