Only In America

Firewoman - The Cult (mp3)
I Think It's Gonna Happen - Army Navy (mp3)

The USA Women’s soccer team is the paragon of American team sport.

They exemplify more aspects of what makes our country so amazing than any other group. They are a walking, running, sports bra-clad icon of American pride.

The only possible competitor for this historical and symbolic spot would be the USA men’s basketball team, where a group of men, generally from lower-income levels of society, generally African-American, have united after they have achieved the American Sports Dream of striking it rich and famous. They attempt to place country before celebrity and, with clearly superior talent in a sport born in the USA, take the itty bitty world by storm.

But soccer is the world’s sport. We didn’t invent it, and our average sports fan doesn’t much care for it. The US men’s soccer team has never won the World Cup, and they won’t in the 21st Century, either. We are far from proving ourselves ready for the world stage as men.

But the women? They’ve taken the world’s game and reminded everyone what is unique about us: Even if we don’t respect women to the degree we should, and even if they aren’t yet given every chance to be equal, we try much harder and are much more committed to the idea than every other country in the world.

For all the flaws in Title 9 -- a law that naively or stubbornly insists on a fantasy world where just as many women as men want to play sports -- the US women’s soccer team is an example of what it did right and of why the law exists.

When they played Brazil on Sunday, the best player -- and probably the three of the four most-talented players -- all wore yellow. But what Brazil and all of South America gains in raw and devoted talent, they lack in financial and social support. South America simply doesn’t care about women being equal, and certainly not in sports. Same is true for big chunk of Europe.

Of course I’m using gross stereotypes here. Plenty of American men are pigs and chauvinists. But what’s truly beautiful about America is that, despite pigs and chauvanists, despite hundreds of thousands of Americans who think women’s sports aren’t worth a fraction of the effort or money they require, something about our ideals and values require that we support them.

Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Croatia. All great men’s teams, but totally marginal on the women’s side. Am I supposed to believe this isn’t cultural, that there isn’t something about the cultures of these countries that simply don’t appreciate, value, prioritize or reward female athletes?

Guess which country won the last two Women's World Cups? Germany. They have a kickass female chancellor. Pardon me if I don't think this is mere happenstance. Yet, by comparison, our women's team says more about our country than Germany's does about theirs.

Don’t take my word for it; take their coach's. Pia Sundhage is a Swede, and they’re not exactly known for their oppressive misogyny, but even she feels something uniquely powerful about the Way of the USA:

“I come from Sweden, and this American attitude, pulling everything together and bringing the best out performance of each other, that's contagious. I'm very proud and very happy to be the coach of the U.S. team."

Or take 5-time FIFA Women’s Player of the Year, Marta, the most-talented crybaby this side of John McEnroe:

(Marta) pointed to her head, leading me to think she meant the Americans were strong in the air. "No, no," she explained. "It's the mentality." (from ESPN.com)

There’s this documentary called PELADA. Fascinating little flick. Young man and woman, floating uncertainly after their college soccer careers have ended, take some grant money and travel the world to experience pick-up soccer games in one country after another. They go through South America, Europe, Asia and even the Middle East and play game after game.... with men.

Best I can recall, they only play two pick-up games with women. One is on some salt flats, and the other is in Iran. Two female pick-up games out of, like, hundreds. And one of those is in I-friggin’-RAN!!

This isn’t my “you really oughtta give women’s soccer a shot” blog. Truth is, there ain’t nothing about women’s soccer that, if you haven’t found it in you to try it, and if you haven’t ever found soccer interesting, is gonna magically win your heart.

It doesn't matter whether you like it, or whether you watch it, because here’s what you can say about our women’s soccer team, and it’s something that proud Americans like saying:

ONLY IN AMERICA.

Those words mean more for this particular team than any other team for any other sport at this juncture in our collective American sports history.

The US women play France in the semifinals tomorrow (Wednesday). Kickoff is at noon EST on ESPN. BOTG's authors will be sitting at Tremont Tavern to cheer on the Red White & Blue, and we welcome others to join us! 

"The Sperminator"

Dirty Denim - The Donnas (mp3)
B is for Brutus - The Hives (mp3)

I would never have voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger. “The Governator” (alt. “Guhvinator,” “Guvinator”) wasn’t a complete disaster during his two terms in California’s highest elected position, but history won’t be kind.

Generally speaking, I’ve come to believe we get the politicians we deserve. We get the politicians who reflect who we are, who we think we are, or who we think we want. We rarely if ever get the politicians we need, people who could actually do something powerful and positive and beneficial. Those people are generally ugly or nerdy, or they have the charm of a roadkill skunk, and we treat politics like “American Idol” or a beauty pageant, expecting entertainment and demanding these people stroke us to earn our votes.

Politics is prostitution. They seduce our minds, and we pay them with our votes and shove them out the door. Politicians rail against the horrors of prostitutes because they’re trying to eliminate the competition.

When the latest news about Arnold emerged this week, it raised eyebrows. I had the rare opportunity on Tuesday to be the one who revealed this information to a handful of people (thanks, Twitter!), and their collective reaction was perfectly 2011. Shock and surprise for all of 30 seconds -- the standard length of a political ad -- and then quick downshift into cynicality and surrender.

No, really? But they’ve been married for so long.
What am I saying? Of course he did.
What did we expect?
He’s no different and never was.

California deserved The Governator. They got the leader they deserve just as Chattanooga deserves Fred Skillern, a man who would apparently joke with a reporter that he wouldn’t invite African-American council members to his house because didn’t think he “could cook barbecue like them n------.”

I digress. Back to Arnold.

It wasn’t 20 minutes into the revelation he had fathered a child a decade ago that the Twitterverse referred to him as “The Sperminator.” Ouch. Humor in Twitterville is like a tsunami, swift and harsh and unflinching.

Meanwhile, my reaction has been quite different. Because I’ve never seen Arnold as a man to idolize or think of as “a good man,” revelation of his infidelity only serves to confirm that which I already assumed: that I didn’t need to waste my time admiring him.

Instead, my reaction is a feeling that we have an opportunity here. If we as a country have an ounce of brain juice left in us, we should take this as an opportunity to reevaluate our foolishness, our obsession with celebrity, our superficial fixation with morality.

It’s a no-brainer that, had this news about “Ahnolt” come out earlier, he would never have been coronated as The Governator. This news was certainly an election killer. It’s killed Spitzer, Hart, Edwards, Sanford... seriously, this list would go on forever. Sex scandal has killed or threatened more politicians than all of Tom Clancy’s novels combined.

But we have an opportunity right now to ask ourselves the most important question possible: Did Arnold’s personal scandal, one unbeknownst to us, affect his ability to do his job?

I believe, confidently, that The Governator would have sucked no less or no more in his elected position had he not knocked up a “household assistant.” Keeping his privates out of his maid would not have given him greater wisdom, and it would not have solved California’s horrifying fiscal issues. Ahnolt stunk as a governor, but it had nothing to do with sexual scandals.

The day may never come, but we eventually need to accept a difficult but essential truth about humanity: Being a great employee or office leader or business owner or elected official has absolutely nothing to do with how you handle your non-work personal relationships.

Of equal or greater importance is this following realization: Being a great and dedicated husband or father or friend has absolutely nothing to do with how well you do a job. In fact, if we know anything in the 21st Century, it’s that placing too high a priority on family can actually hurt one’s professional career.

If we know the second part, that being a good person doesn’t make you a good employee, then why can’t we accept that the opposite is also true? We insist on clinging to this illusion that the only people we can elect with good conscience must be squeaky clean.

Our modern society would not have elected Thomas Jefferson. To anything.

I want that to sink in. It’s pretty friggin’ disturbing.

Please understand. I’m not defending The Sperminator. His scandal conveniently arrives on our doorstep after we were already prepared to stop giving a shit about him, and I can only hope this makes things easier on his family.

The Sperminator will go away. Our delusions that some singular issue of morality determines a person’s leadership skills, on the other hand, will not.

We don’t have to become Italy. We don’t have to become a place where Silvio Berlusconi becomes the standard-bearer of our country.

But what seems clear to me is that, for all our hemming and hawing over the importance of morally-upstanding role models in elected office, America is hardly doing any better than other countries at policing dirty behavior.

Maybe it’s time we took a different approach.

A Glitch in the Step Matrix

Bit by Bit (from Fletch) - Stephanie Mills (mp3)
Work Itself Out - Roadside Graves (mp3)

Progress, it must be remembered, is best as a dance, not a march.

Often the only way forward also requires steps to the side, and steps back. Marching is against human nature. It's forced, not organic. When progress is forced, it creates friction, tension, unease. Dancing, on the other hand, requires an understanding of what the body's natural inclinations are, combined with tons of practice and work. But dancing, when done right, is not forced. It is free of tension. It looks completely fluid and simple. Thus the lovely saying, "Free your mind, and your ass will follow."

So let's apply this notion to the progression of race relations in America. Specifically, what happens to this progress when a white sorority gets all uppity and wins a national step competition?

That's exactly the question forced upon us this February in Atlanta, when the Zeta Tau Alpha chapter of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville won the Sprite Step Off.

Most of BOTG's readers, I suspect, know little if any about Stepping. Personally, I'm only just knowledgeable and educated enough to get myself in trouble. When I was a freshman, my dorm RA was the president-elect of UNC's Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, and because he was easily the most influential African-American presence in my young and clueless life to that point, I was given several mini-lectures on the history and significance of stepping. I also witnessed two official step shows and at least a dozen impromptu step performances in the Pit outside the school's main dining hall.

Something about the live performance, about witnessing a step show happen right there in front of you, multiplies the power of the experience. In this, it's very much like hockey, which in my opinion is the sport whose awesomeness is the most powerfully affected by watching it live. (Football, soccer and basketball, on the other hand, translate far too well to TV, which is why they are the world's most popular sports.)

Anyway, a bunch of white chicks from Arkansas won a national competition intended for, if not explicitly exclusive to, historically-black sororities. When they were announced as winners to the predominantly-black Atlanta audience, the crowd reacted by gathering in a circle, holding up empty soda bottles, and announcing that they'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Ha. Of course that wasn't the reaction.

Here was the reaction, according to the Washington Post.

Here was the reaction, according to The Root.com.

If you read the YouTube comments -- thousands of them -- in response to the various videos of their performance (a 2-minute excerpt is embedded at the bottom of this post), you will see a display of all levels of IQ, knowledge, and tolerance warring and wrestling with what all of this means.

Here's my reaction to the reaction.

First, the immediate and negative response of the crowd was something any idiot should have seen coming. History is full of competitions where a square peg attempts to fit in a traditionally round hole, emerges victorious, and is consequently despised by large parts of the traditional public. Jackie Robinson. Althea Gibson. Calvin Peete. Lamar Latrell. Daniel Laruso. Herbie The Love Bug. But I digress.

We look back on these moments and admire the people (or cars) involved. People my age tend to undervalue and underappreciate the struggles and scorn the great groundbreaking athletes endured. There's no way I, at 38 and white, can truly appreciate appreciate that, when Hank Aaron rounded the bases after breaking Maris' home run record, it lingered in the back of his mind that someone might well try to kill him.

It is entirely irrational to look to a bunch of binge-drinking white college chicks from Arkansas to be game-changers in the world of racial progress. But, if you look at the dance of progress in history, we must at least acknowledge that what happened that February night in Atlanta will be considered a vital and important "step" in this never-ending move towards something better. (Sorry for the pun. Couldn't help it.)

Now if we can just get Darius Rucker to win the seed spitting contest at the Redneck Olympics, our dance of racial progress will surely be complete.

A plan to fix our economic crisis?

Thanks to my cousin Evelin for sharing this excerpt from a St. Petersburg newspaper... Apparently, a couple of months ago the St. Petersburg Times asked its readers to write in with their ideas on the question "How would you fix the economy?" One man's response is pretty interesting...

("US Flag" by albinoSmerf @ Flickr.com)

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"Dear Mr. President,

Please find below my suggestion for fixing America's economy. Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.

You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan: There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force. Pay them $1 million apiece severance pay for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings. Unemployment Fixed

2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered...Auto Industry Fixed

3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage. Housing Crisis Fixed.

IT CAN'T GET ANY EASIER THAN THAT!!

P.S. If any more money is needed, have all members in Congress and their constituents pay their taxes........Mr. President, while you are at it, make Congress retire on Social Security and Medicare. I'll bet both programs would be fixed pronto!"

St. Petersburg Times @ TampaBay.com

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It's clever! Though, highly unlikely to occur... And, although I'm sure most people would jump at the cool million, there would be many who would not. To play devil's advocate, it would be discriminatory and unfair to force out people over fifty from our workforce by bribing them with a million dollar retirement severance. However, with all that said, if I was Obama - I'd chuckle and invite this guy to the White House for dinner ASAP to get some more insight! :)

What do you think?

Thanksgiving: "Too Big To Fail"

Everyday I Think of Money - Stereophonics (mp3)
Bright Future in Sales - Fountains of Wayne (mp3)

Would someone please explain to me what the hell the phrase "too big to fail" actually means? Is "too big to fail" something akin to calling a huge ocean liner "unsinkable"? If so, then America seems to have sailed right into one hellacious iceberg.

If CitiGroup is "too big to fail," then why the hell is it failing? If Detroit's carmakers aren't "too big to fail," why does it feel like losing those companies would be pretty darn catastrophic? More importantly, why are we allowing companies to get so large that they can be declared "too big to fail"? Isn't this a problem we should chew on going forward?

To me, a mere serf who couldn't even manage his Columbia House membership, I honestly don't get it. To me, it seems like our government is picking -- somewhat arbitrarily -- which companies are really important, which ones are only kinda important, and which ones are "too big to fail." Am I s'posed to just trust them that they know what the hell they're doing? Like I trusted 'em that there were WMDs? (OK, so I didn't trust 'em then, either.)

I don't mean to sound like an ignorant conservative, but it really feels like our government is handing out welfare checks with NINE ZEROES on them to a bunch of idiots who just proved they can't manage their own affairs. Conservatives get upset that we hand out teensy tiny checks to poor mothers who are "too lazy" to find employment, but this one bailout could probably put our entire country's welfare roll into houses for a year or two.

If people get pissed off that our government creates an entitlement mentality in the hearts and minds of the extremely poor by giving them a teensy pittance of cash and food stamps, what are we telling corporations by handing them the equivalent of a bajillion welfare checks?

Hey, I've got a plan! Why not kill two birds with one stone? The government can buy up a whole bunch of houses (thus helping the housing market) at reduced cost and place homeless welfare recipients in them for a year. [Yes, this is mere random conjecture, but it's no more idiotic-seeming that trusting the greedy Wall Street bastards who captained these Titanics to make the right decisions going forward.]

Here's what I'm thankful for in this holiday season:

1. That I'm too poor to be all that terribly affected by this collective stupidity... so far, anyway.
2. That all I've lost so far is half of my retirement.
3. That I never promised anyone a rose garden, or even much of a weed garden.
4. That I can criticize and mock our elected leaders no matter which decisions they make, because either way we're probably screwed for a while as a nation.
5. That even if Obama does a lot of stupid things, he'll seriously deliberate them first, try his hardest to ingest the opinions of the highly-educated experts around him, and sound intelligent about it when he explains it all to the American public. (And he'll probably say the phrase "Now look..." about a million times in four years.)
   

I raise a big ol' chunk of cranberry sauce and a big ol' glass o' chardonnay to you on this severely recessed Thanksgiving! Here's to being sincerely grateful that, no matter how crappy it is, it's all still pretty damn good.

The Stereophonics song is off their least-impressive album of all time, Just Enough Education to Perform. The Fountains of Wayne song is from Welcome Interstate Managers, their best album. Both can be purchased on iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 site.

Drinking and The Deadwood Effect

Party Pit - The Hold Steady (mp3)
Drinkin' Problem - Lori McKenna (mp3)

How many people you think the people he talked to have talked to by now? I guarantee at this minute my whole fucking action downstairs is fucked up, and nobody's drinking and nobody's gambling and nobody's chasing tail. I've got to deal with that. -- Al Swearengen, Deadwood

Gotta hand it to the Amethyst Initiative.

Once again, an "elite" and "educated" and "intelligent" people have coagulated into one collective and made some wildly insane suggestion to an American public that prefers to remain "unelite," "uneducated" and "unintelligent." In other words, we're sure you've got your high-fallootin' reasons for coming up with this idea, but you're too snooty and smart, and we don't heed advice from geeks.

What's the Amethyst Initiative, you ask, other than a kick-ass name for a fantasy football team? It's a group of college and university presidents and chancellors who have united to propose lowering the legal drinking age back to 18.

These are people who are forced to spend a much larger percentage of their time contemplating the risks and dangers of alcohol use in young adults. And these discussions, these experiences, have them inclined to believe 18 is the right age. Is it because they're sick of policing the problem? Is it because it's a law that is so proudly and constantly broken that it encourages kids to have less respect for the law? Do they hope to remove some of they worshipful myth of alcohol? (Actually, they do a pretty good job of answering this on their site. You should go read it.)

One common thread with journalistic reports is to compare how the United States handles a societal ill compared to other civilized countries, as can be viewed in this CNN "iReporter" article. It's a natural thing to do, to compare apples to apples and ruminate on why one orchard deals with a problem better than another.

Why is it that Australia, a country not exactly founded under the most impressive of purposes, handles its liquor better than we do? How can the UK with its millions of pubs be that much more responsible than we are? How in the name of all that's holy can anyone claim that Russia handles its vodka more responsibly?

Yet, strangely enough, none of these countries have the same per capita deaths of younger adults due to alcohol-related issues.

Although I'm completely in favor of lowering the drinking age to at least allow 19 and up to drink (maybe 18 if you're drinking on a college campus and have a college ID or something), I'm not really sure even 20 years of such a law would tame our Girls Gone Wild, beer bonging, upside down melonball culture.

I believe this because of Deadwood.

Granted, Deadwood is only slightly more historically accurate than The Amityville Horror or Macbeth, but as in all great creative works of art inspired by reality, this great HBO show reveals deeper, harsher truths about our country.

Ours is a wild land. We're a wild people. In some ways, we white-ass pilgrims brought civilization to the untamed expanse. But in others, the untamed expanse made us wild. Don't mess with Texas. Don't tread on me. Outta my cold dead hands. Shoot first, ask questions later. We love our tough talk, and we love our tough leaders.

Even me, the wussified, girly-man who prefers loving to fighting and negotiation to nukular aggression, found myself loving outlaw cutthroat businessman Al Swearengen more and more with each season of the show. In season one, I rooted fully for Seth Bullock, the lawman with a slight anger management problem, and feared, nay loathed, Swearengen. But the farther along the series goes, the more you realize Swearengen (as depicted in the show) isn't amoral or even completely unethical. He's brilliant, and he has adapted his own laws and priorities to the wild and untamed civilization in which he lives.

We don't particularly like laws or rules, kings or dictators. We like things the way we like 'em, and screw you if you wanna try to tame us or confine us.

When your entire country is born under such conditions, how can we expect to be anything less than what we are: gun-totin', whisky-swiggin', 2-minute sex with multiple partner-havin', flag-wavin' yahoos.

Legalizing alcohol or lowering the age limit won't curb the binge drinking. Not much, anyway. Legalizing drugs won't decrease drug use, although it might make the underworld a little less violent. Taking away guns probably won't keep us from shooting a whole heap o' people every year.

We is what we is, methinks.

"Party Pit" is from The Hold Steady's album Boys and Girls in America. "Drinkin' Problem" is from Lori McKenna's album Unglamorous. Both are available at iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 sites and should be purchased forthwith if'n you c*#ksuckers know what's good for ya.