So I'm in a superdupermarket in suburban Pennsylvania and I'm staring in amused horror at a couple of middle-aged consumers sat in the cafeteria. They have their heads bowed and their hands clenched and are saying grace over a couple of slices of cold pizza. "Look!" I titter-whisper, pointing at the freak show. My American companions blink at me. They see nothing odd or strange or even remarkable. I'm the freak here.
"America is not the world," warbled Morrissey, the Lord Voldemort of pop. But America begs to differ. Most Americans (who are always stunned to learn that anywhere else does anything differently) consider their surreal wonderland - packed as it is with God-bothering gun-nuttery, soulless strip malls, mind-blinding ad saturation and froth-gobbed patriotism - to be the norm. The USA is the standard by which all other countries (especially the Europeans, with their crazy atheism, lunatic welfare states and bizarre handgun bans) must be judged. Not for nothing did the GIs in Vietnam refer to the USA as "the world".
And now and then this bites the visitor in the ass. Like when sports commentators refer to the Boston Red Sox as "world champions". Or when my friend, Dan The John Travolta Lookalike American Sports Fan, starts talking about the movie Miracle - which tells the tale of the US ice hockey team's famous victory over the USSR in the 1980 Winter Olympics.
That, says Dan, was the most glorious and famous result in the history of sports.
I tell him I've never heard of it. Dan is stunned. I tell him I'm pretty sure that almost nobody outside of North America has heard of it either. Dan is shocked. I tell him that aside from a handful of soccer and basketball players, hardly anybody outside the USA would be able to name a single current US team sports player.
And Dan starts laughing. Now he knows I'm taking the piss, the way the English always do. But I'm not. Globalisation has taken American movies, clothes, music, soft drinks and fast food to the four corners of the earth. But now globalisation has come home - and bitten American team sports in the padded, over-evolved and steroid-swollen ass.
This is the story of how the United States Of America - having won a hot war against fascism and a cold war against communism - is being slowly but surely eaten alive from the inside by socialist soccer. America's homegrown sports, like the genetically unique fauna of some long-isolated island, have no natural defences against the soccer plague. And - like the Dodo, the Tasmanian Tiger and the Passenger Pigeon - baseball, basketball and gridiron are all doomed to extinction.
The evidence is everywhere; every suburb of every city in America is dotted with soccer pitches. In many communities gridiron has ceased to exist as a youth sport. When baseball legend Joe DiMaggio died in 1999, newspapers across the US carried the same cartoon. It showed an empty baseball diamond and asked, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" And a little boy kicking a soccer ball across the deserted pitcher's mound provided the answer. In some towns the voters are actually calling for higher taxes - to build more soccer pitches. From sea to shining sea, the USA is succumbing to soccer.
It's like coca-colonialisation in reverse. Barely a week goes by without a local paper somewhere in America reporting that yet another high school has abandoned gridiron in favour of the beautiful game.
The inevitable anti-soccer backlash has been as savage as it has been futile. High-falutin' neo-cons intellectuals and knuckle-dragging internet boo-boys have combined to claim that soccer is inherently gay, feminine and communistic.
I think they're right. The rest of the world has been worried for some time that America will try and change soccer. The truth is that soccer is changing America. Socialist soccerphiles should take heart. The Presidential election does not tell the whole story. Inside the snorting, steroid-swollen, padded and armoured behemoth of George Bush's America - there's a gayer, girlier and more socialist America struggling to get out. And, (like John Kerry), it plays soccer.
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