I really like the positive blog postings from all of the foreigners who came to the states for the World Cup, and have been rhapsodizing about all the great things they’ve discovered about the USA. From the Waffle House to Buc-ee’s to the size of the country, the diversity of the landscape and the friendliness of the American people, they’ve been citing a lot of everyday things that we take for granted.
It’s especially nice to see our nation through their eyes after so many years of relentless negativity about America. The elites in Europe have been sneering at us even as they depend on us for their defense, and for many of the inventions, innovations and trade that have enriched their lives. Too many of the millions of illegals who have been coming here criticize everything about America even as they praise the home countries that they couldn’t wait to get away from.
And of course, way too many of our own citizens don’t appreciate our great country. Some because they went to college and were indoctrinated into the trendy leftist disdain for everything good, healthy and normal, and some because they’ve been spoiled, and take the blessings of living here for granted, as we all tend to do.
Against that backdrop of international disfavor and domestic carping and self-flagellation, it is incredibly refreshing to see appreciative visitors, wide-eyed with wonder and enthusiasm about everything they see as they travel across America.
On the other hand, I don’t like that some of these blogs are phony, or at least exaggerated, and driven by self-serving motives. I’ve heard that at least a few of them are AI-generated, and that many more are coming from bandwagons of people who want to promote their own causes or blogs. The latter makes sense, because with so many people getting into podcasting, people are always looking to find a way to get clicks and attention.
After the wild success of a few foreigners’ podcasts that have gone viral – Freddy from Germany is a particularly famous one, but you can quickly find a half-dozen others – it couldn’t happen any other way. Americans are a huge, mostly patriotic audience, hungry for acknowledgment of the beauty of our country and the virtues of our system and culture, and for the chance to tout our hometowns and states. So catering to that hunger would inevitably draw some inauthentic copycats.
But we shouldn’t let that dampen our enthusiasm. I wrote several months ago about a wholesome British couple with a blog in which they traveled around the South, reveling in how welcoming and engaging everybody was. They were taken to gun ranges to get a taste of our pride in the Second Amendment, on boat rides to see gators or do some fishing, and to local attractions and bars and restaurants of all sorts. And this was well before the World Cup visitors and the recent spate of pro-American travel blogs.
Our country and people are mostly awesome, and it’s good to be reminded of that. Especially because if we only watch the media, we can start to think that dysfunctional hives of malcontents – LA, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, NYC, etc. – are the norm, rather than the blessedly rare exception.
Oh, and I can’t leave this topic with one more thing I hate: soccer!
Sure, it’s great that so many foreigners came here to watch soccer, but got introduced to America’s greatness instead. But it would be even better if they were here in the fall, and had the chance to see real football, so that they could realize how lame soccer is. And then renounce it, and all of its foolishness.
The latest example of soccer’s imbecility came last week, when the world soccer community (shudder) went crazy because of one momentous, epoch-defining game. It was between Cape Verde (a small island nation off the coast of Africa, with around half a million people) and Spain, which is apparently a soccer powerhouse, and a favored contender in the tournament. It turned out that tiny Cape Verde wildly over-performed in its David vs. Goliath game.
It was a classic underdog story that transcends sports, and captures the public imagination. Like the Miracle Mets of 1969, or the Miracle on Ice Olympic hockey game when the US beat the Russians, or when an unknown Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson.
And the breathless sports reporting reflected the instant-classic status of the contest. Headlines announced that “Cape Verde Pulls Off Historic Upset,” and that “Cape Verde Stuns Favorite Spain in Historic Contest,” and called it, “A World Cup Shocker.” One story began, “It may never get better than their first day at the World Cup for Cape Verde.” Grown Cape Verdian men were openly weeping with joy at the end of the game.
But before you wonder how tiny Cape Verde could defeat European powerhouse Spain, they couldn’t. And they didn’t. They tied.
I know what you’re thinking. “Martin, you hilarious, ruggedly handsome genius, only you could think up something as absurdly comic as an epic, heroic battle that ends in a tie! Are the Miracle Mets remembered because they achieved a tie in the World Series? Did euphoric chants of ‘USA! USA!’ cascade down on the stunned Russkies’ heads in 1980 because we tied them in the Olympics? Ridiculous!”
But no. I’m not making that up. They tied.
So your next thought is probably that that must have been one hell of a back-and-forth, edge-of-your-seat rollercoaster of a tie, where each team traded goal after goal, before finally collapsing in exhaustion. You’re probably guessing that the final score was something like 12-12.
But no. The game was scoreless! A zero burger! The “highlights” of the game would consist of several minutes of clips in which one team or the other got within a quarter-mile of scoring a goal…and then failed. The pride of Cape Verde and the indolent Spaniards played for 60 minutes – or however long a soccer bout lasts – and they scored the same number of goals together, as I scored by myself.
And I wouldn’t play soccer if you cut off both of my arms, and told me that that was the only sport I could ever play for the rest of my life.
So, yeah. You know everything you need to know about soccer if you just ask the question, “What would it take to achieve ‘the best it will ever get’ plaudits, and garner World War III-sized headlines in soccer?”
Because the answer is, “A scoreless freaking tie.”
In other news that I already wrote about recently, the Obama Library/Flak Tower/Ginormous Trash Compactor opened last week, and the ceremony was as obnoxious as the structure itself, and the man it honored.
First, because as the great Babylon Bee noted, “Obama’s library cruelly disenfranchises millions of black Americans by requiring photo ID for entry.”
(Just as we should never stop mocking Liz Warren’s forked-tongue fairy tales about her native ancestry, we should never stop mocking leftists who claim that blacks are incapable of getting IDs to prove their identity before they vote.)
Second, because the speeches were kicked off with that hallmark of hypocritical stupidity and lameness, the “land acknowledgment.” In this case, Valerie Jarrett – the grifter who is getting $750K per year to be a librarian at a library with almost no books in it – gave a shout-out to “the Nishinabe, the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatami” who originally occupied Chicago, I guess.
I really wish that all Americans would start heckling anybody who gives a land acknowledgment in public ever again. Something like, “Give it back, you virtue-signaling hypocrites!” or “My great-grandpa was on the Council of Two Fires, before those Council of Three Fires jackasses stole the land from him. Boo!”
However, in this case, that wouldn’t work, because any Ojibwes or Odawans who might be wandering by and get offered the Obama Library land back, would take one look at that gigantic, ugly, inverted paper shredder and back slowly away with their hands out in front of them, saying whatever is Odawan for, “No way Jose! You can keep that monstrosity.”
Third, like you, I thought that Jarrett’s opening would be hard to top when it came to unsettling comments from the dais.
But that was before I heard Obama’s odd opening words: “Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station.”
0-0-0
If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.
Martin Simpson 