GOPPER MOM’S SPORTING NIGHTMARE

A soccer mom is a middle-class mother who makes it possible for her child to safely play a gentle version of soccer. The typical soccer mom will steer her child away from "niggerball" sports, like basketball and American football, and instead chauffeur her delicate offspring to soccer practice in a hybrid station wagon or SUV, all the time protecting their fragile self-esteem by acting as cheerleader. 

Ann Coulter is definitely not a soccer mom. In fact quite the opposite – she is a “GOPper Mom” with millions of GOP-affiliated readers who go on safe little mind trips in her roomy and comfortable columns, where they can safely indulge in harmless conservative politics that protect their fragile self-esteem as “Americans,” and are spoon-fed pulped low-hanging fruit and coded racism while being kept well away from the real thing. If actual racism is ever required by “GOPper Mom” there are always the French, enemies of Israel, or just “foreigners” to fall back on.

Now GOPper Mom, sensing the faint unease of her sensitive charges – mainly middle-aged and elderly conservatives of limited sophistication – has taken aim at soccer, which I will hereafter refer to by its proper name of "football," because "soccer" is to football what "ni##er" is to African American. 

    

Would never play football.

The American Conservative is a pathetic creature. It expresses its racial identity awkwardly and timorously, mainly through passive actions such as “White flight” and suburban herding. Its moral identity comes from a universalist, Middle-Eastern faith that typically instills a deep sense of guilt and self-loathing, while its totemic identity is appended onto a series of confusing and ineffectual symbols and abstractions.

This can also be seen in the poor creature’s sporting affiliations, most of which are for sports that are dominated by people of a race the American Conservative would never actually associate with socially. This is all part of America’s guilt-driven sporting caste system: Better to pay Le Bron James tens of millions of dollars to shoot hoops than have him do your brain surgery for you or fly your passenger jets. 

No mention of soccer in these important documents.

For the American Conservative, football is a problem as it threatens this racial caste system, first because Whites (or near Whites) dominate the sport, and secondly it is international, making it difficult for America to transform it into a cozy, domestic Black-dominated sport as they have done through the “Galapagosization” of their other main sports that the rest of the World has little interest in. If football were to become the dominant sport in the USA, Blacks would no longer have their assured sporting enclave. The ghetto walls would be breached.

TV viewing figures for the World Cup suggest that football is starting to appeal to Americans a lot more than people like Coulter are comfortable with. 

Coulter’s criticisms of football are so stupid and blatantly absurd that they don’t even need to be refuted. They simply reveal the woman’s mind-bending ignorance (of sport). Reading her article is like watching a clown throwing cream pies in its own face while pouring a bucket of water down its pants. Her main “criticisms” are as follows:

• There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability
• Everyone just runs up and down the field and, every once in a while, a ball accidentally goes in
• Girls can play with boys
• Not enough goals
• You can't use your hands in soccer
• It is connected to Liberals
• It's foreign and evokes the French revolution and mass murder

But why waste any more time with GOPper Mom’s inane babblings? There have been much more intriguing critiques of football, like that of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who once wrote that, "Soccer is popular, because stupidity is popular." All sports, of course, allow stupid people to converse knowledgeably about something – with a few exceptions, Ann. But the very thing that Borges liked least about football was its intense fan culture and affirmative mass mindset, which he viewed as a substitute religion and equated with elements of nationalism, fascism, and Peronism.

"There is an idea of supremacy, of power, [in soccer] that seems horrible to me," he wrote. The potency of football in creating a mass, positive identity has had several manifestations. In the case of Brazil – an essentially diverse and deeply divided country – it has served as a unifying factor and source of collective pride, with Brazilian teams typically featuring a good cross section of the country’s diverse population and thereby helping to defuse or distract social pressures. Other multiracial states, like France and England, have with less success, also tried to use the national team in a similar way to create a collective multiracial identity.

But, while it is possible to create such artificial statist identities, the tribalistic aspect of football is always bubbling away underneath the surface, and threatening to connect with and express true tribal identities.

It is for this reason that that FIFA and the various football associations have to constantly run endless anti-racism campaigns, while European governments have connived at the internationalization of the sport through a virtual international free market in players in order to create multiracial teams of interchangeable superstars as objects for the fans.

Despite this, football in Europe often serves as a means of expressing localist, racialist, and sectarian identities. It is no wonder, then, that American conservatives, like Coulter, with their fake sense of national consciousness, sub-racist leanings, and loathing for true, organic identities feel unspeakable horror at the rise of the sport. 

Colin Liddell
Alternative Right
28th June, 2014