Ann Coulter Thinks Football Is Socialist

By Dan Hancox, Guardian UK

27 June 14

Team USA may be through to the last 16, but for some, the suspiciously popular game with the round ball is leftie nonsense

ith Team USA suddenly in the round of 16, and World Cup fever allegedly sweeping the nation that football forgot, the American right has sprung into action. Determined to preserve American exceptionalism against a rising tide of baguette-munching ball-juggling pinko Europhile hippy surrender-communism, Ann Coulter has come to the rescue: "Any growing interest in soccer," she wrote to widespread amusement, "can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay."

Her reasons for hating football are manifold, and typically hilarious – chiefly, the suspiciously popular game with the round ball seems to show all the key indicators of socialism. The New York Times likes it. It's foreign. Foreigners like it. Obama likes it. It is even, somehow, "like the metric system". For arch conservatives like Coulter, the culture wars never stop, and the sudden spike in interest in the World Cup is just the latest assault on The American Way, accompanying the barrages of promiscuity, multiculturalism, Islam, R'n'B, and trains: "The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO's Girls, light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton."

It's not just that the wrong people like it – Coulter thinks football as a sport is intrinsically socialist. "In soccer," she laments, "there are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child's fragile self-esteem is bruised." Unlike the glorious sports of basketball, American football and baseball, she says, all individual talent is subsumed into the back-patting, winning-isn't-everything comradeship of football. (Because obviously, no one minds if you win or lose a game of football – and at the full-time whistle, after meditating for a while, the players pool their wages with the fans, before shyly retiring to their modest homes and ascetic lifestyles.)

In any case, are American sports really a Randian festival of untrammelled capitalist heroics, as she claims? Besides being more arcane, bureaucratic and hyper-managed than anything the Soviet Union ever dreamt up, the draft system used in most American team sports sends the very best young players to the clubs that did most poorly the previous season, in order to establish parity and fairness the following season. Have you ever heard of anything more socialist in your life? As if that wasn't enough, the NFL, MBA and NHL even have salary caps! Negotiated by – wait for it – trade unions! The MLB, meanwhile, has something called a "luxury tax" on its richest teams. What kind of lefty nonsense is this?

Of course, people always project their politics on to sport. Without naming and shaming, during the USA's game against Portugal, I saw one leftwing tweeter ask with plaintive, stony-faced sincerity "how can anyone be supporting the imperialists?" – as if Clint Dempsey had personally signed off on the CIA's covert military operations in Nicaragua (the poor lad has enough to handle with his burgeoning rap career).

What Coulter hasn't noticed is that even in the global game, Team USA is comporting itself with its usual bombastic exceptionalism, strutting around with an eagle tattooed on its chest. "I believe that we will win!" is exactly the kind of ridiculous army recruitment advert of a chant that you would expect from our cousins across the Atlantic.

Admittedly, there has been a bit of sour grapes in the English response to the success of Dempsey et al, and no doubt we will be treading those grapes into wine and drinking ourselves into oblivion if Team USA get much further – they are, as today's typically excitable NY Daily News front page informs us, now just "four wins from glory".

In the unlikely event that they do win the World Cup, I can see Coulter coming round to football. In the second verse of the The Right Brothers' tribute, I'm In Love With Ann Coulter, the ultra-conservative duo inadvertently sum up the appalling partisan burlesque that is modern American politics: "I've been driving liberals crazy / I bet I've quoted half her book at work / To those godless jerks who can't debate me". Like the woman herself, Coulter's armchair fans are completely unwavering in their faith, shout themselves hoarse, and are chauvinistic to the point of comical absurdity in their hatred of their opponents. Sound like anyone you know?

What We Can Learn From Lawrence of Arabia

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company

27 June 14

s fears grow of a widening war across the Middle East, fed by reports that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) envisions a region-wide, all controlling theocracy, we found ourselves talking about another war. The Great War – or World War I, as it would come to be called — was triggered one hundred years ago this month when an assassin shot and killed Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Through a series of tangled alliances and a cascade of misunderstandings and blunders, that single act of violence brought on a bloody catastrophe. More than 37 million people were killed or wounded.

In America, if we reflect on World War I at all, we think mostly about the battlefields and trenches of Europe and tend to forget another front in that war — against the Ottoman Empire of the Turks that dominated the Middle East. A British Army officer named T.E. Lawrence became a hero in the Arab world when he led nomadic Bedouin tribes in battle against Turkish rule. Peter O’Toole immortalized him in the epic movie, “Lawrence of Arabia.”

You may remember the scene when, after dynamiting the Hijaz railway and looting a Turkish supply train, Lawrence is asked by an American reporter, “What, in your opinion, do these people hope to gain from this war?”

“They hope to gain their freedom,” Lawrence replies, and when the journalist scoffs, insists, “They’re going to get it. I’m going to give it to them.”

At war’s end, Lawrence’s vision of Arab independence was shattered when the Versailles peace conference confirmed the carving of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine into British and French spheres of influence; arbitrary boundaries drawn in the sand to satisfy the appetites of empire – Britain’s Foreign Office even called the former Ottoman lands “The Great Loot.”

The hopeful Lawrence drew his own “peace map” of the region, one that paid closer heed to tribal allegiances and rivalries. The map could have saved the world a lot of time, trouble and treasure, one historian said, providing the region “with a far better starting point than the crude imperial carve up.” Lawrence wrote to a British major in Cairo: “I’m afraid you will be delayed a long time, cleaning up all the messes and oddments we have left behind us.”

Since 2003, as the reckless invasion of Iraq unfolded, demand for Lawrence’s book, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” increased eightfold. It was taught at the Pentagon and Sandhurst — Britain’s West Point — for its insights into fighting war in the Middle East. In 2010, Major Niel Smith, who had served as operations officer for the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, told The Christian Science Monitor, “T.E. Lawrence has in some ways become the patron saint of the US Army advisory effort in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

But then and now, Lawrence’s understanding of the ancient and potent jealousies of the people among whom he had lived and fought generally was ignored. In 1920, he wrote for the Times of London an unsettling and prophetic article about Iraq – then under the thumb of the British. He decried the money spent, the number of troops and loss of life, and warned that his countrymen had been led “into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information…. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It… may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”

Not for the last time in the Middle East would disaster come from the blundering ignorance and blinding arrogance of foreign intruders convinced by magical thinking of their own omnipotence and righteousness. How soon we forget. How often we repeat.