Soccer, Football, and the New Post-Colonialism

Although I put my future happiness at risk by admitting it, I confess that I missed all of Algeria’s games in the World Cup. Yes, even the spectacular, save-the-day, Landon Donovan goal in the ninety-first minute of the match with the US. Although I am keeping one eye on the proceedings, that’s about all I can afford at the moment; and when I do commit to watching a match, it’s inevitably a daylong affair, as viewing space in Brooklyn is now coming at something of a premium, and once you stake out a space, you don’t want to let it go. I watched Brazil/Cote d’Ivoire at Madiba, the South African joint on Dekalb in Fort Greene, and was overwhelmed by the throng. Friends that work at restaurants throughout our fine borough report a dramatic tide of customers, the ebb and flow coinciding with FIFA’s schedule.

I don’t remember it being like this, last time around. Granted, I was leaving New York in July 2006, and I don’t remember much of the period immediately before. What I do remember, however, is that World Cup spectatorship was a relatively isolated phenomenon, with fans gathering in a few scattered bars on the Lower East Side, where the expatriates of the professional class would gather to watch the action and commiserate over being lost in a sea of red, white, and blue ignorance. I was still working in a restaurant at the time, one on the Upper West Side. For the duration of El Mundial, I witnessed an all out war for control of the television over the bar, with the largely Mexican and Central American kitchen and floor staff battling the bourgeois, largely white, American bar crowd. For some reason I still can’t entirely fathom, in this particular establishment, the bar patrons loved to watch golf, a sport that proceeds with all the kinetic energy of a caterpillar in its pupa stage. Yet, when the kitchen staff managed to commandeer the television for the hour or so between the lunch and dinner shifts—the point when the restaurant was at its most informal—the bar patrons would complain, at great length, about the tedium of soccer, about how they just didn’t understand the game, and about the enthusiasm of its fans. How, they wondered, could something so boring mean so much, to so many people? Soccer fanaticism confirmed my bar patrons in their jingoism because, once you assume that soccer is inherently boring, the only possible answer to their question is that people in the rest of the world are crazy—which is something that Americans are generally inclined to believe.

Or at least they were. It’s obviously still too early to tell, but I’m beginning to wonder if something has changed. And, keep in mind that I am, at best, a gloomy, cynical, disheartened wretch. I don’t trade in gooey sentiment or hopeful sloganeering. I believe in misery, and I believe that there is more than enough reason to be miserable, at the moment. That said, it seems like something is shaking loose. Americans have a very conflicted relationship to the game they call soccer (a word that somehow derives, I’ve learned from Brett Baldwin, from the game’s official moniker “association football”) and, even when American interest in the game has been low, American attitudes toward football/soccer have generally been as political as those of more rabid fans around the world. As my restaurant example suggests, a myriad of social, cultural, political, and economic conflicts are manifest in and through soccer in the United States, even if the lines of class affiliation and national identity characteristic of European football are not as clear, and even if some people claim not to care. At present, this dynamic shows up in the right-wing’s attempt to link the World Cup to President Obama’s “secular-socialist-Islamist” conspiracy. By forcing us to watch soccer, Glenn Beck argues, Comrade Obama is trying to turn America into Europe. Next thing you know, we’ll have Parisian-style public toilets lining Fifth Avenue! Good thing we’ve got the Second Amendment so we can defend ourselves against such government overreach.

Yet, for all that bluster, the ratings for the World Cup are up. The US/England game was watched by more people than the opening game of the NBA finals. The same applies, however, even to matches in which pretty boy douchebag Landon Donovan is not playing. The Brazil/Cote d’Ivoire game, for instance, was broadcast not on ESPN or ESPN2 but on ABC, in the middle of the afternoon, on a Sunday, the zero hour of American sports spectatorship. Perhaps more significantly (although it is a big country, so maybe this is no trick) Americans make up the largest portion of spectators in South Africa. None of this is conclusive, of course, yet it is suggestive, and the media who cover these things have wasted no time suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Americans are finally getting into it, that the beautiful game might finally be resonating on these shores, that—like it or not, Glenn Beck—football’s coming home.

Over at The Nation, Dave Zirin has been very attuned to the cultural politics of this moment, and I think he got it right when he argued that the rise of soccer fandom corresponds, in part, the subtle demographic shifts that have taken place, in the United States, since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. Right-wing opposition, Zirin posits, stems from the same phenomenon, as white Americans seek to fortify their already slim majority against Lothrop Stoddard’s “rising tide of color.”

While this explains a great deal, I’m not sure it’s the whole story. And what I’m wondering about now—and what gives me pause and opportunity for hope—is whether or not the generational and demographic shifts that are very clearly at work, in this moment, can be thought in terms of the waning of American empire. That’s a big, broad, not entirely coherent thought, so let me try to parse it out.

About two years ago, I had my introduction to American studies seminar read a short article, by Immanuel Wallerstein, called “The Curve of American Power.” First published in the New Left Review in 2006, “Curve” is a condensed version of the argument that Wallerstein has been making for years; namely, that alternations in the nature of global political economy threaten the bases of American political and economic power. Without getting into the K-waves of it, the argument is fairly straightforward: since 1945, America’s global political and economic power has rested upon its ability to dictate the terms of the world system. With European and East Asian industrial plants destroyed during World War II, the US became the producer, financier, and political broker of the so-called First World. Because of the presumed stability of the US government and economy, the dollar became the global reserve currency. Profits from US global supremacy were redistributed, domestically, into the development of the infrastructure and consumer culture we have come to associate with the suburban American middle-class. Such downward redistribution of wealth, coupled with the cultural politics of the Red Scare, stemmed dissent, thus keeping production humming.

Since the early 1970s, however, when European and Asian industrial capacity began to exceed that of the US, American hegemony over the international system has been threatened. American consumer culture and political power rested upon the ability to control the international market and, once forced to compete with other industrial powers, that power began to fade. In order to preserve profits, corporations began looking for ways to circumvent the power of labor, while the government began searching for new strategies through which to preserve America’s political might. This is, in David Harvey’s rendering, also the moment in which the financialization of the economy began to take shape. As competition rendered assets in the “real economy” less and less profitable, investors begin inventing derivatives based upon credit and currency markets, leading to ever more risky investment schemes that are less and less connected to the materiality of production. The edges of these pieces are somewhat jagged, yet they add up to a fairly clear picture. American power has been on the wane since the mid-1970s, Wallerstein argues, and every national security strategy, from then until now, has been predicated upon slowing its decline.

My rendering of the argument is piecemeal, at best, but then, so is Wallerstein’s. The point that I wanted to get to, though, is that, in sharing this line of argument with my undergraduates, I set off a firestorm. My students—my highly intellectual, politically savvy, bright and committed students—had a reaction to Wallerstein that was as visceral as it was bizarre (at least, to me). “You mean we’re not the best anymore?” Although we analyzed the article on its merits and its flaws, the general tone of our conversation followed this line. “How is it possible?” “I’ve never thought of that.” “How can we not be the best?”

Americans do not think of themselves as an imperial people, yet they have the imperial habit of thinking the best of themselves at all times, in all situations and—fair or not—the domestic arrangements of the last seventy-odd years have helped support this illusion. And in those moments when it was becoming painfully clear that America was not “the best,” that it had some painful, profound challenges to face, we Americans ducked those through fits of magical thinking. We ask for more government services even as we argue against government; we ask for high levels of super efficient government service, yet we refuse to accept the necessity of paying taxes, even when it means that our market-based expenses might be decreased. We elect Reagan to protect us from the downer Carter. We respond to President Obama most when he is telling us things we want to hear—about our goodness, our greatness, and our willingness to sacrifice. But, of course, we don’t want to sacrifice. The last great gasp of collective belief in this America might have come after 9/11, when it was—at least for a moment—possible to believe that our hurt was greater than the whole world, that no one had never been hurt like us before, that the worst thing ever had happened, and it had happened to us. Because we were great and good.

There is a generational fault line running through American culture, and the crack begins at the point where American power made its hairpin curve. On one side are those Americans who grew up in a world in which they could believe that they were at the top of the pyramid; on the other are those of us who have been told, our entire lives, that America is the greatest, even after that statement stopped matching our material reality. Those of us on the other side of that line, those of us born after such certainties were possible, have been slowly waking to the realization of our national decline. Some may celebrate it, others may not; everyone might have different ideas about what it means, but one way or another, we are losing our illusions, and that loss opens up new vistas, new possibilities.

At the US Social Forum, this week, the cry has gone out: “Another world is possible; another US is necessary.” I want to believe that, if some Americans are watching soccer, their interest indexes a new consciousness in formation, and of a chance of a truly post-colonial America.