'schland und die WM

and also my political musings on America in the context of sports, individualism and Alexis de Tocqueville–have fun everyone.

So I know that it's been more than two weeks since the World Cup (which I shall refer to as the WM–die Weltmeisterschaft–from here on out) started, but I haven't really had much of a chance to blog about it due to traveling and trying to finish presentations during that traveling. First off, let me just say how wild it is being in a country where not liking football (not gonna call it soccer, sorry not sorry) and particularly not caring about the WM is weird. As in you are very much the exception. And may I also say that I absolutely love it. I can't imagine a day where the streets of a place like Boston (or I guess a more appropriated analogy would probably be Urbana-Champaign Illinois) would close simply because the USA won a match in the WM. Emphasis on a. Not the entire thing just simply one match. That's what has been happening in Tübingen, you know when Americans aren't getting stuck in vagina statues. The Neckarbrücke (the main bridge in town) was closed for an hour yesterday simply because people were partying in the streets. A bus was caught in the middle of it, so the bus driver simply pulled out a newspaper and waited for the partying to stop. It's a crazy feeling to be in the middle of all of the hullabaloo. 

For this reason, I am glad that the WM seems to finally be catching on in America. But a friend of mine also posted an article from the Daily Beast entitled Why the Yanks Don't Get Futbol. In case you are too lazy to read the link, here is a brief summary. Essentially, the articles argues that Americans do not understand a sport like football, because football is in every sense of the word a team game. Now you may be saying or thinking, American football is a team game, basketball is a team game, baseball is a team game. What's more American than baseball. Pshaw, Americans don't understand team sports. But think about it, how much emphasis do we put on certain individuals within those teams. We talk far more frequently about Lebron James than we do about the Miami Heat. Or frequently you hear things like, another win for Aaron Rodgers and the Packers. You hear about how many homeruns Ryan Braun scored more than the actual score of the game. And you care, you care deeply about the stats of a certain player, sometimes more than the team overall. As this article puts it, for football, "the only thing that counts is the team: did they win?" The cult of individuality that characterizes many American sports simply does not exist. Thomas Müller scored a hat trick against Portugal, but you didn't hear about that. What you heard was that the Deutsche Nationalmannschaft beat Portugal 4 to 0. And that to me is incredibly refreshing. 

I read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America as a freshman in college, and despite having written this book in the 1830s (first published in 1835), I think that it still is relevant in analyzing and theorizing as to why the United States of America seems to be so much different than the rest of the western world in so many aspects. This interested freshman year, but reading this Daily Beast article, I kept on thinking about to Tocqueville.  

Some context: Tocqueville traveled to the US during in the 1830s for roughly two years and went around observing and writing about what he saw, which later became Democracy in America. One of the most interesting part for me is his discussion and musings about American Individualism. He writes, "...I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each of them withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest. Mankind, for him, consists in his children and his personal friends. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, they are near enough, but he does not notice them. He touches them but feels nothing. He exists in and for himself, and though he still may have a family, one can at least say that he has not got a fatherland."

This individualism is still alive and well. I have heard so many times "I don't want to pay for another's person XYZ" whether it be healthcare, food stamps, education, you name it. This discussion doesn't exist in Europe. There is little to no controversy over their healthcare system. Hell, even the radical right-wing parties here don't want to touch government programs like that. And I believe the only reason that controversy over these things exists in America is because of this anti-traditionalist individualism that the United States adopted pretty much at its founding. While this individualism is certainly sometimes admirable, I also think it is what is keeping us different from the rest of the western world. It is why we don't have universalized healthcare or government-funded education the way that most European countries do. I guess you can view that favorably or not, but I think that it is largely to our detriment. 

Before I thought that Tocqueville had merely made a cogent point about our political thinking, but clearly that extends far beyond even into the way that we watch sports. To extend what Nico Hines was saying in his article, Americans can't and won't appreciate football in the same way that the rest of the world does until we confront and perhaps change this individualist lenses through which we as Americans see the world. 

A small PS: Sorry if this isn't exactly what you are looking for with this blog post but as an international relations kid with a pretty serious interest in politics and political theory, I kind of like my political musings. 

A short PPS, I had no idea that Ann Coulter had written this lovely little Op-Ed for the Clarion Ledger when I was writing this.