NPR’s by Dave Zirin responds to right-wing commentators who during World Cup arrive like clockwork to take their shots at soccer.
“It doesn’t matter how you try to sellit to us,” Glenn Beck, whom Zirin calls the Prom King of new right. “It doesn’t matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn’t matter how many bars open early, it doesn’t matterhow many beer commercials they run, we don’t want the World Cup, we don’t like the World Cup, we don’t like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.” G. Gordon Liddy said on hisradio program: “Whatever happened to American exceptionalism?”
Saying, as Beck does, “We don’t like soccer” when it is by far the most popular youth sport in the United States is likesaying, “You know what else American kids hate? Ice cream!” For adults soccer is also growing because people from Latin America, Africa, and the West Indies have brought their love of the beautifulgame to an increasingly multicultural United States.
Zirin hopes for a successful World Cup run by the USA, because it would be high comedy to see Beck and Friends caught in a vice betweentheir patriotic fervor and their nativist fear.