How World Cup Soccer Explains My World

A few days ago, I was watching the Ghana-United States soccer (or, as I like to call it, anti-American football) game at my in-laws' house, with various members of my wife's family around and about, with my brother-in-laws Mark and Patrick and I following the game pretty much from start to finish. None of us are what you would call avid fans of the world's most popular game. We're all passionate Saints and LSU football supporters. Mark also gets pretty nuts for college basketball, I'm probably the most diehard baseball fan, and Patrick, from what I hear, really developed an affinity for curling while watching the most recent Winter Olympics.



Second round of the World Cup, single elimination, loser goes home round, featuring two relative upstarts on a stage typically reserved for Europeans and South Americans, not Africans and North Americans. I casually mention that I'm rooting for Ghana, for a variety of historical and political reasons (only African team left from the first World Cup hosted by an African country, first African colony to declare independence in 1957, their team name [the Black Stars] is a reference to Harlem Renaissace-era black nationalist Marcus Garvey). They know me, right, they know that even my sports loyalties are informed by politics to a greater degree than most. But my rooting for the team playing the United States, even in a sport that commands minimal attention from them, really seemed to cross a line of disbelief for them. It wasn't hostility, mind you, just a palpable sense of a lack of understanding on their part. I mulled it over for a while, and this is what I'm thinking.



My geo-cultural identification operates on two levels, I believe. I am a citizen of the Greater New Orleans area, which is both an insular world unto itself and, I would argue the hub of a region that extends north of Lake Ponchartrain, west almost to Baton Rouge, east into the Missippi Gulf Coast and south to the Gulf of Mexico. I am also a proud Louisianan, born and raised and then left briefly and then cam back and then left for a long while and then came back again. Lived in the major cities as well as Frierson and Gueydan and Haughton. I am fiercely, passonately ambivalent about the legacy of Huey Long. Jim Garrison, too. But I sure as hell hope Governor Bobby Jindal and Attorney General Buddy Caldwell can tap into their persistence and sense of moral outrage in the coming months and years of the showdown at BP Corral.

So, to return to the sports theme, my love for the Saints and (to a much lesser degree) LSU is obviously tied in with this love of New Orleans/Louisiana as place and region. Wear the t-shirt, wave the flag, jump and down and scare my daughter because I have instantly lost my rudimentary knowledge of basic physics and am personally attempting to recover the fumble I see in the televised game from....Buffalo, for instance. I think that experience is similar to what many Americans feel as patriotism, and what certainly will be defined as so by the right-wing pundits looking to score quick, button-pushing political points. More benignly, my two brothers-in-law, not right-wing zealots at all, just seemed flabbergasted that I was not embracing the U.S. soccer team in the same way we all do the Saints and LSU, as our natural birthright.

I hope your seatbelt was on, because we swerve over into politics again. As regular readers of this blog (hi, Mom!) know, I have been preoccupied, perhaps obsessed, with the idea of the revocation of the BP's corporate charter as punishment for the ongoing spill for which they have publicly acknowledged full responsibility. This would be in addition to criminal prosecution, pending the results of criminal investigations. It is my understanding that corporations are chartered in each state in which they operate, and it seems like the state legislatures of at least Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida would take the bold step of charter revocation. But on the website greenchange.org (which may or not be an arm of the Green Party), writer Gary Ruskin advocates for the revocation of BP's federal charter, which is filed with the state of Delaware. Therefore, the legislature of the first state to ratify the United States Constitution (on Decenber 7, 1787) has the power to apply the death penalty to this sociopathic corporate criminal. And let us not forgot that the attorney general of Delaware is Beau Biden, son of the notorious loose cannon who is the proverbial heartbeat away from the Oval Office, Vice President Joe Biden. Sure, he is bought and sold by the multinational financial interests which make Delaware the go-to state for polluting, tax-dodging, downsizing megacorporations, but anyone is subsceptible to grassroots agitatin', especially given the gravity of this situation and the anemic response to this point by the Obama Administration.

Still, it would be a shame if the momentum had to shift completely to the federal level, effectively acknowledging that Louisiana legislators and prosecutors are unable or unwilling to take on such a crucial constituency. Here in New Orleans, concerned citizens have cheered as U.S. Attorney Jim Letten has successfully investigated and prosecuted one crooked politician and criminal police officer after another. But it highlights the inability of local and state officials to do the same, time after time after time.

So here's a modest proposal. They say hair keeps growing after death, right? How about if the bodies of Huey Long and Jim Garrison are exhumed, the accumulated hair cut and stuffed into oil-fighting boom, accompanied by clipped hair from every statewide office-holder and state legislator, as well as local and parish officials from the most affected areas (sorry Mitch, I forgot you're a bit tonsorially challenged). That single boom, held as high as the Vince Lombardi trophy in Sean Payton's arms, will be the single symbolic fetish object for the corporate charter revocation movement, and, who knows, maybe the post-corporate revolution that follows.

Happy 4th of July, folks. But, at the same time, Go Black Stars!