The Illuminated Donkey

Normally I wouldn't read an article that was blurbed with the line "In defeat, the U.S. soccer team won an epic victory: It brought America into the world of sports," but for some reason I slogged into Gary Kamiya's U.S. World Cup wrapup in Salon, which basically said that it was good that the U.S. lost, since it means we're at an equal footing with the rest of the world in the world's sport, and anyway, a win would have led to mass slaughter. ["For fans in Buenos Aires and Paris and Berlin and Sao Paulo, already chafing under a Sisyphean load of Britney CDs and Rumsfeld declarations in the Pax Americana, the prospect of the Big Bully triumphing in a sport it doesn't even give a damn about would be intolerable. The untrammelled rage of 2 billion nationalistic, testosterone-spewing males, directed at Uncle Sam? Osama bin Laden is a kindly, retired Sunday school teacher by comparison."]

Well, there's a lot of crap like that, which I'll leave to others, but the part that really caught my eye, after some comments on the U.S. "finally joining the global brotherhood of athletes on equal terms," was the following:

The beauty of the World Cup is that theoretically — and, to a greater degree than in any other sport, also in practice — any country, no matter how tiny, impoverished or geopolitically insignificant, can beat any other country. China may have more people, the U.S. may have more money, Brazil may have the proudest tradition -- no matter. Little Cameroon can smoke 'em all.

Well, I'm not much of a student of soccer history, but I don't seem to recall too many Cameroon World Cup championships, so I thought I'd check the record. Basically, the idea that the World Cup is some sort of model for world equality is pretty cracked. Four countries — Argentina, Brazil, West Germany, and Italy — have won 12 of the 16 championships to date, and have sent 21 or the 32 teams that have competed in the final game. If the favorites, Brazil and Germany, win the semis this year, those figures will become 13/17 and 23/34, hardly the festival of openness Kariya makes it out to be.