PARODY
Parody A Tale of Two Cultures How Two Newspapers Cover the World Cup Allemagne v. EtatsUnis The green field at Pare des Princes shimmered like the lips of the virgin spring, unmistakably French,...
...Across its surface, 22 men— non-French, non-significant—scampered after a black and white ball, their existence overshadowed by the deep wisdom of the French soil, the chic of the grass...
...The rest of the world is filled with dim-witted dribblers—half of whom don't even have last names—who no sooner see a ball flying through the air than they want to stick their foreheads in its way...
...Whenever I see an American calling this game "football," I want to puke...
...Up in the press box, I sneezed, and the entire Yale English faculty got a cold...
...It may not occur to the pansy mandarins of the corporate class, but American greatness was built on the premise that God gave us arms, and we should use them...
...Meanwhile, their hordes of fans—whose lives consist of riots interrupted by welfare checks—jump up and down screeching their idiotic anthems...
...Is a ball in the back of the net a mere construct played upon by the ever-shifting fancy of our perceptions...
...As the game commenced, the score was nothingness to nothingness...
...Parody A Tale of Two Cultures How Two Newspapers Cover the World Cup Allemagne v. EtatsUnis The green field at Pare des Princes shimmered like the lips of the virgin spring, unmistakably French, innocent yet knowing, a totality bursting upon a completion...
...Is it not a slavish concession to the bourgeois production ethic...
...The score may have changed as the match progressed, but is a goal an addition or a subtraction...
...So the nation of Mark McGwire and Michael Jordan finds itself sucking up to Yugoslavia and the Netherlands in this quadrennial soccerfest...
...United States v. Germany American soldiers with names like O'Brien and O'Malley didn't die at Verdun and Bastogne so a bunch of Huns with names like Klinsmann and Mattheus could shoot soccer balls past American goalies...
...Does it not mar the Hellenic perfection of the spheric zero...
...This reporter sat in the press box munching a biscuit, remembering the soft smells of his nursemaid so many years ago in Deauville...
...Meanwhile, the Americans, vulgar, commercial, yet vital in their childish way, stood hapless before the Hessian onslaught...
...The ball was round with that marvelous roundness that round things have when they are in France...
...They sound like a bunch of banshees worshiping a potato chip...
...But, my friends, that's where America's elites have led us—into the clutches of a bunch of thick-thighed Hessians with devious elbows...
...Pierre Henri-Levy Derrida (Mercredi 27 mai...
...How did we get into this position...
...The Germans, paradoxes of angst and Anschluss, pushed from East to West (ironic echo of their Austrian cousins at Austerlitz...
...The answer is that the World Cup is the sports equivalent of the GATT: big, multicultural, run by hairless global bureaucrats, and organized to create the greatest possible humiliation for the American working man...
...And the global elites, who check their loyalties at the airport Gold Club lounges, want to merge our identity into some cosmopolitan cocktail reception...
...The full lyrics of one of their soccer songs is this: "Oh-lay, oh-lay, oh-lay, oh-lay...
Vol. 3 • June 1998 • No. 40
