PI: Would you like some elitism with your soccer?

Steven Wells’s Guardian blog entry this morning on English attitudes toward American soccer provoked a rather visceral reaction from this quarter. Of course, provocation was his goal, calling out traditionalists as xenophobic “little-Englanders” simply afraid that resurgent U.S. soccer could displace Britain from yet another field in which it regarded dominance as its birthright (capitalism, naval warfare, etc.). And he might have a point.

But it takes chutzpah to condemn prejudice in one paragraph and in the next type this:

Public toilets, atheism, publicly funded radio and association football - these are all things of which no society can have too much. Witness the fact that soccer-playing America is massively liberal, loving, caring, socially conscious and nice. While soccer-hating America consists of increasingly isolated gangs of Bush- supporting, bible-bashing, gun-crazed, dungaree wearing, banjo-playing, quasi-fascist chicken-lovers and their twelve fingered, pin-headed, cyclopic, drooling monster children.

Bias and hyperbole aside, he inadvertently touched on a key conflict of English-speaking American soccer fanhood — one that was easily observable during the 2006 World Cup, when U.S. political blogs that otherwise condemn spectator team sports as low culture (and don’t even ask about NASCAR) professed sudden admiration for a European-based game. Soccer has an internationalist cachet in America that no other sport can match; that self-identification was virtually irresistible to the young, urban, well-travelled and politically alienated.

But if soccer support in English-speaking America becomes strongly associated with the cultural elitism of urban left-wing Euro-wannabes, the sport’s commercial horizon is awfully close.

Can MLS succeed as a niche product for this fanbase plus the Hispanic market? At its current scale, perhaps — it’s a well-off demographic. And maybe that’s fine. But if MLS wants to overtake the National Hockey League and join the top ranks of North American sport, it needs to be accessible to the casual fan who’d just as soon go to a baseball or American football game. That won’t happen if you have to buy a whole set of cultural assumptions with your ticket, when you’d rather just have a hot dog and a beer.

This post constituted my first entry over at PitchInvasion.net, a new blog hosted by Thomas Dunmore focusing on soccer fan culture. Give it a read — it’s well worth your while.

Post out of tune

As I write this, George Allen is holding onto a twelve thousand-vote lead in the Virginia Senate race. He might win, he might not. I’m sick of him either way, I just didn’t want to put the Democrats in control of the Senate.

The Washington Post needs a good kicking, though, for its treatment of Virginia regionalism in the final weeks of the campaign. Sunday’s inset under the front page banner headline, titled Md., Va. Challengers’ Fate May Depend on Inner Suburbs’ Muscle, was perhaps the most clear in its arrogant dismissal of downstate opinions as relevant to the national picture.

In the case of Northern Virginia, dramatic growth and changing political attitudes that set it more in tune with the rest of the country than the rest of Virginia are vital to Democrat James Webb’s challenge of Republican Sen. George Allen.

Let’s do a little bit of math here, starting from estimates of a basically even country and state (which seem obvious). I’m going to slightly overstate Northern Virginia’s size for the sake of estimation, and call it 1/3 of the state’s population. I’ll further estimate that downstate is roughly 60-40 Republican, which puts them 10% out of sway with an even country. If that’s the case, downstate Republicans are 40% (3/5 * 2/3 == 6/15) of the state, and downstate Dems are about 27% (2/5 * 2/3 == 4/15). To make up for this kind of a split and get it to even, Northern Virginia has to go 70/30 to the Democrats (NoVA R: 1.5/15 or 10% of the state; NoVA D 3.5/15 or 23%).

To boil that down: NoVA is considerably less than half the state’s population. If the state is even, and NoVA is to provide an even counterweight at a statewide level to the Republican downstate, NoVA has to be MUCH more disproportionately blue than the rest of the Commonwealth is red. The country would have to be 55% Democratic to make this kind of divergence even (15 points either way). It’s not.

So, Posties, give us a break with the superiority crap. NoVA isn’t more in tune with the rest of the country, it’s just more in tune with the rest of your country — which doesn’t appear to stretch much more than 100 miles or so from the tracks of the Northeast Corridor.

More Randomness!

The Fill BTN With Random Stuff ‘06 campaign continues this week, as we again wander North America through the text of a blog.

Up in the True North, Canadians elected a Conservative government for the first time since 1993 on Monday. Prime Minister-designate Stephen Harper immediately provoked a minor spat with the USA by announcing plans to outfit three new naval icebreakers for Arctic duty; Canada claims sovereignty between the lines of longitude of its northernmost points of land all the way up to the North Pole, a claim generally ignored by everyone else on the planet; the Arctic was a submariners’ playground throughout the Cold War, and various countries have continued to sail below the icepack since. For my money, this is, as usual for Canada, a domestic political play thinly disguised as a foreign-policy dispute. Firing off a few small-caliber shots at America never hurt a Canadian pol, and Harper is in a tenuous position as the leader of a minority right-wing government that will have to work point-by-point coalitions with three opposing left-wing parties: the traditional rival Liberals who they forced out of power, the wacky near-socialist New Democrats, and the separatist Bloc Québécois. The Liberals in particular knocked Harper off in 2004 by trying to paint him as “George W. Bush-lite”, and cut into a once-big Tory lead this year the same way; being mildly irritating to us before he even gets into office is probably sound strategy. It’s vaguely disappointing, but Harper merits withholding judgement for now; if he can stay away from the spite that characterized Canadian Liberal governments’ transborder relations, he’ll be a major upgrade for both countries.

Read More »

Katrina Sidenotes

I’m going to hit some side issues to the hurricane/flood disaster down on the Gulf Coast, because I’m not sure my thoughts on the direct situation will be helpful to anyone involved. I’ll just suggest heading over to UMCOR or the American Red Cross, breaking out the plastic and skipping a few meals out this month.

One of the key points of conflict on the governmental response has been the functionality of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Questions have especially been raised over whether its capabilities were reduced as a result of its post-9/11 alignment as a component of the Department of Homeland Security. Some people are suggesting that FEMA be returned to its Clinton-era status as an independent Cabinet-level agency.

Mid-July Roundup

At this point, I think we can conclusively say that getting engaged and buying regular tickets for a major league baseball team is bad news for a blog. Tough luck, but the blog’s just going to have to deal — or, as I said in a comment on this site a few months ago, “Priorities, m’boy, priorities.”

But let’s do a quick tour, just to see what interesting stuff has gone on while I laid down on the job.

• Several of my co-workers are native Chinese speakers, and their cube-to-cube chatter exhibits a fascinating linguistic phenomenon called code switching. A conversation that starts in Chinese might shift into English for a sentence or two, then (apparently) seamlessly back and forth again several times in the span of 90 seconds.
  I could tell more if I understood Chinese, but even with my complete lack of knowledge in that arena, it seems to me that work-related segments — and not just technical terms, but talk about work hours, time off etc. — come out in English, while parts that I would expect to be personal (just by contextual positioning, tone of voice etc.) are usually in Chinese. It’s quite interesting to listen to as an amateur linguist.
• Bret is on a roll these days (though it’s said so for a while on the hot dog cart). He’s blogging up a storm during his last summer of freedom before he joins the Metro-riding masses. Pay him a visit, read the comments, and check out his Flickr photostream as well.
• Amy has also been in high gear recently, despite (or perhaps because of) her pregnancy and move from Paris to Arizona by way of the East Coast. I’m still weighing my bets for the baby birth stats pool.
• A few weeks ago, Eric at Off Wing and Ryan at Distinguished Senators took note of the Nats’ high no-show rate — people buy tickets and then fail to show up for the game. I’ve contributed to this problem several times myself, and I suspect the size and inflexibility of the Nats’ ticket packages are the main causes. Almost all MLB teams offer fixed packages down to as few as 7 or 8 games, while this season the Nats only offered one set of 41 games or two different sets of 20 games. In addition, several other teams offer “make-your-own” packages — essentially bulk tickets, where you could buy ten at a particular price level and use them any way you like, whether it be ten seats at one game or a single seat for ten games. The Nats offered nothing of the sort. Hopefully, this can be attributed to the rushed nature of the move from Montreal, rather than a deliberate attempt to force buy-up; if so, next year should offer more options (and I’ll be more likely to purchase a package again). My fondest wish? Trade-in, where if I knew in advance that I’d miss a game, I could trade my tickets in for equal value on a game I could attend. With lower-deck patrons taking advantage as well as upper-deck customers like me, the Nats would then have the opportunity to resell expensive seats to walk-up fans, who right now must buy seats at my level or cheaper due to the full-season lower-deck sellout. Win-win, right?
• While I still don’t drink coffee or any of its derivatives, I’ll second Monday’s D103.com endorsement of the Starbucks Mint Mocha Chip Frappucino by adding a BTN endorsement of its coffeeless counterpart, the Mint Chocolate Chip creme-based Frappucino. Like Daryl, I have trouble with Starbucks’ pretentious sizing scheme. But now that I rattle off a fourteen-syllable drink order (at 29 cents per syllable!) without blinking, it seems that emphasizing “medium” over “grande” crosses the line between principled and passive-aggressive.
• Karl Rove / Valerie Plame / Joe Wilson: yawn. Lileks is right on this one — even I can’t make myself care, and I both follow politics and work inside the Beltway.

I’d promise more content soon, but you wouldn’t believe it if I did. So you’ll have to be satisfied that photos from Lake J and Baltimore are coming… sometime. Hopefully “sometime” will be before next month, when Cleveland/Cedar Point, Roanoke and western Maryland will join the photo queue in successive weekends.