I don’t watch soccer, and I can show you why baseball and football are the quintessentially American games, but it’s been a delight to read about the fun that people from around the world are having as they visit the United States for the first time to attend the World Cup matches. They are discovering that ordinary Americans are a cheerful and friendly lot, nothing like how the mass media in this nation and all throughout the world have portrayed them to be. They gasp in wonder at the grocery stores, the gas stations where you can get a meal, the diners with endless choices for full meals or breakfast all day or 10 kinds of pie or 20 kinds of sandwiches, the oddball attractions, and Americans eager to say, “Oh, you have to go see this,” and ready to give them directions too.
I know my countrymen. I like them. We have our problems, certainly, but they are not the problems that those who despise their fellow Americans suppose. Fatherlessness—a huge problem; the childlessness that goes along with it; the social dysfunctions that result. But we are no readier to go all “fascist,” whatever that is supposed to mean, since evidently the people who make the accusation do not have in mind the statism that they themselves share with the likes of Mussolini, than a Salvation Army band would be to play for a striptease. I mention the Salvation Army advisedly, because it, too, is American to the core, and its stores are centers of real social assistance, without the interference of government directors skimming their substantial take.
But the fun—it has not yet disappeared! And I ask myself where I would have taken a good crew of Scotsmen if they showed up in my hometown years ago, and I wanted them to see Americans in their natural state. My answer? A bowling alley.
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