Ann Coulter is not that stupid, as she sounds: Soccer and the Empire

Ann Coulter, an outspoken right-winger, denounced soccer as anti-American and morally harmful. Her points might be seen stupid, yet, in their own ways, they are not that stupid for they show that she does know what is the formula for   cloning a rugged imperialist and possibly even a new Nazi. (The same formula is also followed almost robotically in numerous Hollywood action and Superheroes movies).

To show it, I will first digest the elements of the formula present in Coulter's repudiation of soccer, which is in fact not merely a criticism of soccer, but a defense and hence disclosure of some of the key elements of the social formula for (re)making and molding characters.

1. The making of a "brave new man" needs to start with deliberate "bruising a child's fragile self-esteem." The sense of one's self needs to be attacked and violated at an early age. A deep wound or injury is to be inflicted to the child's soul. "The prospect of either personal humiliation or major injury is required to count as a sport” and soccer doesn’t have it," Coulter, an initiate into the American social formula, complains. (Hollywood's formula is to start stories with a usually violent death of one or both child's parents and with an attack on the child's own life or, as a minimum, the child is to be collectively and publicly humiliated)

2. The child must be taught very early on that society is not make of equals, but that it is segregated into "heroes" (winners) and losers.

3. Various forms of incipient segregation (i.e., fraternities and secret societies) need to be promoted and encouraged as a badge of social prestige, status, self-esteem, and superiority (in Coulter's soft version of this rule: “Liberal moms like soccer because it’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys.”).

4. The principle of this imbued sense of superiority based on the radically injured self is that "the winner takes it all" (hence playing for the sake of playing and enjoying the game for its own sake is in Coulter's eyes decadent and anti-American: “No other ‘sport’ ends in as many scoreless ties as soccer").

5. The child ought to be taught to see himself, even if unconsciously, much as a weapon, which achieves its purpose and greatness in some violent act (now explicitly taught by some of the recent Hollywood productions). “You can’t use your hands in soccer,” Coulter says, [this] goes against “[w]hat sets man apart from the lesser beasts." In other words, one's arms are arms, and the child of the empire is taught that his violence and weaponization of his desires is what raises him above "lesser beasts."


Here is Coulter's Nazi anti-soccer catechism as presented to the public on the occasion of the World Championship of Soccer in Brazil:

“Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer … There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child’s fragile self-esteem is bruised.”
“Liberal moms like soccer because it’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys.”
“No other ‘sport’ ends in as many scoreless ties as soccer.”
“The prospect of either personal humiliation or major injury is required to count as a sport” and soccer doesn’t have it.
“You can’t use your hands in soccer,” a fact that, Coulter believes, goes against “[w]hat sets man apart from the lesser beasts,” i.e., “we have opposable thumbs.”
“The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s ‘Girls,’ light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton.”
 ”It’s foreign.”

Ann Coulter's full essay on the political and moral threats of soccer is here, together with her masterfully connecting the metric system with the guillotine and her inability to visualize 147.2 centimeters.