Down Pat

THIS is football

Everyone who’s got a brain, and there are damn few of us left, is not even that upset about Pat Robertson’s calling for the assasination of Hugo Chavez. That sort of boorish behavior by Americans is pretty old news, after all.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Robertson and his ilk are all for the revival of that odd mixture of overt theocrats and covert murderers who once dominated Latin American politics.

Yup, let’s overthrow the legally elected government of Venezuela. After all, it worked so well for us in Chile. (Remember Pinochet? He’s the one now being tried for crimes against humanity.) And how about El Salvador, where our boys murdered Bishop Romero while he was saying mass, raped and murdered a van full of American nuns, and dragged 12 Jesuit priests out of their beds one morning and shot them all in the head? All that in the name of putting a stop to godless Communism (today, read godless Islam.)

Of course, most of the victims were Catholic Christians, instead of the good ol’ American Evangelical Christians, so they probably had done something to deserve it, such as speaking out against the army’s murdering of the campesinos…or, even teaching them to read.

But, I didn’t want to belabor this. What I did want to belabor is something I read about in the Sunday Strib sports section. This was a story about the assault of some American pro football players who pissed off the wrong Germans.

It seems a bunch of American football players went into a Dusseldorf club, didn’t receive the adulation they are used to getting on First Avenue, spit on a bouncer, and left. To nobody’s surprise, except the Americans’, the Germans didn’t like this much and responded with clubs and various other weapons.

Duh.

I’ve spent some time in Germany. I’ve lived in Italy and Spain. And, if there’s one thing I’ve learned for certain, it’s that 98 percent of all American tourists walk around these countries as if they owned them. Most make no attempt to speak the language at all, not even to the point of learning that beer is cerveza and wine is vino. Or that please is por favor, per favore, or bitte. Not that hard.

But, we’re used to being the big dogs with the dollars. It hasn’t sunk in yet that the Euro is galloping ahead of the dollar in value every day. This, thanks to our government’s assumption that we’re too big to actually pay our own way in the world and that everyone else will gladly lend us the money we’re too decadent to tax ourselves to pay for the Iraq war. When we act like the big shots we think we are, the home towners somehow resent that Americans don’t even seem to acknowledge that they aren’t in Kansas any more.

In contrast, I’ve never been treated rudely in a foreign country. (Well, almost never. I have been to Paris.) But I can order beer in five languages and can carry on a conversation about football (the kind you actually play with your feet) in two and a half.

Strangely, people seem to respond nicely when you are making an effort to understand them, instead of getting pissed off when they don’t undertand you.

When you call yourself football players, or call for killing their president, they somehow find that rude. Go figure.