The name of this blog is a goal, not a description.  No, not a goal either, that's impossible. More like a reminder.  A reminder to write about "Big Stuff."  I have felt compelled to at least mention things like the earthquake in Haiti, even if I have nothing to say about them. In writing about the soul I have written more about "pop" culture in the last couple months than I had in the previous eight years: college tackle football (out of season, too), professional basketball (out of season), top-40 music, country music. The name of this blog is a curse, too.

And so, speaking of goals as this post was begun the World Cup had just. Americans prefer their tackle football to futbol. I do too, although I like futbol.  America is very nearly alone in the world in its disinterest in soccer.  I used to think it was because soccer was a "foreign" game.  But the English invented it and we Americans have borrowed heavily from England and don't consider England as foreign as, say, Spain.  Soccer wasn't invented until the mid-nineteenth century though and by then America was ninety years independent of England and had fought two wars against her. Maybe that was it, I thought, maybe we only borrowed from England what was there in 1776 but that doesn't explain the popularity in America of the Beatles one hundred and ninety years after independence.

Tackle football is by far the most popular of our four "major" team sports.  I get that (I think).  It is by far the most violent of the four major sports and infinitely more so than soccer and America is a violent place.  Football is also land-acquisitive.  The goal is to get across the goal line but in doing so a team must "eat up yardage."  You have to possess and hold land.  Americans like to possess and hold land, and other property. There is no near equivalent of this in futbol or the other three major sports in America. Tackle football, to me, is so quintessentially American that it does not surprise me that it is the one American sport that has even less appeal abroad than soccer has here.

But I have no compelling theory about the unpopularity of soccer in America.  I don't know what it says, if anything, about the soul of America.  And so I just record that on this date the World Cup between the Netherlands and Spain was played and at the conclusion of this post it was 0-0 at halftime.