Americans Conception of Time and Space and the World Cup

I watchted the World Cup Final yesterday. The biggest story of the event, short of Italy's defeat of France on penalties, was Zinidine Zidane's unexplainable chest butt with ten minutes left in the second extra time period. But a more important story (for me) and one that will probably get no mention in the post-World Cup discussion is the role of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) in the American telecast of the final. I watched Brent Musburger, a highly esteemed broadcaster (who clearly knows very little about soccer/football), begin the telecast failing to put the World Cup into its proper global context. Instead of mentioning the teams or the players involved in the event, Musburger spent several minutes re-introducing the stadium to his American audience. The Olympic Stadium in Berlin played host to the 1936 Olympics in which Hitler used to dilute the reputation of his oppressive regime. Jesse Owens infamously won four gold medals by defeating Germany's "aryan" athletes. This has continuously been used by Americans and the West as evidence to label Hitler's ethnic/racial hierarchy as ridiculous despite the fact that Jesse Owens suffered degrading segregation and discrimination in the United States before and after his achievements in Berlin.

Musburger, nevertheless, opened the ABC telecast with a short anachronistic biography of the stadium as the camera panned across Jesse Owens's inscribed name on plaques just outside the Olympic stadium denoting his four gold medals. The announcer continued to mention that Owens symbolically confronted Hitler who watched the American sprinter defeat the so-called German aryans. Musberger failed to remind audiences that in 1936, Owens's achievements critiqued America's regime as much as it did Hitler's.

But the fascinating aspect, at least for me, of the opening moments of this broadcast is that Musburger and ABC felt compelled to place an American context onto the stadium and onto the World Cup Final. They feared that the American audience, already dubious about soccer, would fail to understand the momentus occasion of the match unless it was somehow Americanized. Thus they perverted the history of the stadium and the political context of the Olympics so that Americans could "know" the match better and the "historical context" of which the game was played. There was no mention that Hitler's nazified stadium was actually the second stadium built on the site, nor any mention of the British de-nazification of the stadium after the Second World War, nor any mention of its extradornary remodeling under Shroeder's post-Cold War regime. I was left amazed wondering why ABC opened the broadcast in such a fashion. What about Zidane and his Algerian connection and the fact that Jean Marie Le Pen of the National Front had made racialized remarks in regard to Zidane, Veira, Gallas, etc. as ineffective representatives of the national team? How does this resonate with French citizens who set automobiles on fire and marched throughout all of France when Chirac's government decided not to give jobs to immigrants? Will the French national team bring a superficial unity to France's war on religion? What about Italy's players and their exemplary conduct throughout the tournament despite their clubs being found guilty of unethical sporting practices? What about the monumental event of global proportions for its own sake? Is it impossible for ABC to sell the world cup to Americans who no longer eat french fries?

I think that part of the answer for this lies in Americans' conception of space. Early in the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that Americans should generate authentic American scholars who did not look to Europe for ideas rather, they contributed American ideas that would change the discourse so long dominated by Europeans. To encourage this, Emerson claimed that America was a boundless and timeless space; Americans had a blank canvas with which to create art. Emerson's speech delivered at Cambridge in 1837 has successfully framed American attitudes about politics and culture. In the twenty-first century, however, it has become a burden to understanding.

Take for example Jay Leno's humorous "Jaywalking" in which the host of NBC's tonight show asks people on the street seemingly simple questions about history and politics. Here is an excerpt from one of them:

- Leno: "Who was the first President of the United States?"
- interviewee: "Abraham Lincoln"

-Leno: "What are the ten first amendments to the Constitution called?"
-interviewee: "I don't know."

-Leno: "How many states are there in the United States?"
-interviewee: "52."
-Leno: "No, there are only 50."
-Leno: "What did you think was the 51st state?"
-interviewee: "I thought it was Hawaii, but I guess I was wrong."

These people are not dumb. They are normal people with good jobs and are paid well. They are average middle-class Americans who have gone to High School and College. Why, then, can't they provide the correct answers for these simple questions?

Similarly to the problem that ABC perceived in packaging and selling a World Cup Final that had absolutely no American context, Americans have an inaccurate understanding of time. Emerson's boundless and timeless space have persuaded many in the twenty-first century that time began in 1776 and never existed before. Space exists inside the American context and does not exist outside of it. If we all live in this boundless ambivalent society, chronology and geography are completely irrelevant. Many Americans have committed themselves so much to Emerson's creed that they cannot understand time and space outside of the American empire. In the post-industrial, post-modern, consumer driven America of the new millenium, it has become more difficult for them to understand time and space inside the empire. Thus 1776 and 1865 can be flipped, mixed around, de-contextualized. It doesn't matter because time is irrelevant as long as it happened between 1776 and 2006. Is Hawaii the 50th state, 51st state, 36th state, or is it even a state? What about Puerto Rico, is it a state? It doesn't matter because geography is irrelevant and meaningless. What does matter? Only that the American empire exists and that it is boundless, and that Jesse Owens critiqued Hitler's ideology. It is no longer relevant that Owens also critiqued America's racialized ideology.

How did this happen? Why have Americans become so constrained by boundless timeless space? My two preliminary proposals are that 1) history professors are guilty of over-indulging in Emersonian logic that privileges the nation-state above all else. 2) The process of globalization and decolonization have made Americans aware that the world is much bigger than "the West" and that space and time exists outside the parameters of the United States. But many have not quite realized this yet; so when they tune in to the World Cup Final, they need ABC and Brent Musburger to tell them where and when America exists.