Americans Can Finally Stop Pretending To Care About The World Cup

For the United States, the World Cup is over, bringing Americans welcome relief from a suffocating atmosphere of boredom that engulfed our nation like a gigantic bowl of green Jello stretching from our Pacific coastline to the shores of the Atlantic, giving everything a nauseating imitation lime taste, not to mention staining the sky a vomitous shade of chartreuse.

In the final game, Belgium defeated the United States — a sentence so nonsensical it’s almost an absurdist work of art, like one of those Salvador Dali paintings where a gigantic eyeball melts beneath a hole in the sky while elephants with spindly legs thrust their trunk tips into the clouds and trumpet the words, “Belgium defeated the United States,” as if that could actually happen in any situation besides a soccer game no self-respecting country should have been involved with in the first place.

The final score was 4-1, meaning that in a game lasting about ninety minutes, there were exactly five half-seconds during which you might have blinked and missed something semi-exciting, as opposed to the other five thousand three hundred and ninety-seven-and-a-half seconds which were as soporific as a Jimmy Kimmel monologue, although, of course, funnier.

To give a brief recap of the action: A group of apparently grown men wearing shorts like a class of gay second-graders ran from one end of the field to the other, some of them gingerly kicking a ball with their tiny tippy-toes for no discernible reason, while others occasionally fell down and pretended to be hurt so they could leave the game because the boredom had become absolutely unbearable.

Every now and then, someone would give the ball a really good kick, probably out of pure frustration, and then the announcer would become momentarily excited, or at least conscious, even though the kicked ball sailed past the goal by eleven feet. Then the second-graders went back to prancing back and forth and falling down and generally being gay.

The media have been trying to force this excruciating ordeal on our vibrant American sports scene for years in the hopes we would become more like Europe, namely a decaying former civilization where the old people die from not having air conditioning in the summer because having air conditioning wouldn’t be good for the environment as opposed to some old codger lying dead in his bed-sit for two weeks before his grown-up children return from vacation and finally start to wonder how grandpa might be handling the hundred degree heat.

The whole idea that America would stoop to competing against irrelevant hellholes like Senegal or Great Britain is already degrading, but now we’re supposed to say something ridiculous like, “Good game, Belgium,” instead of giving Europe a little reality check by carpet bombing Belgium, then waiting around a week or two to see if anyone notices that it’s gone.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I would root for the United States to win any contest it was in. If the United States were in an international knitting bee, I would sit in front of the television shouting “Purl that yarn!” or whatever the hell you shout at knitting people, until America had taken home the trophy or the sweater. But of course, the minute we were out of the competition, I would gratefully take my skirt off and try to overcome my sense of shame, and get back to enjoying real sports like basketball or BloodRayne 2.

Anyway, for us, the World Cup is finally over, and I’m totally willing to let the whole embarrassing incident fade into the past, although I’d also be willing to round up any Americans who got swept up in this cavalcade of monotony and then shave their heads as the French did with women who slept with Nazis during the occupation.

This is America, for crying out loud. When we call a game football, it’s not because the players use their feet. It’s because they’ve been hit so hard in the head by a three-hundred-pound man that they can’t remember which part of their bodies they’re supposed to use. So let’s send the World Cup back where it came from: the world. We came here to get away from that.