Soccer - Why isn't the 'Hood down with the Beautiful Game

It is a question that vexes serious American soccer fans. Why isn't the 'hood down with the beautiful game? Soccer and the poor have an enduring love affair on the majority of the planet. One of the noteable exceptions to this is the USA. Both the sport and the athletic talent that abounds in America's disadvantaged neighborhoods are the poorer as a result. The beautiful game loses out on an abundant bounty of talent that is largely directed towards gridiron football and basketball, and said aforementioned sports does not fully employ said talent because both sports have daunting physical requirements (size being the main one) that mostly preclude those of average height. Whereas soccer is a sport where all sizes of athletes have a place on the pitch. Another inducement for the poor American athlete is one of numbers. The NFL has only 1696 (53 man roster times the number of teams, 32) player jobs available every year. The NBA and other professional basketball leagues has more jobs available, but height is a daunting prerequisite. Professional soccer meanwhile has many more jobs available across the planet. It also has the added benefit for those with the outsized ego whom feel the need to proclaim to the world that they are "the best in the world" that their boast will have been proven or not in a sport that has actual world reach (that is partial at best with basketball and certainly not the case with gridiron football).
Part of the answer can best be laid at the door of culture. Soccer is simply not on the radar of the native-born American underclass. You do not see rappers wearing soccer jerseys in their videos (even though the opportunity was there for Snoop Dogg to do so for his "Beautiful" video, which was partially shot in a Brazilian favela; he wore NFL jerseys instead). This despite American rap being ubiquitous in the locker rooms of professional soccer teams in Europe and South America, not to mention the larger media landscape. The wider media landscape is not a part of the lifeways of the poor though, as poverty world-wide tends to have a provincalizing effect: how many times has one heard from poor athletes the eye-opening effect sof leaving their 'hood? Add in the particularity of American soccer being the province of the suburban elite (whom more than likely would not welcome the competition, as their resistance to the inclusion of American Hispanics into the mainstream of the sport shows), and the picture presented is not encouraging.
Barring a media figure along the lines of the aforementioned Snoop Dogg or 50 Cent adopting soccer as part of their iconography, soccer is more than likely to remain an unknown amongst an audience that both could profit from.

Those whom fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it

Another dog and pony show has hit Washington D.C. & the noise class (formerly the press) are busy with their sturm und drang. I am refering to the Congressional appearance of General Petreaus. What is going mostly missing here is an acknowledgement that the error of the post-WW1 breakup and reconfiguration of the Ottoman Empire must finally be allowed to be undone. Said re-ordering, the largest since the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars, has directly led to two of the more sorry episodes of recent history: the breakup of the former Yugoslavia & Iraq. A bit of history review is called for at this point (especially if the reader is the typical clueless Fox viewer whom has no idea of what has happened in the last five minutes...let alone the last five hundred years). Iraq and Yugoslavia are former Ottoman dominions. The Ottoman Empire consisted of South Eastern Europe, the Near East, & a good part of the Middle East for roughly six hundred years (that's longer than the Roman Empire). The Ottoman Turks (who's descendants are the majority of modern day Turkey), though a minority in their own realm, ruled with an iron fist over a vast state encompassing many peoples: Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, & Albanians are amongst those who filled the ranks of whom the Turks called "the Herd." One of their strategies to retain control the Ottomans used was divide and conquor. This created intense rivalries and hatred between the component peoples of the Ottoman Empire that continue to this day. Thus when the inevitable hit the Ottoman Empire and the structure came down after WW1, the Allies were left to parcel out former Ottoman territories. Among the "solutions" that were engineered was the creation of two states that were multi-ethnic and carved out by outsiders, not the people's of the affected countries, Iraq and Yugoslavia. In fact, during Ottoman times, the territory that made up those two countries respecitively were merely neighboring provinces. They were subsequently thrown together and told, "You're a country now." It didn't matter to those decison makers that the peoples thrown together despised each other. It is no surprise that eventually Yugoslavia would implode...and Iraq is next. As long as Bush & Co. continue with their stupid fantasy of keeping the artifice of Iraq as a central unified state, the misery will go on ad infinitum. The inevitable result is the eventual break up of Iraq...and it looks like it will be the Middle East's version of the Yugoslavia implosion. Let us name the first concentration camp set up in Iraq after the igniter of this misery, Camp Bush. Other of his accomplices should not fret, there will be plenty others where their guilty monikers can be attached to these places.