If ever there was a much-needed breath of fresh air in this country, it has arrived in the form of thousands of soccer fans reveling in how wonderful America is.
I saw a young British woman on TV about to dip a fried chicken wing into Ranch flavored dressing for the first time. Her eyes lit up, and she vowed to take a gallon of the stuff back home to England.
Who knew they don't have Ranch dressing in England?
Airport officials said they're having to confiscate big jugs of Ranch dressing that soccer fans are trying to take home in their carry-on luggage.
A German soccer fan named Freddy, who is touring the south, reported on X that he'd had his first visit to a Waffle House - “Great food, great prices, friendly staff!” Next to a picture of a Taco Bell, he posted, “The holy land!”
A Japanese soccer fan was shown taking a bite out of chunk of Texas barbecue as big as his arm. Pure nirvana! Obesity is rare in Japan, but the discovery of Texas barbecue could change that.
There was coverage of soccer fans at a Buc-ee's store, incredulous at the size of the super-store-sized truck stop. There's a new Buc-ee's just south of us in Colorado, and I'm told it's as big as a Walmart, and they have a whole wall full of nothing but jerky, even a Jerky Bar. (It's near the site of the old Johnson's Corner restaurant/gas station, where they served the best cinnamon rolls in the world.)
Another guy on television was amazed at how common air conditioning is in the United States. “You walk inside and it's like winter in here,” he said. They don't have much air conditioning where he's from.
The coverage reminded me of the old video of former Soviet President Boris Yeltsin going to a Texas grocery store, and thinking the abundance in every aisle was staged for his visit. When told there was nothing unusual about the store, he knew there was no way communism could compete with capitalism in providing such abundance.
The coverage shows visiting soccer fans who are having the time of their lives in America. Their surprise tells you the news coverage in their home countries paints a negative, sour, disapproving picture of life in the United States. Their liberal news media is even worse than ours, and many soccer fans are going home feeling – quite accurately – that they've been lied to about America.
The best part - the soccer fans are surprised at how friendly and helpful Americans are. The games have been spread out around the country, so they're meeting a lot of heartland folks, and not just coastal elites.
(On an extended trip I once took, we discovered that you couldn't get a decent milk shake outside our own country. In Bali, they put some kind of crazy peanut sauce on steak. Not good. And in South Africa, if you order lobster in a restaurant, they think you're crazy, eating bottom-feeders. It would be like ordering carp at a Red Lobster. Best advice we got was don't drink the water. Drink beer. It won't give you traveler's diarrhea. Went over big with a boatload of college students.)
These soccer fans will be going home with an entirely different view of America, a place where our national anthem and “Country Roads” by John Denver are being belted out by big, joyous crowds at soccer matches.
I'll admit, I'm not much of a fan of the actual game of soccer.
HOWEVER, coming at this particular time in our country, when nutty liberal voters in New York and other states are embracing socialism and communism, and our liberal friends have little good to say about the state of our country, these excited soccer fans scratch an itch that desperately needed to be scratched.
It feels so good - this unbridled enthusiasm for our country. It's an unsolicited, vastly positive view of our country that no expensive public relations campaign could ever achieve. And it's accurate.
What a perfect way to celebrate our nation's 250th birthday.
Dave Simpson can be contacted at DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
