Start reserving your tickets for the Middle East now, soccer fans. The 2022 World Cup has been awarded to Qatar, a tiny emirate on the Persian Gulf whose primary industries include oil, weird-looking skyscrapers, and bloodless coups. Qatar is so small that a 2009 survey of mapmakers revealed that 82% of them could not find it on a map, and 20% of them thought it was the planet Klingons come from. Okay, I might have made those last statistics up. Get me a thousand mapmakers and we’ll see how well they hold up.
The United States was never in the running to receive the World Cup, and wasted no time or money trying to win the commission from FIFA, the international soccer association. Haha, just kidding! I promise not to do that again for the remainder of this post. Actually, we sent Bill Clinton, Morgan Freeman, and Attorney General Eric Holder to Switzerland to make our case. What were their qualifications for the job? Well, Bill Clinton is unquestionably a slick salesman. Morgan Freeman was in a movie about rugby once, so I guess that’s close enough. Now that I think about it, that movie made rugby look much more entertaining than soccer. Have they picked the location for the 2022 Rugby World Cup yet?
As for Eric Holder, he seems like a baffling choice, until you remember his recent courtroom triumph in New York, where he convicted a murderous al-Qaeda terrorist of conspiracy to destroy property. If I were going to put down big money on stadium upgrades for the World Cup, I would want terrorists to know Eric Holder was on the case. Kill the fans if you must, but touch one brick of that building and Holder will rock your world.
Remember when Barack Obama was supposed to charm the world into loving America again? The International Olympic Committee already made a fool of him. He walked out of the G20 meeting in Seoul wearing a “kick me” sign. We didn’t even get to host the ceremony for the Nobel Prize he won by breathing. Now we’ve been snubbed by FIFA, after submitting what was long thought to be the favored bid. Dejected American soccer enthusiasts, and the lonely TSA agents who were really looking forward to patting them down when they flew into Washington, must now spend the afternoon blowing sadly on the vuvuzela horn of failure. Its song is melancholy, and yet unbelievably annoying.
