Soccer, or football, as the brownskins and limeys call it, is a full-throated attack on American exceptionalism, and if I ran U.S. Africa Command, Johannesburg would have been liberated before the first vuvuzela blew.

Darwin himself would be aghast at the spectacle of fields of dwarfs running around like idiots, kicking a checkered ball across a vast expanse in a fruitless quest for meaning. You know who's drawn to soccer at an early age? Kids who are short, weak and grip-challenged - in other words, who can't cut it in basketball, football or baseball. It's no surprise that soccer is the number one youth participation sport in the U.S. - it's a giant self-esteem parade for the genetically disadvantaged, the sports version of social promotion. The only shorties we should be lauding are hos and Elmore Leonard characters.

A good test of a sport’s validity is the quality of women it draws to even mediocre players. Here too, soccer must take an existential red card. Until David Beckham’s mojo can be extracted and mass-produced by Axe, women will continue to associate these blighted ballers with that fat ginger kid (or Will Ferrell). It can’t even produce white-collar criminals like the real sports leagues. If you’re turned on by parking-lot fights between jack-o'-lanterned baldies, by all means, bed a Red Bull.

If the Ammonites hadn’t been obliterated by the LORD thousands of years ago, today they'd be worshipping MLS instead of Molech, led by their chief spiritist, Paul the Octopus. No other sport comes close to competing with governments and religions for the hope and blind servitude that soccer instills in its subjects. The Vatican would love to wield the power than FIFA has over developing countries. This shouldn't surprise us - Europe chopped the balls off Christianity, India worships a bajillion gods already, and the only other bond Africans share is their governments' brutality toward them.

Soccer is the geopolitical translation of "Revenge of the Nerds" - a convenient vehicle for the WASP-haters to drag down the U.S. and assert the legitimacy of all nations, no matter how objectively terrible they are. North Korea has a squad that is almost certainly cracking rocks and paying off their bosses to get work that actually pays. We all know how Saddam’s Iraq treated its athletes. Whip your citizens into a frenzy against the U.S., and they'll forget their government is the real enemy.

Fast kicking, low scoring, and ties - you betcha! Soccer's message to the world is: It's OK if you don't win.  Not being defeated is good enough. Distracting the public with fancy footwork is more important than giving them the tools to score in their personal lives.

Goooooooooooood riddance to Americans' passing interest in this egalitarian excrement for another year.

To make my point, You have to hear it. But first, some backstory.

Lady Gaga thinks she's doing something unique, original, and exciting. And she is. And she isn't. Because of course, nothing is ever new under the sun. Ever. I think Marcel Duchamp said that, was echoed by the Dadaists and Fluxists, and even Jazz had a go at it. And then there was Madonna.

Everything that Lady Gaga is is because of Madonna. And I'm not the only one to think so. Get your own Material, Girl! But I digress.

The song in question, Bad Romance, features a pulsing grind, droning bass and electric ethereal tones shackled to relatively insipid lyrics. The song is about Lady Gaga's quest for fame within the music industry, her play-it-by-the-numbers power grab and submission and ultimate servitude to the god of Western consumerism. Blah blah blah. Its lyrics are still fairly empty. And she can't lip sync worth a damn.

But right away, from the opening twittering high tones, LGG goes big with a OOOOOOpening paen to some nameless hope or sorrow, which leads into the very first line: "Caught in a Bad Romance"...

Listen to the Bad RomANCE segment

And that's when you hear it. Listen to it again. Caught in a Bad RomANCE. Bad RoMANCE. Bad roMAAAANCE.

The sound of Lady Gaga's unmistakable cowboy roots are never more clear than in those two opening lines, when the soft twang of a desert rustler permeates the Romance, making a lie of Gaga's entire enterprise. This is where the Lady Gaga myth falls apart.

Gaga has sold herself as the hippest and most counter revolutionary of all artists, a slave to the Fame Monster (and a bit of one herself), unequaled in genius and industry savvy. But more importantly, what she hasn't, what she can't reveal outright, is that she is a slave to being something she's not.

Her videos are subversive, dark, and disturbing, and often baffling; clearly she has a vision and a sense of herself as a mystical queen of artistic pop. So why is that annoying drawling twang just sitting there like an elephant in the penthouse? Is it affectation? Is it an aural perturbation, heard only by the "haters" who are immune to the genius of Gaga's art?

Hardly. Like Clarice Starling, Gaga has come a long way from her humble roots, hiding childhood poverty and possibly range-riding under a horrendous display of self-lionization--a testicle-less spectacle designed to misdirect the eye with flash and verve. In reality, Gaga is a scared, confused, power-hungry cowgirl who simply can't bring herself to admit that what drives her, underneath those androgynous body suits, the bizarre symbolism and the occult imagery, she's still not more than one generation from poor western trash.

This is not the look of a man. It is the future suicide of Western masculinity (so I guess the wristbands make sense).

Maybe I missed the boat somewhere along the way. When did the formerly successful, aging and over-the-hill tennis star look become, like the sport itself, bigger than it ought to be? Even Bjorn Borg, the patron saint of headband-wearing tennis stars, knew when enough was enough. He gave it up because he knew that the look belonged on the clay courts, not Abercrombie and Fitch.

Naturally, the look has been consumed by the trans-Atlantic culture which now deems that looking virtually homeless is now chic and to be emulated, and worse, revels in the superficiality of the past, imagining that even if it's not real, it's more real than the suburban fashion mythology posed by, well, people like me.

The Tenenbaum screams desperately for approval from the gods of retro-cool, and signals a lack of true identity in self; this is a look predicated upon the mistaken belief that if disaffected enough, one can transcend the sad void of existence and wallow forever in the cultural wasteland inhabited by zombie Wes Andersons and BeeGees band members. In particular, it presents an aesthetic vacuum of self-obsession: Look at me! it screams, but the "me" referenced is without locus or identity--it is an empty canvas painted by the brush of popular cinema and comic iconography--a being created entirely by Hollywood, the East Village, and a Cliff's Notes reading of The Great Gatsby.

So why are men carrying this look like a banner into the future? Why do American men persist in taking the low road every time they are offered a fashion and grooming choice? Why are we slouching toward Tenenbaumism? It's not progressive, it's stagnation.

The Royal Tenenbaums was about a clan of people who never learned how to grow up emotionally, about ambitious children who become failures as adults, about prodigy becoming apathy.

Sound familiar, America?

But when your mommy had an affair with a blogger, and your daddy doped up with his own blood before the race, who can you trust for moral clarity? Put down your 12-sided die and grab your inhaler - the tag on your shirt is the answer.

That's as ridiculous as taking courage from your Nirvana-era No Fear shirt that you wear while watching "Clueless" on TBS, you will surely say. But think about it: Where else can you find so much information on how to live in such a small space?  Plato took 320 pages to discuss the nature of justice in The Republic, but your shirt tells you in 2 square inches who made it, what it's made of, how big it is, and how to take care of it, probably in multiple languages. It's practically biblical, with the exception of a redemption narrative (found on all manner of stain removers). Ignore the wisdom on your tag, and your clothes will pay the price, becoming noticeably musty in five years.

It's not a full thesis on the good life, of course, but it's a start. And without your tag to guide you, where will you find moral direction? The trendy shirt-wearer will cut off the tag to avoid the possibility of flipping out and drawing the dreaded two-finger "L" from a snarky observer. But once the tag is gone, how do you even know which way your shirt goes on?

This is not an abstract problem for those postmodern dressers who scorn any kind of adornment on the front or back or a shirt. The tagless clothee's only option for deciding how to dress may be what "feels" right, an ambiguous judgment call that relies on imperfect human notions of what is good, not the revelation of a tag.  Our society already covers up its moral muck by turning its shirts inside out instead of washing off the sinful stains, proudly rocking the exposed knittings that connect sleeves to body like a man sleeping with his father's wife in the approving view of the congregation. Put your shirt on backwards, and soon there will be no social norms for shirting and pansexual orgies will be more common than FarmVille on Facebook.

Call me a strict apparelist, but I believe society crumbles when we vainly decide to cut the tags.  That's not just your neck itching - it's your conscience calling.

It's a slippery slope. On the one hand, co-opting a symbol in an effort to promote common affiliation is itself an essentially tribal act, a matter of local pride in competitive endeavors. But while there may be nothing inherently racist about choosing an Indian as your trademark on the field, the issue appears to be rooted in more than one's ancestry, or else we'd see a lot more teams whose mascots resemble Woody Allen or Italian plumbers. To put it bluntly, you would never see a team named the Nashville Negroes or the Texas Towelheads, or the New York Jewboys. But give it up for the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins.

Then again, if a team named itself the Fighting Whiteys, the South might rise again, but not before the ACLU filed a suit on grounds of fomenting nascent Nazism.

Obviously, teams wishing to instill fear in their opponents and inspire confidence in their fans want to present themselves as strong and intimidating warriors. Hence, the Warriors or the Hawkeyes or the Seminoles as opposed to the Tax Accountants or the Pasty British White Guys.

The name itself is only one aspect of this particular debate. In some cases, the visual representation of these teams may cause offense. Such a reaction is not surprising if your mascot looks like a pre-civil-rights racist caricature.

It might be me, but I'm not sure this bill goes far enough. After all, what about corporations whose name stems from ethnic roots? Oneida, for instance, is an Indian tribe, though you wouldn't know it from their wonderful flatware specials. And let's not fail to call attention to Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Illinois, Alaska, Alabama, Michigan, and oh, half a dozen other states whose names derive from Indian tribes who may or may not have been consumed in white man's apocalyptic expansion. And what about sports teams that have co-opted other peoples and civilizations to represent their fearsomeness on the field of mock battle? The Trojans, the Spartans, the Fighting Irish and the Aztecs are all victims of this possible racism.

The truth is, this bill may be the first strike against any and all ethnic team names and mascots; once you name names, the domino effect ensures a chain of more ludicrous legislative actions to prevent any and all from experiencing the slightest sense of cultural disenfranchisement as a result of seeing one's ethnic or national heritage used as a chant in a basketball game. And if taken to its logical ends, we will be left with nothing but neutered images and undefinable shapes and organic blobs as our symbolic warriors, offensive to none, and therefore acceptable to all.

Frozen yogurt is, however, universally the most pretentious and therefore useless dessert.

Actually, it may not even be a dessert. The litmus test, aside from the taste of it, is the plethora of storefronts peddling this enigmatic frozen treat the way Wes Anderson sells lost paternity as drama, with earnest-yet-sly-winking nods of knowitall gustatory celebration, each name more bizarre than the last. Red Mango. Not a mango bodega. Flurt. I'd rather not. Öko. Like a cryogenic, fruit-enhanced Beatle-killer. You have to be Norwegian to even enter an /eks/ (Slashing prices upward!).

And this list doesn't take into account the numerous Los Angeles mini-froyo dealers "specializing" in the icy concoctions. Feeling a bit overwhelmed by the choices actually proves you have a soul; if you don't feel the faint whiff of obtuse hipsterism spawned by names like CéFiore, YogurtBerry, BerryLine, Yo Berry, Kiwiberri, Snowberry, Roseberry, Berri Good, Limelite, Bear Naked, Pingo Berry, Peach House, Dolci Mango and Cantaloop, well, you're just a tool. The general math nomenclature seems to be either the combination of colors and fruits, or something that sounds like it was barfed out in a back alley behind a Karl Lagerfeld photo shoot.

Icy crystallized yogurt brings to mind the fjords of Norway, or perhaps the cliffs of Dover in December. The AC is always cranked like a European winter, but stepping into a gelato/yogurt proprietorship, and I'm thinking especially of Pinkberry, is functionally no different than visiting a very small version of Tokyo. While the sheen of curvacious, hard white plastic furniture and translucent hot green and orange table tops might bring to mind a certain Barberella-esque whimsy, the Eastern European-Asian fusion music pulls you back from your futuristic flight of fancy into a Hell constructed by a Japanese Eve Ensler who thinks the dessert world needs more clitoral references or exotic shampoos.

The Kings of Wham!

If Wham! mated with Kings of Leon, their babies would be poster children for the Frogurt Franchises of the world.

While there might be money in the frozen yogurt stand today, there may be a happy rainbow to this tale of Ugly Dorothy. Tangy yogurt (isn't that just sherbet?) has limited appeal in the low-to-mid middle class, and when the economy takes another nosedive, elitist yogurteers won't be able to rely on the fawning appeal of overpriced frozen custards and high-end fruit toppings to your inner giggling pierced teenager. And why not?

Because you'll be busy bailing out your hipster friends who spent their trust funds on the milky ice suds you can't seem to stop posting to Facebook about.

Because when you dip your tiny organ-o-plastic spoon into the melting glop of post-cow-tal bliss, you hear the untainted Western man whisper "Why?"

Because frozen yogurt is the Wild West aspar-tamed into soothing nihilism, propped by the devils of large blueberry toppings on one shoulder, pomegranate seeds on the other, each urging you further into the excess of elitism.

Because deep in your heart you know how false a dessert frozen yogurt really is, how deceptive neon lighting can make angels of a writhing swath of Greenwich Village denizens.

Because when Hell freezes over, it's not from the rare, the scarce, or the unexpected, but from the frigid familiarity of the fifteen ounce fruit parfait.

Because there's nothing so fleeting, so faint, as fifteen minutes perched in faux splendor, fixated by your frozen f***ing yogurt.

And it's groin-grabbingly adorable.

They hop around on your lawn, fluffy tails twitching like an epileptic drag queen, sniffing for nuts like [poor-taste joke removed]. Rotating food in their little paws while they look around nervously, squirrels remind me of myself when I chow down on an empanada from the shop near my office. There are few things I enjoy more in the morning than watching these cranked-out proto-bunnies leap between trees, chasing each other in desperate pursuits, like James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow.

Approach a squirrel in the park and chances are he'll sort of run alongside you at an angle, not sure whether to be intimidated or want to play. He'll scamper over and stand on two legs as if sizing you up when you hold out food or just throw sticks at him, as I did at the Capitol last weekend. Squirrels never look dirtier than you did after playing in the leaves, and you never notice their dung in public, unlike those chattering disease-bags that befowl our waterfronts and statues. I lured a squirrel on my porch once with Cheetos and all he left behind was a heart-warming puddle.

Some may theorize that squirrels are hellbent on world domination, as an attractive but paranoid coworker of mine did. They could very well rise up in menacing tripods and claw us into their munch-holes, but what's the worst they could really do? Perhaps a wealthy madman could train them to attack low-level municipal officials who stroll through parks without a bodyguard. You can do that for free with Tea Partiers.

There's a spritely grace in squirrels, like watching a slumber party with the Spice Girls. Until the day you come across a dead one, feet in the air, rigid as your stepfather, they seem more like the seraphs of Scripture than svelte rodents. Nietzsche may think God is dead, but I know He exists, because I see his furry spirit children playing every day. And I ain't talking about Zach Galifianakis.

Image courtesy of Lookbook.nu

The world is a smorgasbord of hotties. This is not a surprise, especially if you're from Sweden or Southern California, where a disproportionate number of babes, models, hot chicks, and sexy coeds originate. For single men, the landscape is an almost mind-numbing swath of feminine beauty, and like browsing the farmer's market, the bachelors can look and date at will. There's a reason the word allure contains a word also used in fishing. Those with godlike powers of persuasion could easily maintain a casual dating regimen to cover much of the population of perfectly proportioned pulchritudinous princesses.

But what about men who are firmly entrenched in a relationship? Is it morally acceptable for attached males to scope out the cuties?

As one of those attached males, I have firsthand experience with this issue; living in Southern California, I have the blessing and curse of being confronted with the bountiful crop of beautiful women and the instinctual male urge to simply look. Forget lust, this is like driving by a horrible traffic collision. Like car accidents, women prompt autonomic ocular responses. And like rubbernecking, there's a sense that if not reprehensible, the gazing from afar is not exactly high value activity, especially if you're in a committed relationship to a woman you may have previously rubbernecked before you became attached to her.

Can guys make mental maps of the feminine representatives without falling into the soul-damning territory of adultery and fornication?

Here I will step out of my role as beleaguered man and step into the role of impartial observer, and point to Ace of Cakes and beta fish as an answer to the dilemma at hand.

Ace of Cakes is a television show that features a master baker and his team of elite pastry specialists creating a cake for a client; perhaps the cake is for a wedding, or a bar mitzvah, or in honor of a bicentennial. The cake created for each event is a work of art in its own right, and often is elaborately built with materials rivaling those used in large construction projects.

One gets the sense that these cakes are the most beautiful baked goods ever created, but after all the sawing and cutting and painting, the thought of tasting these cakes is almost abhorrent. Not only would it be a crime to destroy these works of art by cutting into and consuming them, but that even to do so would result in dissatisfaction; the cake is not meant to be eaten, only admired and appreciated.

Back to beleaguered hero: to men with a woman (beautiful or not) on their arm, other beautiful women are like the cakes baked by the Ace.

Put another way, the ladies pass in and out of the male consciousness like betas in a twenty gallon tank. We see them on the street, they occupy the moment and possibly co-opt our glandular functionality, but six seconds later, the memory and the moment are gone. To restrict or morally judge as unacceptable the very nature of male existence is not only anti-Darwinian, it is scientifically impossible.

However, we are not only creatures of instinct, but we are creatures of reason. Men must know the line they walk is always precarious, and must guard against the incursions of infidelity and the tyranny of titillation. When it comes to the babes that pass in the night, there might be no better mantra than that of the goldfish: To look is human; to forget is ichthyine.

Clearly some writers hit upon these themes more explicitly than others. Stephen King's Under the Dome, which I haven't read yet, was recently described in Esquire as a novel perfectly positioned as the personal and somehow unique vision of an author who is the ultimate harbiter of "post-9/11 fearfulness." I love King to morbid death, but is he really the guy we need to go to for another booze-swilling look inward? King doesn't lack for vocabulary, but he's not exactly Faulkner, and his philosophic musings are the least interesting facet of his books.

Philip Roth's The Plot Against America was described as casting post-September 11 era in a chilling new light, notably through a Jewish lens, and though I suppose a novel with a titular plot against America might include some post 9/11 inferences, I question the need for all our literature to be stained in some way, explicit or no, with the ash of that day.

It's not that I'm a denier, a relativist, or obstructionist. I understand 9/11 has deep national consequences and I also understand that when the twins fell down, our deep Western liberal guilt rose up like Poseidon from the sea. I'm not saying our novelists who have tapped into and utilized September 11 and after as subtext, thematic forces, or verbose recreations of the day in full are full of crap. But really, can't we finally leave behind the punditry and pedantic soulful corrections via the verbose pens of Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Safran Foer?

American authors in particular seem incapable of moving past what essayist Richard Gray called "the preliminary stages of trauma" resulting from the 9/11 attacks. I agree wholeheartedly. The patient was admitted and has since been released, but like Page Six our post-9/11 novels seem to proliferate in tabloidian fashion, as if we as a nation are incapable of registering anything other than shock at the realization that something bad happened to us, and by setting it into bone china of the author's mother's growing up in New Jersey, has somehow made a salient point about how our culture now can't afford to look backward except to see the flames and falling bodies, and the deep psychic impact those flames and bodies had upon the American landscape.

I guess I'm just tired of viewing the world in its every facet with the unstated but ever-present reminder of terror's toll, of jingoistic effusions in misguided attempts to thwart the flow of extremism, and how to get from teenage sexual anxiety, to planes hitting buildings, to waterboarding terror suspects in just 600 pages.

We may be Americans, but we're not dumb. It's time to move on, time to say something new worth saying. If you reference 9/11, it had better be to make an Islamic fart joke or to talk about how it reflects God's love of the color fuschia or describe the fractal nature of terror and how it fits into the mathematics of fear--a treatise on the numbers of nihilism.

Cup-shaking for change from passers-by is the first skill a novice bum learns from elder bums. And why not? Lacking the fortitude to stand up all day like a waitress or wait in a parking lot for manual-labor opportunities, bums learn to park their bums on the sidewalk, stare ahead blankly, and shake their moneymaker whenever two-legged mammals come within range. This exercise seems doomed to fail for all but the most pitiful and progressive (an overlapping category if there was one): It spares the emotional tenor of a verbal request in lieu of a begger's bicycle bell, warning pedestrians there's trouble and passive aggression ahead.

Though I've been personally solicited by alms-seekers a handful of times in recent months, with sometimes poignant and always respectful stories about their hardships and appreciation of a few dollars (I'm a sucker for 'em), the Cup Shake seems likely to prevail indefinitely. Before an enterprising personal-injury lawyer jumps on this and starts flooding interactive billboards with promises of municipal payouts for hand-wringers, and a reporter in search of an easy Pulitzer does a six-part series titled "A Fair Shake," cities had better pull together their lawyers and message men (er, persons). Here are a few ideas to get the ball rolling.

Renewable bumergy. An enterprising bureaucrat would attach small generators to these bums' hands, to create energy that can be sold back to the local power company, with revenue put into a Bum Fund to pay for their medical expenses - not just carpal tunnel, but also sore ass and Your Mother Told You Your Face Would Freeze in That Shape Syndrome. (The latter shouldn't be confused with the inevitable acronym for non-heterosexuality, YMT-YYF-WFTS.)

Heavier coins. This will require some help from Uncle Sam. If the U.S. Mint starts pounding out chunky currency - from quarter-pound quarters to half-pound pennies - not only will pedestrians want to get rid of their change more quickly, but bums will be forced into a Hobson's choice: keep less change in the cup to go easy on the wrists, and reduce the sonic effectiveness of the shaking, or actually ask people in English for change. The latter was successfully used by our president.

Punitive tax on change-givers. Create a field on tax forms that asks how much change you gave to bums last year. Those who are proud of their giving of course will dish, to look good for their preachy girlfriend, Governmentia. But this field actually calculates their Bum Maintenance Tax - because this stunt can only be pulled once before The Blogs are all over it, the tax will have to be a highly punitive figure, such as 1,000 percent. Next on my agenda - the Bird Maintenance Tax for bread-tossers.

Cities can also avoid this fate by licensing my Bum Stamps patent. Interested parties can contact me at greg@culturalimperialist.com.