No Americans Allowed

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, no one was allowed to enter the European Union, or EU, and few if any people in one European Union country were permitted to enter another.  But starting today, nationals from fifteen nations can enter the 27 member states of the EU for non-essential travel.

Thanks to the way it's botched its own pandemic response, however, the United States is not one of them.

As an American who has never set foot in a single European country, has seen college classmates travel to London before he ever left his own time zone, began planning a trip to Italy with my mother before 9/11, began planning another trip to Italy with my mother just before getting laid off, saved cash in a tin container for a European trip before having to save it in the bank for something else, began planning a trip to Paris least year before having a health crisis, and spent the past thirty years looking forward to seeing the Eiffel Tower, seeing the Vatican, seeing the Tivoli Gardens, going to Volkswagen's Autostadt museum, and riding a bullet train to any of these places, I . . . well, I think you know where this is going.

I'm ready to give up.  After traveling to eighteen states and the District of Columbia (or whatever the hell they call that place these days), I decided there was not much else I wanted to see in America, which doesn't say much for the remaining thirty-two states (that includes Texas), and having visited two Canadian provinces, my mother and I were eager to go to the Old Country.   I don't need to tell you again what happened - my first tale of my frustrations, from 2014, is available here - but, suffice to say, Murphy's Law has hung over my European travel hopes for a good twenty years.  The EU's decision to ban Americans from its member states is all but a death blow to my already slim chances.

It's understandable.  The United States, already the nation with the largest number of cases - 2.6 million - and more than 126,000 deaths - and so no Frenchman or German worth their salt would allow a Yank to set foot in their countries and reinfect them or their fellow citizens.  Donald Trump has utterly failed to contain the COVID-19 virus even as European countries like Italy - one of the worst-hit countries in this pandemic - have flattened their curves and gotten their caseloads down to a manageable level.  It's not like we're the laughing stock of the world now - heck, we've always been, because we're such a clownish people - but now the Europeans are no longer holding in their laughter out of politeness.  Some of them even pity us now.

So what are my plans?  Nothing, for the immediate future. For the far future - that is, for the time after the pandemic ends - I don't know, because I simply don't know when the pandemic is going to end.  Nor do I know what my financial or personal situation will be.  I could set a date, but I've tried doing that before.  And by the way, I know that this embarrassing travel ban isn't going to hurt Trump with his base.  No one who supports Trump would bother going to Europe because they think America is the greatest country in the world.  Even though they likely never traveled anywhere outside the U.S. to allow them to make that conclusion.  But I have to confess . . . EU countries are pursuing the same policies and restrictions to combat COVID-19 that are similar to what smart states like New York and New Jersey are doing, and so even if I could go to Europe now, I probably wouldn't have a good time anyway.

I'm just ticked off that once again, I had hoped to travel abroad some time in the near future, like maybe next year, and . . .

Yeah, well, Abraham Lincoln hoped to visit Jerusalem after the end of his second presidential term.  But John Wilkes Booth had other ideas.    

Clearing the Air

The two biggest polluters on this planet we call ours, the United States and China, formally agreed to adopt the Paris Agreement negotiated in late 2015 to keep the increase in the average global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius.  The United States has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 28 percent below levels of emissions produced in 2005. The deal also hopes to provide $100 billion a year between 2016 and 2020 in financing to help developing countries meet their gas reduction goals.  As soon as the deal takes effect, nations that have ratified it have to wait for at least three years to leave it.

Unfortunately, climate-change denier Donald Trump is gaining in the presidential election polls and a presidential term is four years.  

Despite Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, despite the drought in California and some of the worst flooding in Louisiana in decades, despite the receding beaches in Miami, congressional Republicans still don't believe climate change is real and Trump is happy to please them by promising to commit the country to producing more coal.  President Obama knows this and has framed the deal as an executive agreement rather than as a treaty because he knew the Senate would never ratify it as a treaty.  But if the deal goes into effect before the year is out, that means a President Trump would be able to take the U.S. out of the deal by the end of 2019.  If you thought the United States was the skunk of the world under Ronald Reagan of George Walker Bush, wait'll the Donald takes over; you ain't seen nothing yet!

The one thing that gives me hope is that efforts to combat climate change are going full tilt boogie all over the world, including this country, as more energy producers are turning away from coal and more toward cleaner fuels like natural gas, as well as wind power.  Even if Trump gets into the White House, there's no stopping the tide of history.  And when the tide of the ocean floods his own properties, maybe then the Donald will come around.

On the other hand, maybe he'll eat the loss and build condos in a melted Greenland. :-O :-(              

Summer Sports Report

Many fans of the U.S. women's soccer team, who played in the Women's World Cup in Germany (hmm, they seem to stage the Women's World Cup in the host country of the men's World Cup before last) are upset about the penalty-kick loss of the Cup to the Japanese team yesterday. To which I say, get over it. The U.S. women's team has already won the Cup twice; we're still waiting for our men's team to win once!

Anyway, it was Japan's first victory in the Women's World Cup soccer tournament. Japan obviously needed it, after the earthquake in March and the subsequent Fukushima nuclear plant disaster (which, of course, has fallen off the American media's radar screen, leading many Americans to think that the damage in Japan is all cleaned up). I didn't get to see any of the games this time around, but I'm sure it was exciting, and I'm happy to see the Japanese win.

So, with American sportswriters relieved that they no longer have to cover women's soccer because it involves having to talk about women and soccer, they're praying to the spirit of Vince Lombardi that the NFL can avoid a lockout. Now they're looking forward to covering a real, all-American sport like football, and they hope the season will be saved.

Reports now circulating suggest that the lockout is almost over. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But sportswriters must be relieved, because the alternative would have been to cover something they consider even more unmanly than the Women's World Cup - the Pan American Games in Mexico in October.

Oh, no, Guadalajara won't do.

Going, Going, Ghana

Okay, so the United States lost to Ghana in their World Cup game. All right, so they don't advance to the quarterfinals. But -and you knew I was coming to a "but," and it's a heck of a "but" - they got more Americans interested in soccer and attracted more fans to the sport. The Major League Soccer All-Star Game next month is likely to draw its largest audiences ever. Landon Donovan is a celebrity on the order of David Beckham. The U.S. has now competed in six consecutive World Cup tournaments. And when the MLS championship is played this fall, even the most apathetic Americans will be able to tell you who won, just as even Americans completely disinterested in football can tell you the New Orleans Saints won this year's Super Bowl.

Okay, maybe not so much on that last point, but the American team can now be taken seriously. They played with heart and passion, and they won the hearts and attention spans of millions. They won their group and outperformed the French and the Italians - the two teams who played for the Cup in 2006. They made it difficult for Ghana to win. The United States men's soccer team returns home with their heads held high and their dignity intact.

But did we have to lose to Ghana, the same country that eliminated us from the 2006 tournament?

Goal!

You know, I'm one of those disgruntled souls who grew cynical about patriotism, largely because I found so many scoundrels taking refuge there. To paraphrase Bill Maher, I grew tired of Americans yelling how we're number one even though we don't have the objective rankings and studies to back up our claim. I have been hugely embarrassed at this country being seventeenth in the number of women in elective office, twenty-second in controlling infant mortality, twenty-fifth in mathematical aptitude, thirty-seventh in health care delivery, and forty-ninth in literacy. I have bitched about how our high incarceration rate, our high murder rate, our massive military spending, and our coddling of millionaires at the expense of everyone else.

But when Landon Donovan scored the deciding goal late in the second half in the U.S. men's soccer team's match against Algeria, I couldn't help but cheer. I was proud to be an American. They did it. The American men's soccer team proved that the United States is a force in the game to be reckoned with. They showed that soccer is growing in America, and that it's becoming more accepted and more mainstream. They proved we have some of the best, most talented, and the most determined players in the world. They never gave up. They pulled through. They now advance to the group of sixteen out of 32 teams.

It almost makes me forget that, according to a recent survey, 41 percent of all Americans believe Jesus will return before the middle of the century.

Oy.

World Cup Update

The contest for the World Cup in South Africa won't shape up for awhile, as the national soccer teams vie for position to get out of their respective groups, but the big surprise was that England and the USA tied at one apiece. American goalkeeper Tim Howard let a ball get by him early in the first half, but English goalkeeper Robert Green made an even bigger blunder, letting the ball go right through his hands and roll softly across the line and into the net. Had Jozy Altidore, who had a blazing run with the ball across the field in the second half, managed to get it through Green's defense (and he came very close!), The United States would have won outright.

The United States can claim a morale victory for going against England, one of the mightiest soccer teams on the planet, and holding their own. The United States still has an outside chance at the cup at best, but England could be on its way to winning it for the first time since 1966.

Meanwhile, perennial Cup powerhouse Germany (three Cup championships) scored four to nothing in their match against Australia today. Geez, those Aussies are playing like Canadians! :-D

All Aboard The Night Train!

Oh, this is sweet . . ..

The four-man bobsled team United States 1, whose sled is known as the "Night Train," made history today by speeding to an Olympic gold medal in Vancouver - the first American gold medal in the four-man bobsled event since 1948. Steven Holcomb was the driver, supported by Steve Mesler, Curt Tomasevicz and Justin Olsen. They set the pace in the first of four runs and never looked back. Their final margin of time on the fastest sled track ever built was .38 of a second.

To give you an idea of how significant this is, American bobsledders had long been considered more of a novelty than the Jamaican bobsled team.

The Night Train crew beat a German sled piloted by the esteemed Andre Lange, a friend of Holcomb's. Now the Americans can take their places among great Olympic bobsledders such as Lange, Peter Kirby of Canada, Eugenio Monti of Italy, Jean Wicki of Switzerland, and the Latvian bobsledder Janis Kipurs.

I remember Janis Kipurs, a member of the Soviet team in the 1980s, very well, largely because of his name - pronounced "YON-is KIP-ers." I like saying it over and over - "YON-is KIP-ers." "YON-is KIP-ers." "YON-is KIP-ers." :-D

Of course, Steven Holcomb, Steve Mesler, Curt Tomasevicz and Justin Olsen are four more names worth repeating. :-)