American Stoats, Part Three

In November, I posted Part Two of my American Stoats. The following is Part Three:

American Stoats, Part Three

10th Sept, 2008

I arrived in Austin on the 8th of September. The squeezy accordion tunnel from the aeroplane to the airport building was bakingly hot, the true heat of Texas sandwiched between two areas of heavy air-conditioning.

When we got back to the house, American football was playing on a huge screen, like a small cinema. E–, L–'s brother, said the lighting on the pitch was horrible. I noticed in the trailers for the NFL – presumably National Football League – that some cover version of Everyday is Like Sunday was being used. I had noticed this in Chicago, too. Only the lyric "Every day is like Sunday" was actually sung. Presumably Sunday has some significance to American football, or the broadcasting of American football. The lyric did not continue to "Every day is silent and grey" and certainly not to "Come, come, nuclear bomb". L– assured me that Morrissey would have been paid for the use of the song. I imagine he could have got more than a slap-up meal with the money.

M–, having attended one or two baseball matches and a 'soccer' match in Chicago, told me that he was surprised at how civilised it all was. The crowd, he said, lacked the passion of the British football crowd. He speculated that the general absence of fans supporting the away team at the American games might have been a deciding factor here. At British football matches, the presence of away-team fans gives the proceedings the feeling of tribal war. Then again, I wondered – and M– said there might be something in it in a coffee-table book kind of way – perhaps there is some indication here of a general difference between British and American society. On my previous visit to America, I said, I had found the place very clean and orderly and Protestant. Returning home, to Twickenham, and walking between trees in the park along the banks of the Thames, hearing, from a distance, the roaring drunken chants of rugby fans, or perhaps just gangs of lads on a night out, I had felt Britain to be a very pagan country. Football fans even paint their faces with woad as if for battle.

I remembered We'll Let You Know, from Morrissey's Your Arsenal. Even the title of that album is a football reference, seeming to associate football with war and quite possibly with latent homosexuality. Morrissey has often said that We'll Let You Know is the best song he's done. It's interesting that it's a song that seems to tie British identity so closely to football. M– expressed it as an Anglo-Saxon thing – the value of loyalty. Even if football is now going down the pan and the fans are being ripped off – I don't know the details myself – you can't not support your team, you can't not go to the match. It's like Beowulf, said M–. You are the ringbearer. Once you're in, you're in for life.

You can hear the swelling roar of the football crowd on We'll Let You Know. Only those who are part of that roar could ever understand: "And the songs we sing/They're not supposed to mean a thing". Football is dying; Britain is dying. But we are part of the crowd. We understand that roar. We will be in until the end. "We may seem cold/Or we may even be/The most depressing people you've ever known/At heart, what's left, we sadly know/That we are the last truly British people you will ever know/The last truly British people you will ever… never… wsnt to know."