"How Soccer Is Ruining America: A Jeremiad," by Stephen H. Webb, is a satirical essay designed to ridicule the thoughtless idea that something so wonderful as soccer could do anything other than enhance our lives and improve our collective national soul. This idea, that soccer is a destructive force, is popular among certain intellectually challenged individuals in our society, and Webb takes on their assertion with a mock earnest and a hilarious appeal, resulting in laugh-out-loud moments for his audience of, most likely, fellow soccer enthusiasts. Webb's ironic tone and his arguments ad absurdum score a beautiful goal: the defeat of the soccer naysayers who would banish the sport to the foreign fields of Europe or South America.
Webb begins his "Jeremiad" with a nice play on words, resulting in an onion skin of meanings. His first words are worthy of full recount: "Soccer is running America into the ground, and there's very little anyone can do about it" (267). The play on words here is the use of the phrase "running America into the ground." The running of anything into the ground typically refers to overusing or totally exhausting a resource. When one runs a car into the ground, one typically has 300,000 miles on it, and the wheels fall off, rendering it unusable. When someone's good will is run into the ground, he or she has been taken advantage of to the degree that their good will is no longer available.
And so on...
Webb begins his "Jeremiad" with a nice play on words, resulting in an onion skin of meanings. His first words are worthy of full recount: "Soccer is running America into the ground, and there's very little anyone can do about it" (267). The play on words here is the use of the phrase "running America into the ground." The running of anything into the ground typically refers to overusing or totally exhausting a resource. When one runs a car into the ground, one typically has 300,000 miles on it, and the wheels fall off, rendering it unusable. When someone's good will is run into the ground, he or she has been taken advantage of to the degree that their good will is no longer available.
And so on...