USA Wins 1-0!!

Destiny? Two months ago I posted about two American footballers who made a real impact in England this season - Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan. Today I have the honor of posting about a historic World Cup win for the United States, secured in the dying minutes of the match by Donovan on a rebound from a Dempsey shot.

I celebrated the victory with several colleagues from Southbank - two Englishmen, a Spaniard and another American - at a nearby pub called the Old Swan. I had watched the USA's amazing second-half comeback against Slovenia there, and the bartenders and owner remember me for jumping out of my seat and running screaming across the pub to celebrate the goal that put us up 3-2. Of course, the goal was disallowed and all the Brits had a good laugh at my expense.

However, I reminded the bartender of my celebration yesterday, and he agreed to air the USA game just for me if I promised to celebrate like that again. And so it was that my colleagues and I sat watching England on two big screens and the USA on another, watched only by the handful of other Americans and the lone Algerian in the pub, with whom I shared a pleasant back and forth throughout the match.

Everyone cheered for England when they scored in the first half, but that meant the pressure was on for the USA to win. After yet another unjustly disallowed goal in the first half and too many missed chances in the second, I was thoroughly depressed and resigned to our fate. I complained to my English friends about how unfair it was, and how the referees should never be able to affect a nation's performance like this. "That's nothing," they told me. "Real injustice and real heartbreak is watching your team get to the World Cup semis and losing to the Hand of God!"

Well, perhaps there was some divine intervention in our favor today, because we certainly deserved this one as much as we did the last. When Donovan hammered home from Dempsey's rebound, I jumped wildly around our area screaming, hugging and high-fiveing everyone in sight. When the BBC cameras cut to some Americans in the crowd with a 'Yes We Can' sign, I took up the chorus and led our contingent in an exuberant 'Yes We Can' chant that surely amused all the Brits in the pub.

After all, we don't have any football songs like they do here, but if the USA continues on its current form, I may just have to write one.

Rage Against The Machine

I just returned from a testament to the power of music, the power of the people, and the power of grassroots organization to foment revolutionary ideals and action. Rage Against The Machine played a free thank-you concert in Finsbury Park, next to our house, and although I didn't have a ticket, I wanted to at least get close enough to feel the noise.

The concert was a tribute to a UK campaign to knock the X-Factor single from the #1 slot at Christmas. The X-Factor is Simon Cowell's creation, Britain's version of American Idol, and it's all about manufacturing cheezy pop music. Fed up with five years in a row of X-Factor #1 singles at xmas, a British couple started a Facebook campaign to get as many downloads as possible of Rage's "Killing in the Name of." Ultimately, Rage pulled off a totally unexpected upset and got the #1 slot, with over 500,000 downloads to the X-Factor's 450,000.

So at 8:30 this evening, having struggled with report writing all day, I walked across the bridge over the train tracks and into Finsbury Park. The usual suspects ringed the concert area - punks, drunks, potheads, dreadheads, and square-looking people like me whose appearance belied a more colorful youth:-)

As the first booming bass notes sounded, the crowd inside the gated area screamed, and those of us without tickets on the outside strained our necks and searched for higher ground to get a glimpse of the giant TV screens. I was happy enough to be this close to one of the most hardcore and inspirational bands of my time, and I bobbed my head and played my air guitar along with tunes like 'Bombtrack' and 'Bulls on Parade,' remembering the good old 90s and all my high school memories.

But then, as the band launched into 'Know Your Enemy,' I decided to see if I could get closer, and it turned out I wasn't the only one with this idea. A shirtless drunk guy went running through police cordons and yanked down a set of temporary chain-link fencing separating us from the main gates. A woefully obese security guard yelled at him, saying "I'm gonna get you!" but the drunk guy continued his rampage, hauling down section after section of fencing. By this time, people had begun streaming over the downed barrier and mounting an assault on the main gates, giving each other a leg up and triumphantly climbing atop the gate to celebrate before hopping down on the inside to be part of the show.

The police were frantically trying to blockade people right and left, but as at the Woodstocks of the 60s and the 90s, the streams of freaks couldn't be stopped! So many people were breaching the gates in so many places that the police finally gave up and let everyone through. It was a magical moment, and I was ecstatic to enter the fray of waving hands and thrashing bodies.

The band played for another hour, and I was mesmerized by every sound, until they stopped to bring onstage the couple who began the campaign. Everyone cheered, and then Rage announced that they had donated 100% of the profits of those 500,000 downloads to Shelter, a charity for the homeless in the UK. We all roared our appreciation as the band handed over a giant check for the couple to give to Shelter, and I noticed that Tom Morello's guitar was graffitied up with the words "Arm the Homeless," in the grand tradition of musical political revolutionaries like Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was famously scrawled with, "This machine kills fascists."

Fittingly, the show ended with a full-blooded rendition of the track that inspired this unlikely campaign, and upon leaving the people swarmed over and through any gates that police refused to use as exits. So many lines of Zack de la Rocha's militant poetry could describe this evening perfectly, like when we watched the chain-link fence being hauled down as he was raging:

"Yes I know my enemies,
they're the teachers who taught me to fight me
Compromise, conformity, assimilation,
submission, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite
All of which are American dreams,
all of which are American dreams..."

But the most fitting of all had to be when the entire crowd screamed along with him at the climax of Killing in the Name of... and if you don't already know those words by heart, I suggest you download the single:-)