Root American!
The LA Times op-ed page - perhaps in a bid to boost today’s newsstand sales among local talk radio listeners - gives top-rated KFI 640 AM host John Ziegler a forum to make the case that since Mexican-Americans were paying more attention to the World Cup team of Mexico than the U.S. team, they are not really Americans:
Some may argue that you can be a bigger fan of the Mexican team than the USA and still think of yourself as an American first. But as someone who was born in Germany and who would root for Germany against anyone but the USA (and would be far more likely to watch the USA play than tune in for Germany), it is very difficult for me to comprehend such divided loyalties.
Debating talk show hosts is a losing proposition, but Ziegler’s German heritage and his well-documented history with starlets and race issues begs a couple of questions. If an American of German descent was rooting for Katarina Witt over Debi Thomas, would we have cause to question that person’s loyalty? Who was Ziegler rooting for? Who was he “far more likely to watch?”
My guess is that neither the Minutemen nor the NAACP would hold it against Ziegler if they learned that it was the hope of catching Witt’s “Up Close and Personal” - not Thomas’s - that kept him glued to his TV.
