ArcaMax

So, Belgium is cool now? Scotland's cool? What next? Everyone starts trying to act Algerian?

Cool is supposed to be American territory. Vietnamese workers might be making sneakers at lightning speed for $1 a day, but who designs the sneakers? Whose basketball players put their names on the sneakers? Which country's youth wears those $400 sneakers with a magnificently casual attitude?

So, Donald Trump, who is roughly as cool as your grandpa saying "Bermuda shorts," tries to fix a soccer game between the USA and Belgium. Picture, if you will, President Harry Truman caring enough about soccer to try to rig a game. Truman didn't have bone spurs. He had bad eyesight, but he got into the National Guard by memorizing an eye chart and rigging his own physical.

Oh, hell yeah. That's cool.

Sure. The Soviet Union fell because they got tired of being sent to prison for 20 years every time they complained about sawdust in the bread, but it also fell because they wanted Marlboros, and rock 'n' roll, and T-shirts with "I'm With Stupid" printed on the front.

America is Elvis. We're the Fonz. We're Southern Rock and Blues and the Grateful Dead and a lip-curling sneer. We're the flash on a rapper's finger. We're the twist in Sabrinas Carpenter's hips.

So, because Trump can't fix a soccer game any more than he can fix a pool liner, the Belgians beat living hell out of the American team. After the game, the Belgians did a hilariously apt version of the famous Trump dance.

You've seen the Trump dance. It's the upthrust thumbs and pumping arms and wiggling-off-the-beat-hips dance beloved of our rapidly failing president.

The Trump dance is the cold dirt grave of cool. When V-neck T-shirt Grandpa does it at the family reunion, Grandma tells him he can't have any more beer because he's acting the fool.

So, the Belgians are cool now, and we're the guys who can't get a date to the prom?

Beautiful.

Scottish soccer fans show up in Boston and maybe 30% of them are wearing kilts. A kilt is a kind of a plaid skirt like the ones Catholic school girls wear. It hits just a little above the knee.

Did the Scots begin demanding to look under each other's kilts to check for the wearer's real sexual identity? They did not. Did they start quibbling about who could use which bathroom? They did not.

Instead, when Duncan ran into Angus in a Boston pub, Angus smiled at Duncan.

"That's a bonnie kilt ye've got there, Angus," Duncan said.

"Aye," Angus answered. "You're wearing a perky plaid yerself."

Cool isn't what you wear; it's how you wear it.

Used to be, people in Eastern Europe didn't want to read the national poet whose best poems all started, "Mine more coal for the glorious steel mills of the glorious people's struggle."

Instead, they wanted Jim Morrison riding on a storm, they wanted drunken old hobo Jack Kerouac writing that the only people for him were the "mad ones."

The United States can still bomb the hell out of your country from a safe distance, but our cool is slipping, and slipping badly.

Increasingly, what we are is a bunch of white people who argue crankily about what we're going to "do with" gays, people darker than an Irish guy with a tan, and non-Christians. We do this in the same tone we use when we talk about what we're going to "do with" the family dog when we go on vacation.

"I don't know what we're going to do with Bosco when we go to Disney World," we say, slightly annoyed that we have to do anything with Bosco.

They argue about that stuff in European, too. It's the new international cool. It's what we export instead of beatnik shades and leather jackets and the effortless cool of barefoot California girls.

It's time for the World Cup to end, not for good, just for now. Let the teams go back to Cape Verde and France, and leave us alone with our uncool, boiling hot racial and sexual arguments, our attempts to whitewash slavery, our rehashing of the Bible into some kind of blueprint for turning your wife into an agreeable robot.

And in the hurtful noise of our shattered country, sometimes you'll see a skater kid, or a Goth kid, and you'll know it's still there for us if we'll reach.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.