President Obama’s expressed concerns about violence in football a week before the Super Bowl seem oddly calculated. Are his recent comments intended to parallel his campaign against guns and his assault on the Second Amendment? Are we Americans — the ones who watch the Super Bowl — inherently violent? He wouldn’t want his boys to play, if he had any. They might hurt themselves. Surely, a viewing of Hockey Night in Canada would send Obama to the fainting couch. But it is not hard to see him in future days high up in the stands with Bill Clinton and Mick Jagger and old friend Beckham and his Spice Girls missus, hoping against hope that some unheard-of Third World nation, newly thrown together by Western clerks and movie actors, will win the World Cup in soccer (and swooning with disgust when it goes once again to those gnarly Germans).

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