Through the magic of sports, we have the following actual headline in Alabama media: The real star of Alabama’s World Cup match? Freddy from Germany and his 1 a.m. Buc-ee’s dinner My most requested topic this week is not this classic NBA Finals. Instead, it’s this sudden genre of “Awestruck Europeans traveling through the USA heartland.” Apparently, due to the World Cup, an event that arguably means less to Americans than the aforementioned Finals or even your standard NFL playoff game, we’ve been invaded by gawking Euros. These visitors see our land through a different lens, excitedly consuming flyover state bounties we often take for granted. This is like if a thousand Alexis de Tocquevilles applied their observations to Bass Pro Shops. Is this now viral commentary authentic? Flattering? Condescending? Is “Freddy from Germany” even real? Maybe not, but in a way, yes. With now-famous German fan FreddyLA7, who’s notable enough to receive tourism assistance from NFL great JJ Watt, there’s some mystery here: He apparently started his X account back in the days when it was known as Twitter in 2021. His X account states he’s based in Germany (according to X, “The country or region that an account is based can be impacted by recent travel or temporary relocation. This data may not be accurate and can change periodically.”). He’s got a verified account, but all that means is that he pays for it. He’s had four username changes since September 2024. Some cynics, including those who regularly visit this podcast, view the emergent onslaught of Freddys as plausibly part of some astroturfed campaign to raise pro-Murica sentiment during these festivities. The softer cynical theory is just that these Euros have found an easy template for positive Internet engagement. Maybe AleksanderGunner89 doesn’t really like Costco that much. Perhaps what he really likes is all the likes he gets from liking Costco. And why are we Americans so generously handing out that Internet engagement? Aren’t we infamously incurious about the broader world’s judgment? My take is, contrived or not, the America-loving visitors are tapping into an understandable want. I think these football tourists landed on a market inefficiency that I first noticed back in March, when the Twitter/X translation feature revealed an entire Japanese subculture of USA fetishization. Those Japanese X users were into the cowboy hats and BBQ, and Americans aware of this phenomenon were mostly tickled by it. Growing up, I associated the export of our brand with gleaming Manhattan skyscrapers. To many around the world, their America was the version Billy Crystal and his New York friends sought in “City Slickers.” The prevalent Japanese view of USA culture reminded me of that old 2004 election meme of describing the divide in our nation as between the United States of Canada vs. Jesusland. These Japanese America lovers betrayed little interest in the United States of Canada. It seems they preferred Jesusland, or perhaps more currently, Trumpland, a profound source of embarrassment to an American traveler type who craves an image of worldly sophistication. The Japanese Americana moment turned this sore subject on its head. Japan, a high-status travel destination for our coastal elites, contained people who saw high status in what many here regard as low culture. They saw something to be proud of in archetypes that my friends and neighbors view as intrinsically embarrassing. Now the visiting Euros are putting an additional spin on this. The Japanese were in love with an image, whereas the charmed Europeans are more like Boris Yeltsin at the Houston grocery store. Yes, France might have given the world “democracy, existentialism, and the ménage à trois.” But America invented the free refill. You arrive here and of course aren’t easily finding your way to a cattle drive. The real America isn’t necessarily the one spotlighted in the TV series “Yellowstone.” Instead, it’s a vast expanse of commercialized abundance. It’s the biggest Bass Pro Shops. It’s the Wisconsin Dells water parks. While our elites fetishize the “walkable” European city, World Cup Europeans are gobsmacked by the scale and splendor of the drivable USA safari. For whatever we lack, we also have a lot of space and stuff. It’s easy to see the flaw in a culture that revolves around consumption, but it’s also easy to take stuff, like air conditioning, for granted. We have poverty, of course. We have gun crime, infamously. We also have a middle class with access to wonders unimaginable to many around the planet. “Freedom” is a well-worn American cliché, but clichés exist for a reason. There’s so much negativity out there in high culture about our nation, from our own elites and elites abroad. We’re at a current low point in Gallup’s “Are You Proud to be an American?” question, with much of the decline driven by liberals during this Trump era. That makes some sense, but let’s take a 30,000-foot view of that historic bottom: A record-low 58% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” (41%) or “very” (17%) proud to be an American, down nine percentage points from last year and five points below the prior low from 2020. This means that a solid majority of Americans are still “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American. Where in the national news can they find feel-good stories that channel this sentiment? If you’re looking for smaller anecdotes, it’s not especially novel to see Murica-love voiced by a flag-waving Texan. It’s more fun to witness such positivity from the vantage of a cosplaying World Cup Brit. In conclusion, yes, there might be an aspect of contrivance to the current praise of our country from this influx of visitors. There’s also a real, mostly unmet yearning for that kind of admiration. Perhaps Buc-ee’s isn’t really the best we have to offer. But our country offers a whole lot to a great many, and there’s something glorious about the size and color of the American mundane. *** This is republished with permission from the author. The original essay appears here. Ethan Strauss is the creator of the Substack House of Strauss. He is a former NBA PR gopher, basketblogger, and NBA beat writer.