Standing in line Tuesday morning at the United States Embassy, breaksing from some serious hot sun, it was very easy for simmering anti-American sentiment to come to the boil.
But as demeaning as it is to be shunted away from "their" half of Marli Street-unless all your documents are in order and your appointed time is at hand-you have to give it to those folks cloistered in their well-appointed fortress.
As the undisputed world champions of consumerism and marketing, they know they've got a product that most of us here seem to want desperately, and all systems are in place to make it available to you, so long as you are prepared to play by their rules.
Watching the system at work, from the polite grilling by local security personnel, to the extensive search of all personal effects, to the line-up and sit-down awaiting the interviewer, it is easy to understand why they get their way with almost anything they put their collective minds and muscle to, like Afghanistan, Iraq and football.
Yes indeed, as much as we hate to admit it, the nation that still refers to the game as "sakkerrr" has once again shown us that talent, ability, genius-whatever you want to call it-is almost useless without those boring old qualities of consistency, dedication and discipline.
Reading most of the reports and listening to the opinions in the aftermath of the Ash Wednesday loss to the Americans at the Queen's Park Oval, the uninformed would certainly have been led to believe that the visitors had pulled off a major upset with their 2-1 World Cup qualifying victory.
That an impenetrable fortress had finally been breached by lesser invading forces, and that this was merely an aberration.
But the facts (and that's the problem with facts, they are just so obvious, unless you're blinded by something else, like patriotic fervour or too much to drink) paint a very different picture.
I await correction from the experts, but the United States have never lost a full senior competitive football international to this country. Not in the present era of the Soca Warriors, not in the heady days of the Strike Squad, not even in the time when the authorities lacked media savvy and referred to us as just Trinidad and Tobago.
While our super-duper, ultra-talented stars have repeatedly taken us only so far on the qualifying road, the Americans have appeared at every World Cup finals since Paul Caliguiri's speculative shot beat Michael Maurice and ended the hopes of a nation on November 19, 1989.
Their greatest moment may still be the 1-0 humiliation of England at the 1950 finals in Brazil, but just three years ago they made it into the last eight in Japan/Korea.
But not to worry. That's all in the past and Germany 2006 is our inevitable destiny. It's a good thing the German Embassy is just lower down Marli Street, so I could get the necessary paperwork in place well ahead of time.
Like the Australian cricket authorities, who were determined not to let the embarrassments of the 1980's at the hands of the mighty West Indies and even lesser teams be repeated, officialdom in United States football has long committed itself to pursuing another aspect of global domination.
I can hear some of you laughing out loud already. How can a nation of obscure players with ordinary-sounding names ever hope to conquer the Ronaldos, del Pieros and Rauls of this world? Simple, and this may go against the grain of popular American culture, but looks without substance count for very little, potential without performance results in frustration and broken dreams. Just ask the hundreds who still feel abused and betrayed by the fiasco that became the "Road to Italy" qualifying campaign.
For more than 30 years, the Americans have been nurturing a genuine footballing culture in their vast country thorough an elaborate system of coaching clinics and structures based on meritocracy and strategic planning towards achieving a specific goal.
It's not perfect-nothing is-but the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations has borne a bountiful harvest. Yes, they have the money to get the job done. But greenbacks without discipline and purpose will only fill the pockets of parasites and opportunists, leaving the game languishing in mediocrity.
Speaking of which, assess the 15 years of football in Trinidad and Tobago since the agonising near-miss at the National Stadium. There has been a succession of Caribbean Cup triumphs, yet Jamaica were the first English-speaking Caribbean nation, in 1998, to reach the World Cup finals.
Coaches-some hailed as saviours only to be exposed as jokers-have come and gone, players with considerable skill have been regularly flown in with great fanfare only to fail to deliver when it really mattered, and gullible fans have generally been taken for a ride by outlandish marketing campaigns that are as disconnected from the real world as American foreign policy.
And so we are in the grip of another mamaguy cycle, appropriately, in the aftermath of Carnival.
The Ash Wednesday loss, instead of being a setback, has apparently revealed how truly great and gifted we are. Sunday night's Digicel Cup defeat to Jamaica in Barbados was only because we let in two "soft" goals (how many "soft" goals have been conceded by a consistently porous defence over the years?).
Then, of course, there is always the last resort of alluding to a great conspiracy to pull down anything local, including newspaper editors who allow subversive comments such as these to be published.
Wake me up when it's over.