I went to my first ever baseball game on Friday night. I didn’t think I’d enjoy it. It seems too similar to cricket, a game so long and boring that it feels like training for life in a nursing home.
But I was pleasantly surprised. Baseball’s a fast moving battle of nerves. When it comes down to three “balls” and two “strikes,” the guy at the bat has the world on his shoulders. If he takes another strike, his head hangs low. If he knocks it out of the park, he stands among the gods. The rules are simple and any confusion is cleared up by more beer. After two hours, I graduated from total novice to seasoned pro – shouting, “You could see the ball better if you got a haircut, hippie!” and “Hit it, don’t swat it, Zimmerman!” [That Zimmerman really bugged me. His whole technique seemed to rely on the pitcher not being able to throw. Is the man allergic to running?]
...Another, more stark, reminder of that truth is the role that military pageantry plays at a baseball game. At the start of the contest, the CIA honour guard trooped the colours and we were all invited to stand and applaud the folks serving in the US military. But nothing prepared me for the moving rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner, as sung by a female soldier in combat fatigues. The stadium stood proudly – hats clasped to chests – as she powerfully, beautifully sang the national anthem. “Does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave/ O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” It sure does.
In contrast, American patriotism is sharper and more certain – and more fixedly about ideas. Its promise is individual freedom. But that freedom is guaranteed – just like victory in a baseball game – by thinking and acting as a team or a nation. One of the reasons why civil society works in the US slightly better than it does in Britain is that they understand the balance of rights and responsibilities between the individual and the group. Without the security of a welfare state, Americans are acculturated to risk and sacrifice, and so (ironically) they can be a little more charitable than us. They are certainly more free.
After the game we moved to a bar and got chatting with some young marines, who were talking excitedly about the fact that they are going to present the flag at one of the ballgames next week. After that, they will fly off to war. We are lucky to share the world with a nation that produces men like these.
Repoz
Posted: April 18, 2012 at 02:23 PM |
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Hey, he saw a fine game for his first, with the Nats winning in 13 innings, and said "hippie" driving in the deciding run.
I bet I can find a crap load of Yemenis, Afghans, Iraqi, Libyans, Somalians and Pakistani who would disagree.
Edit: I see Zimmerman isn't. Who the hell am I thinking of then.
This is the most communist thing I've ever read on this website.
Maybe he wrote all about Pat Buchanan's extensive military career. Why am I not surprised that this article appeared in The Telegraph?
I'm reminded of a Frasier episode called The Candidate:
At least he's not a chickenhawk. He's been pretty reliably against every war in recent years.
This is true, though that sure wasn't the case during Vietnam, when his only criticism was that it wasn't fought strongly enough.
THAT's a great line.
The guy/gal in the Abe costume running around the warning track in the fourth inning is not amused.
First stop, San Francisco - our narrator (who is both funny and charming) finds time to take in a baseball game.
He never does make it over to the Tenderloin, which is fine, because, hey, you do have to watch your step over here.
Huh? Lincoln served.
Someone's obviously not a red diaper baby.
Some think he enlisted the service of young guardsmen a little too vigorously, though.
That's just Red Sox-Yankees the rest of the sport can be quite pleasant.
What about James Madison during the burning of Washington?
Kinship with Grammer.
I guess he wasn't technically "under fire", but JFK was aboard a ship that was sunk by the Japanese (via ramming).
He must mean "under fire as President", because otherwise there's a long list: Washington, Grant, Jackson, TR, Taylor W.H. Harrison, Hayes, etc., etc.
PT 109 was likely sunk in large part due to Kennedy's own incompetence, so lets not give him too much props.
I'd like to hear more from your newsletter regarding this.
No, really.
No, really.
There have long been stories that JFK was below decks at the time of the ramming, when he should have been on duty.
His actions post-collision were undoubtedly heroic, but getting your ship or boat rammed is generally something that gets you court-martialed.
Edit: This article does not repeat the "below decks" story, but discusses his general incompetence as a commander (e.g. nickname "Crash" b/c a reckless stunt caused his boat to crash into a dock) and the poor state of readiness on the boat at the time of the incident:
http://www.historynet.com/pt-109-disaster.htm
Americans love their country because nationalismThe hero-cult around John F. Kennedy is the stupidity that never stops giving.FTFY.
I bet I can find a crap load of Yemenis, Afghans, Iraqi, Libyans, Somalians and Pakistani who would disagree.
And they'd be wrong.
Giggity!
What do you mean?!?! All those countries were peaceful, prosperous, paradises before the US showed up. They had equal right for all, and well functioning civil societies.
Right???
Maybe some day we'll have those here...
All those countries were peaceful, prosperous, paradises before the US showed up.
The U.S. wasn't even this.
That's a 30 sec Google search.
But just from that article, there is ample evidence that JFK was bad at his job. His crew was undisciplined, and he was reckless. His radio operator wasn't even monitoring the radio during the incident.
How much that incompetence contributed to the ramming is likely unknowable.
His older brother clearly thought something was fishy. From the same article:
Maybe some day we'll have those here...
The U.S. wasn't even this.
Hah! The attempt to draw moral equivalence between the US and hellholes and brutal dictatorships is really laughable.
Glad to see some trope never go out of style.
Or the WWE, with a Mohegan Sun casino as a backup.
Samuel Johnson
Constitutional patriotism excepted, of course.
We all know the answer to winning hearts and minds is to bomb them. Or 'drone them'.
I didn't do this. I've been all over the world, and some places you would consider hellholes; and with all this, I find the U.S. to be incredibly awesome. That you still find my daring to dispute that the U.S. has always been a peaceful, prosperous, paradise the same thing as drawing a moral equivalence to a war-torn dictatorship dystopia is your comprehension problem, not mine.
I find UK (or more specifically English) patriotism endlessly fascinating. It's probably due to the demographic I predominantly associate with, but in my experience the way the English feel about their country falls into two, sometimes over-lapping groups
1) embarassment over being a bit of a bully to the rest of the world for a couple centuries.
2) embarassment over their current status as secondary power after being a dominant one for so long. In a sense, being on the wrong side of history.
Not to mention the strange (and certainly non-unifying) significance of St. George's cross in political culture.
American patriotism has always fascinated me for opposite reasons.
Canadian patriotism appears to be somewhere in the middle. Most Canadians are quite proud of their nation, but don't really go out of their way to tell you*...unless there's a hockey game on.
*for instance they'll make statements like "Most Canadians are quite proud of their nation" that perhaps imply that they themselves are, without actually saying so.
I agree with this.
Because human beings are fundamentally tribal; we like similar people more.
Why do people show favoritism towards their children and other family members over non-family? Why do they show favoritism to friends over strangers?
Becasue they share commonalities: DNA, interests, values, experiences etc. The same thing extends to further and further circles.
You can't ask why do Americans privelege American lives in jobs without asking why do you privelege the lives and well being of your kids over starving kids in the Sudan? How many people would take their kid's college fund and spend it on food and medicine for poor African children? hell, how many would take their iPhone away, and give the money to charity?
Hey, I think America is a loathsome self-deluded POS...but I'll defend it to the death from foreign bad-mouthers because they have their own problems and arn't any better. Except for Scandanavian countries. And those places are cold, so who wants to live there.
They're no bed of roses either. The pressure for conformity is apparently crushing.
i think you're making stuff up.
but i agree with dale's evaluation. they're cold as hell, so i wouldn't want to live there. in fact, i pretty much agree with his whole comment.
life sucks, but baseball makes up for a lot of that.
That's only what I've read.
I should have phrased this another way. I do totally understand this. We all draw lines around our "tribes" somewhere, and if you interrogated me on the subject, I'm sure I hold some totally irrational ideas about who's in my tribe and who isn't. I suppose what I meant was that I don't personally have the impulse to draw those lines around my nation's borders.
It is of course a crude division, largely driven (I think) by the fact that that's the unit we've picked to fight wars in for the last 400+ years.
But it's certainly true that I personally have more in common with a politically conservative, devout Catholic, middle class Brazilian, than I do with an ultra-liberal, vegan, environmentalist, atheist owner of a IT start-up, than may live 2 miles from me.
Really?
Most of our ancestors made a conscious decision to come here, despite a lot of hardship, because they thought it was a great country. Most of us have ancestors, or family members and friends, who fought to keep this a great country.
We're proud of our freedom, our prosperity, the fact that we've generally been a force for good in the world. A lot of things.
And most of us play some small part in maintaining that. Voting, paying taxes, being involved in our communities, giving to charity, serving on a jury, etc.
Lots of countries have reasons to be proud, that's true. But to say an American has no reason to be proud is crazy.
I'm more "patriotic" about being a USC Trojan than an American, at least there I had to meet some standards to be accepted and then accomplish something to become an alumni.
Funny, I feel no "patriotism" towards Harvard. It was a business transaction. They took my parents' money, and I got an education. I don't give them and their zillion dollar endowment $0.01. I feel no more affinity for them selling me my education than I do for Chrysler selling me my Jeep.
No, you couldn't have. If "you" were born in Somalia it wouldn't be you. "You" are are a product of American upbringing, American education and American peers. If things were otherwise we would have to do retroactive abortion on all the small Americans wanting to be lawyers that would be born in Europe.
Thank you for apologizing. No worries, I've been called worse ;-)
Unfortunately for my debt situation, neither institution I attended accepted my parents' money; they just accepted loan money on my behalf.
I'm still not sure if that was character-building or not, and I debate pretty much daily if I will pay for my childrens' college education or make them go it alone like my folks made me.
Stupid kids.
Edit: My home is filled with Clemson and Northwestern paraphenalia, but nary a single American flag. Telling? I don't know.
"Proud" to be an American may be the wrong way to put it. I feel very fortunate that I was born an American, and that my relatives took risks and endured hardship to get here. I feel proud of some of my contributions to my community and country, but I don't consider myself better than others because of where I was born.
It's tough to think of anything more irrational than caring about a professional sports team. Patriotism - even if it's pinned on the way the water goes down the toilet - makes more sense than that.
Not me, most of my friends are jerks!
At the same time, I've found a lot of wonderful echoes of and tributes to America abroad. I went to a bar in Thailand overlooking the Mekong and the Laotian border, where the seats were hay bales, all customers were given 10 gallon hats, and a band was playing Johnny Cash and Neil Young songs. Also pride inflaming, in a totally different way. Tough for me to imagine looking at that and thinking to myself, "Well, I am not a cowboy, nor did I write any of these songs, so this has nothing whatsoever to do with me, and it would be irrational to take any extra enjoyment in this." Seems like a soulless, robotic way of looking at things.
Eh. Not to me. One has more personal choice in the former.
This actually raises an interesting discussion. When was Canada the greatest and when was America and who is now? I really hope this doesn't come across as snarky, I think it's a fun way of thinking about the issue. Or maybe I've just got rankings on the brain from too much time spent lately ranking all the baseball players who retired in 2008.
I would think it's probably one of the northern European countries; I've been pretty blown away by places like Sweden and Denmark in recent years. Methinks it's really, really hard to be a superpower and "greatest country in the world."
And someone else probably thinks that only superpowers ought to be considered. Maybe it's easy to have a great country when you're tiny and you don't have any global responsibilities. Just imagine if America cut its defense budget to the bone and reinvested all that money into quality of life infrastructure.
And someone else probably thinks that only ethnically diverse countries ought to be considered.
And...
Not helping our national insecurity complex!
More seriously I agree with your overall point. My natural instinct isn't favourable to the US (it's the petty instinct of a jealous younger brother, but my instinct none the less), but nothing makes me want to stand up for my American brothers more than foreigners who generalize about Americans without ever having been to the country.
And also I find being around foreigners makes me feel a stronger connection to my nation than when I am home. Not in an exclusive "I'm better than you people!" kind of way. But I feel more Canadian when I'm talking to someone from Belgium, Romania, Libya, wherever. When you're surrounded by your countrymen you kind of take it for granted, but there's nothing like immersing yourself in other cultures to remind yourself about your own. As a bit of an odd example, no one in England seems to eat those little Valentine's Day cinnamon heart candies. Personally I've always hated them, but a Canadian friend of mine smuggled some into the country and I've been hooked on them ever since.
This is of course the correct answer.
You definitely haven't lived long enough in the UK yet. They are plenty smug about a lot of stuff. Insufferably jingoistic about the English national soccer team, even though it hasn't done #### since 1966.
Here's a good example, an article that basically slags off the Norwegian legal system for not being English.
Oops. But hasn't he lived in America since like the 60s?
Also, as an American, I consider Canada to be a kind of quirky unofficial state, and I claim all of its good cultural offerings for our own.
I think Canada was the best from about WWII through 1988, and I think the US was the best from 1776 til 1929. Just my opinions of course.
Yeah I think it's mostly the type of English person I usually talk with. Hardly any of them are football fans and they're all pretty embarassed about the national team. Come to think of it I must have tapped into the English demographic that's natural reaction to everything is embarassment.
You're braving the staunch BTF anti-mayonnaise faction.
Miserable Fat Belgian Bastards!
Well, as long as you let us keep the credit for Nickelback and Celine Dion I suppose that's a fair deal...
But the Dutch can be really aggressive about people who think Holland is really great. They are like a bad teen drama where the skinny, dorky girl refuses to believe the football captain is actually attracted to her.
But they are crazy patriotic. The whole country drapes itself in orange on Queen's Day and major soccer tournaments, and it's common to serve hors d'oeuvres with a little Dutch flag toothpick, and all the boats people have (which is everybody) has a Dutch flag on the back.
Just wait until this summer. They'll be all embarrassed and talk about how John Terry is a jerk and then when the whistle blows for the start of England-France, it'll be LOL FRANCE HAHAH FROGS CAN'T PLAY FOOTBALL WOOOOO STEVIE G!!
I've found generally that those who affirm their choices the loudest are the most insecure in their choices. (Empahsis on "generally". It's not universally true.) They might be insecure in the choice itself, or insecure in their ability to defend their choice, or insecure that few people have made a similar choice. They might even have made a different choice, but don't want you to find out (e.g. Ted Haggard).
Well, yeah. Isn't that the crux of pretty much every baseball discussion on this site?
My problem is my favourite team is Germany. I didn't really think about where I'm living at the moment when I bought my Ozil jersey. I'm not sure I have the courage to wear it outside the house.
Yeah I think that's what I was getting at. If there was an actual definitive answer it would be the opposite of a fascinating discussion. "Fascinating" does probably over-sell it, "interesting" perhaps. As revealing about an individual's values as the objective greatness of a nation.
In this case it was a particularly useful discussion as it reminded me why Shooty is awesome.
I imagine that quite often.
Until you try the food. WTF are they thinking putting cream sauces on all their meat.
The food in Italy more than makes up for the stagnant economy and disfunctional govt.
Wales
Modern Germany
Early 20th Century German Empire
Soviet Union
Province of Ontario
As an undergrad I had them on a rotation as my curtains. But I eventually pulled the Soviets out because it filled my room with a red haze that made it difficult to read.
But, a lot of the reason Norway is doing so well is they are sitting on a shitload of North Sea Brent. That's just as much an accident as Somalia haven't shitty farmland.
Wales
Modern Germany
Early 20th Century German Empire
Soviet Union
Province of Ontario
As an undergrad I had them on a rotation as my curtains. But I eventually pulled the Soviets out because it filled my room with a red haze that made it difficult to read.
It's very interesting to me that reasonable people will fly the Soviet flag, but express disapproval of those who fly the Confederate flag, and absolute shock and horror (justified) if someone flew a Nazi flag, or a German Flag that included the swastika.
I'm not sure if it's a similar dynamic or not, but there's a guy who started his PhD at the same time as me who is working on representations of Thai culture in travel books. It sounds like his thesis tackles a similar issue in that country.
And most importantly, they had enough sense to nationalize it. Canada has a lot more oil (albeit dirtier and costlier to produce) than Norway, but our citizens will never reap its rewards liek those in Norway can.
I could live in Norway in the summers, but I'd probably commit suicide by the end of January if I had to endure the 5-6 hours of daylight in the winter.
Because a lot of otherwise reasonable people view the Soviets the way Marge Schott apparently viewed Hitler. "They were good at the beginning, but they probably went a bit too far." Like Marge, these people are both wrong and foolish.
I realize this isn't really a response to the comment, and I can totally see how it can be offensive...
But for me it's more of a personal history thing. As part of my "younger brother" complex when I was a kid I was a bit of a contrarian. My brother always got to choose what to play first...he'd get Batman and I'd be stuck with whatever else there was. So I ended up sort of revelling in the opposite. He was an Athletics fan and a Cowboys fan (this was the late 80s/early 90s), so I was a Cubs, Whalers, and a Broncos fan. The Soviet Union was just a similar choice. I was too young to actually know what the Soviet Union was except that they seemed to be people everyone was down on. So I took to it with glee. I actually marched to my elementary school with my massive Soviet Union flag on a pole on May Day when I was 10 or so. I guess my parents were pretty relaxed...or my mom's pretty relaxed, my dad just has a sense of humour.
Anyway, I still have that particular flag and so it means a lot to me, as I've clung to this complex my whole life. I realize that no one who sees the flag knows about this significance it has for me, and it means something quite different to them...but at the core I'm a pretty narcissistic person, so I don't let that bother me.
I was actually just telling someone earlier today...I think it's the summers that would do me in. I'm finding summers in England do my head in. The sun wakes me up at 5am every day. The winters are a bit drearier than I'm used to, but often I don't really notice.
You mean 100% consciously in control? Cause if so, try telling that to someone who is clinically depressed.
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