Taking the Joy out of my Favorite Sport

I grew up in the Caribbean and it is not surprising that I love baseball. But even though I live close to two Major League Baseball franchises, I rarely attend games. An oped by Howard Bryant in the New York Times sums up my feelings about baseball these days. And it all goes back to the fateful day of September 11, 2001. Slowly, starting with the Yankees, teams replaced the seventh-inning stretch’s silly rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” with the jingoistic “God Bless America.” Eventually, the mix of imperial politics and sports  worsened. Here’s Bryant describing the transformation:

It all felt right, until temporary grieving turned into a permanent, commercial bonanza — and a chilling referendum on who gets to be American. But then it didn’t feel right, like when in 2008, a New York police officer ejected a fan at a Red Sox-Yankees game after he left his seat during a seventh-inning-stretch recording of “God Bless America.” Recently a high-ranking Red Sox official told me — nearly 17 years after the towers fell — that he really doesn’t know why the team still plays “God Bless America,” but he knows this: The team would “get killed” publicly if it was the first team to stop doing it.

As an atheist, I don’t apppreciate the overtly religious tones of the song that essentially tells me that I don’t belong. I’m constantly reminded that I do not belong. The seventh-inning should be for stretching, not for cramping your arm in faux-patriotism celebrating the military-industrial complex. Alhough this blog is supposed to go beyond church and state matters, sometimes I wonder if there’s a church/state separation case to be made with Go Bless America in stadiums. The teams are private enterprises with stadiums that, for most of them, are heavily taxpayer subsidized and, in many cases, single-use facilities. So, who knows? Maybe there’s an enterprising case to be had.

 

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Taking the Joy out of my Favorite Sport
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