The problem with the football player who didn’t stand during the anthem is that there is zero point to these competitive sports other than promotion of the nation-state. They were created to foster patriotism and to promote emotional attachment to the nation-state. And the players today get enormous payouts because they help fans experience the ecstasy of nationalism.
Other than this, they serve no purpose whatsoever. For the players, shitting on the trappings of nationalism is like cutting off the hand that feeds you.
Clarissa's Blog 
“..there is zero point to these competitive sports other than promotion of the nation-state.”
I know, but american sports really take it to the next level. Fucking fighter jets flying over the stadium, perfectly timed with the crescendo of the national anthem, lordy lord.
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I haven’t seen that but knowing how Americans do nationalism, it’s very believable. 😃
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Whitney Houston’s national anthem rendition at the Super Bowel (the fighter jets appear at 3:18).
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*Bowl
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I liked “bowel” more in this context. Seems to me that the Super Bowl is a chance for people to pig out like crazy.
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LOL, Super Bowel! A slip quite telling of your sentiments towards the event!
🙂
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Have you read George Orwell’s essay “The Sporting Spirit”? It is very short and fantastic:
Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/spirit/english/e_spirit
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The problem with the football player who didn’t stand during the anthem is that there is zero point to these competitive sports other than promotion of the nation-state
Nation-state? Yes there’s that. These games foster regionalism much more strongly. Most fans of teams come from the area the team is based out of. There is more passionate interest and rivalry in an OSU-Michigan game or a Steelers-Browns game than whether a team from Canada is matched up against a team from the United States. Even though the best players just go to play with the team or franchise that pays them the most money, there’s this fiction that they are loyal to the “home team”. For this reason, the way LeBron handled his free agency decision pissed off many basketball fans.
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http://deadspin.com/these-teams-earned-the-most-from-the-militarys-paid-pa-1740567338
Senate investigators report that the Department of Defense has spent more than $9 million over the last four years on military tributes at sporting events, carefully staged patriotic displays meant to drum up goodwill and recruiting that weren’t publicly disclosed as paid advertisements.
If you’ve gone to games or watched TV, you’ve been exposed to these ads. They take familiar forms: giant American flags, military-family reunions, the singing of “God Bless America” at baseball games, even things as seemingly minor as showing troops on the jumbotron for a round of applause.
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\there is zero point to these competitive sports other than promotion of the nation-state.
Uri raised an interesting possibility of winning a gold medal w/o promoting it:
More then a thousand young male fans came to welcome the two Israeli Judo fighters – one female, one male – who had won a bronze medal each at the Olympic games in Rio.
…
WE CAN only imagine what would have happened if the Israeli Olympic contingent had included Arab athletes. Arabs? In our contingent?
True, Arabs constitute some 20% of the Israeli population, and some are very active in sports. But God – or Allah – saved us from this headache. None made it to Rio.
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1471611894
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Also, we have recently talked about ‘nationalnost’ in FSU vs the concept of citizenship in USA. In Israel, according to Uri’s above column:
\ the Israeli government registration authority, which asks for the individual’s “nationality”, refuses to register “Israeli” and insists on “Jewish” or “Arab”. (In Israel, nationality does not mean citizenship.)
An appeal was made by a group of Israeli citizens (including me) to the Supreme Court against this decision, but it was rejected.
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In other news:
Fuelling the flames in Hebron
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4847689,00.html
Agree with many things here:
Op-ed: The current debates around raising the national flag or banning the burqini shine an important light on the importance of patriotism and the dangers of zealous nationalism and or a border-less world that strives to live by the alluring words of John Lennon.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4846674,00.html
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