By Peter Gabel

1. Patriotism at the Ballpark

LAST MONTH I DROVE MY TWELVE-YEAR-OLD SON DOWN FROM SAN FRANCISCO to Los Angeles to attend Opening Day of the baseball season at Dodger Stadium. We're both Giants fans; we love going to games together; the Giants were kicking off the season against their great rivals, the Dodgers. But it turned out we were going to much more than a baseball game.

Prior to the game, as always, the crowd of some 50,000 was instructed to stand and remove our hats for the Star Spangled Banner. On this ceremonial Opening Day, however, the National Anthem was accompanied by the unfurling of a gigantic American flag that gradually covered the entire outfield. As an opponent of the war in Iraq and coercive patriotism, my son never wants to stand for the Anthem, and I've had to go through verbal contortions to persuade him that in spite of our common feelings about this matter, he should still stand in order to not appear to show contempt for others around us or at least to avoid being punched in the mouth, but that we could do so without standing at attention or putting our hats over our hearts, as is the custom of true believers.

But the giant flag was more morally compromising, and I was the one who snapped when at the height of the ceremony, three Navy jets, described as "bombers" over the public address system, flew overhead with a deafening roar. As I ran up the steps to the rear of the stands to escape with a shred of my conscience remaining, my son shouted "Dad!" and scurried after me not really knowing what panic had suddenly overcome me, the supposedly reasonable, balanced one with all the explanations. And our moral trial wasn't over: the whole thing happened all over again in the "seventh inning stretch" between the top and bottom halves of the inning, when the normal "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" was replaced by a glorious singing of "God Bless America" (since 9/11, this ritual substitution has occurred throughout the major leagues on weekends and on special occasions).

The Giants lost 5-0, but the idea was that at a higher level we had participated in a ritual that had reaffirmed our national unity. The point is the more telling when you consider that since the game was in Los Angeles, and even factoring in the self-selection of those who go to baseball games, more than half that crowd likely voted for Kerry, opposed the war, and felt confusedly pulled along by some iconic larger "We" that overpowered and more-than-half-silenced them.

The point here is that sports as a cultural phenomenon is much more than a game, and also more than a "business" as the media cynics sometimes characterize it--it is an important public activity saturated with moral meaning that plays a role in shaping popular consciousness. And because sports is overlain with this moral dimension, progressives should insist that sports be a contested terrain from a moral standpoint rather than just ceding this cultural arena to the Right as the supposed political haven for winners and tough guys. We have already seen a positive example of this kind of progressive resistance in the worldwide demonstrations against the running of the Olympic torch prior to this summer's Olympic Games in Beijing, contesting China's claim to international legitimacy as the host of all of the world's sports teams by challenging its occupation of Tibet and its investments in Darfur.

But the same kind of moral struggle should be carried out across the sporting spectrum, including, for example, challenging the willingness of so many American sports teams to require their players to wear the Nike "swoosh" in spite of Nike's exploitation of international child labor, or allowing the noisy louts on Fox Sports Net's "The Best Damn Sports Show Period" to utter any sexist thoughts that come into their minds on national television. If sports are going to be wrapped in the American flag, let's challenge those who do so to also celebrate the positive accomplishments of American social movements and the progressive moral values by which these movements in part have redefined American identity. Major League Baseball's decision to spend the entire 2007 season honoring Jackie Robinson for his courage in risking his life and health to break baseball's color barrier in 1947 is an excellent example of just this kind of public linkage of sport with a commitment to social justice, and it contrasts sharply with baseball's normal fare of military spectacles glorifying how tough we are and how we can kick people's asses.

The article that follows shows how the moral dimension of sports plays out in the context of the investment practices of team owners--in this case, in the investment decisions of the owners of one of Tikkun's local baseball teams, the San Francisco Giants. At the present time, baseball ownership groups and the media who report on them conceive of team ownership as basically a form of private investment like any other, with owners having the right to manage their assets and pursue their own economic self-interest without regard to the moral and social consequences of their actions. But this self-interested and privatized view of the prerogatives of owners and investors overlooks the fact that sports teams have a public and civic relationship with the team's home city, with that city's culture and values, and with the tens of thousands of fans who provide the team with its revenue precisely because of this communal identification. And it's in significant part because of this communal dimension, because teams representing cities travel all around the country to play other teams representing cities (as opposed, say, to conceiving of the games as the Chevron owners vs. the Safeway owners) that baseball has become known as "The National Pastime." This quasi-public nature of the team is what accounts for the fact that Congress has taken upon itself to oversee and regulate baseball in ways that would be inconceivable in the case of most private businesses, recently criticizing both players and owners during televised public hearings regarding steroid use and other drug practices that, according to many members of Congress, undermine the integrity of the "National Pastime" and contradict the morally uplifting influence that baseball is supposed to have on each successive generation. Thus the very same public moral elements of the game that justify the National Anthem, the Navy jets, and other conservative patriotic rituals also provide the basis for an ongoing moral scrutiny by Congress that would be perceived in other corporate contexts as an intrusion on the individual rights of owners and players.

Peter Gabel is Director of the Institute for Spirituality and Politics and Associate Editor of Tikkun.