The nuances of patriotism…
Frank Rich is sick of all the flag-waving patriotism–the kind that is crass, self-agrandizing, partisan, and commercial:
But patriotism needn’t make us so weary. Look around our culture, and it isn’t hard to find a faith in America that is not defined by government-commissioned flag-waving, political demagoguery or cable news’s jingoism-as-marketing-strategy. The most telling American fables don’t come in the blacks and whites of our current strident political and cultural discourse, which so often divides Americans into either flag-draped heroes or abject traitors. The great American stories, from Huckleberry Finn’s to the Dixie Chicks’, have always been nuanced; they can have poetry and they can have dark shadows. They can combine a love of country with an implicit criticism of it.
And, following from that last idea, this:
As one of our best playwrights, Richard Greenberg, writes in another genuinely patriotic drama on tap this summer, the baseball play “Take Me Out,” these all-American competitions reveal something about America that our current political debates avoid: “While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says: Someone will lose…So that baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy evades.”
I usually like to make a final comment about now. This time, however, I’ll choose one of the blogosphere’s popular directives: Just go read the whole thing.
Virginia Postrel sums it up the best: “Just say no to reviews and columns on stupid books!” http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/archives/000291.html
Wise advice. But, like all vices, isn’t it fun to look?
Amen to that - it’s a guilty pleasure - that’s for sure!!
Perhaps you could do a post on the rhetorical excess that is engaged in by people who want to find synonyms for all of life in the “Elysian fields” of baseball.
Bryan… oh, man. Don’t mess with my baseball metaphors!
Yeah, ya know, it’s a funny thing, tho, to those of us who are suckers for the ol’ baseball-is-life rhetoric. I’ve even got a few I toss out in class every now and then.
But, maybe I will do exactly that. It might be a lot of fun to see how broadly applied, and excessive, these comparisons are.
Hey, george will and bob costas alone could keep a PhD student on his toes. Throw in Ken Burns and David Halberstam and, whoa, I think I hear James Earl Jones calling!
Let me know if you ever do such a thing. I’d love to read it.
Truth be told, I enjoy baseball when I’m in the stadium, and I’ve even read a lot of Will’s books, but it gets to be a bit much eventually.