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American in Paris |
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FAN MENTALITY |
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Support American Values,
Stop Cheering Team USA
By KENNETH DREYFACK
of TheColumnists.com
When I was a boy in the Bronx, one of the things that mattered most was whether you were a Yankees, Giants or Dodgers fan. Each team had its own unique personality and aura. So the one you chose to support told other kids a lot about who you were--your values, your aesthetics, your view of the world. It mattered an awful lot to an 8-year-old boy which team’s cap he wore, which players’ photos were taped to his wall beneath the team banner, which baseball cards he most treasured. It was a defining issue.
To be a true fan, you had to be a loyal one. And that meant you would support your team through thick and thin, no matter what. The kids who switched their loyalties when their team fared poorly were considered to be flakes, fair weather supporters without gumption.
That hasn’t changed much over the years. If anything, loyalty to teams has probably grown stronger, as professional sports have flourished. Perhaps because it is so strongly instilled in our psyches, team loyalty has spilt over into others areas. Colleges and universities, for example, build loyalty among students, to later reap contributions from alumni. Corporations go to great lengths to instill loyalty among employees, to incite cooperation and keep them from jumping to the competition.
Today, that die-hard, thick-and-thin fan mentality seems to infuse the way Americans look at their country and the rest of the world. When people are asked to reflect on world events, their response seems to be: ‘Our team is the U.S.A. and we support it no matter what.’
Fan loyalty. It’s the only reason I can find to explain why, confronted by a constantly growing series of patently obvious, gross blunders by a band of manipulative, arrogant incompetents, so many people are happy with how the US deals with the rest of the world. Reinforced by video game-like televised images and reassured by Fox News cheerleaders, many people seem to be delighted, or at least relieved, to settle into a steadfast ‘my country right or wrong’ position. Those who decline to line up blindly behind the coach and his management are at best flaky wimps, at worst enemies of America.
I’m not knocking patriotism (even if the patriotic sentiment does sometimes tend to degenerate into xenophobia), but I do think there’s something dangerously wrong with patriotism reduced to the level of juvenile fan loyalty. It’s fine for the world of sports, where part of the pleasure lies in the comfortably absolute categorization of contestants into good guys (the home team) and bad guys (the visitors). After all, what difference does it really make which team wins? Dismissing a particular group of overpaid professional jocks as ‘those bums from Brooklyn’ is not likely to harm anyone.
That’s not the case with world affairs. The players and the outcomes do matter. The visiting teams are real people and it makes a very considerable difference to their lives and fortunes whether or not their country is invaded, whether or not farmers receive fair prices for their crops, whether or not their air and water is loaded with chemical garbage.
If fans do indeed identify with their teams, what are the underlying values of Team USA? Instilling hatred and terror among millions of poor, ordinary people worldwide? Holding unidentified people who have been accused of no crime incommunicado, indefinitely, in Cuba, Morocco, Pakistan and God knows where else, undergoing God knows what kind of interrogations and treatment? Undermining international initiatives to combat crimes against humanity or global warming and pollution?
Let’s replace blind loyalty to team USA with some meaningful discussion about the issues that affect peoples’ lives and welfare worldwide and the values that U.S. democracy are built upon.
©2003 by Kenneth Dreyfack. The illustrations are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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