Yeah, an expletive hardly seems worth the trouble and out of bounds for government involvement. What bothers me about baseball games occurs prior to every game: playing the national anthem. The custom is to rise during the national anthem to show allegiance with the nation--a nation I and others can't feel allegiance to when it drops drones on weddings and houses where it is known children are present, a nation that uses my tax dollars for hegemonic purposes and privileging the interests of wealthy elites and large corporations against the interests of the working class. Why should and I and others even have to make a political statement and risk reprisal from a patriotic nutcase by refusing to stand at a baseball game? (And don't forget that quite often local tax dollars were used to build that stadium.) Furthermore, the expectation and risk of reprisal serves as coercive force that is just as effective in its influence as direct coercive methods used by explicit totalitarian regimes at similar events. The coercive control of the USA government has reached a level of sophistication and subtlety unmatched by explicit totalitarian regimes because the government instigated and can now rely on patriotic control being enforced culturally and not explicitly by the government.
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Yeah, an expletive hardly seems worth the trouble and out of bounds for government involvement. What bothers me about baseball games occurs prior to every game: playing the national anthem. The custom is to rise during the national anthem to show allegiance with the nation--a nation I and others can't feel allegiance to when it drops drones on weddings and houses where it is known children are present, a nation that uses my tax dollars for hegemonic purposes and privileging the interests of wealthy elites and large corporations against the interests of the working class. Why should and I and others even have to make a political statement and risk reprisal from a patriotic nutcase by refusing to stand at a baseball game? (And don't forget that quite often local tax dollars were used to build that stadium.) Furthermore, the expectation and risk of reprisal serves as coercive force that is just as effective in its influence as direct coercive methods used by explicit totalitarian regimes at similar events. The coercive control of the USA government has reached a level of sophistication and subtlety unmatched by explicit totalitarian regimes because the government instigated and can now rely on patriotic control being enforced culturally and not explicitly by the government.
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