Today we celebrate our athletes in the way we used to celebrate war heroes, with giant parades. I was by accident caught downtown in the 2016 celebration of the Chicago Cubs world series victory. I was meeting a friend for breakfast, we scheduled the meeting a week or two prior. I get on the train that morning, and everyone was dressed in blue. The last time I saw so many people crowding together, where the crowd was larger than what my eyes could register, I was in Mecca for the pilgrimage, though without all the alcohol. I suppose that is a fitting analogy, because sports can be religion for many, and religion can be sport for many.
We see contrast in this film, not between sport and religion, but between patriotism and nationalism. In championships, we root for our own team and share in their victory or loss. In war, regimes fill their populaces with nationalist pride (rather, rage), so as to justify the bloodshed of villains.
We depicted the Nazis and Soviets this way. Now, we depict China and Muslim-majority nations like Saudi Arabia this way. In 2018, something has shifted: Saudi Arabia grants driver's licenses to women and screens American movies in modern cinemas while we are walling ourselves in from the “infestation” of illegal immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.
I am old enough to remember a time in our American history when politicians and their followers would not equivocate on references to the Nazis. Today, leaders take moments to explain why their policies are not like the Nazis. That was a time when camps of detainees were empty haunted museums preserving an evil past that could never again happen. They were fossils showing us that we had evolved. Most important, despite our own history with the Native Americans, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the Interment of the Japanese Americans, the Nazi was a foreign villain. Things are different today: it is as though many in our society have merged patriotism and nationalism, taking such offense at any criticism of our nation—even from veterans—they excommunicate them as disloyal threats.
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