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Conclusion: Reconstituting the National Pastime
- The University of Alabama Press
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Conclusion Reconstituting the National Pastime on May 25, 2006, with British prime minister Tony Blair at his side, President George W. Bush acknowledged that he had made some mistakes during the war in Iraq. Specifically, he regretted using the phrase, “Bring it on,” to terrorists, and he termed the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib “the biggest mistake that’s happened so far.”1 In spite of these setbacks, neither Bush nor Blair was willing to concede that the policies underlying the “war on terror” were misguided. Nevertheless, by early 2007 Blair announced that British troops would begin withdrawing from Iraq.2 undaunted , the Bush administration remained committed to fighting a war in which few remained confident. In the wake of continued confusion and disappointment about Iraq, Americans grew increasingly critical of their president. An April 2008 poll revealed that 63 percent believed the Iraqi war to be a mistake and only 28 percent approved of Bush’s performance, the lowest approval rating ever recorded in the seventy years of the Gallup poll.3 on January 12, 2009, Bush held his last press conference at the White House.When asked to comment on mistakes he had made during his term, the outgoing president responded: “I have often said that history will look back and determine that which could have been done better, or, you know, mistakes I made. Clearly putting a ‘Mission Accomplished’ on a [sic] aircraft carrier was a mistake. It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently, but nevertheless, it conveyed a different message. obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake.”4 He went on to defend his handling of Hurricane Katrina, and declined to consider any possibility that the war in Iraq was a mistake. By this time, the overwhelming majority of Americans viewed the president negatively.5 Meanwhile, throughout the decline in support for the president and the “war on terror,” baseball marched forward in its affirmation of Ameri- Reconstituting the National Pastime / 159 can identity. As the first decade of the twenty-first century neared a close, some of the memories of 9/11 began to fade. The 2008 presidential election , for example, featured economic issues (as if they could be divorced from the war) much more prominently than questions about the continued American presence in Iraq. Despite the growing opposition to the war, one had the sense that many Americans simply wanted the issue to go away. Antiwar activism too often gave way to collective cynicism; and the rants of Keith olbermann and the critiques of Jon Stewart notwithstanding, little seemed to shake President Bush’s confidence in the military venture . Even after it appeared that a much-debated troops “surge” yielded, at best, mixed results, Bush asserted in a March 2008, press briefing, “When the history of this era is written, it will show that the Air force and all of America’s armed forces performed with unfailing skill and courage. It will show that the united States of America prevailed and freedom advanced, and so did peace.”6 These words were especially striking, having come just days after the number of Americans killed in Iraq surpassed 4,000.7 The baseball discourses I have detailed in this study are located at a particular sociocultural conjuncture in American history. In the wake of 9/11, Bob Herbert argued that President Bush had two philosophical choices: “He could have followed the wise counsel of Edward R. Murrow, who memorably told us, ‘We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.’ But he didn’t. He chose instead to follow the disturbing course mapped out by Barry Goldwater, who insisted, ‘Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.’”8 By embracing the extremist position, the Bush administration (re)constituted a rhetorical culture divided simply between good and evil, with the united States standing alone as a beacon of hope and virtue in a wicked world. Concurrently, baseball, both through its official statements and performances and the appropriation of baseball themes by American leaders, has served as a “regenerative rite” in the affirmation of national identity.9 In this conclusion, I want to revisit the themes contained in the previous chapters in the hopes that a more democratic conception of baseball might be imagined. This goal is not merely an effort to reconstitute baseball. for if the national pastime is, indeed, a representative institution of America, a more democratic...