Embodied Patriotism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week, on the patriotism we live in our ordinary lives.
This Monday, after a long day working on my dissertation I went with my parents to Kauffman Stadium to see the Kansas City Royals play the first game in this week’s series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Of the many things that I think of when I see the Pirates, memories of the weekend I spent in Pittsburgh in January 2020, or memories of watching them with my grandmother play the Cubs on WGN in my youth, I have a slight soft spot for the Pirates as a fellow legacy nineteenth-century team (1887) in the National League Central alongside my Cubs (1876), the Reds (1890), and the Cardinals (1892). The great Irish American artist Gene Kelly often said that he took up dancing to meet girls and to be agile and athletic so he could play outfield for the Pirates, his hometown team.
On this particular Monday, once we finished our walk into the stadium, bought our dinners and bottles of water, we made our way up to the top level of the stadium, the View Level to watch the game. I broke off from the rest of my family for a few minutes when we made it up to the 400s level to buy myself a brat. I didn’t realize though that the pregame ceremonies were reaching their conclusion with the march of the color guard and the performance of the national anthem. I consider myself patriotic in my own way; I hope you’ve seen in the last six months on this blog that I strive to elevate my fellow countrymen, my fellow humans in fact, through evocations of all the tremendous things we are capable of doing, of the extraordinary acts of ordinary people.[1] So, as the singer began her tune, I looked around at the people around me to see what I should do. At that moment I was at the register paying for my brat (everything is self-checkout now), yet as I saw no one else at the registers beside me were stopping to make our salute it occurred to me that nothing could be more American, dare I say more patriotic, than engaging in commerce with overpriced foods and drink that’s probably not good for any of us. I quickly finished my purchase and stepped back from the register and took a place beside a group of fellow millennials who held their right hands over their hearts, as we’re taught to do.
Throughout the game, a strong showing by the Royals who hit in 9 runs over the Pirates 3, I thought about this brat purchase during the national anthem and felt resolute in my decision. There are people who I know who take the anthem very seriously to the point of zealotry. In my many years of attending baseball games and soccer matches I’ve often wondered what would happen if someone chose to keep their hands at their sides or even remain seated during the anthem? We saw the harsh reaction of the clamorous cacophony when Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the anthem a decade ago. At the time I was ambivalent yet now having heard more stories of oppression and promises unkept I appreciate what he did. I believe this question of how free we are to patriotically express discontent in civic rituals is essential to the vitality of a democracy. I’ve often found the crafted rituals which the Royals put between innings to be at times bordering the ludicrous. This is especially true in 2025 after the Royals ruined their relationship with so many of us Kansas Citians with how they misled us and took advantage of us in this year’s stadium sales tax vote. My distrust of the team is why I effectively retired the Royals cap that I bought only two years ago at another visit to Kauffman Stadium.
We embody our rituals by wearing American flags on our clothes and demanding unquestioning patriotism in this American life. Here I’m adopting Céline Carayon’s notion of embodied language in her 2019 book Eloquence Embodied about early colonial French communications and relations with Indigenous Americans through gestures and visual language.[2] Today in the United States our patriotism is just as often meant to be blood-red flowing within our bodies as it is worn on our chests and loudly proclaimed with often poorly sung renditions of the national anthem, a hymn requiring professional training to perform. It is meant to be shouted in unquestioning proclamations of American freedom even as that liberty seems ever more fleeting under the combined weight of a cruel-minded governing majority and an even crueler corporate elite that has created so much of the embodied rituals which define American culture in the 21st century. These rituals, always sponsored by some robber baron and crafted by their public relations department, sing proudly of American freedom all while ensuring their own profits at the expense of the American people’s own freedom from want and fear. We embody our patriotism in what we purchase and where. Earlier that day, looking for a late afternoon pastry, I ended up at my local Whole Foods. Their bakery is good; the chocolate croissants are about what you’d expect for a gargantuan corporation’s attempt at mimicry of a Parisian classic. Yet as I bought a slice of pizza that caught my eye thinking how I might stop here for pizza by the slice more often I felt a pang of guilt after all there’s a good local pizzeria, Pizza 51, just across the street and several more within walking distance. Even as bakeries go as fair as Whole Foods is during the morning rush I would much rather go to McLain’s, the Roasterie, or Heirloom, all local bakeries within walking distance of my family home and along the route I was driving yesterday afternoon. Yet where Whole Foods won was that they forego the usual bakery hours and keep baking pastries in the afternoons whereas the others are usually low on their morning batches or already closed for the day. I’ve known for most of my life that these big corporate chains put tremendous stress on small local businesses; in fact I’ve flatly refused to shop at Walmart for this very reason, only buying a couple of bottles of water at one in the Kansas City suburbs once in 2020 when my Dad’s old truck broke down outside of it during the evening rush hour under a hot summer sun.
The America that I love seems more and more fraught the further from walkable neighborhoods and into the suburbs and exurbs you go. This is where most Americans have built their lives in common isolation living in mansions of rest surrounded by moats of artificially green grass regardless of how dry the local climate may be. It’s a life spent driving individually in vehicles increasingly resembling The Princess Bride’s rodents of unusual size in their environmental dangers. Several months ago, I had a bad argument with an attendant at a car wash in a nearby suburb because I ended up in the members’ lane on accident. I told the teenager working there that I made the mistake because there wasn’t a sign that I could see in my Mazda where the two lanes split (the big overhead sign is blocked by a dumpster from my lower line of sight) while the guy kept telling me that I can’t pay in the lane I was in. I was angry because the way that place was built favored the minivans, SUVs, and trucks that most people drive at the expense of those of us who still drive sedans. Yet I lost my temper because when the management got involved in our deteriorating conversation they shrugged off my suggestion that the row of ground-level signs standing outside their toll booth ought to be placed where the lanes split saying “that’s something for corporate to decide.” This is where that America of neighbors seems to be at least dormant to me; rather than making decisions that will benefit all of us together we instead more often choose inaction rather than risk our own individually precarious position. I grew up admiring the likes of Daniel Burnham and was proud as a young kid to say I was from Carl Sandburg’s City of Big Shoulders with big ideas and big ambitions. I’m just as proud to have witnessed firsthand the renaissance that Kansas City has experienced since the millennium. Those sorts of dreams and ambitions are what make me proud to embody our shared patriotism when I feel we’ve warranted it. I prefer the embodied patriotism my parents and grandparents taught me which as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found grew out of the progressive and city beautiful movements of a century ago and felt their greatest expression during FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. That is my America, the America of neighbors standing up for each other. I see that America every day in my neighborhood where people say hello to each other when walking down the sidewalks or on the Trolley Trail. It’s for that America that I feel pride is warranted, that America which we should be working to rebuild by reconnecting our car-dependent suburbs and neighborhoods, by forcing us to spend time with each other again, to be social again.
[1] That’s one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written.
[2] Céline Carayon, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 