Tag Archives: St. Louis Cardinals

A photo from the upper deck at Kauffman Stadium looking down toward the baseball field during a Kansas City Royals game in July 2025.

Embodied Patriotism

Embodied Patriotism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, on the patriotism we live in our ordinary lives.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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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).

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Rivalries

The idea of a rivalry and all the extra stuff that goes with it seems to be baked into American culture. Rivalries often make for the most exciting games in a league’s calendar not only for the history traditionally associated with that matchup but also for the antics and occasional brawls that break out in the process of playing the game. As a young Cub fan I always expected there’d be a fight during a Cubs vs Cardinals game or a Cubs vs White Sox game, just as any meeting between the Red Sox and the Yankees seemed sure to produce the sort of atmosphere normally reserved in North American professional sports for the hockey rink.

Interestingly, going off of what I wrote about last week in terms of regionalism, I think it’s important to recognize that rivalries often define a region’s local identity more than anything else. The two great cities of Missouri, Kansas City and St. Louis, are defined just as much by the shuttlecocks at the Nelson-Atkins and the Gateway Arch as they are by the rivalry between the Royals and Cardinals, particularly during the 1985 World Series, which ended in Game 7 with a Royals victory over the red birds. I only hope that with the introduction of MLS’s new St. Louisian team, St. Louis City SC, that we’ll see a strong rivalry between “City” as likely they’re going to call themselves, and our own Sporting.

If anything unites most American cities and their surrounding metropolitan suburbs it’s a general dislike for other cities and their metros. Often the greatest of these rivalries seem to be founded in sports: the Chicago/St. Louis rivalry for example, which certainly began as a disagreement among two of the Midwest’s greatest metropolises in the nineteenth century and developed in the last decades of that century and into the early decades of the twentieth through the birth of the Cubs in 1871 and the ancestors of the Cardinals, the original St. Louis Browns, in 1882. In the decades and generations since that rivalry has grown not only with the introduction of the Blackhawks vs. Blues rivalry in hockey but also a general sentiment that I experienced as a Cub fan going to college at a place dominated by St. Louisians; it didn’t help that my freshman year was also a year when the redbirds won their last World Series.

On a larger scale it seems like we could carry this idea of the rivalry to a geopolitical level. Sure, the US has rivals, traditionally they’d be our counterparts in Europe, in particular in the nineteenth century Britain and in the first half of the twentieth century Germany. More recently though, in the last few generations the US’s biggest global rivals have tended to be the likes of Russia and more recently China. I will fully admit to playing off of the eternal bogeyman in the American psyche by playing the sublimely stereotypically Russian theme tune to the fantastic 1990 film The Hunt for Red October every time I find myself in St. Louis when the Cardinals are doing well. In my own silly way it’s playing off of fears of the bogeyman projected on the wall in this country in communism, comparing my own Cubs’ greatest rival to that red scourge.

It’s interesting though that we have come to develop such profound senses of national pride out of how different we are from other countries, or at least how different we see ourselves from other countries. People in positions of authority, both in government and in the media, have taken advantage of this idea of rivalry to profoundly change the political discussion: we hear more banter about the creeping influences of socialism or Islam today than we do from the same people about problems that face our country internally like racism, vast inequality, and the constant threat of violence due to our overly lenient gun laws.

I’ve often thought that if anything is true it’s that a people who define themselves by what they aren’t rather than what they are will surely fall apart in the long run. Equally, a people who cry wolf at the shadow of the wolf on the wall, labelling it something foreign, when its fangs are being used by the same crier to cause chaos in the cave itself is a people doomed to falter. We’ve found ways to use the excitement of sports to infiltrate our politics and our daily lives, forcing us to adopt a mindset that it’s always us vs. them. Eventually, if we’re not careful we’re going to bring about our own defeat on the field of play, and not by anything our opponents do. It’ll be an own goal, a safety, our knives in our own back that will bring the land of rivals to its knees.