In Babylon 5 Londo Mollari is explaining how the Centauri government works. He tells how in the middle of the courtyard at the palace a guard is permanently posted, guarding nothing in particular. Curious he did some research and found that some 300 years before the first flower of spring sprouted between the stones at that spot and a five-year-old princess, afraid it would be stepped on, requested someone guard it. Flower, princess, and the original guard were all long gone, but the order was never rescinded.
So where do you think you are when the Toronto Blue Jays play any other MLB team, smarypants? 
Nor is it the 7th inning stretch song. Until 9/11 that song was, by tradition, “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” In the first game after 9/11, NYPD Tenor Daniel Rodriguez sang “America the Beautiful” Most teams have gone back to the old song, but the nationally televised games, instead of cutting away for commercial stay for AtB.
As I said in another thread on this subject: These are not some international sporting event like the Olympics. It’s purely domestic entertainment. It would make as much sense (that is, none) to play the anthem before every airing of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
I think its also a way of eating up time.
For example down at SeaWorld in Florida they do it before every whale and dolphin show but… why? I think its how they can eat up an extra 5 minutes.
But really I think its more of a way just to start a game.
Given the length of MLB and NFL games these days, there is really no need to “eat up time.”
With no comment about songs & such, I say { ↑ ↑ ↑ } ← This X 42 
Depends on which game you’re talking about.I know the Mets play God Bless America ( not *AtB *) during the 7th inning stretch at least on Sundays, I believe the Yankees do it every game, and I think it’s also played at all post-season games. But they also play Take Me Out to the Ballgame.
They play the national anthem before movies in theaters in some countries. In South Korea they do or did when I lived there, and I read that the Indian Supreme Court controversially ruled it must continue there just last year. OTOH I don’t see the particular logic why anthems need to be played at international sporting events as opposed to any other method of identifying the teams, if that’s the purpose. And if it’s as a celebration (when medals are awarded) of ‘our country won, yours lost!’ it could if anything be more easily attacked as ‘jingoism’ than playing the anthem in strictly domestic situations.
I still think it comes down in the US to the ‘America bad (or not what it’s cracked up to be, so let’s make it, etc)’ v 'America good (despite its flaws and room for improvement etc) factions in US society since the 1960’s. Overlaid on that is sometimes a particular mindset of countries with a different background (ethno-national states like Continental Europe, or grateful offspring of Empires, like Canada) as if the US tradition of focus on common political ideas and their symbol (the flag) is a one-off outlier. It’s not. Other often relatively younger countries have a strong emphasis on their symbols. But within the US since the cultural divide of the 60’s, and now what a lot of people have grown up with in their CC families, is a tradition against that older American idea, pretty much any older American idea, kind of reflexively. But a lot of people are still for those older ideas.
It’s not because of a compelling practical need to play the anthem. People who insist you should say ‘X people’ and never ‘X’ without ‘people’ etc and all the other variations of PC, which descends from the counter culture, aren’t expressing a need for practicality either. They are expressing a perceived need for respect for their norms. In a divided society, it’s a constant fight.
Nice. I feel the same way, although I consider myself a christian (a very liberal one) and the Pledge has always creeped me out as such. The only time I run into it is at city council meetings (after the prayer (???)) and I always just stood but no hand on my heart or saying it. Now I’m running for council so people are watching and I gotta go through the motions. Motions only.
Well, here is an article talking about when it was first played to gain some insight. Here is another take, though I won’t quote from this one…read it if you are interested. There are actually tons of articles on this out there if you want to look around.
So, basically, we haven’t always done it…but we’ve collectively done it so long that most people don’t even remember why we do it or when we didn’t. It became custom, and the custom has only grown stronger over time and through the various adversaries that have happened to the US since 1918. World wars, financial collapse, moon landings, civil rights…the best and worst, the stuff that brings us together with a common narrative and common mythology that stitches us together as one people, even though we are a continent-sized nation of 360+ million people with different perspectives, goals, and backgrounds.
I’d go with ‘Because we’ve always done it’ as a good enough reason, with the caveat of ‘and there hasn’t really been any reason not to do it strong enough to break the tradition’. Personally, I don’t go to ball games so I don’t know how big the push is to change this one way or the other, and don’t really care all that much, either…we are past the point where we really need something like this to bring us together I think, and if folks don’t want to stand for the anthem then that’s fine by me. If enough folks don’t want to have it at all anymore, I’m fine with that too…I don’t think it will break the country. I think this whole issue is a tempest in a teapot and just stupid, and I find it more than a bit ironic that Trump seems to have revived the movement almost singlehandedly with his stupid tweets. 
SK is just a few decades away from a time when it was a military dictatorship. Besides, US culture is not similar to either of the cultures of those countries.
If you can’t see that it makes more sense to play an anthem at an international event than at a purely domestic event, I’m not sure what I can say to help. It might make as much sense in a dictatorship, but not in a democracy where the government is less prone to feel an unbinding need to drum up patriotism anyway it can.
I think one of the moments when I was most proud of my nine year old son was when we were discussing the pledge recently. I asked him what his day at school was like and after he mentioned saying the pledge I asked what he thought of it. He told me it wasn’t a big deal but it would make more sense if they were pledging to the constitution instead of the flag. I thought that was pretty good for a nine year old.
Coincidentally to this thread’s topic, I think he came up with the idea of pledging to the constitution because we saw a ceremony take place on the field before a AAA baseball game where new Army enlistees took the service oath. That happens to include the pledge to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
It’s nothing directly to do with dictatorship in the ROK. The reason national symbols of the ROK not just Koreaness are important is the legacy of a legitimacy struggle at the country’s birth with North Korea. Not just a military or even purely ideological contest, but which side was legitimate. That’s a battle ‘South Vietnam’ lost (coming to be identified by too many Vietnamese as just a vehicle for the French then other outsiders) which was critical to the eventual outcome of the whole struggle. It’s one where the ROK held its own besides reaching a military stalemate with outside help. Only later on did it run up the score in an economic competition blow out and become a functioning democracy as well. But ROK legitimacy was the foundation, hence a heavy emphasis on common reverence for national symbols.
And in India it’s obviously not about dictatorship since except for a brief suspension of democracy there under Indira Gandhi it’s always been a(n albeit messier-than-some) democracy. It’s about the importance of unifying symbols in a country without a fully common language or history.
I didn’t say the US and other countries which emphasize unifying symbols had the ‘same culture’ (one of the basic issues is that not everybody in the US has the ‘same culture’ anymore either, that’s more and more what we are seeing IMO). I didn’t say the reasons all countries which emphasize unifying national symbols compared to lesser emphasis in old ethnic states (Germany, France) or the children of an ethnic empire who kissed it goodbye rather than throwing it out (Canada, Australia) were all the same. But the US is not unique in this respect. The traditional US view that is. The Western countries I mentioned are closer to the US historically in some ways, not in others and this is one of them.
As I already stated, the argument against national anthems in international competition is actually one compatible with the counter-culture descended view of domestic displays: it can be a manifestation of ‘jingoism’. It’s again not like anthems are practically required to identify participants in international competition. In a domestic setting OTOH it can be a celebration of ‘what unites us’ with less potential for ‘us v them’ like it is internationally. Except if the society doesn’t really revere the symbols in common anymore, then they can be perceived as ‘us v them’ domestically. That’s where the US is now, with the traditional v. counter-culture-descended cultural divide.
*it’s correctly pointed out that few specific customs go back to the 18th century, they are mostly delayed action outgrowths of the national self conception of post CW and/or the challenges of foreign wars after that. But they aren’t new either.
So everyone can look around and see who are the dangerous dissident non-patriotic elements. Hows would you find out who the subversives in the NFL are without putting them all on camera and playing the national anthem? Try going to a game, and refuse to stand up for the anthem. See how quicklly that is added to the your dossier. Don’t forget to wear the official Fox News Lapel Pin.
In banana republics, it is common to play the anthem at the beginning and end of a movie, with spotters in the audience to see who is paying insufficient homage to the despot. See one banana republic, you’ve seen them all.
Don’t give them any ideas.
Because its always been done is a perfectly good reason. Doing away with tradition just because seems deleterious. In a way, we need traditions that people believe strongly in so movements like this can make a statement.
Canada waves the flag and anthem as much as Americans do, but for a different reason, different message. In Canada, they are proclaiming not that they are Patriotic Canadians, , but just that they are Not Americans At All.
My goodness why do so many people hate patriotism? It helps to unite us and allow us to better work together as a people. The alternative has just degraded into small special interest groups fighting it out for their little causes.
Every country’s patriotism is a special thing, that came about in its own way. A Russian has no sense of the ties that bind diverse Americans together, just as Americans have no sense of “Mother Russia” and what that has meant through so many upheavals.
Patriotism is, in intrinsically, neither a good nor a bad thing, but is a tool to shape public posture. It is not a good thing for Patriotism to be the last refuge of scoundrels, nor to cling to indefensible doctrine like slavery, segregation, male suffrage, or quite a few ills whose faults may not yet be so apparent.
(bolding mine)
This is exactly why we do it. Haven’t you been paying attention (I’m not attacking you, just using your post to make my point)? Trump can’t stop whining about the lack of patriotism and half of the sheep in this country are scared that their precious nation will crumble if someone doesn’t take a (specific) moment to show reverence.
I don’t hate or want to do away w/ patriotism. This isn’t a yes/no situation. I can still love my country and have issues with the things it has done/is doing.