This Game is Our Game

"How many times in a single game is it necessary to assert one's patriotism?," asks Clyde Haberman in today's Times, in reference to a recently settled lawsuit over an incident at Yankee Stadium.

According to Haberman, the answer, apparently, is once: during the playing, and the singing, of Our National Anthem.

Haberman draws an unfavorable comparison between the current situation in Iran and what befell one Bradford Campeau-Lorion of Queens at a Yankees-Red Sox game last August 26. Bradford got bounced by the police -- not because he happens to be a Red Sox fan, but because he started to make his way to the men's room during Kate Smith's rendition of "God Bless America," a staple of the 7th Inning stretch at Yankee Stadium.

Apparently, though the Yankees deny there is any rule governing fan obeisance to Kate Smith and Irving Berlin, the security detail at the stadium made it clear that fans were obliged to stay put during the ritualistic enforced patriotism.

So, as the Red Sox were beating the Yankees on that August night, "they shoved me out the gates and told me to get out of their country if I didn’t like it,” Campeau-Laurion told Haberman. Campeau-Laurion called the ACLU, which filed a federal lawsuit on his behalf. According to the Times, the lawsuit has just settled, with the plaintiff getting $10,001 and his lawyers getting $12,000 in fees.

I find Campeau-Laurion's defense of his right to micturate rather than venerate at Yankee Stadium to be highly laudable, and not just because I too was once ejected from the same baseball edifice for an equally ridiculous reason (throwing peanut shells over the front railing of the upper deck, during a rain delay in which the stands were otherwise empty). Where I part company with Haberman is in conceding that one mandatory act of mass patriotism per game is acceptable. Why should one be obliged to violate the first of the Ten Commandments -- the one banning idolatry -- in exchange for the right to watch a baseball game?

Admittedly, I go along with the Star-Spangled Banner ritual because there is something vaguely pleasant about participating in a longstanding tradition with respect to starting off each game. But, when I attend Cape Cod League games and other contests at ballparks that persist with the "God Bless America" thing in the 7th inning (which apparently started in the wake of the September 11 bombings and has persisted at some but not all ballparks), I don't get up to pee. That would be too wimpy for me. I make a point of remaining in my seat.

Maybe I would feel differently if, on alternating nights, they gave Kate Smith a rest and, instead, played a version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," which he wrote as a musical rebuttal to the Irving Berlin song. Now that Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen have sung Woody's number on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as part of the inaugural festivities in January, surely "This Land is Your Land" has as legitimate a claim on being a patriotic song as "God Bless America" does, yes?

We're going to watch the Sea Dogs in Portland on July 25th. During the 7th inning stretch, I plan to do just that. I'll be stretching, not standing, no matter what they blast through the loudspeakers.