Baseball and the rhetorical purification of America: The national pastime after 9/11

Baseball has long been considered America's "national pastime." For decades, that term has been used to symbolize the ubiquity and significance of baseball in American life. Too often, this symbolism has been reduced to claims of American exceptionalism, with baseball serving as an exemplar of the liberal democratic state. This dissertation is a critical engagement with baseball as a rhetorical phenomenon, specifically with attention to its role in the reconstitution of American identity following terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.; The study is framed by a discussion that links the development of the national pastime to a Christian tradition in the United States. From there, it examines ritual performances at baseball games, a traveling museum exhibit sponsored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, the recent debate about the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and the return of Major League Baseball to Washington, D.C. in 2005. Together, these rhetorical performances have contributed to a collective ritual of purification that has characterized U.S. culture following 9/11. As an exemplar of innocence and purity, the national pastime has been upheld as a healthy diversion for American citizens, a symbol of national unity, and a model institution of democratic inclusion. In spite of such rhetoric, however, baseball has been complicit in the rhetorical construction of a world defined by good and evil, and has thus provided substantial support to President George W. Bush in his "war on terrorism."; The goal of this dissertation is to complicate the metaphor of baseball as America, and to reconstitute it in more humble, democratic terms. This requires a critique of the discourses of both baseball and U.S. foreign policy. It demands that readers, spectators, and citizens acknowledge their roles in the construction of a world in which Americans define their adversaries in problematic and destructive ways. Furthermore, it is an invitation to recover a more active and critical sense of judgment, insisting that the only way to foster our democracy is to speak and act democratically. In short, this study envisions an American political culture in which diversity is valued and democratic contestation encouraged.