“Please rise and remove your caps as we honor America.”

I have taken this phrase, and the national anthem that follows, for granted. But the phrase’s meaning still confuses me, and I don’t mean in the grammatical sense.

Is it saying you must stand up?

After a narrator announces this customary clause before games, I always witness more than 99 percent of audiences suddenly stop wolfing greasy junk food and insipid Bud Light, get plugged in to rise and listen attentively to the national anthem. It not only stuns me that millions of people from the “Land of the Free” uniformly practice the same custom from Chesapeake to Oahu, or from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, but it also disappoints me that sports have been turned into propaganda devices to inspire nationalism in this country. To make matters worse, the situation looks no more controllable, especially after September 11, 2001. Now we hear “God Bless America” in the World Series, and the deafening roar of military aircraft flying during Super Bowls.

Stop and think. Was Jesus Christ such an important figure for baseball? No, because he probably neither had a strong arm as a center fielder nor deigned to juice himself with steroids. “God Bless America” in baseball always offends people like me, a non-Christian from abroad, with an impression that my beloved sport has a bias according to religion and nationality.

The reason why we listen to the national anthem at sporting events is purely political. It was not until the 1918 World Series that the “Star Spangled Banner” was played in professional sports, according to Richard C. Crepeau, a professor of History at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. After the anthem’s huge success at the Fall Classic, and being prompted by President Wilson’s intense nationalist program in the midst of WWI, Americans began to hear the then-unofficial national anthem performed more frequently in sporting events. In late 1930s, with the United States on the verge of another war, there was increasing talk of the need to play the “Star Spangled Banner” (declared to be the official national anthem in 1931) regularly in hockey and baseball games. Thanks to the “PR-conscious owners who wanted to make sure that no one would question the patriotism of athletes” (Crepeau), by 1941 the practice had already spread nationwide. As the United States entered the Cold War after 1945 and established the new American Empire, the practice remained and is now once again swelling since the United States went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dissidents from the designed “patriotism” can be harshly pounded. For example, Toni Smith of Manhattanville College women’s basketball team had been turning her back on an American flag during the playing of the national anthem in the 2003-04 season, saying that the song and the flag are symbols of oppression to minorities like herself, such as African Americans and Native Americans. Her brave deed sparked such debate and criticism that a Vietnam veteran once stepped down on the court, Old Glory in hand, and pushed it into her face. Also, the Merchant Marine Academy (“the worst team in the league” according to Smith) packed the gym during their home game against Manhattanville with cadets lined up on the sidelines and with everybody in the stand in uniform, with a flag.

I understand and have respect for what soldiers and veterans believe in, and that they should be allowed certain places to express their opinions. But in this respect there is nothing those groups need to worry about. They already have Independence Day, Memorial Day, Veterans’ Day, and American flags everywhere, or at least far more than the 20 or so countries I’ve visited.

Sports are not simply the Promised Land for soldiers, whose goal is a mountain of corpses at the best. It is also the time for us, ordinary people, to realize that every time we stand up for the national anthem and support nationalist propaganda in games that we love, vicious powers encroach into our sanctuary, just like Hitler did at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin.