21 Feb Do You Believe in Miracles?
Tomorrow marks the 45th anniversary of one of the most important cultural victories of the entire Cold War era. It was an event that changed the world, that bolstered flagging American confidence and taught the American people that it was OK to be proud of themselves, to be proud of their country, and to expect greatness from it – despite the domestic and foreign setbacks of the previous decade. It was an occasion that brought the bitterly divided country together for a moment that, while brief, was nonetheless real and powerful. In many ways, it presaged Ronald Reagan’s victory eight months later and the return of “Morning in America.” It was the perfect start to a new and hopeful decade.
I am referring, of course, to The Miracle on Ice.
On that cold and dreary day – February 22, 1980 – a ragtag bunch of American college kids took the ice in Lake Placid and did the unthinkable, beating the vaunted Soviet hockey team, perhaps the best hockey team the world had ever known. A couple of days later, the Americans went on to beat Finland, securing the gold medal for a thrilled and grateful nation. Five years ago (on the 40th anniversary of the “Miracle”) columnist David Harsanyi described the victory’s cultural impact as follows:
The game at Lake Placid may not have sparked the American revival but, in many ways, it would become the demarcation line between the sad-sack ’70s and economic renewal of the 1980s. The mystique of the moment would endure for a generation that grew up to see Soviet Union’s ignoble end.
Sadly, such an event will almost certainly never be repeated. It’s not that the United States hockey team will never win another gold medal. They might. Indeed, they probably will. But no one – outside of a handful of hockey fans – will know or care. More to the point, such a victory will never have the kind of cultural impact the Miracle had.
For starters, the Olympics just ain’t what they used to be. Back in 1980, the Olympics were, at least in theory, a competition for “amateurs.” While the Soviet hockey players were undoubtedly well-compensated (in Soviet terms), the American team was, as I noted, a group of college kids who volunteered to be put through the torture of Coach Herb Brooks’ coaching philosophy. There were no “dream teams” then – at least not in the West. There were only college kids or – as in the case of gymnastics – high school kids who did it all for the glory of competition.
Look, I like Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley and all the rest as much as the next guy, but the truth of the matter is that they destroyed the Olympics. When the International Olympic Committee caved to external pressure and agreed to allow professional athletes to compete, it sucked all the life and the joy out of the event. The Dream Team was kinda fun, but it didn’t really embody the spirit of the games or of competition more generally. There was no competition – and that was, indeed, the point of the whole exercise. Add to that the ubiquity and commercialization of television and internet coverage of the games, plus the stupid decision to put the winter and summer games in different years, thereby subjecting us to their torture every two years rather than every four, and the whole business has become a giant pain-in-the-backside. The thrill, as B.B. King might say, is gone.
Additionally, and more to the point, it is exceptionally unlikely that any such event could ever unite the American people again. Even if the Olympics weren’t awful, and even if an incredible team of American Davids could, once again, slay the sports world’s Goliath, the victory would not resonate with at least half of the country. It is far more likely, frankly, that half of the country would take such a victory as evidence of a conspiracy of some sort or as proof of athletic privilege or even as a pitiful effort to distract the public from the death throes of late-stage capitalism. The country cannot be united again, like it was on February 22, 1980, because its people largely want nothing to do with one another.
As I have noted (multiple times) before in these pages, pride in and love for one’s country – also known as “patriotism” – is not merely a feeling one gets occasionally or the pleasure one feels when his political “team” is winning. Patriotism, rather, is both a virtue and the means by which we come to understand what is important and valuable and MORAL in our community. In his famous 1984 Lindley Lecture (given on the campus of the University of Kansas, Rock Chalk Jayhawk) “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” the communitarian moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put it this way:
I understand the story of my life in such a way that it is part of the history of my family or of this farm or of this university or of this countryside; and I understand the story of the lives of other individuals around me as embedded in the same larger stories, so that I and they share a common stake in the outcome of that story and in what sort of story it both is and is to be: tragic, heroic, comic. A central contention of the morality of patriotism is that I will obliterate and lose a central dimension of the moral life if I do not understand the enacted narrative of my own individual life as embedded in the history of my country. For if I do not understand it I will not understand what I owe to others or what others owe to me, for what crimes of my nation I am bound to make reparation, for what benefits to my nation I am bound to feel gratitude.
The problems here are as numerous as they are obvious, but most importantly, Americans today, more than any other people, even in the West, deny the idea that we have a common heritage or a common stake. It is all well and good to say we have a common heritage, to declare that we have historical ideals that bind us together, but the likelihood of convincing a critical mass of the people of this is vanishingly small. This is particularly so in an atmosphere in which the institutions of cultural transmission have been overtaken by those who fervently believe otherwise. Our media, our education systems (lower and higher), even our religious leaders, in many cases, thrive on the notion that this nation is “diverse” and thus has neither any uniting characteristics nor the need for them.
Last night, the Canadian Hockey Team beat the American Hockey Team in something called the 4 Nations Face-Off Championship. Did you notice? Did you care? Would you have cared if the United States had won? I’m guessing you probably didn’t because…why would you? What stake does anyone here have in the outcome of a game played between multimillionaires for the benefit of other multimillionaires?
As you may have noticed, I’ve decided to dedicate the second half of my career to fighting the decay of our institutions of cultural transmission and to encourage the long march back through those institutions. I have little doubt, however, that the success of that effort depends first and foremost on recreating the sense that ALL Americans have something in common, something they share and think is worth preserving. That’s not going to be an easy ask. It will, I’m afraid, require another miracle.
That said, if a miracle is what it will take, then what better day to start than tomorrow?
