> I see what you're saying, but corporate sports culture is used as
> military/nationalist propaganda. It helps condition people to militarism.
> Ballet and opera don't -- unless you take certain German composers too
> seriously.
I think you are conflating two different things: the display of militarism/nationalism and the creation of militarism/nationalism. Yeah, sporting events have all sorts of patriotic rituals, but it doesn't necessarily follow that any appreciable support for militarism is created by those events. There's no evidence I know of that shows that those displays increase nationalist feelings. Barring any evidence, I assume that like me most people are unmoved by them.
I'd say it's more likely that they reflect an already-existent nationalism and support for militarism. Those rituals are, as you say, propaganda, but propaganda and ideology aren't sufficient grounds for explaining nationalism; they are window dressing, effects not causes. The relative absence of patriotic rituals at ballet and opera more likely reflects that their audiences think they are gauche, not the absence of nationalism. Given that a significant portion of funding for those events comes from local, state, and federal governments and that an increasing number of baseball and basketball players are from countries outside the United States, in some way you could make the argument that those sports are less nationalist that the ahts.
(Dennis C, this, by the way, is part of what I mean by Chomsky's moralizing. There's no material basis for anything he says about sports. There aren't even any facts, which is especially funny coming from Chomsky. I agree with Mike that some people are too prolific for their own good. Just because someone asks a question doesn't mean you have to answer it, but he's given the same answer to that question many different times even though he has no idea what he's talking about. I also agree with Jordan that just because people watch sports doesn't mean they turn off their brains or political awareness. Chomsky's belief that sports = passivity is pretty fucking patronizing.)