Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Miracle On Sand”

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July 30, 2007

Miracle On Sand

Hatched by Dafydd

I recently rewatched the movie Miracle for the first time since I saw it in the theater. I remain convinced that without that "miracle" win against the Soviet Union hockey team in the 1980 Olympics -- the so-called "miracle on ice" -- Amercans might never have elected Ronald Reagan president.

My reasoning is subtle but not, I hope, specious: What Reagan sold more than anything else was hope -- hope that the evil empire could be not just contained but destroyed, hope that the economy could be not just suspended above the brink but driven forward full-throttle. Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford before him, and Richard Nixon before that, and every president back to Harry Truman, offered nothing better than limbo... the vague promise that things wouldn't get worse, or at least not much worse. But Reagan offered realistic hope that they would improve and improve tremendously.

But what you cannot believe you will not buy. If Americans did not first believe in hope, they would not have invested in a presidential candidate who peddled it. (Today's Democrats believe in nothing, nihil, as in nihilism; to "Pinky" Reid, hope is a four-letter word.)

What made us believe in hope in November 1980? What broke the charm of the inevitability of American decline? Remember where we were in that year and the preceding eight (in case you forgot, the movie helpfully reminds viewers in the opening collage): the loss in Vietnam, Watergate, the resignation of a president, oil embargos, the fall of Saigon, inflation, stagflation, soaring interest rates that killed business, strikes, the perception that Japanese automobile imports would destroy the American automobile industry, just as Soviet sports teams destroyed American Olympic hopes, serial killers, the Iranian hostage crisis (in which we appeared so helpless)... the dirge sounded relentlessly.

I remember being politically adrift (I was at UCLA at the time), certain I was an American but unsure whether that meant anything anymore. I don't think I was unique.

I was no hockey fan; I'm still not. But I watched that game out of stubborn hatred of Communists; and I was so stunned when we won it that I just sat still and quiet before of the TV screen for perhaps a half an hour, just absorbing and digesting what that meant.

It meant we interrupted our march into the dustbin of history; suddenly we felt brash, strong, American again. Many have remarked that the US-USSR game was the first time they ever heard the chant "USA! USA!" I watched the Olympic gold-medal game that followed (the first and last such I have ever watched), and I felt an elation that another part of me thought was absurd: I didn't even like hockey!

Later that year, when I moved up to Santa Cruz to attend UCSC, I took a new outlook with me. I became profoundly disliked by the leftie students there; but my persona prior to that match would not have aroused any political enmity, because I was politically a tabula rasa. I was never a liberal; I have never considered myself a conservative; but in 1980, I went from being "an American" to being American.

It didn't extend to voting for Reagan, alas; my greatest political regret is that I decided he was the greatest president of the 20th century -- only after my last chance to vote for him in 1984. But I knew I despised Carter in a way I had not before (I had merely been apathetic about him). I did not vote for him either; I wrote in candidates in both elections.

I believe this change to be true of others: That victory introduced many cynical Americans to the audacity of hope, to swipe a book title from a far lesser man than either Ronald Reagan or Herb Brooks, the coach of the 1980 United States Olympic hockey team. Without it, would we have elected the "hope-filled man" as president? I don't think we would have. The "what's the use" drug would have suppressed our traditional American response to travail.

Why am I telling you this? It should be obvious: I desperately hope for a "miracle on ice" effect in Iraq because of yesterday's win in the Asian Cup, beating Saudi Arabia, of all countries. I don't anticipate a Kumbaya moment, where Shia, Sunni, Kurds, and Turkomen come together in a cluster-hug. But I expect, at the very least, an embrace with the final inadvertent gift of Pandora, after all the evils had escaped her box... Hope remained, and she kept it tight and safe.

I want Hope to begin to creep across Mesopotamia; not the wicked hope of empire or caliphate, not the vile hope of slaughtering those whose God is a different shade of doctrine from one's own, but the deep hope that Iraq can pass through this dark night of the soul to emerge reborn on the flip side. The hope that it can shake off the dead, skeletal hands of enmity, resentment, vengeance, and fourteen centuries of arrested moral development and burst forth, fully formed, from Bush' brow as a modern country in at least the periphery of the Functioning Core.

I believe in miracles -- the kind that human beings make for themselves, with perhaps a touch of the divine, God or Muse, behind them. Talking oneself into hope and courage is 90% of the trick; I hope the Iraqis will allow themselves to believe in a miracle on sand.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 30, 2007, at the time of 5:21 AM

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Comments

The following hissed in response by: dbrussat

I came of political age during the late '70s, and it was the blasting of Jimmy Carter from the pages of The New Republic that pushed me toward conservatism. I too regret that I had not gone far enough over the edge to vote for Reagan in 1980. I voted for the Libertarian Party candidate (whatever his name was). I could not bring myself to vote for an actor. (I may soon find that bar easier to surmount the second time around!) I also felt exactly the same way as you when I heard about Iraq's victory over the Saudis. By the way, if it were really all about oil, why would we not have simply invaded Saudi Arabia (with its 15 of 19 9/11 hijackers)? Anyway, I've been reading Big Lizards for about a year, and take great joy from your commentary.
- Sincerely, David Brussat

The above hissed in response by: dbrussat at July 30, 2007 5:53 AM

The following hissed in response by: dbrussat

The above hissed in response by: dbrussat at July 30, 2007 5:53 AM

The following hissed in response by: k2aggie07

Excellent post Dafydd. I was too young to watch that game when it happened, but I've watched it since and I've heard my dad talk about it. Its funny how small, irrelevant things in our lives can have such major impacts. I think you're spot on with this.

I also think the win goes further than giving Iraqis a chance for hope -- it reveals that when it comes time to chant, they don't chant for their Kurdish, Shia, or Sunni states. When it came time, they wrapped themselves in Iraqi flags and chanted for Iraq. A spark of nationalism may be all thats required to set the country ablaze -- in a good way.

The above hissed in response by: k2aggie07 at July 30, 2007 6:24 AM

The following hissed in response by: cdquarles

Dafydd,

We are contemporaries ;). I became politically aware sooner that you did, out of necessity. My dad died young in Jan, 1962. My grandfather had to bring my mother back to her birthplace from Davis, CA. I grew up in the ferment of the 60's in Alabama. Absorbing my grandparent's conservative lessons of life, I became aware of the fact that the Democrat party was the party of slavery, doom and gloom. In 1973, I obtained my first regular library card; and in the B. B. Comer Library discovered Dr. Thomas Sowell. At that point, I knew that I would never be a liberal as currently defined; and that I would never vote for a Democrat as long as they were Socialist in outlook, and feckless in matters of war and national security. I proudly voted for Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1980. I was not old enough to vote in 1976 (you had to be 21 at the time and I wouldn't be 21 until late 1979). I knew enough about James Earl Carter to vote against him, even if we had not won the 1980 Olympic gold for ice hockey. I have never voted for a Democrat for president in any election where I was eligible to vote. I have either voted Republican or Libertarian.

The above hissed in response by: cdquarles at July 30, 2007 8:39 AM

The following hissed in response by: Terrye

Yes, a miracle would be nice and I too believe in them.

The above hissed in response by: Terrye at July 30, 2007 1:57 PM

The following hissed in response by: Rickbert

I watched Miracle for the first time on cable this past year myself. I remember the hockey game. I was just young enough, and had had a good enough elementary school civics teacher, that I hadn't yet learned to be ashamed to be an American. It took a while to get past the education I was to get as I grew older, but the arc isn't that far off from what you describe.

And the phrase Miracle on Sand? Priceless. Captures the idea perfectly.

The above hissed in response by: Rickbert at August 1, 2007 7:15 AM