ABSTRACT
Within this chapter, I center on two elements of the sporting popular, both of which form part of the Disney stable and both of which speak to the cultural politics of the post-9/11 moment. Even though extremely differentone a feature fi lm and the other ‘regular’ television broadcasts of the Little League World Series, a children’s baseball competition-they both bear the hallmarks of Disney’s “trademarked innocence” (Giroux, 1995, 1999) and can be read as part of the broader (sporting) response to the events of September 11th, 2001. Both provided ‘dominant’ ways of knowing about 9/11. They spoke not only about the reassertion of a particular preferred vision / version of ‘we,’ but to the ‘right’ to assert democratic values throughout the world, to reaffi rm the neo-imperial ambitions of the US Right, and to defi ne the ‘other’—in a moment in which the ‘other’ was intangible, increasingly hard to defi ne and geographically locate.
