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Because nothing noteworthy occurred anywhere in the world through the month of August and the first half of September, the local news in New York City turned its attentions to a few women who have apparently been bothering people in the otherwise calm, decent section of Manhattan known as Times Square.

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By Peter Gardella

Unlike the 4th of July with its fireworks or Thanksgiving with its turkeys, Memorial Day has no special object. But the new 9/11 Museum near the World Trade Center in New York has thousands of objects. Some complain that its objects are for sale, in a gift shop and because of the admission fee. Together, the old holiday and the new museum show what has changed and what remains constant about American civil religion.

For a century after Memorial Day began, it had its own date, May 30. That was lost in 1968, when Congress passed a law moving Memorial Day to the last Monday in May. Rather than interrupting the week whenever it falls, as July 4th still does, Memorial Day became the end of a long weekend. A search for Memorial Day parades finds as many parades happening on Sunday as on Monday. Some happen on Saturday.

These parades are not nearly as important as they were in the decades following World Wars One and Two, when veterans were much more numerous than they are now. The unpopularity of Vietnam also hurt Memorial Day parades. In my childhood, all grammar school children in my town marched on Memorial Day, but now even high school bands march reluctantly. Having parades to honor war dead came to seem to be celebrating war, and after Vietnam celebrating war was unacceptable. Memorial Day was once called Decoration Day, a day for visiting and decorating graves, and this quieter ceremony persists. On Memorial Day, the president still lays a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and a small crowd gathers for a speech.

But the site of the World Trade Center drew large crowds in the first weeks after the attack. The 9/11 Memorial has been drawing millions since it opened in 2011, and the new Museum will draw millions more. It will become a pilgrimage site of American civil religion.

As Mayor Bloomberg said at the dedication ceremonies, the site of the World Trade Center will join Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a “sacred marker” and a “solemn gathering place.” The word “sacred” was used by many at the dedication, and this sense of being set apart marks the sites of civil religion. The word “solemn” was identified more than a century ago as an aspect of religious feeling by the psychologist and philosopher William James. Expressions of religion involve solemnity, respect for what is held sacred, even when triumphal pride or ecstasy may also be expressed. Such solemnity can be felt at older sites of American civil religion, like the Capitol or the White House, the Washington Monument, and the memorials to Lincoln and Jefferson. The new Martin Luther King Memorial continues a mood of solemnity combined with triumph. It’s a place where clean white stone invokes eternity.

But the 9/11 Memorial belongs to another tradition, finding the sacred in dirty objects. Twisted beams of steel and mangled fire trucks dominate a seven-story atrium. More intimate objects, like displays of sweatshirts that were for sale on that day, now covered in ash, and shoes worn by survivors as they fled the Twin Towers, and melted fax machines and rolodexes, are displayed under glass to help visitors identify with the human victims and their suffering. Voices from last cell phone calls can be heard. This power in everyday objects has appeared before in memorials to the Holocaust and in the museum on Ellis Island. Leaving objects on graves and memorials is new to American civil religion, but it is a practice with old roots, seen on the graves of slaves in the South and in the tombs of Egypt. Visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial surprised groundskeepers by leaving objects at that memorial when it opened, and people left objects along the fences that separated the streets of New York from Ground Zero in the months after September 11.

Questions have been raised about the stress on objects in the new museum. Some think that unidentified human remains should not be in the same building as a museum visited by tourists. According to some family members of victims, the gift shop profits from the deaths of their loved ones to support the salaries of administrators. Some object to the cafe. Even more object to the $24 admission fee. One answer might be to keep the gift shop and cafe but to eliminate any admission fee, following the examples of Smithsonian and National Park Service sites, some of which also contain human remains.

Many new forms of American civil religion stress death and the ancestors, not God and the future. The new museum goes down into the earth to bedrock, rather than rising toward heaven. Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which follows the line of its landscape and honors the dead, and the Pearl Harbor Memorial, which centers on the sunken wreck of the U.S.S. Arizona and the dead that it contains, the 9/11 Memorial and the 9/11 Museum both emphasize descent. In the Memorial, cascades of water, the largest man-made waterfalls in the world, flow from bronze parapets etched with the names of the dead into the former footprints of the Twin Towers. The sound of the water cancels street noise. The sight of the water falling into the squares at the center of each footprint suggests the underworld journey.

But next to the Memorial and Museum rises the spire of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. This pairing echoes the rise of the Statue of Liberty, next to the buildings of Ellis Island where immigrants were examined and sometimes rejected. However much expressions of American civil religion change, they still affirm personal freedom, the triumph of the human person over all difficulties, and even over death.

Peter Gardella is Professor of World Religions at Manhattanville College and author of American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred (Oxford, 2014). His previous books are Innocent Ecstasy (Oxford, 1985), on sex and religion in America; Domestic Religion, on American attitudes toward everyday life; and American Angels: Useful Spirits in the Material World. He is now working on The World’s Religions in New York City: A History and Guide and on Birds in the World’s Religions (with Laurence Krute).

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By Thomas Peeters, Victor Matheson, and Stefan Szymanski

The World Cup, the Olympics and other mega sporting events give cities and countries the opportunity to be in the world’s spotlight for several weeks, and the competition among them to host these events can be as fierce as the competition among the athletes themselves. Bids that had traditionally gone to wealthier countries have recently become a prize to be won by prospective hosts in the developing world. South Africa became the first African host of the FIFA World Cup in 2010, and this summer, Brazil is hosting the first South American World Cup in 35 years. Russia recently completed its first Winter Olympics in Sochi and will return to the international stage in 2018 when the World Cup heads to Eastern Europe for the first time.

On the surface, this might appear to be a leveling of the playing field, allowing developing countries to finally share in the riches that these events bring to their hosts. A closer look, however, shows that hosting these events is an enormously expensive and risky undertaking that is unlikely to pay off from a purely economic standpoint.

Because of the extensive infrastructure required to host the World Cup or the Summer or Winter Olympics, the cost of hosting these events can run into the tens of billions of dollars, especially for developing countries with limited sports and tourism infrastructure already in place. Cost estimates are often unreliable, but it is said that Brazil is spending a combined $30 billion to host the Olympics and World Cup, Beijing spent $40 billion on the 2008 summer games, and Russia set an all-time record with a $51 billion price tag on the Sochi games. Russia’s record is not likely to stand for long, however, as Qatar looks poised to spend upwards of $200 billion bringing the World Cup to the Middle East in 2022.

Why do countries throw their hat into the rings to host these events? Politicians typically claim that hosting will generate a financial windfall For example, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, the focus of our paper, cost the country $3.9 billion including at least $1.3 billion in stadium construction costs. The consulting firm Grant Thornton initially predicted 483,000 international visitors would come to the country for the event and that it would generate “a gross economic impact of $12 billion to the country’s economy”. The firm later revised its figures downward, to 373,000 international visitors and lowered the estimated economic impact to $7.5 billion.  Following the event, a FIFA report stated that  “309,554 foreign tourists arrived in South Africa for the primary purpose of attending the 2010 FIFA World Cup.”

Our analysis of monthly tourist arrivals into South Africa during the months of the event, however, suggests that the tourist arrivals were even lower than this. The expected crowds and congestion associated with the tournament reduced the number of non-sports fans traveling to the country by over 100,000 leaving the net increase in tourists to the country during the World Cup at just 220,000 visitors. This figure is less than half that of Grant Thornton’s early projections and a full third below even the lowest visitor estimates provided after the tournament. We estimate that the cost to the nation per World Cup visitor lies in the range $4,700 to $13,000.

Our results provide a cautionary tale for cities and countries bidding for mega-events. The anticipated crowds may not materialize, and the economic gains from the sports fans who do come to watch the games need to be weighed against the economic losses associated from other potential travelers who avoid the region during the event.

Thomas Peeters is a PhD-fellow of the Flanders Research Foundation at the University of Antwerp. His main research interests are industrial organization and labor issues related to professional sports leagues. His work has been published in journals such as Economic Policy, the International Journal of Industrial Organization and the Journal of African Economies. Victor Matheson is a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA. He is the author of numerous studies concerning the economic impact of major sporting events on host countries and is a member of the executive board of the North American Association of Sports Economists. Stefan Szymanski is the Stephen J. Galetti Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan. His research in the economics of sports includes work on the relationship between performance and spending in professional football leagues, the theory of contests applied to sports, the application of sports law to sports organizations, financing of professional leagues and insolvency, the costs and benefits of hosting major sporting events. They are the authors of the paper ‘Tourism and the 2010 World Cup: Lessons for developing countries’, which is published in the Journal of African Economies.

The Journal of African Economies is a vehicle to carry rigorous economic analysis, focused entirely on Africa, for Africans and anyone interested in the continent – be they consultants, policymakers, academics, traders, financiers, development agents or aid workers.

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Image credit: South Africa fan in Johannesburg during World Cup 2010. By Iscar Blanco [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Last night Daughter, Mother, the Webmeister and I attended the Awards ceremony for this year's JDRF walk. Our team, The A-mazings won raised almost $13,000 for this year's walk, and we won individual Golden Sneakers, a Platinum Team plaque and a Sapphire level Circle of Appreciation pin. But best of all....WE WON THE BEST T-SHIRT contest!!

Just as a reminder, here's what they looked like:



I was so proud that we won that because my daughter designed the shirts herself. Of course, I had to tell everyone at the surrounding tables this fact, to my daughter's extreme chagrin. Sheesh, what does the kid want from me? I can't help being proud!

Anyway, here's Daughter with her armful of awards:



And here's me after picking up my Golden Sneaker:



Can you see my extremely groovy necklace? My daughter made it for me for Chanukah. I love what it says: "Imagination is everything.It's the preview of life's coming attractions."

Ok, I'll stop bragging about my daughter now. Even if she is smart and funny and talented and creative and generally gorgeous.

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