By the way, although American spectators had started doing that “USA! USA!” chant with its cheerfully fuck-you edge at international sporting events during the 1970s, it was in the 1980s that it became a national cultural habit, first at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, when Team USA (a new coinage) beat the unbeatable Soviet hockey team, then spreading into professional wrestling and Reagan reelection campaign rallies and finally to any sort of excited mob of Americans who felt like madly insisting on our awesomeness, to perform feelings of patriotic self-confidence, which used to
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