False Jersey Ops (Part 2): Kaepitalism

Basketball, T-Shirt Praxis, and Crafted Storytelling

Major sports are now transmitted by satellite to global audiences. The commercial messages accompanying the broadcast, ringing the stadia, and often worn on the uniforms of the athletes constitute a concerted assault of corporate marketing values on global consciousness. The envelopment of professional and amateur sports for transnational corporate marketing objectives and ideological pacification and control is not a patented American practice, limited exclusively to U.S. companies. It is, however, carried to its fullest development in the United States[1].

It’s that time of year again. American football players (along with other assorted sportspeople and posturing opportunists) are performing revolutionary acts at an unprecedented rate! Standing shoulder to shoulder with ruling class millionaires, arms linked in heart-warming unity, professional athletes are once more using their platforms to bring people together and make a difference.

The major organisations now jostle for the title of “most socially conscious professional sports league,” and, smelling opportunity, Adam Silver has descended like a gangly, besuited vulture, offering in an open letter to help his players “figure out the most meaningful way to make [a] difference[2]” (it’s wearing t-shirts and linking arms, in case you were wondering).

Like all sports leagues, the NBA—as its players and commissioners never tire of reminding us—is a business. “In the United States,” Herbert I. Schiller wrote, “practically no sports activity remains outside the interest and sponsorship of the big national advertisers”—and these include government agencies. Teams are owned by the very richest of the rich, and unthinkable sums of money are spent on advertisements of various sorts, from regular TV commercials, to branding, to Department of Defence propaganda, to God knows what else. With this in mind, we ought to consider the question of what, aside from jerseys and t-shirts, we are being sold. So, let’s investigate.

Just a normal basketball game in a not-fascist country.

From the very beginning of this tiresome saga, Colin Kaepernick proved himself to be a faithful and unashamed propagandist for the US armed forces, and for American exceptionalism in general. When asked to clarify his thoughts on the military in August last year, Kaepernick made the following remarks:

I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. I have family, I have friends that have gone and fought for this country. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone … [Kneeling during the national anthem is] a freedom that men and woman that have fought for this country have given me this opportunity by contributions they have made … I know a lot of people’s initial reactions thought it was bashing the military, which it wasn’t. That wasn’t my intention at all[3].

Kaepernick’s former teammate and fellow grovelling kneeler Eric Reid reemphasised the pair’s reverence for murderous American soldiers in a recent op-ed for the New York Times, explaining that he “wanted to be as respectful as possible,” and that they “chose to kneel because it’s a respectful gesture.” He continues:

It baffles me that our protest is still being misconstrued as disrespectful to the country, flag and military personnel. We chose it because it’s exactly the opposite. It has always been my understanding that the brave men and women who fought and died for our country did so to ensure that we could live in a fair and free society, which includes the right to speak out in protest.

The pro-empire orientation of Kaepernick and his copycats has always left room for cross-pollination with other ongoing psyops and enabled the US military to boost its image in ways other than the crude displays that are typically associated with American sports (mindless flag reverence[4] and tasteless pageantry, recruitment ads, collaborative PR performances, and so forth). Thanks to Kaepernick’s “socially conscious” credentials, bloodthirsty imperial soldiers can, by association, now posit themselves as sympathetic characters who share our concerns, and even as revolutionaries! They’re cool and subversive, and we kneel with them!

The prophet Mani recognised the power of images in spreading propaganda way back in the third century CE, and the best propagandists today are well aware of this utility. Kaepernick’s CIA-endorsed “protest” may be short on theory and on focus (“there’s a lot of things that need to change, a lot of different issues that need to be addressed … it’s really hard to lock down one specific thing that needs to change currently”), but it produces endless iconic and inspirational imagery! Look at the images! Wear them on a t-shirt. Are you not empowered?

An expression of fascism.

By clearly emphasising this supposed distinction between US police (who are temporarily bad and racist) and US soldiers (who are eternally good and noble), Kaepernick promotes a myopic understanding of contemporary America, according to which racist policing is not an intended and inevitable outcome of capitalism, but rather an alarming deviation from an otherwise presumed American exceptionalism, a problem which can be treated and dealt with in isolation through kneeling and t-shirt wearing, “raising awareness” and “having conversations.” But as David Gilbert observed in 2001,

there is a complete correlation over the past twenty years between the greatest ever recorded shift of wealth from the poor to the rich and our skyrocketing prison population. The dual needs of containment and scapegoating are clearly expressed in the racial character of American justice.

Kaepernick’s belief that American cops can be reformed or “held to account” without really understanding in the first place why they consistently exhibit racist behaviour amounts, in other words, to a liberal complaint (as opposed to a radical analysis). American police do not intend to serve and protect the working class, and it is crucial to do away with any belief in a community of interests—and thus any chance of productive dialogue—between cops and the people they brutalise, imprison, and execute. You cannot condemn American cops without also condemning American capitalism.

But Kaepernick does more than just pose and sell t-shirts—he’s an activist. Eric Reid vouches for him, pointing out in his op-ed that Kaepernick is “a man who helped to orchestrate a commercial planeful of food and supplies for famine-stricken Somalia.” Kaepernick and the “Love Army” (a subliminal command as well as a name?) did indeed deliver 60 tonnes of food to hungry Somalis this year, and that’s all very nice. But why does Somalia suffer such terrible famines? Kaepernick doesn’t say. But I’m going to tell you!

“These people, they have no food.”

Somalia is a victim of (you guessed it) US imperialism (or, as Kaepernick calls it, “politics”). The very soldiers whose deeds Kaepernick and his cop friends love to celebrate have murdered dozens of Somalis this year alone by the most conservative estimates. Thousands of Somalis have been killed (and hundreds of thousands displaced) by US invaders since 2007 in a rarely-publicised war that has been going on for decades. Famines have occurred with ever-increasing frequency and severity since the United States instigated this war, and this is no coincidence:

A country that has been deprived of any civil peace and stable government by the repeated meddling of imperialism over a period of decades, a country whose economy has been destroyed by IMF loan sharks, a country whose fishing industry has been wiped out by giant factory ships deployed by monopoly capitalist poachers, and whose fishermen have been transformed into pirates, is not well-equipped to deal with the consequences of major drought.  Whilst the drought is, in some measure, a natural phenomenon, the famine is entirely man-made: the consequence of the decades of imperialist meddling which have effectively sabotaged any hope of peace and order for the Somalis.

To borrow Kaepernick’s own words, there’s “a social responsibility that we have to be educated on these things and talk about these things,” and “when you have the knowledge of those things you can make an educated decision on what you really feel and what you really stand for.”

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have visited relentless persecution on them and received their teaching with the most savage hostility, the most furious hatred, the most ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons, canonise them, and surround their names with a certain halo for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating and vulgarising the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge[5].

Colin Kaepernick is often credited with raising awareness and starting a conversation, but this is giving him too much credit. He is more than happy to strut about in t-shirts branded with images of revolutionary figures (Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Fidel Castro[6]), but when it comes to discussing the topics with which these great leaders spent their lives grappling, Kaepernick has nothing to say. His t-shirt praxis is offensive not just because it is dishonest, but because it contributes to the debasement of powerful revolutionary icons and ideas. The late poet Amiri Baraka once prophesised that Malcolm X’s face would appear on a t-shirt worn by Colin Kaepernick:

There is, of course, the syndrome Lenin spoke about when he said that once opponents of the bourgeoisie are dead the rulers transform these class enemies into ciphers or agreeable sycophants of Imperialism (however “askew” they might have “seemed” in life) who are now “rehabilitated” all the way into being represented as the very opposite ideologically of what they actually were in life.

In particular, Kaepernick seems intent on “rehabilitating” the Black Panther Party, whose 10 point programme he has caricatured and had printed on t-shirts. The original Panther Programme was a substantial list of demands, while Kaepernick’s “10 inspirational sentences” have the air of a friendly cop reading you your rights: “you have the right to be brilliant; you have the right to be courageous”—fuck off. Black Panthers, evidently, can be “radically audacious” backup dancers sharing a stage with Coldplay; they can be obsequious grovelers; and they can be Marvel super heroes. They cannot, however, be revolutionaries.

But enough about Kaepernick. He’s old news, and his feckless demonstrations were on the verge of disappearing down the memory hole until former NBA cameraman and current US President Donald Trump gave this dying story a much-needed shot in the arm. Trump’s remarks have provoked a renewed frenzy of insipid jingoism from athletes and pundits alike. The problem with Trump, you see, is that he’s not a patriot. His presence disgraces the White House, which until last year was a monument to freedom, universally respected and beloved.

“We know this is the greatest country in the world. It’s the land of the free[7].”

Trump, like racist police brutality, is un-American, and bending over in order to revere the US military is not only the best way to protest these things, it’s the American way. Stephen Curry is a real American. So is Bill Russell. Are you?

Cops and soldiers are now joining in these pathetic displays to demonstrate their commitment to American Values, but this is not evidence that Kaepernick’s “protest” has been “ruined” or subverted by opportunists. “Empty platitudes and gestures aimed at pleasing and comforting everyone” were all there ever was to this brain-dissolving spectacle. The whole thing is, I think, an elaborate recruitment ad for the US military (a more ambitious and interactive advert than we’re used to seeing, but an advert nonetheless). Today, the whole world is an advert. Advertising is no longer about straightforward product placement, brand sponsorship, and commercial breaks; advertising today consists of “compelling narratives” and “crafted storytelling” directed at “highly valuable and engaged audiences.” The BBC smuggles ever more subtle and sophisticated advertising into its news broadcasts, boasting of its ability to “deliver content solutions built on compelling narratives that engage audiences across the globe.”

“Welcome to the science of engagement.”

With the DoD throwing millions of dollars at professional sports leagues, it’s not at all wild to suspect that something a little more creative than a bit of flag waving is taking place. All it takes is “matching the content strategy of brands [i.e. the DoD] to issues [i.e. #BlackLivesMatter], motivating audiences anywhere on the planet.” We’re not only being sold products, we’re being sold wars, and we’re being sold a belief in capitalism itself.

Inevitably, Kaepernick will sign with some NFL team or other, and this will be hailed as a great victory for America. Like Chelsea Manning, who was banished and then forgiven, Colin Kaepernick will be welcomed back into the fold and celebrated for his courageous struggle. Kaepernick may mobilise people, but he will never organise them[8]. Instead we will learn an important lesson: that change comes from the top down, led by millionaire capitalists performing gestures on the stage, and not from the bottom up by the likes of you and I. Mission accomplished!

As Gaddafi wrote, “[t]hose who make their own life do not need to see how life takes its course through watching the actors on stage or other theatres.” We should always remain critical when observing media-appointed spokespeople and celebrity revolutionaries, especially those that appropriate and pervert the images and teachings of real anti-imperialist heroes. There have been principled and admirable athletes and entertainers, and they deserve to be taken seriously, but they tend to receive quite different treatment to that enjoyed by Kaepernick. Tupak Shakur, for example, was a black radical, and for that he was assassinated by the FBI. By contrast, Colin Kaepernick receives words of solidarity from the former Director of the CIA.

Thank you for reading, and death to the USA.

[1] Paraphrased from Herbert I. Schiller’s essay Not Yet the Post-Imperialist Era.

[2] Amusingly, this letter was initially reported as “encouraging players to speak out on social issues and not be afraid like NFL players,” but in a subsequent memo the league has made it clear that all players had better stand up straight during anthem performances.

[3] If you think he’s being cautious and is simply worried that by condemning the NFL’s military sponsors he runs the risk of losing his job or endorsement revenue, consider his own remarks from this same interview: “Those are things I’m prepared to handle … I can live with that at the end of the day.” He no longer has an NFL job to lose, anyway. He’s free to set the record straight whenever he likes.

[4] James Johnson: “Without the military there would be no freedom to even play basketball.” What?

[5] Lenin, State and Revolution.

[6] None of these three had a high opinion of the US military, in case you were unsure.

[7] LeBron actually said this.

[8] Kaepernick doesn’t need your help: “This isn’t something I’m going to ask other people to put their necks out for what I’m doing. If they agree with me and feel strongly about it then by all means I hope they stand with me. But I’m not going to go and try to recruit people and be like ‘Hey, come do this with me’ because I know the consequences that come with that and they need to make that decision for themselves.”

 

Hercules and the Hydra

Basketball, Myth, and the Symbionese Liberation Army

From the beginning of English colonial expansion in the early seventeenth century through the metropolitan industrialisation of the early nineteenth, rulers referred to the Hercules-hydra myth to describe the difficulty of imposing order on increasingly global systems of labour. They variously designated dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, pirates, urban labourers, soldiers, sailors, and African slaves as the numerous, ever-changing heads of the monster. But the heads, though originally brought into productive combination by their Herculean rulers, soon developed among themselves new forms of cooperation against those rulers, from mutinies and strikes to riots and insurrections and revolution.

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt have noticed the image of the seven-headed snake that sits at the top of the page [edit: I’ve since replaced it with something nicer]. It is of course the logo of the SLA, an apparently revolutionary organisation which was briefly active in the Bay Area during the 1970s, and which has since been the subject of a great deal of controversy. I first became aware of the SLA after listening to Third Sight’s Symbionese Liberation Album, and, after tracking down their audio dispatches and hearing of their audacious attempts to distribute free food to the poor and hungry people of California by extorting media baron and raving fascist Randolph Hearst[1], I decided I rather liked them.

It wasn’t until several years later that I stumbled upon rumours and allegations that Donald DeFreeze (the group’s leader) was an informant for the Los Angeles Police Department, and that the SLA was essentially a CIA-orchestrated false flag operation. I find this perfectly plausible, though I will leave it to readers to conduct their own research into the SLA if they’re interested (it’s not really within the scope of this blog post, though it is all quite fascinating). What I intend to focus on below is the question of whether or not the fact that the SLA was almost certainly a fake left-wing revolutionary group whose purpose was to discredit the so-called “New Left” really matters, and, naturally, the implications this may have for the 2017 NBA Finals.

After kidnapping Patty Hearst (Randolph’s daughter, then a student at UC Berkeley) from her apartment on 4 February 1974, the SLA released a series of communiques to local media (issued between 12 February and 2 April), which they stipulated were to be broadcast in full, no editing. In hindsight, these tapes may well have been cynical attempts to caricature the kind of language used by the stereotypical white bourgeois “radicals” that UC Berkeley is famous for, and thus were intended to sound ludicrous and off-putting to ordinary, sensible Americans[2].

Yet some of Donald DeFreeze’s speeches were actually surprisingly good. Patty Hearst frequently spoke of “fascist America,” with its “concentration camps” and “fascist pig media.” This is perfectly reasonable language which accurately describes the society in which she lived (and which remains accurate to this day). If these were attempts to make a mockery of idealistic young revolutionaries, they were not successful. In fact, the SLA’s message inspired me to read about (real) revolutionary movements around the world and throughout history, and ultimately to join a communist party.

The logo of the SLA is reminiscent of the mythical hydra of Lerna, a many-headed monster that Hercules was apparently obliged to kill in exchange for immortality. This is significant because rulers and exploiters have throughout history used this myth to represent the struggle between themselves and the people they seek to oppress. Naturally, the ruling class identified with Hercules, the powerful and heroic individual who overcomes challenges and is rewarded handsomely for his efforts. The role of the hydra was reserved for the exploited, the working class, whom the rulers feared and despised. The hydra, write Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, was regarded as “an antithetical symbol of disorder and resistance, a powerful threat to the building of state, empire, and capitalism.”

Implicit in the hydra myth is the fundamental truth that the working class vastly outnumber the craven capitalist dogs who struggle to contain them, and therefore pose a permanent threat to the capitalist system. When Hercules lopped off one of the hydra’s heads, two new ones grew in its place. Likewise, cut down one revolutionary and you only create more. As Hearst explained in her eulogy to her fallen comrades after they were brutally massacred by the LAPD on live television,

I know that the pigs are proud of themselves; they’ve killed another black leader. […]. But no matter how many leaders are killed, the pig can’t kill their ideals. […]. They live on in the hearts and minds of millions of people in fascist America. […]. The SLA terrifies the pigs, because it calls all oppressed people in this country to arms, to fight in a united front to overthrow this fascist dictatorship. The pigs think that they can deal with a handful of revolutionaries, but they know they can’t defeat the incredible power which the people, once united, represent.

Is it possible that ideological projects which were intended for one thing may be requisitioned, rehabilitated, and redeployed for something entirely different, to take on a life of their own?[3] Consider the example presented by Richard King in Orientalism and Religion of the faux Vedic text which, when originally forged by French Jesuits, was intended to lampoon Indian culture, but, when later read by Voltaire, impressed him with its sophistication! Discourses, concluded King, “cannot be controlled once they have entered the public arena and become subject to contestation, appropriation, and inversion by others.” Of course, this is by no means a new idea. As Roland Barthes[4] wrote,

We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

We may well be able to dismiss the author of a text, but can we dismiss the authors of events, of whole systems of ideas? Consider the particular brand of Zen Buddhism that was famously popular in the Bay Area a few years before the SLA emerged. The Zen of the Beat Generation was largely the product of Japanese ultranationalists and bore little resemblance to Zen as it was practiced in Japan. Rather than dismiss it as corrupted and inauthentic, however, I think it is more useful to understand Beat Zen as Californian Buddhism. Religions do change; they are adapted to suit different cultures and periods, and this can happen in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. As far as I’m concerned, Californian Buddhism functions as a religion and is therefore legitimate (though of course it is important to understand it in context).

The classically educated architects of the Atlantic economy found in Hercules—the mythical hero of the ancients who achieved immortality by performing twelve labours—a symbol of power and order. For inspiration they looked to the Greeks, for whom Hercules was a unifier of the centralised territorial state, and to the Romans, for whom he signified vast imperial ambition. The labours of Hercules symbolised economic development: the clearing of land, the draining of swamps, and the development of agriculture, as well as the domestication of livestock, the establishment of commerce, and the introduction of technology. Rulers placed the image of Hercules on money and seals, in pictures, sculptures and palaces, and on arches of triumph. Among English royalty, William III, George I, and George II’s brother, the “Butcher of Culloden,” all fancied themselves Hercules. John Adams, for his part, proposed in 1776 that “The Judgement of Hercules” be the seal for the new United States of America. The hero represented progress: Giambattista Vico, the philosopher of Naples, used Hercules to develop the stadial theory of history, while Francis Bacon, philosopher and politician, cited him to advance modern science and to suggest that capitalism was very nearly divine.

By arranging for the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers to face one another in the NBA Finals for the third year in a row, Adam Silver was clearly attempting to revive and re-present the Hercules-hydra myth for a contemporary basketball audience. This time around, the hydra was permitted to overpower Hercules. Were LeBron James to have cut down one Finals MVP, another would simply have risen from the bench to take his place! The team of perfect unity and cooperation won against the outmoded brute force of capitalist domination. The Cavaliers could not overcome their own internal contradictions.

Or so the NBA would have us believe!

By signing Kevin Durant in 2016, the Golden State Warriors became the best basketball team that has ever existed. They are incredibly fun to watch, and, I think, even quite likable. As a basketball enjoyer, I love watching teams that rely on isolations get crushed by teams that move the ball, and the 2017 NBA Finals would have entertained me ten years ago.

However, things are not as they are made to appear. In fact, the Warriors are not a hydra but a team of Herculean individuals. The signing of Durant not only represented the further concentration of unimaginable wealth in the hands of the already filthy rich (the Warriors won a record 73 games last season before Durant arrived), but Durant himself did not join the team due to any high-minded basketball ideals. He does not play in a beautifully planned and executed offence because he wants to liberate the NBA from the tyranny of isolation ball. Rather, Durant was bedazzled by the promise of Silicon Valley riches offered to him by his venture capitalist teammates.

Like the SLA, the Golden State Warriors are presented to us as a revolutionary organisation. But just as the SLA were in fact puppets of the CIA, so the Warriors actually represent the ideology of another terrorist organisation—the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley (who “saw the 3-point line as a market inefficiency”). The SLA was indeed revolutionary—their gruesome end, broadcast live on national television, resulted in a revolution in US policing, in the militarisation of American cops. As they watched the murders unfold, fascist police across America were beguiled by the Kevlar vests and incendiary grenades of the SWAT team that had been called in to murder the entire SLA, and subsequently set about arming themselves in a similar vein. By the same token, the revolution the Warriors are ushering in is one of mass surveillance and the tyranny of technology.

So where does all of this leave us? Is it advisable to enjoy watching the Golden State Warriors, or is their very existence a duplicitous scheme to foster within us sympathy for Silicon Valley and its evil plots? Critics of the secularisation thesis, from Émile Durkheim to Rachel Wagener, have pointed out that truth claims by religious authorities and sacred texts in fact mean relatively little to most religious people[5]—what matters is community, tradition, ritual, identity, and so on. Perhaps, then, the truth that Donald DeFreeze and Kevin Durant are agents provocateurs does not matter very much after all so long as alternative ideas, inspirations, and significances can be drawn from their escapades. Viewed this way, they become as much a myth as the Hercules-hydra drama they echo. As Nancy Isenberg writes, the Patty Hearst saga resists one single meaning:

This surfeit of information generated by the SLA, and the overproduction of meaning by the media, suggests why Patty Hearst is perhaps the best of all postmodern subjects. Her story at once registers and resists the desire to find a single meaning. Despite all attempts by journalists, psychiatrists, and jurists to explain her persona through either the tragic story of a female captive/brainwashed victim or the dark comedy of the spoiled rich girl/pseudo revolutionary, her gendered identity cannot be fixed. […]. The Patty Hearst case obliges us to reassess the meaning of identity through a postmodern lens. In a profound way, Hearst’s trial problematizes the meaning of human agency, volition, and the “truthful” representation of facts—cultural categories central to the law and a postmodern critique of bourgeois individualism and “reality.”

The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author.

In both instances, the battle between Hercules and the hydra turns out to be an illusion, a theatrical production. Both the Warriors and the Cavaliers are owned by vile plutocrats whose only goal is capital accumulation at the expense of you and I. As for the SLA, it was created by the CIA and destroyed by the LAPD; the SLA saga was essentially a puppet show between two arms of the fascist American state (two heads of the fascist American hydra?). Yet, as Stuart Hall argued, audiences are not passive and stupid, and though a certain message may be encoded within a text, this message can be contested, subverted, rejected.

According to Brad Screiber (an author who investigated the SLA fairly thoroughly), “neither Hearst nor the white radicals who followed DeFreeze realized that he was molded by a CIA officer and allowed to escape, thanks to collusion with the California Department of Corrections.” Screiber claims that Patty Hearst was a “closet radical,” and that most of the SLA’s members were unaware that they were being manipulated and led to their deaths. It is possible that some members of the Golden State Warriors are trapped in a similar predicament, believing naïvely that they are simply members of a basketball team when really their job is to crush any and all resistance to capitalist expansion. I think perhaps we owe it to the idealistic young souls who died in that tragic shootout with the LAPD to rescue what we can from the wreckage of the SLA, just as we owe it to innocent and idealistic basketball players to sometimes simply enjoy a basketball game. I enjoyed watching the Warriors beat the Cavs, and I think Patty Hearst was right about her parents.

The SLA’s rhetoric was imaginative and invigorating, and the principles that they outlined—of racial harmony, of men and women working side by side in a united front against fascist America—are laudable. I like the image and the idea of the hydra, even though the hydra myth was selected by the ruling class because they felt as though it cohered with their worldview, and, moreover, despite the fact that Hercules defeats the hydra in the original myth. I don’t believe in myths. In reality, the hydra (the workers of the world, united) would win every time.

In conclusion, I think I have established beyond any reasonable doubt that the purpose of the 2017 NBA Finals was ultimately to trick the public into thinking that the Warriors’ (i.e. Silicon Valley’s) “disruptive” and “innovative” style represents something different, something in opposition to LeBron James’ (i.e. the real estate mogul’s) more “traditional” Herculean approach to crushing their opponent (i.e. you and I), and as such to foster within us a false sense of security and a trust in the methods, products, and institutions of Silicon Valley.

Regardless of what we each think about the SLA and the Golden State Warriors, there is one thing that I’m confident we can all agree upon:

[1] Incidentally, Hearst Communications Inc., the “fascist media empire” (DeFreeze’s words) established by William Randolph Hearst (Patty’s grandfather), owns 20% of ESPN, and we would be wise not to discount the possibility that they are working to insert fascist messages into their basketball broadcasts right now.

[2] Brad Screiber, who wrote a book about the SLA, believes that these communiques were probably written by Nancy Ling Perry, rather than DeFreeze or Colston Westbrook (the alleged CIA contractor and mastermind behind the SLA), and, moreover, that she was probably quite unaware that the SLA was not what it seemed to be. They may therefore have been written in earnest, making them “authentic.”

[3] Similarly, can one enjoy a Radiohead song knowing that Thom Yorke doesn’t give a shit about Palestinians and appeals to the authority or J. K. Rowling in order to excuse his apathy towards the disgusting violence of Israeli settlers?

[4] The CIA was, incidentally, quite fond of Barthes, promoting his work in the belief that it would lead well-meaning academics into a dead end. They weren’t necessarily right, however. Is it possible that, just as a discarded weapon, which may have been a tool of state repression, can be picked up by a revolutionary and used to murder the agents of capitalism, images, symbols, myths, rhetoric, and theoretical concepts can also be turned against their creators? To be clear, I am not asserting that they can, but it is an interesting and important question to consider.

[5] The secularisation thesis was perhaps most famously advocated by Max Weber, who declared that scientific advances would result in the “disenchantment” of the world. However, in spite of the rise of science and the increasing scrutiny under which religious truth claims are placed, the demise of religion predicted by proponents of the secularisation thesis has yet to occur. Émile Durkheim was more prescient, in my opinion, arguing that although it “seems natural…that religion should progressively fade as science becomes more adept at completing its task,” “insofar as religion is action, insofar as it is a human way of living, science could not possibly take its place.” Religion, according to Durkheim, has ceded one of its original functions to science: that is, its speculative function, its “right to be dogmatic about the nature of things.” Durkheim recognised that “religion clearly cannot play the same role in the future that it has in the past,” but had the foresight to recognise that “it seems called upon to transform itself rather than to disappear.”

“Ask Yourself: Do You Really Wanna Go There?”

Basketball, Procedural Rhetoric, and Cryonic Purgatory

“Do I get up every morning and ask: am I doing the things that I believe in and am I doing them for the best possible motives? Yes. Unambiguously yes.” — Kevin Durant.

Half way along the road we have to go,
I found myself obscured in a great forest,
Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way.

On Monday, Kevin Durant finally put to rest years of speculation by formally announcing his decision to take his talents to Silicon Valley for the 2016–17 NBA season. But is he—as they say at Google—doing the right thing? No. Unambiguously no.

Kevin Durant is a unique player and I have nothing but admiration for his game. Moreover, the figure of Kevin Durant and his NBA mythology represented something special for me, and for many others on basketball’s radical left. Kevin Durant had integrity; he stood up for the working poor of the flyover states while other supposed role models shamelessly fled their post-industrial homes in order to form super teams in tropical tax havens.

He also represented those of us who still believe in competitive basketball, in an NBA that crowns its champions in June, not in July. In 2010, shortly after LeBron James’ infamous betrayal of the state of Ohio, Kevin Durant took to Twitter and issued the following statement:

Now everybody wanna play for the heat and the Lakers? Let’s go back to being competitive and going at these peoples!

The gauntlet had been thrown down! Here was a man of principle, of noble spirit, pledging to stand up to the opulence and corruption of the NBA’s tax-evading aristocracy. And, perhaps most importantly, he was convincing. This wasn’t just any player talking glibly into the ether; this wasn’t Jared Dudley telling us that “the NBA cares,” or Bryon Russell challenging Michael Jordan to a one-on-one. Kevin Durant was a remarkable talent possessed of the requisite physical tools to defy a league plagued by collusion and PED abuse by bringing a championship to Oklahoma. Apollo; the Frog King; Wotan; the Buddha; Kevin Durant: From behind a thousand faces the single hero looks out, archetype of all human myth.

And yet here we are in July 2016. We have been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok, and flat out deceived by Kevin Durant and the Golden State Warriors! Kevin Durant, the people’s champion, the last salvation of the toiling masses, wants to go and play with Stephen Curry in his state of the art San Francisco Panopticon, and to plunge the state of Oklahoma straight back into the agonising misery of the Dust Bowl era.

So what does this mean? What fate lies in store for Kevin Durant? In order to understand the full magnitude of Durant’s epic betrayal it will be useful to consider a parallel case from British politics. On the 16th of July 2010, the same day Kevin Durant composed the above tweet, Liberal Democrat MP Nick Clegg published a pamphlet for Demos in which he outlined his plan for a liberal parliament. An amusing document in hindsight, Clegg pledged to radically redistribute power, restore civil liberties, repair the UK’s “broken political system,” and cultivate a green economy. So much for that.

Like Durant, Clegg appeared at first to offer something fresh and invigorating. His proposed policies were, by their soundness and practicality, unorthodox: scrap the Trident nuclear programme; offer amnesty to illegal immigrants; freeze VAT and tuition fees. This was music to the ears of British voters who had endured sixteen years of New Labour, and, regrettably, the less critical among them yielded to Clegg’s charms when they should have been supporting the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).

The results were no less painful for their predictability: instead of forming a coalition with other “left-wing” parties in the wake of an extremely tight election, Clegg took the path of least resistance and sought to grasp whatever power was immediately available to him by literally entering into a pact with the Devil. Appropriately, this Tory-Lib Dem coalition is represented visually by the blue and yellow of the Golden State Warriors. Yet more evidence of the global capitalist conspiracy I have set myself the task of unravelling.

Literally Satan.

Far from curtailing the rapacious tendencies of the Tories and realising his vision of a liberal parliament, Nick Clegg and his Lib Dem colleagues obediently delivered precisely the austerity policies they had just finished campaigning against. Perhaps these were the policies that he had believed in all along, for Clegg, we must not forget, studied at Cambridge and worked as a journalist for the Financial Times before his career as a politician, and is therefore as apt an example of ruling class vermin as any Tory.

And where is he now? There can be only one fate for a moral coward: Purgatory. Nick Clegg barely even exists today; he is a besuited spectre languishing on the periphery of an irrelevant political party that, in a desperate plea for attention, has taken up the cause of the centre-left imbeciles of the EU referendum’s “remain campaign”—young, “educated,” and entitled urbanites—by vowing to overturn the democratic will of the people and once more deliver the UK into the blood-drenched clutches of the European Union. This is the destiny that awaits all those whose life was a compromise over important issues, those who lived without occasion for infamy or praise.

And it is the will of the people that Kevin Durant, too, seeks to overturn by brazenly discarding his principles—the principles of competitive basketball—to accept dirty Silicon Valley dollars and consolidate greater power in the hands of yet fewer NBA teams. The people demand an NBA that is competitive and fair for all, not an NBA in which the few succeed at the expense of the many.

“It’s a business.” This was the mantra of the Sternist regime, and it is a refrain that Adam Silver keeps at the front of his lizard mind. But basketball can never be subordinated to the dictates of business; basketball is a game, and games, like myths, provide us with foundational stories that offer meaning and instruction for how we are to live. Games impose arbitrary and unexceptionable rules that must be observed, replacing the confused and intricate laws of ordinary life and thus bringing a temporary, limited perfection into an otherwise confused and imperfect world. For the vulgarities of mundane life—of “business”—to infiltrate and pollute the game of basketball is a crime most heinous.

Games present heroes and villains, stories of good versus evil, civilisation versus chaos, and so on, and in so doing provide opportunities for moral engagement. But what happens when a game presents only evil? What happens when a myth tells only of the villain’s triumph? The procedural rhetoric of NBA free agency is saturated with the logic of monopoly capitalism, and therefore directly contributes to tacit popular endorsement of systemic inequality. In other words, by signing with the Golden State Warriors, Kevin Durant is literally condemning millions around the globe to death by starvation.

Neither Kevin Durant nor Nick Clegg is worthy of Hell, and even less of Heaven. The heavens reject them because they are less than perfect; they are forbidden Hell lest the damned should feel some superiority in their presence. Nick Clegg is already consigned to the oblivion of being a Lib Dem MP, but what horrors lie in store for Kevin Durant?

Years from now, his Silicon Valley masters having trained their avaricious gaze on the conquest of death itself, Kevin Durant will sign over the rights to his physical body (the NBPA will have long since surrendered its members’ autonomy and human rights) and be delivered upon retirement to Joe Lacob’s cryonic preservation lab where his seven foot frame—and, in theory, his basketball talent—will be frozen for the benefit of future generations (of profiteering NBA owners). As Durant settles into his capsule and begins to question whether this really is a good idea after all, and even as the ice crystals begin shredding his brain matter, the the enormity of his current blunder will return to him. He will find himself in a forest, dark and cold, and, as he staggers to the edge of the treeline, he will spy a figure.

When I saw that fellow in the great desert,
I cried out to him: ‘Have pity on me,
Whatever you are, shadow or definite man.’

And he replied: ‘You do not want to make an enemy out of me.’

LeBron James and the Path to Power

Basketball, Democracy, and Collective Bargaining

“The new CBA had to be split up into several texts so that they would look like simple amendments. […]. They would be regrouped in a treaty which had become colourless and painless. These various texts would be sent to NBA players who would vote on them separately. In that way, player opinion would be unwittingly led to adopt the provisions that the NBPA didn’t dare present to them straightforwardly.” — LeBron James, 2011.

With another NBA lockout pencilled in for 2017, NBA players must brace themselves and begin to consider alternative approaches to collective bargaining negotiations if they wish to avoid facing defeat yet again. Players need to consider the extent to which the National Basketball Players Association—the union that purports to promote the interests of all NBA players—really does serve them as effectively as it might. The NBPA is a labour union that democratically elects its leaders, yet when we look at its recent track record we see only concession, defeat, and, quite frankly, humiliation. Clearly something needs to be done, and perhaps the UK’s recent referendum on its membership of the European Union can provide some insight into the dangers of corrupt institutions and enable informed and radical NBA players to halt the worrying trends within their own union before it slips into the abyss.

As the referendum—held last Thursday—approached, the unscrupulous jackals of the UK press did their best to fabricate and promote the image of an EU that embodied peaceful and cosmopolitan values, an EU that protected the working poor and their fragile environment whilst guarding against the ever-looming threat of continental war.

Yet the European Union was not founded after the War in order to secure peace in Europe (it is not, in other words, the United Nations); rather, the EU originated as a Cold War bloc that sought to rebuild and protect monopoly capitalism in Western Europe. Far from keeping the peace, after the tragic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the EU expanded eastwards with great rapacity, and EU states have since helped destabilise Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and parts of Africa. Newer EU members have not enjoyed the prosperity promised them, but have instead been maintained as reservoirs of cheap labour and sites of outsourcing, and though their citizens may move freely across the Union’s internal borders, the outer borders of the EU have become increasingly militarised as its core members seek desperately to halt and expel the very people they are responsible for uprooting through their abominable and illegal conquests.

The EU is, in short, an exclusive and antidemocratic financiers club that has wrought unimaginable devastation upon refugees and the poorest people both within Europe and beyond its fortress walls. As Blairite worm and former EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson remarked in 2002, “we are all Thatcherites now.”

Why bring this up? The European Union is a trade bloc, not a labour union. In what way does it resemble the NBPA? Dear reader, the parallels are undeniable. Just as the EU Commission is headed by Jean-Claude Juncker—a man who, during his term as Prime Minister of Luxembourg, turned his home country into one of Europe’s biggest tax havens, and whose current imperative is to unwaveringly carry out the wishes of Europe’s ruling class of imperial gargoyles—so the NBPA’s highest ranking members are conniving and obsequious traitors who consistently sell their comrades out by capitulating to the demands of their bourgeois masters. In recent years, the NBPA has succeeded only in haemorrhaging money to team owners: most recently, in 2011, the share of basketball related income to which NBA players are entitled fell from 57 per cent to just 51 per cent, a disgrace of the highest order.

“I actually see [overseeing CBA negotiations] as an opportunity rather than a challenge.” — Adam Silver, 2015.

So how did this come about? In order to understand how the natural solidarity of NBA players has been so thoroughly eroded and undermined, we need look no further than current NBA Commissioner and shapeshifting reptilian Adam Silver. During an interview with Adrian Wojnarowski in December last year, Silver let slip his insidious plot to exploit the avarice of the NBA’s petit bourgeoisie:

As I’ve gotten to know a lot of the superstar players who are now in the league…they’ve become much more sophisticated as well. And so now, especially when you have of course Michael Jordan as a principle owner; but now Grant Hill is, you know, a significant part of the Atlanta Hawks’ new ownership group; you have Shaquille O’Neal in Sacramento; you have David Robinson in San Antonio; and a lot of people don’t know that Penny Hardaway has a small piece of the Memphis Grizzlies’ group; and so now, what’s changed in terms of the quality of these negotiations, you have a lot of the superstar players sitting there wanting to become owners one day, I think which is incredibly healthy, because what I always say to them even outside the context of bargaining is that the way I always try to do deals is to put myself in the other person’s shoes and, you know, try to anticipate what it is they want. […] . I think that to the extent that…those players…directly involved in these negotiations want to be owners one day and want to sit on the other side of the table, ‘profit’ for example doesn’t become a dirty word. [Emphasis mine.]

Indeed, “profit” is the mantra of the NBPA’s current executive board. The First Vice-President of the NBPA is none other than LeBron James; the Treasurer is James’ Cavaliers teammate James Jones; the President, Chris Paul, is a duplicitous insurance salesman and close personal friend of James. Other Vice Presidents include fashion mogul and art collector Carmelo Anthony as well as Silicon Valley tech lobbyists Stephen Curry and Andre Iguodala.

As I demonstrated in my last essay, LeBron James is a Machiavellian scoundrel of unmatched guile, concerned solely with his own rational self-interest. Would you trust him to negotiate on your behalf, knowing that in crunch time he thinks only in terms of isolation, of how he as an individual can best succeed?

Both the EU and the NBPA are, thus, corrupt and undemocratic institutions whose sole concern is to further the interests of global capital at the expense of the majority of their members. However, there remains one crucial point on which the NBPA differs from the EU: the NBPA can be reformed. In spite of what inspipd careerists like Owen Jones and “erratic Marxists” like Yanis Varoufakis may try to tell you, the fate of the EU was sealed with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, and any hope of reforming it from within, of introducing democracy or accountability, was emphatically laid to rest. Given these circumstances, the people of the United Kingdom had no choice but to unshackle themselves from this machine of imperialism and the crushing austerity, privatisation, and militarisation it has for so long engendered.

Just as the United Kingdom was bound inextricably to the grotesque Thatcherite project of the global oligarchy for as long as it remained a member of the EU, so the NBPA cannot succeed as long as the NBA’s petit bourgeois strata dominate CBA negotiations. NBA players face a slightly different challenge, however. To dissolve the NBPA and strike out alone as individuals would lead to certain doom. This is precisely what LeBron James and his fellow exploiters want; indeed, it is for this very reason that he and Stephen Curry conspired to produce the Randian spectacle of the 2016 NBA Finals! It must be understood that by “individual” James means no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible. Solidarity must be cultivated amongst the disaffected members of the NBPA and power democratically handed to black Muslims like Dennis Schröder—injustice is unacceptable in Islam and Muslims are divinely mandated to confront oppressors—and radical Marxists like Steve Nash.

NBA players must not repeat the mistakes of Europe. A brighter, more prosperous, more democratic future is possible for all. All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. Pass the ball.

LeBron James and the Virtue of Selfishness

Basketball, Big Data, and the Military Entertainment Complex

“Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.”
— LeBron James, game 7 post-game press conference, 19/06/2016.

The Golden State Warriors are famously owned by a sinister cabal of Silicon Valley vampires, so it should be no surprise that the team has embraced the latest in surveillance technologies and concomitant collection and analysis of data. The Warriors were among the first wave of NBA teams to install SportVU cameras—sophisticated data-tracking systems—in their arena, a move that has since been copied league-wide. In case you were wondering, SportVU cameras are owned by STATS LLC, which, in turn, is owned by Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm founded by Robert F. Smith, previously a Silicon Valley tech investor for Goldman Sachs.

When considered solely within the context of basketball, the ubiquity of SportVU cameras does not seem disturbing at all; in fact, the move to install them in every arena has by all accounts been a wonderful development that will no doubt revolutionise the way we understand and play basketball. However, when understood within a wider context, as one of countless manifestations of the Silicon Valley imperative to impose a panoptic environment on an unwitting society, the Warriors’ thirst for data is representative of a far more unsettling trend. Just as Oakland’s basketball team was an early adopter of SportVU cameras, so the city of Oakland itself was among the first American cities to install ShotSpotter systems. Another Silicon Valley innovation, ShotSpotter networks consist of hundreds of hidden microphones and sensors placed throughout cities that alert local police to the sound of gunshots (and, potentially, other noises) while also triangulating their location.

Silicon Valley’s tech entrepreneurs have been buying up NBA teams for quite some time now, yet the figures that make up the Warriors’ ownership group appear significantly more menacing than their counterparts in Los Angeles and Sacramento: comically exuberant Steve Ballmer did us the favour of displacing Donald Sterling, while comically impotent Vivek Ranadivé’s curious vision of an “NBA 3.0” has yet to bear any fruit. By contrast, Warriors’ majority owner Joe Lacob has made it absolutely clear that he and his consortium of pestiferous venture capitalists intend to apply the “efficient” neoliberal logic of the Valley to their NBA team (and to accept credit for its success), condemning both players and fans to increasingly invasive surveillance practices.

Recently unveiled plans for the Warriors’ new San Francisco arena.

While much has been written about the gentrification of the Golden State Warriors by Silicon Valley parasites (ticket prices have risen to outrageous heights, affluent tech nerds view Warriors games as “networking opportunities,” the team will be moving from the traditionally blue-collar city of Oakland to a new arena in its more prosperous neighbour San Francisco in the near future, etc.), my intention is not to bemoan the death of the “real” sports fan at the hands of these contemptible Bay Area hipsters. Rather, I am interested in what the Warriors’ success in embracing the Silicon Valley ethos signifies to basketball viewers everywhere. If Hollywood films convey the ideology of the American ruling class[1], can the other entertainment industry spectacles such as the NBA Finals tell us something about our relationship with Silicon Valley tech companies, “big data,” and the global panopticon? Perhaps. Warriors’ co-owner Peter Guber is, after all, a Hollywood producer.

The Warriors have quickly transformed into an analytics giant, the quintessential Smart Team. This has caused some to dislike them, notably television jesters like Charles Barkley and assorted old school types who still believe in asinine mantras like “live by the three, die by the three.” The team has come to represent Silicon Valley, and much of America (and indeed the wider world) resent them for it. They’re successful, and we enjoy what they produce, but they’re arrogant, and there exists a vague but persistent sense that they’re changing things in a way that, while perhaps positive overall, is without consequences.

The Cavaliers, on the other hand, have been cast as the gritty, downtrodden team of the proletariat. The city of Cleveland itself has endured a sustained onslaught from the capitalist class that has wrought all manner of economic hardship—declining industry, rampant unemployment, transfer of wealth from the public sector to the private, etc.—and in terms of professional sports its citizens have had little to celebrate.

As for the players, LeBron James’ stubborn orthodoxy provides a stark contrast to Stephen Curry’s iconoclastic style. While Curry has turned basketball convention on its head, routinely attempting—and making—what would traditionally be regarded as “bad shots,” James plays with the familiar chauvinism of the archetypal basketball star: the ball is always in his hands—often as he stands stationary for ten seconds at a time—and he invariably falls back on heroic isolation plays in tough situations. This familiar basketball logic has been with us for decades, and while it has in recent years been abandoned by some of the more forward-thinking teams (Spurs, Hawks, Celtics, Warriors), it persists throughout the NBA today.

The Cavaliers, of course, are owned by Dan Gilbert, not the city of Cleveland. An NBA championship will not alleviate any of the crushing economic problems currently immiserating the city’s residents, but will rather empower one of their greatest antagonists. Gilbert’s mortgage lending company has been accused of, among other things, fraud, falsifying loan documentation, and scamming customers with deliberately misleading interest rates. Moreover, LeBron James, far from being an archetypal people’s champion, had previously left Cleveland for a state with no income tax in order to form a super team so that he could more easily win championships (an endeavour he abandoned when a more lucrative situation presented itself).

Nevertheless, the 2016 NBA Finals will be regarded as an instance of traditional basketball values defeating new-fangled data-driven methods, of the common man succeeding with his meagre means in the face of “elites” with infinite resources at their disposal. Heart-warming stuff! I’ve forgotten all of my problems already.

On a deeper level, however, this represents the apparent triumph of the atomised individual over the slick and seemingly irresistible powers of Silicon Valley tech monopolies. Yet this isn’t a heart-warming or inspirational narrative precisely because it adheres to the very bourgeois logic that the Valley touts as the solution to our collective ills. The hacker and the entrepreneur may occupy polar positions, but they are analogous, as their intersection in Silicon Valley clearly demonstrates.

As the welfare state crumbles throughout the world, Silicon Valley has stepped in to provide us all with tantalising solutions. Private tech companies will take care of our health and replace our inefficient public transport systems. Rather than overcoming the problem of obesity on a societal level by creating better city infrastructure and regulating powerful food corporations, we are encouraged to pursue solutions that we can undertake as individuals, with fitness devices that track our activities (and generate a wealth of data for private companies). Instead of working with labour unions to reduce working hours, Google Now will act as our secretary and afford us more free time without our having to lift a finger. Our problems, we are to infer, can be overcome with “ethical consumerism” and “political awareness.” Vote with your wallet! Write to your local politician!

Yet such platitudes are not only insufficient, but harmful. Monopolies own the infrastructures that allow them to provide these services, preventing the development of any viable alternatives. Moreover, politicians have no (class) interest in proposing alternative models. Instead, they simply advocate appropriating the same tools that private companies already use and applying them to the same evil ends, only under a different brand.

We cannot solve the problems that we face today—or oppose the kinds of “solutions” offered by Silicon Valley—if we insist on acting only as individual consumers, applying the logic of the market to political revolution[2]. Just as Max Schrems will not succeed in toppling Facebook, so the isolationist cannot, in the long run, defeat the type of basketball that the Golden State Warriors typically play. Team basketball is good basketball. The Warriors won a record 73 games this year for a reason: it’s the best way to play basketball. Their eventual defeat at the hands of the Cavaliers does not change this fact; NBA teams are not suddenly going to begin running isolation sets all game (though the Toronto Raptors must feel degree of vindication). This Cleveland victory was a mirage, a comforting myth in the same vein as the Hollywood film. It provides the citizens of Cleveland with vicarious relief from the unending torment of a life lived in Ohio, and it tempts the rest of us with the erroneous notion that in order to thwart global capitalism we need only alter our individual behaviour and can comfortably elide the underlying systemic issues that give rise to, among other things, wealth inequality, environmental destruction, and war.

By defeating the Golden State Warriors, LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers have embraced and advanced the pernicious ideologies of Randian objectivism and American imperialsim. The Golden State Warriors may have lost the NBA finals, but this was a decisive victory for Joe Lacob and the diabolical legion of Bay Area tech nerds that may ultimately be the ruin of us all.

[1] This, incidentally, can be seen clearly in the Independence Day adverts that aired incessantly during the Finals [edit: the original video I linked to has been deleted, but this one contains essentially the same message]:

The United States Army assures us that the heroism and virtue depicted in Hollywood films is inspired by the real heroism and virtue embodied by the United States Army. Thus, the audience may use a film like Independence Day as a stand-in for actual war coverage, substituting the brutal realities of American imperialism for sanitised and satisfying battles between Americans and belligerent, incomprehensible aliens. This is not just about cinema, however: “when they find a way to win, no matter what”—this is clearly a reference to the basketball broadcast that the advert interrupts, and is encouragement to view the struggle on the court as having wider implications.

[2] This should under no circumstances be read as an endorsement of the European Union.