WHO WILL BREAKDOWN THE BREAKDOWNERS?

It’s impossible to fix NBA games; there are too many red flags that would be thrown up.
—Former FBI Agent Phil Scala

I recently began watching videos published by the Youtube channel Awful Coaching. Youtube just showed them to me one day, probably to taunt me. I find these videos amusing and insightful, but they are also troubling. They present irrefutable proof that NBA teams regularly throw games, but they are not intended to be understood in this way. Instead, hours of video evidence of NBA teams deliberately trying to lose games is passed off as merely “awful coaching”.

The gentleman behind Awful Coaching made some interesting remarks during two recent videos. The first concerned the Utah Jazz, who appeared to be trying to lose to the Los Angeles Lakers. The title itself, while intended to be tongue-in-cheek, is quite correct: WILL HARDY needs to be investigated for fraud. He does. But don’t worry; it’s just a joke! He’s not actually alleging fraud. “The Jazz clearly are poorly coached … the Jazz and their braindead coaching staff clearly don’t understand…”, etc., etc., etc.—this is the conclusion of this man’s “breakdown”, which he drives home via repetition. It’s the conclusion of every video he makes: these idiot coaches don’t know what they’re doing, so they’re losing games. Not one NBA team is well coached. They are all bad, simulataneously, and none of them can ever win.

“This has to be like a game, or corruption, or—this can’t be real!” He gets tantalisingly close to the truth. The Lakers scored 63 points in this clip. 63 of the Lakers’ 138 points were scored against fake defence. This is how you ensure the outcome of a game. 63 points is a lot. It’s not one or two questionable plays, a free throw awarded here and call missed there. And yet it’s much easier to overlook this kind of pretend-defence than it is to overlook crooked refereeing! It all appears perfectly natural, provided you don’t pay very close attention and really watch what the players are doing (and most people don’t). It’s very clever.

The other video that I found interesting involved the San Antonio Spurs letting the Dallas Mavericks win. “Are you telling me this is ok? That the NBA is ok with this?” Is the NBA ok with its “star” players taking wide open shots and compiling ludicrously high point totals? Yes, I think so. Adam Silver has said as much in interviews. This sort of mock outrage is actually very tiresome and serves a sinister purpose. Does George W. Bush really think that bombing Iraq will bring freedom and democracy? I, a very intelligent person who is not a credulous dupe, can see that it surely will not! What an idiot!

When we find ourselves wondering, “are these people trying to do X? Do they really believe that doing Y will accomplish Z?”, perhaps we should credit others with the capacity to scheme and lie (especially if they are mass-murdering enemies of humanity, but I think this does apply to basketball players as well). If a professional basketball team is playing so poorly that you have to ask whether they are trying to lose a game deliberately—not just on one possession, but consistently throughout an entire game, as though they are following a game plan—then it’s reasonable to conclude that they are in fact trying to lose the game deliberately. But these Youtube breakdowners will always bring you back to square one.

“Coach Nick”, a veteran of Youtube basketball “breakdowns” who hadn’t heard of Caitlin Clark until last week, published an enlightening video during last year’s NBA Playoffs. In fact, I had intended to write this article at that time, based solely on this video, which I consider sufficient proof of fixing by itself. In this particular “breakdown”, Coach Nick gives us the official explanation, so to speak, of the Milwaukee Bucks’ improbable loss to the Miami Heat in the first round: awful coaching!

“There’s no other way to explain this lack of focus on such a singular point of attack other than to say they simply weren’t prepared.” Nonsense. Here’s another way to explain it: the Bucks threw the series. This explanation is much more consistent with what we saw, and it doesn’t require adopting the absolutely absurd, insane belief that some of the best basketball players and coaches in the world kept inadvertently making the same losing plays over and over again (described here as a “game plan”!) when even the lay audience watching at home on their televisions could see that this was not going to help them win. It is the job of the Coach Nicks of this world to enclose our thoughts in this way, to insist that “there’s no other way to explain” the outrages and obscenities we see every day (basketball-related or otherwise) than stupidity, incompetence, arrogance, etc. You’re not getting duped, they insist—in fact, you are the clever one! It’s these people who control events and determine outcomes who are the real fools—they’re not in control at all! Your rulers are stupid and incompetent!

“There were all sorts of weird things happening [in the series]”, Coach Nick continues. Yes. “It had to be frustrating for these guys to execute a game plan that was giving the other team target practice”. Yes, though I imagine they enjoyed their bribes. “Look at how Lopez drops down, but then tries to jump back to his own man without realising how they never recovered. I mean, this has got to be a joke, right?” Yes, that’s right, Brook Lopez “didn’t realise” that he was the only man standing between Jimmy Butler and the hoop because he—just like you’re supposed to!—completely ignored what he saw before his own eyes. Very plausible.

Notice that drop coverage is the main theme in Coach Nick’s “breakdown”; it’s the same in all of the Awful Coaching “breakdowns”. The NBA seems to have discovered that drop coverage is the perfect means by which to give star players wide open shots while still maintaining some superficial semblance of defence (i.e., it’s a defensive scheme that actually has a name and can work in theory).

Of course, I’m not going sit here and ask, “why can’t Coach Nick see that the Bucks threw the series? Is he stupid?” No; he receives money from the NBA to produce videos like these, videos which make obviously fixed results look plausibly legitimate to observers who aren’t paying particularly close attention, or who wish to be deceived and to keep believing that the NBA is a real sports league because they enjoyed it as a child and don’t want to be burdened by the thought that even something as ostensibly inconsequential as the NBA is thoroughly rotten and Satanic. Coach Nick and other simpering Youtube-pundits are enlisted by the NBA to produce Warren Commission Report-like farce investigations of controversies, like “why are the Lakers shooting so many free throws?”, concluding each time without fail that nothing is really amiss, and that your eyes are deceiving you.

In addition to deliberately not defending, teams can deliberately run poor offensive sets in order to obtain a desired outcome. Consider this recent game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Memphis Grizzlies. The Bucks have been terrible since hiring their new “coach”, but the Grizzlies have been terrible for much longer and are not a serious professional basketball team (they are currently making an absolute mockery of the NBA’s new “Player Participation Policy” by bestowing obviously fake—and often unreported—injuries on their entire roster and shuffling players in and out of their active line-ups unannounced and at random). The Bucks “should have” won by at least 20; the TNT pundits suggested as much in their pre-game segment, presumably in an attempt to entice bettors. Hmm. What a shock that the Grizzlies ended up winning! I wonder how much money was made/lost, and by whom?

“Why does Damian Lillard have no idea how to run a pick and roll?”, asks our man. Does any serious person really believe that Damian Lillard has no idea how to run a pick and roll? Of course he does. So we can rephrase the question and ask something more sensible: “why is Damian Lillard, a brilliant and experienced point guard, not running a pick and roll correctly? Why is he failing to do this over and over again?”

“These men are paid actors”. Maybe.

Regular season games have begun to look like the All-Star Game, which takes this kind of pantomime basketball to is most nauseating extreme and has therefore been unwatchable for about the past twenty years. It doesn’t surprise me that since I began writing this (last Saturday), Awful Coaching has published a video breaking down the All-Star Game. Ha-ha-ha! Do you get it? The All-Star Game is a fake game, and he usually breaks down “real” games! Wouldn’t it be funny to take the All-Star Game seriously and pretend that it’s a real game? Ha-ha. Karl Anthony-Towns scored 50 points in 28 minutes off the bench—how absurd! Well, time to get back to watching regular games. I can’t wait to see Luka Dončić make 20 open threes and score 85 points in a real game.  

False Jersey Ops (Part 3): A Late Whistle

Basketball, Reality Programming, and Programming Reality

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do[1].

The 2017–18 NBA season has been underway for a couple of weeks now, and keen-eyed observers will likely have noticed a few interesting things about the new uniforms that have been introduced league-wide. Aside from the obvious fact that they are all hideous and ill-fitting[2], a handful of teams have struck jersey sponsorship deals and now boast garish corporate logos just above their player’s hearts.

Starting this season, Orlando Magic players will wear Disney logos on their jerseys. This is no great surprise; Disney World is located in Greater Orlando, and the team name is an obvious allusion to Disney’s “Magic Kingdom.” Less well-known is the fact that Disney owns ABC and ESPN, which, between them, broadcast the majority of nationally televised NBA games.

Why is this interesting? Described by David Kunzle as “arguably, the [twentieth] century’s most important figure in bourgeois popular culture,” and a man who “has done more than any single person to disseminate around the world certain myths upon which that culture has thrived,” Walt Disney was, of course, a fascist[3] and an anti-communist FBI snitch. Henry Giroux sums up Disney’s mission:

There are few cultural icons in the United States that can match the signifying power of the Disney Company. Relentless in its efforts to…send into the community an endless stream of representations and commodities that conjure up a nostalgic view of the United States as the “magic kingdom,” the Disney Company has become synonymous with a notion of innocence that aggressively rewrites the historical and collective identity of the American past.

While Disney owns ABC outright, it shares ESPN with the Hearst Corporation (which owns 20%). Its founder, William Randolph Hearst, was (surprise!) a zealous fascist responsible for publishing all manner of pro-Nazi and anti-communist propaganda in the United States. As we explored in last month’s instalment, the NBA, like other American sports leagues (and like Disney), is quite keen to team up with the fascist US military in order to produce fascist propaganda of various kinds. I mention this at the outset because I think it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the NBA entertainment we view is curated and framed by fascist media empires intent on promoting fascist messages. I do think this is noteworthy, and not a coincidence or an irrelevance. As Michael Parenti observes, “even a sector of the entertainment media such as sports reportage, which has no narrative line, can be permeated with anticommunist, militaristic, and chauvinistic imagery.” Major American media of all kinds have historically been very receptive to fascism, and I really don’t see any indication that this state of affairs has changed.

Disney has patented—”sewn up all the rights on”—tomorrow as well as today. For, in the jargon of the media, “he has made tomorrow come true today,” and “enables one to actually experience the future.” His future has now taken shape in Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida; an amusement park which covers an area of once virgin land twice the size of Manhattan … With its own laws, it is a state within a state. It boasts of the fifth largest submarine fleet in the world[4].

But enough about Disney (for now); it’s Halloween, and we’re going to take a look at some spooks. Ten years ago, the NBA found itself in the midst of a gambling scandal. Referee Tim Donaghy appeared to have been busted by the FBI for betting on—and fixing—a number of games, and was ultimately sentenced to 15 months in prison on July 29, 2008 as a result of misconduct during his final two seasons. Shortly before his sentencing, however, Donaghy attempted to blow the whistle (ha…) on the NBA itself, alleging that the league regularly fixed games in order to sell more tickets and boost television ratings, and that all of its referees were in on the scam. Donaghy would go on to write a book, and, after serving his sentence, establish a niche for himself on the periphery of NBA-related media, giving interviews and fuelling ever more speculation about the latest in referee skulduggery.

In summary, a rogue official caused a considerable stir by deciding to leak information concerning unscrupulous institutional practices (about which everybody already knew), and, following his “revelations,” nothing whatsoever appears to have changed (the NBA, in case you’re wondering, is indeed fixed). This should have a familiar ring to it.

Donaghy’s narrative arc matches that of Edward Snowden, a man who is almost certainly not what he says he is. I don’t intend to devote much space here to the Snowden psyop theory—this work has already been done by other more capable people who were on the ball as the saga unfolded, so if you’re unfamiliar and are curious (or sceptical), I recommend you click these links. Briefly, there is a compelling argument to be made that Snowden’s exhaustively promoted and image-laden whistleblowing caper was a limited hangout. Indeed, now that surveillance is more pervasive, invasive, and normalised than ever, Snowden has declared his mission accomplished.

Whether or not we ever get to the bottom of who Snowden really is, whether he is still working for the CIA, etc., we can learn quite a bit from the entertainment media by which he is presented to us. Most people have come to know Edward Snowden through slick, well-produced documentaries, Vice Interviews, Hollywood films, and, famously, the fascist platform that is Twitter[5].

Oliver Stone’s Snowden (2016) helpfully provides audiences with the official version of events in one neat, entertaining package. The film affords Snowden yet another opportunity to tell his tale, framed and lit just right, adding another layer of fiction to the already fictional Citizenfour (2014), and supplanting whatever real images and fragments might remain in viewers’ minds with dramatic re-enactments of dramatic re-enactments[6].

The film quite explicitly lays out Snowden’s mission to preserve America’s spying apparatus and protect ruling class interests: “Look, I had access to the entire intelligence community, so if I had wanted to harm the US, you could shut down the entire surveillance system in an afternoon. But that was never my intention.” The blurring of reality and fiction reaches its climax at the end of the film when the real Ed Snowden replaces Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the screen and delivers his concluding remarks: “I no longer have to worry about what happens tomorrow, because I’m happy with what I’ve done today.” Mission accomplished. Unfortunately, the rest of us do still have to worry about what happens tomorrow.

In addition to tying up loose ends by retroactively providing sanitised, official narratives for otherwise confusing or controversial episodes in history, Hollywood films can be utilised to alter public perceptions in advance of major events. Edward Snowden, for instance, may have been “predicted” by Enemy of the State (1998). One of the most famous examples of “predictive programming” is Disney’s Pearl Harbor (2001).

Agent Affleck and his handler Jennifer Garner enjoy a fascist spectacle[7].

Produced with the assistance of the Pentagon, and starring CIA agent Ben Affleck, Pearl Harbor appeared in cinemas in May 2001, less than four months before 9/11. In the immediate aftermath, every politician, pundit, and academic drew the seemingly natural comparison between the two events. As Noha Mellor writes,

a study about American and British coverage of 9/11 attacks found that newspapers frequently resorted to history to draw on comparison and analogies with previous events, such as those from World War II. Historical context here helps journalists interpret this event while tapping a collective memory. It was particularly the memory of Pearl Harbor that was commonly used in British and American newspapers to link 9/11 to the past. As Brennen and Duffy (2003: 3) observe: “journalists and citizens struggled to find a way to frame the disaster socially and historically. ‘it’s another Pearl Harbor’ was a frequent comment uttered by pundits and politicians alike.”

But were commentators really drawing from “history” and “the memory of Pearl Harbor”? Where did this “memory” come from? More accurately, they were tapping a collective memory of representations of Pearl Harbor in popular culture. Mellor continues:

Moreover, the images showing the gradual collapse of the towers lend resonance to the images of Hollywood action movies, as shown in the American coverage (Nacos 2003: 25). In a comment on this resemblance to fiction, the American novelist John Updike said that “the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect perception” (quoted in Nacos 2003: 26) … Each of the Arab newspapers examined here picked up on these blurring boundaries between fact and fiction in this unprecedented event, seemingly indicative of Hollywood entertainment, in order to stress the public disbelief.

That the actual events of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were nothing alike doesn’t matter. The fictional Pearl Harbor is more real to Americans than any first-hand account. When PNAC signatories suggested in 2000 that “a new Pearl Harbor” would be a useful catalyst for “rebuilding America’s defences,” we can read this literally as a desire for a Michael Bay dramatisation, because it was this false memory of Pearl Harbor—Disney’s signature “innocence that aggressively rewrites the historical and collective identity of the American past”—which helped to prime Americans for the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

As Geoffrey M. White explains, a preoccupation with historical trivia obscured for many critics the utility that Pearl Harbor had as war propaganda:

Over the years, Hollywood and the U.S. military have formed innumerable partnerships in the production of war films—partnerships that can, potentially, raise questions about the image-making power of the military-corporate complex and its stake in producing inspiring stories for purposes of profit, public relations, and recruitment. These sensitivities provide yet another rationale for attention to matters of “accuracy,” to telling the story “the way it was,” as attested by military historians and veterans. Yet, raising questions of historical accuracy has the ironic effect of deflecting the viewer’s gaze from such questions of politics and purpose to concern with specific details and inaccuracies. With attention focused narrowly on the truth of details in a given text, larger issues of context never arise.

Similarly, a narrow focus on the particular details of this or that leaked document may deflect the viewer’s gaze from more pertinent questions concerning Edward Snowden’s identity (CIA agent) and agenda (promoting American imperialism). This applies equally to the Donaghy case: the result of the Tim Donaghy scandal has been to attract considerable attention to the sanctioned conspiracy (the NBA is fixed), while deflecting the viewer’s gaze from some of the NBA’s more nefarious activities. There are, for example, documentaries about the refereeing in the 2002 Western Conference Finals, but very little is said about the friendly and lucrative relationship between the NBA and the US Army[8].

What is real, then, is what can be (like the signifier) perfectly programmed, controlled, and reproduced each and every time from a preexisting symbolic model or “simulation.” There is thus no “reality” or Real in the Lacanian sense; what is real refers back each and every time not to something, but to a model, a program, a simulated hyperreal[9].

As well as investing in Hollywood productions and sporting events, the Pentagon is very interested in reality television, as a glance through its Entertainment Liaison Office reports will reveal. This interest is shared by NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who considers NBA basketball “the ultimate reality programming[10].” As with other forms of popular entertainment, it is unwise to dismiss reality television as meaningless or unworthy of our attention. On the contrary, as David R. Dreyer explains:

Reality television programming has become a pervasive part of popular culture. Although such programming may seem to be mindless entertainment, it can serve as a tool to introduce political lessons … An analysis reveals that contestants often behave strategically when forming alliances and voting, in ways that are similar to the strategic behavior of nation-states and individuals residing in democracies, respectively.

Are the NBA and the Pentagon using reality television formats to promote fascism? “There is,” writes Karen D. Austin, “no reason to suspect that the producers of American Idol, Survivor, and all of the other new reality shows are driven by any ideological agenda larger or more comprehensive than making money.” Yes, exactly! But the ideological agenda of making money at any cost—of capitalism—is vile and poisonous, and if government agencies can use films as psychological weapons, of course they are doing the same with reality television shows. The NBA already has a popular reality television series underway, and with ESPN ranking college basketball players by their reality television potential, we can expect to see many more such shows in the future.

In his typically provocative way, Baudrillard claims that in industrialized societies capital has attained such sophistication in the manipulation of popular consciousness through the interdefinition and the constructed character of contemporary media products (both news and entertainment) that it no longer needs to substantiate its claims in real terms to the public. He describes this situation by positing what he calls the “precession of simulacra” which generates what he calls “the hyperreal.” The hyperreal is that realm of appearances which are “dishonest” not merely in failing to faithfully copy their originals in structural terms but in failing to copy at all. In other words, this is the realm of simulacra that functions in the absence of corresponding real things which could serve as models for pretended likenesses represented by simulacra. Baudrillard’s view is that the public is now used to authentications of simulacra by other simulacra[11].

It is interesting to note the similarities between the activities of Colin Kaepernick, Tim Donaghy, Edward Snowden, Ben Affleck, Bana Alabed, etc. As Adorno and Horkheimer wrote of the culture industry,

Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan.

I think it is useful to view what is known as “predictive programming” from this angle. Rather than creating in advance media which “predict” specific events and prescribe the ways in which audiences are to conceive of such events, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the same stale but effective narratives are constantly being acted out (on film sets, on football fields and basketball courts, on Twitter, in “real life”) by actors (willing or unwitting as the case may be), in order that “history’s actors” may always have new realities at their disposal.

As always, thank you for reading, and death to the United States of America.

[1] A senior advisor to George W. Bush, speaking in 2002, and cited by Ron Suskind in the New York Times, October 17, 2004.

[2] I am convinced that the drab and displeasing colours of more recent NBA uniforms are a form of psychological warfare, but this is a topic for another time.

[3] To get a sense of “the iron fist beneath the Mouse’s glove,” do take a look at How to Read Donald Duck, an exploration by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart of the ways in which the images and stories found within Disney comics—and disseminated around the globe—naturalise capitalism and imperialism.

[4] From the introduction of How to Read Donald Duck.

[5] Predictably, Snowden’s Twitter activity includes (but is not limited to): chauvinistic American exceptionalism; promoting “regime change” in Syria; equating communists with fascists.

[6] I re-watched Citizenfour while writing this, and during the scene in which Glen Greenwald initially begins to interrogate Snowden, I expected Laura Poitras to interrupt him and suggest that “we just start with your name.” A “real” scene from this documentary had been replaced in my memory by a scene from Oliver Stone’s film. These tricks work.

[7] Speaking of basketball and hyperreality, Ben Affleck was once interviewed for ESPN and recounted a story in which he was playing basketball and leapt “like six feet off the ground” to block a layup attempt by Matt Damon. Asked when this had occurred, Affleck responded, “I’m not sure that actually took place. I think it might have been an implanted memory.”

[8] A relationship that the US Army is eager to take to the next level. You can sense their frustration with the “limited messaging impact” of having troops parade about before a Clippers game, and they write elsewhere in their ELO reports that they want to “attract larger roles with…sports entertainment networks for future Army-related stories.”

[9] Anthony Kubiak, Disappearance as History: The Stages of Terror.

[10] The ambiguity of this statement is interesting—is he talking about the reality television format, or about programming (an audience’s perception of) reality?

[11] Thomas Heyd, The Real and the Hyperreal: Dance and Simulacra.

Court Fools

Basketball, Drawing-Room Life, and the Function of the Fool

Witty people are a very important part of modern life, and they are very popular. They replace truth, seriousness and profundity with a quip that makes people laugh. The idea of their spiritual life is the elegant drawing-room, its fatuous and brilliant conversation, its measured applause and the veiled smile of its habitués. They reduce all life to the clever mediocrity of drawing-room life: a lot of words, amiable scepticism, and a light sprinkle of melancholy sentimentalism. The wit has become even more important through the latest incarnation of drawing-room life, namely the offices of the bourgeois newspapers. Here the wit has enlarged the circle of his audience and has made everything a source of humour—politics, war, pain, life and death—thereby winning much applause and earning a pile of money[1].

The 2017 NBA All-Star Game was shit. I’m by no means the first person to make such an observation, but I nevertheless feel that a thorough investigation into the All-Star Game as an institution is warranted, and that its descent into self-parody can tell us something about the destructive potential of jokes.

As the above clip from the 1996 game in San Antonio demonstrates, defence was not always a faux pas at the All-Star Game. The annoyance with which Marv Albert declares Grant Hill’s dunk “too easy” is telling: such lapses were not the norm, and they were certainly not to be encouraged. Steve Jones is even able to joke that some sort of conspiracy exists between Hill and Shawn Kemp, a joke that can only work if the audience knows that these are in fact competitive players, that they are of course taking this game quite seriously. An earlier remark by Jones—“you’re seeing a team from the West not playing much defence, looking to score a lot of points”—likewise indicates that prioritising scoring over defence was simply one of a number of legitimate strategies that a team might adopt, not a prescribed play style.

Much has changed in the 21 intervening years. What was once a wink-wink, unwritten-but-slyly-acknowledged aspect of the All-Star Game has become its raison d’être. While the All-Star Game is still officially a real basketball game, the “you let me have one, and I’ll let you have one” arrangement has been formalised and is now taken for granted by all involved. That an actual basketball game might occur is recognised to be a slim hope by the television announcers (“a game will break out—a real game,” a despondent Marv Albert unconvincingly reassured his audience in 2013). The running gag that the All-Star Game is not really a game at all but simply an excuse to see a lot of cool dunks has been turned on its head; to suggest that the players might expend any effort at all on defence is to elicit laughter today. Thanks to the ceaseless chattering of Marv Albert and his accomplices, both participants and audience have stumbled into a sort of joke-induced hyperreality, unable to apprehend what the All-Star Game really is any more, let alone what it ought to be.

The result of all this is that the NBA’s modern stars are, in the words of Aram Goudsouzian, “boiled down to commercial symbols, icons of the global marketplace.” They do not play exciting basketball; they perform exciting basketball by rote (thereby stripping it of excitement).

Here we see the power of jokes at work. Jokes are not trivial at all; they are deeply serious. Jokes influence reality. They can disarm and make an audience receptive to otherwise unpalatable ideas[2]. Jokes also reveal intent:

A joke can also be an expression of power. There are those who would have us believe that maintaining a detached, sardonic demeanour and joking about very serious contemporary issues is a sophisticated and wise mode of engaging with the world. This sort of approach is often confused with good adversarial journalism. As Tom Mills observed of Jeremy Paxman, his “bumptious posturing” has a great deal more to do with the glib, self-congratulatory Oxbridge debating society culture of which he is a product than with any desire to speak truth to power.

This was a milieu with which Malcolm X became closely acquainted in December 1964. Invited to participate in a debate at the Oxford Union by its president Eric Anthony Abrahams, Malcolm, who took the debate[3] quite seriously,  was subjected to a barrage of smirking, sneering, and hectoring from his unbearably smug opponents (for whom nothing whatsoever was at stake). The event sounded more like a stand-up comedy gig than a serious debate, an audience of cretinous aristocrats-in-training erupting in hoots of laugher after every clever inside joke or humble-brag (a remark about the “great colonial experience” of a Tory peer elicited merry laughter from these contemptuous jackals).

By their serious remarks, the chief antagonists Humphrey Berkeley and Lord Stonham portrayed themselves as very reasonable and progressive people indeed who were of course opposed to any kind of racism or apartheid. It was their humorous remarks that betrayed their true character—their ridiculing Malcolm X for adopting a pseudonym and joking about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of British politics. During the open forum, a speaker whose identity isn’t clear delivered a sort of horseshoe manifesto, stressing the importance of “justice for the oppressed, and justice for the oppressor too[4]!”

But what is going to happen to the Black Muslims? […]. Will it not mean…that the, er, there would be, perhaps, a black Ku Klux Klan of extremists who, in alleged defence of their liberty, would repeat in reverse the vicious extremes o-o-of white oppressors? […]. Extremes…will not provide a solution, will not provide true liberty or freedom. […]. Moderation is not synonymous with cowardice!

Lebert Bethune, who had accompanied Malcolm to the debate, later remarked that the “flippant, drawing-room comedy manner” of the speakers had angered Malcolm. Are contemporary pundits and podcasters, in their ironic detachment and affected vulgarity, really any better? Who do they think they are, and what are they trying to accomplish? Let us consider the most idealised view of such people, the romantic myth of the court jester:

Later in this same talk, Alan Watts goes on to describe the fool as “an analogue of the Sage[5].” Is it possible that these comedians, from celebrity left clowns to edgy internet ironists, perceive themselves as wise and daring, dispensing enlightenment by bravely subverting social norms and cleverly behaving like credulous imbeciles?[6] Or is it possible that all such people are merely climbers, eagerly peddling ruling class propaganda under the guise of humour while earning a pile of money?

The prohibited impulse may be tolerated if there is no doubt that the final aim is its elimination—this is the case with jokes or fun, the miserable parody of fulfilment. As a despised and despising characteristic, the mimetic function is enjoyed craftily. Anyone who seeks out “bad” smells, in order to destroy them, may imitate sniffing to his heart’s content, taking unrationalised pleasure in the experience. The civilised man “disinfects” the forbidden impulse by his unconditional identification with the authority which has prohibited it; in this way the action is made acceptable. If he goes beyond the permitted bounds, laughter ensues[7].

It is not the case that all jokes are bad, or that political satire is inherently dangerous. As Lenin said of art and literature, “partisan literature and art will be truly free, because it will further the freedom of millions of people.” By the same token, jokes in the service of communism may further the freedom of millions of people, while jokes which promote imperialism will lead to the immiseration of millions.

Exciting basketball cannot be simulated. Exciting basketball is so precisely because it is spontaneous and unscripted. Any attempt to make a formal obligation of fun and exciting basketball will inevitably produce the sort of facile basketball exhibitionism we have become accustomed to seeing at the All-Star Game. Good basketball is produced through struggle between offensive players and defensive players. Likewise, good jokes are not the product of a practiced and reflexive cynicism; they are the fruit of struggle—class struggle.

 

[1] This is a Gramsci quote.

[2] According to Kierkegaard, when an audience does not want to hear a speaker’s message, the speaker needs to communicate in an indirect fashion, and the queen of indirectness is irony. The CIA is adept at utilising humour for its Hollywood propaganda, at using comedy as a Trojan Horse. Often it isn’t very subtle.

[3] The motion for the debate was a statement made by the US right-winger Barry Goldwater when he accepted the Republican nomination for the presidential election: “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Despite Malcolm X’s brilliant and persuasive speech, the motion was defeated 449 to 225. What a surprise!

[4] In other words, are there civil liberties for the fascists? As Stephen Gowans put it,

Moralist positions on human rights are not only beside the point; they’re nonsensical, inasmuch as they assume rights are absolute and that antagonisms between the rights of oppressor classes and nations and the classes and nations they oppress can be mediated. In the real world, it is not possible to build a socialist society if the capitalist class is allowed the freedom to organize to restore its power. It is not possible for a government of national liberation to achieve its country’s independence if it grants political and civil liberties to all, including agents of the oppressor nation who seek to restore that nation’s formerly privileged position.

…

The battlefield of human rights isn’t one in which the object of Left forces should be the securing of absolute rights for all (for there is no such thing as liberty and democracy for all) but the securing of the rights of oppressed classes and nations at the expense of those of their enemies. The right of the sheep to be free from predation comes at the expense of the wolf’s right to eat the sheep. The question is never whether you’re for human rights or not. The question is always whose rights are you for?

[5] That this myth of the jester as wise and subversive gadfly probably isn’t true doesn’t really matter. Wise fools may not have existed, but the idea that there existed wise fools does exist, and it is pervasive.

[6] I know a stand-up comedian personally, and he is absolutely insufferable. This is definitely how he sees himself.

[7] This one’s Adorno and Horkheimer.

Pigs and Fishes. This is Auspicious.

Basketball, Alchemy, and Mantic Insight into the Workings of the Universe

An interest in the [I Ching] has become more widespread, and as its popularity as a text for translation has grown, it has sometimes been considered as a philosophical gem suspended in a historical and cultural void, removed from its ancient Chinese context. Without this context, some translators and writers on the [I Ching] have dressed it in clothes of their own choosing, often inappropriately.

I first became interested in applying religious theory to basketball practice in 2007. I had just picked up a book about Zen, and, naïvely believing that it might fulfil its promise of “hard-won insights” rather than “second-hand slogans,” began reading with the expectation that I would soon learn how to hit targets in pitch darkness (a skill that Glen Rice claims to have mastered).

Of course, as I explained in a previous entry, Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery is a dubious sort of book, and certainly not one that I would recommend to anybody interested in reading an accurate account of Zen as it is practiced in Japan. But this initial disappointment did not deter me. I turned next to Daoist alchemy, which, according to one practitioner, could be used to transmogrify the body into a “shining, adamantine substance, weightless yet hard as jade.” This sounded as though it would be useful for taking charges and finishing through contact.

Xian (immortals or genies, roughly translated) were those who had successfully conquered mortality and acquired magical powers by performing certain exercises or consuming the correct elixirs. These elixirs were made using either vegetable, mineral, or animal elements (or a combination), though the first two were generally favoured. Ingredients like gold and jade were considered superior to herbs since they do not decay when buried or turn to ashes when burnt, and it was understood that such properties could be transferred to one who consumes an elixir created from such materials. One recipe guarantees that “having eaten the medicine for three years a man attains buoyancy in movement and is able to travel great distances; stepping over fire, he is not scorched; dropped into water, he does not get wet. He is able to appear and disappear at will. He will be happy for ever.”

Unfortunately, owing to the deliberately esoteric nature of alchemy, instructions and recipes were not made available to the general public or the merely curious[1], so most of the methods of concocting these elixirs are not known today. Even in those few cases in which exact ingredients[2] are given, the proportions are withheld. Nevertheless, a few quick and easy tricks have survived: juniper sap, for example, will enable one to walk on water if spread on the soles of the feet (I haven’t yet tried this, so I can’t confirm). Similar prescriptions abound in western alchemy: dog piss, mouse blood, and stones found in a crab’s head (?) were said to cure heart trouble, while baldness could be eliminated by the application of bees burnt to ashes (this last one actually works, by the way).

To those rational sceptics out there who foolishly believe that such pursuits are a waste of time, I invite you to consider the words of the renowned alchemist Ge Hong (283–343 CE): “Although the deaf could not hear thunder or appreciate music, and the sun and the splendour of the Emperor’s robes were invisible to the blind, it did not mean that these things did not exist.” Indeed, although statistical studies have yet to detect it, this does not mean that the hot hand is a myth! Alchemical elixirs are basically PEDs, anyway, making athletes the natural inheritors of the alchemical tradition[3].

Elixirs may not be the most affordable or reliable way to get ahead in basketball, but there is one method for success that we can all make use of relatively easily: consulting the I Ching[4]. The I Ching (well, this translation at any rate) promises “mantic insight into the workings of the universe and into the dynamic of a situation.” The applications for basketball should be obvious; from foreseeing the specific set plays your opponent will run during a game to predicting the winners of NBA championships. I have used this method myself for several years now, betting successfully on NBA games and accumulating such an enormous fortune that I now enjoy the luxury of blogging full-time from a solid gold laptop.

Since I don’t have any yarrow stalks[5] lying around, I’ll be using coins to make my divinations. I’ll try to keep each entry short, selecting only the most relevant fragments and passages. To avoid confusion, I will be asking each question from the perspective of the team with home court advantage (i.e., “will the Warriors defeat the Blazers?”). This is all very scientific, you understand. And so, without further ado, let’s play.

[As a result of changing lines, most of the readings below include two hexagrams, but in each case I’ve only included the image of the first for reasons of aesthetics and not wanting to do any more scanning.]

Round 1

Warriors vs Blazers

Be steadfast to the very end. None can hinder you.

Pretty straightforward.

Forecast: Warriors in 4.

 

Clippers vs Jazz

The True Gentleman Has a Destination.

Forecast: Clippers in 6.

 

Rockets vs Thunder

Slight fortune for a traveller.

A Wanderer moves on, writes Magister Liu. He does not linger in one place. […]. This is the Tao of the Wanderer. He passes through and does not linger; he is not attached to any country.

A soft style of leadership should be adopted when operating away from home, writes Professor Mun.

Forecast: Rockets in 4.

 

Spurs vs Grizzlies

There’s quite a lot of talk here about danger and peril.

He is caught in a thicket of thorns. For three years there is no success. Misfortune.

One has lost the means to escape from peril. This thicket of thorns, writes Magister Liu, [consists of] bad habits of Heart-and-Mind, vanity, and self-destruction.

A leader who has misjudged his direction, writes Professor Mun, now has to pay the price. He has fallen into a deep pit. 

Forecast: Grizzlies in 5.

 

Cavs vs Pacers

Calamitous advance, nothing profits.

This hexagram is generally seen as inauspicious.

When pleasure is the sole goal, writes Magister Liu, when desire and emotions dominate, the union will be inauspicious. The True Gentleman perceives these flaws; he sees that the union is not harmonious and well founded at the outset.

No fruit. An empty basket.

The marriage is broken. It is void. […]. The sacrifice is without effect. It bodes ill. This is a selfish union which will fail, writes Magister Liu. There can be no profit.

Great matters are abandoned.

Forecast: Pacers in 6.

 

Wizards vs Hawks

Supreme fortune. It profits.

The True Gentleman cultivates inner strength. He rouses the folk.

The Son sets right the blight of the Father in its early stages, before the corruption is too deep and advanced. In the end, the Father will be seen as having caused no lasting harm. […]. If an executive, writes Professor Mun, can carefully clear up the mistakes made by his predecessor, things will turn out well in the end. The decay is at an early stage.

The Leader’s resources accumulate: his knowledge, his experience, friends, special abilities.

Forecast: Wizards in 6.

 

Raptors vs Bucks

The hexagram name has traditionally been taken to mean “wounding of the bright,” and the individual lines contain frequent references to wounding and injury, and to the repression of all that is good and bright. […]. In human affairs, there is a Dark Lord above, and a Bright Minister below, one who cannot show his Light. It is a time of great Darkness. One cannot go along with the general trend, which is impure. […]. In such times the True Gentleman should find a way to preserve his integrity amid Darkness. A loyal minister is steadfast, and serves his country, even in hard times under a weak and unsympathetic sovereign.

Darkness. The left thigh is wounded.

The wound is not fatal or disabling. There is still a way to save oneself, and maintain Aspiration.

In this case, the second hexagram is actually quite auspicious and suggests that aspiration was indeed maintained. This will be a very close series, but the Raptors will overcome injuries and advance.

Forecast: Raptors in 7.

 

Celtics vs Bulls

Good faith. Luminous fortune. This is auspicious. For the steadfast, it profits.

The True Gentleman takes his ease; He feasts joyfully.

Respect and caution stave off defeat.

This is the very brink of the abyss. Advance has provoked resistance, which may result in injury. Mud is dangerous, writes Professor Mun. People can be trapped in it. A leader needs to be particularly cautious.

The True Gentleman calibrates.

The ruling idea of this hexagram is…the maintenance of a well-regulated cadence or rhythm, a fine sense of timing. It is essential to be in tune with Time, to be at one with the rhythms of the seasons and the equilibrium of society.

If one does not adapt to change, if one is too rigid, writes Magister Liu, this can create danger.

Forecast: Celtics in 7.

 

Round 2

Warriors vs Clippers

This is auspicious. To be steadfast profits. […]. There is success.

The work is of long duration, writes Magister Liu. It requires order, and gradual progress. This is not a contrived union…the marriage is not for the sake of a moment’s pleasure. […]. This union grows stronger with time, until finally the work is completed and the effort becomes effortless spontaneity.

Nothing can stand in her way. Her aspirations are fulfilled.

Difficulties will eventually be resolved, writes Professor Mun.

It is auspicious to be steadfast.

Forecast: Warriors in 7.

 

Rockets vs Grizzlies

There is no profit in making war. […]. That which one most esteems is exhausted.

Corrupt and powerful influences must be put out of the way. […]. He must be generous and not isolate himself in the pride of self-cultivation. […]. The Heart-and-Mind is mired in delusions.

Ultimately there is misfortune. Ultimately one will not prevail.

In this dark extremity, Small Men prevail.

Today’s revolving movement [gives way] to an identical movement tomorrow.

Forecast: Grizzlies in 6.

 

Wizards vs Pacers

Pigs and Fishes. This is Auspicious.

The leader’s good faith is such, writes Professor Mun, that the members of his organisation respond to him, like the chicks to their mother crane. […]. Relationships among people made on the basis of good faith will be deep and lasting.

The joy of the folk knows no bounds.

This indicates a good relationship among the respective units of an organisation at the upper level and below, writes Professor Mun. This creates a sense of cohesion and cooperation within the whole organisation. Helping others can be a mutually beneficial act.

Forecast: Wizards in 4.

 

Celtics vs Raptors

Stepping on the tiger’s tail. Not bitten. Fortune.

There is no failure, there is bright light.

Step forward in harmony and joy, with caution, writes Magister Liu. Then the tiger will not bite.

Calamity is avoided. What has been gained is not lost. Guard against overconfidence, writes Professor Mun.

This is auspicious.

Forecast: Celtics in 5.

 

Round 3

Warriors vs Grizzlies

Good faith. Luminous fortune. This is auspicious. For the steadfast, it profits.

The True Gentleman takes his ease; He feasts joyfully.

It profits to persevere.

Ultimately, all is auspicious.

This is a celebration of triumph. With steadfastness, one will go from strength to strength.

Fortune. The True Gentleman has a conclusion.

The humble, writes Magister Liu, possess but do not depend on, are not attached to, that which they possess. They have talent but do not presume on their talent. […]. All pride is gone. The Heart-and-Mind is level.

Forecast: Warriors in 4.

 

Celtics vs Wizards

Friends depart.

The city wall crumbles into the moat. The army is not deployed. In the hometown, orders are not issued.

Grandeur has run its course. It will be followed by stagnation. […]. The ruler may issue orders, but distress cannot be averted altogether. […]. It is too late for regret, writes Magister Liu. There is no point in resisting natural change, writes Professor Mun. The leader must accept the end of grandeur. He can do nothing to stop it. He must make preparations for the bad times to come.

It is dry. It is turtles, crabs, snails, mussels. Of trees, it is the hollow, rotten at the top.

Forecast: Wizards in 6.

 

Finals

Warriors vs Wizards

Interpret this last one for yourself!

[1] To the merely curious among my readers, I’ve got you covered. Here are the ingredients for the Empyrean-Roaming Elixir: cinnabar, realgar, malachite, laminar, amorphous sulphur, and quicksilver. Give it a go if you’re feeling brave. Alternatively, here is a different, somewhat more precise, recipe: “Prepare three pounds of the skin and fat from the back of a hog and one quart of strong vinegar. Place five ounces of yellow gold in a container and cook in an earthen stove. Dip the gold in and out of the fat one hundred times; likewise in the vinegar. Take a pound of this and you will outlast all nature; half a pound and you will live two thousand years.”

[2] As far as ingredients that are actually accessible and safe, we do know that asparagus was very highly regarded: it could “strengthen people and cause them to walk twice as fast as would thistle or knot-grass if taken for one hundred days.” The power of asparagus was most famously harnessed by Tzu-wei, who ate so much of it that “he had eighty concubines, sired a hundred and thirty sons, and walked three hundred miles a day.” Pine needles and peaches are good, too.

[3] Clear evidence exists of alchemical abuses at the highest levels of basketball. In his main remaining work, He Who Embraces Simplicity, Ge Hong describes how special diets can be used to improve one’s health and extend one’s life, and how elixirs may bestow magical qualities such as being in several places at once, becoming invisible, and flying in the air.

[4] Sticking with the Wade-Giles spelling here for the sake of familiarity. I’m using John Minford’s recent translation of the I Ching, which was written and arranged with lay idiots like me in mind. It’s pretty good; I’d recommend it.

[5] The yarrow is a plant botanically related to chamomile and tarragon, and it was traditionally used for divination in England as well (being placed under the pillow to induce dreams). Arthur Waley and his Bloomsbury friends used to use matchsticks instead of yarrow stalks. Waley’s translation of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book is worth a read, incidentally (not because it’s accurate, but because it’s funny—he was a really good writer).

The Glass Backboard

Basketball, Apartheid, and Scientific Sexism

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling basketball apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. None of these struggles is ever easy, and even the smallest victories must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept, and to call that acceptance inevitable. — Nneka Ogwumike

A few years ago, Dallas Mavericks owner and exploitative parasite Mark Cuban made headlines in the sports world by suggesting that he might draft Brittney Griner, or at least invite her to play in the NBA’s Summer League to see whether or not she could earn a place on the Mavericks’ roster and thus become the first woman to play in the NBA. Predictably, Cuban’s (cynical and self-serving) remarks elicited derision from the usual parade of talking heads, and while it may briefly have generated a little extra interest in the Mavericks, it also placed Griner under considerable scrutiny and thrust upon her unreasonable expectations that evidently continue to haunt her.

One episode that sticks in my memory (and which has since been deleted from YouTube because the NBA fastidiously deletes any and all videos that might be construed as remotely controversial) involved Brent Barry—or perhaps Wally Szczerbiak; I don’t remember or particularly care—and a couple of other pundits laughing through bared teeth like the chauvinistic jackals they are at the very notion that a woman could compete in sport alongside men. “How is she going to guard Shaq?” they asked one another, hooting with merry laughter. Shaq, it is worth noting, had already retired by this time.

Such responses will be familiar to women, who are routinely met with condescension and scepticism even when competing against one another, let alone when challenging men. At the 1988 US Olympic trials, Florence Griffith Joyner ran 100 metres in 10.49 seconds, knocking an incredible 0.27 seconds off the existing world record. “No woman can run 10.49 legit,” declared Linford Christie, the men’s 100-metre winner at the 1992 Olympics. “I know what it feels like to run 10.49,” he continued, “and it’s hard.” For what it’s worth, Griffith Joyner never failed a drug test and her record has yet to be beaten.

All of this may appear reasonable enough to some readers. After all, it’s a scientific fact that men are, on average, bigger and stronger than women, and that they therefore make better athletes. It’s biology! But the female body is not just a collection of 60 billion cells organised into muscle and tissue, flesh and bone; it is also—and has been for centuries—the subject of a variety of discourses that are specific to particular periods and cultures and that, thankfully, are ever shifting. The way that Linford Christie et al. view women’s bodies is not in reality a matter of natural and immutable scientific fact. Rather, it echoes a kind of scientific sexism that has been practised for centuries and that we must endeavour to put to rest once and for all.

In the seventeenth century, women were placed at a severe disadvantage educationally. In their political development, for example, they were hindered through their lack of formal education in political rhetoric, their official exclusion from citizenship and government, the perception that women ought not to be involved in political affairs, and the view that it was immodest for a woman to write at all. Yet despite such—to contemporary eyes—obvious impediments to women’s intellectual development, they were widely assumed to be naturally inferior to men.

While in retrospect it ought to go without saying that men’s apparently superior intellect and achievements might lie in sources other than natural neural endowments, at the time it did need saying. After all, the objective and rational disciplines of science were on hand to explain and justify the gender status quo. In the seventeenth century, French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche declared women “incapable of penetrating to truths that are slightly difficult to discover,” claiming that “[e]verything abstract is incomprehensible to them.” The neurological explanation for this, he proposed, lay in “the delicacy of the brain fibres.”

Over the intervening centuries, the neurological explanations behind the different roles, occupations, and achievements experienced by women and men have been overhauled again and again as neuroscientific methods and modes of understanding have become ever more sophisticated. Early brain scientists, using the cutting-edge techniques of the time, busily filled empty skulls with pearl barley, carefully categorised head shapes using tape measures, and devoted careers to the obsessive weighing of brains. Infamously, they proposed that women’s intellectual inferiority must stem from their smaller and lighter brains, a phenomenon that came to be known among the Victorian public as “the missing five ounces of the female brain.”

Only when it became inescapably clear that brain weight did not correlate with intelligence did brain scientists acknowledge that men’s larger brains might merely reflect their larger bodies. Yet rather than abandon this avenue of inquiry, scientists instead undertook the search for a measure of relative—rather than absolute—brain weight that would leave the absolutely bigger-brained sex ahead.

Many ratios were tried—of brain weight to height, to body weight, to muscular mass, to the size of the heart, even (one begins to sense desperation) to some one bone, such as the humerus or radius. — Breanna Stewart

These days, most people would, one hopes, acknowledge that men and women are intellectual equals, and regard the above examples as amusing and primitive pseudo-science undertaken by the kind of rational and enlightened inquirer who begins by drawing a conclusion—i.e. that women are stupid—and proceeds to work backwards in order to “prove” why this is so. Thank goodness we’ve moved beyond such dubious “scientific” justifications for sexism, right?

Yet when we consider the history of women’s involvement in sport, the parallels between discourses concerning women’s bodies and discourses concerning women’s minds quickly become apparent. Pierre de Coubertin[1], founder of the International Olympic Committee and “father of the modern Olympic Games,” urged the prohibition of women’s participation in sport, arguing that the sight of the “body of a woman being smashed” was “indecent.” The Olympics, he declared, were to be dedicated to the “solemn and periodic exultation of male athleticism…with female applause as reward,” since “[n]o matter how toughened a sportswoman may be, her organism is not cut out to sustain certain shocks.”

Despite such fears, women were cautiously admitted to the more demanding track events in the early days of the Olympics, though the sight of exhausted female athletes fighting for their breath as they crossed the line of the 800 metres in 1928 was so repugnant to Olympic organisers that they removed the event from women’s schedules. Not until 1960 was the distance reinstated for women.

Pierre de Coubertin’s views were perfectly in line with those of his contemporaries. According to Victorian attitudes, sports that were appropriate for women were those that involved the projection of the body through space in aesthetically pleasing patterns, or those that required only light implements. Golf, for example, was ideal: it made minimal physical demands and could be played in full dress (and the languid elegance of the swing made the sight of female players pleasing to men’s eyes). It was a convention of Victorian society that women should appear decorative at all times, and so those who could afford to play tennis were expected to wear full skirts, tight corsets, high-necked, long-sleeved blouses, and boaters.

It was also believed by men that the kinds of physical changes brought on by regular exercise were liable to make women unsightly; strength was beautiful in men but ugly in women. Though wealthy and privileged women were permitted to compete at Wimbledon in the early 1920s, to actually train was considered vulgar, if not outright cheating.

The justification for all of this, as is usually the case with any form of discrimination, was a patronising—but scientifically objective!—concern for women’s wellbeing: it was for their own good. Menstruation—the eternal wound—was seen as a form of invalidity, and its beginning meant that young women would need to be careful in conserving their energy. Disabled by menstruation, women were often prohibited from competing against one another, let alone against men: if they tried to emulate their physically superior male counterparts, they would risk damaging their delicate selves.

Some schools of thought held that the enfeebling effects of menstruation could be offset by cold baths, deep breathing, and mild exercising, such as beanbag-throwing, hoops, or golf. Especially appropriate, according to Alice Tweedy, writing in Popular Science Monthly in 1892, were “homely gymnastics,” i.e. housework. Around this time, cycling was becoming a popular pastime in North America and Europe, and though women were permitted to cycle, there were suspicions about whether women’s bodies were up to the task. Many doctors believed that the peddling motion involved in operating a sewing machine would, conveniently, afford women sufficient exercise without any unnecessary risk or unsightly sweating.

The science of legislation, of jurisprudence, of political economy; the conduct of government in all its executive functions; the abstruse researches of erudition…the knowledge indispensable in the wide field of commercial enterprise…these, and other studies, pursuits, and occupations, assigned chiefly or entirely to men, demand the efforts of a mind endued with the powers of close and comprehensive reasoning, and of intense and continued application. — Wally Szczerbiak

These attitudes were—and continue to be—dangerous precisely because they feel intuitive, natural, inevitable. But is it really a scientific fact that men are inherently better at sport? Is it possible that there are factors other than average size and strength contributing to the disparity we see today between male and female athletic performance?

Consider Samuel Johnson’s famous quip: “much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.” The United Kingdom has produced up to (depending on how generous you want to be) eleven NBA players, only one of whom was actually any good[2]. Roughly 3,000 NBA players have come and gone over the last 50 years, so this isn’t a terribly impressive contribution from a country whose population is about 20% that of the United States. Few would argue that male citizens of the United Kingdom are in fact inherently, biologically bad at basketball, yet their collective achievements are, frankly, pathetic. The idea that the UK could compete with the USA in basketball is ludicrous: maybe, maybe, the very best player from the UK could cut it as a bench player in the NBA. Then again, maybe not.

Ask any Scotchman and they can tell you precisely what the problem is: the UK’s total lack of investment in sports, education, and culture (and indeed anything other than weapons and finance). Ever since Thatcher closed all of the basketball courts in the 1980s, we’ve had to struggle just to find somewhere to play. Absent are the facilities, the encouragement, the prestige that are available to young athletes in the United States. As long as these obstacles remain, the UK will never produce a Kristaps Porzingis or a Giannis Antetokounmpo. The parallels should be obvious. As Ellis Cashmore explains:

Over the years, women have not achieved as much as men; yet the conclusion that women cannot achieve the same levels does not follow logically from the original premise that they are biologically different. In fact, it coule be argued that, if women had been regarded as equally capable as men physically, then they would perform at similar standards, and that the only reason they do not is because they have been regarded as biologically incapable for so long.

To say this is not to deny that there are physical differences between women and men, but rather to acknowledge that striking physical differences exist between individual NBA players as well, and that these differences can be overcome and even put to great use. Biological differences between women and men are, in other words, of significantly less importance than our conceptions about them.

Women’s bodies—and, indeed, men’s bodies—are, in part, the products of discourses as well as of biological factors. Human bodies have been perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimilar cultures, subjected to various technologies and means of control, and incorporated into various different rhythms of production and consumption, pleasure and pain. Women were prescribed the role of delicate and decorative object in Victorian Europe, but Victorian values are hardly universal. In ancient Sparta and Crete, for example, athletic contests were part of young women’s education. In ancient Greek and Roman cultures, women would hunt, ride, swim, and run, though not (usually) engage in combat. By the time of the emergence in the nineteenth century of the organised, rule-bound activities we now recognise as sports, women were effectively pushed out of the picture and assigned roles as spectators. This was merely a matter of convention, not an inevitability.

While much has of course changed since the nineteenth century, these changes can be overstated, and it is crucial to acknowledge that female athletes still face innumerable—and unnecessary—obstacles. The obscene disparity in pay between WNBA players and their NBA counterparts, for example, is not a result of the natural and immutable forces of a supposedly impartial American free market. Under their current TV deal, WNBA teams each receive $1 million per year, but, according to Colin Davenport, they would be entitled to $4.3 million per year were they to be given the same percentage of revenue NBA teams receive. This would eliminate the need for women to play in Europe, China, and Australia during the offseason while their male peers enjoy a three-month holiday at the conclusion of their schedule.

For WNBA players, the basketball season rarely ends when the W schedule is complete, the WNBA’s official site proclaims cheerily. This need to play overseas during the offseason simply in order to receive a decent income isn’t just a nuisance and an indignity—it can cut legendary careers short. At a time when NBA players routinely receive rest days during their regular season in order to preserve their health, the fact that WNBA players are forced to play ceaselessly all year round in spite of the damage this is known to cause is simply disgraceful.

[T]he body is a process, not a thing: it is constantly changing physically and culturally. Sporting performance promotes changes in terms of muscular strength and oxygen uptake; changes in diet and climactic conditions induce bodily changes too, of course. In our particular culture and this stage in history we understand women and their association with men in one way; in another place and at another time, this relationship may be understood quite differently. It is a matter of convention that we organise sports into women’s and men’s events. It seems contradictory then to itemise the differences in adipose tissue, respiratory volumes, activity of sweat glands, etc. To do so would be to fall into the same trap as those who went to so much trouble to “prove” that women were simply not capable of sporting endeavour. — Lauren Jackson

Despite the recent addition of women’s boxing, which finally signalled the opening of all Olympic events to participation by both female and male athletes, there remain some important differences between the ways in which men and women are expected to compete. Women’s sports are generally played in shorter periods of time, or with smaller equipment, but in an event like athletics the difference is stark: men take part in six disciplines (floor, vault, pommel horse, high bar, parallel bars, and rings) while women do only four (floor, vault, uneven parallel bars, and balance beam). The resulting difference in demands produces strikingly different bodies compared with other sports: women gymnasts tend to be very small and thin in the upper body compared to the men. Thus, bodies are not strictly the products of blind and immutable biological factors but are the products of specific cultural and discursive inputs.

It is a matter of convention that sports like basketball prize strength and size, areas in which men generally possess an advantage over women. But what if more were done to conceive of sports that emphasise the physical traits from which women derive an advantage? There is evidence, for example, that women are actually able to outperform men in endurance and stamina events that last longer than two hours: women’s smaller bodies radiate heat more efficiently, and they tend to more effectively convert body fat into energy. Indeed, since official records for women’s marathon times began in 1964, the best women’s times have been improving at a faster rate than men’s times. By 1979, Greta Waitz had surpassed the fastest male marathon runner from 1925, Al Michaelson. Had women been permitted to compete in marathons alongside men since their inception in 1896, it is not unreasonable to assume that today’s top marathon runners would be women[3].

Cashmore, Ellis (2000) Making Sense of Sports. London: Routledge.

Women’s experience has historically been one of denial: they simply have not been allowed to enter sports on the basis of mistaken beliefs regarding their natural predisposition. Because of this, the encouragement, facilities, and, importantly, competition available to male athletes from an early age has not been extended to them. In the very few areas where the gates have recently been opened—the marathon being the obvious example—women’s progress has been extraordinary. Given open competition, women could achieve parity with men in virtually all events, apart from those very few that require the rawest of muscle power (while men will likely lag behind in events that require endless stamina). But more important than this is the fact that the vast majority of events require, above all, fineness of judgement, quickness of reaction, balance, and anticipation, and women have no disadvantages in these respects. Their only disadvantage is what men believe about them.

As Angela Davis once observed, sexism is an obstacle to socialist development and the eventual advent of communism. It is therefore imperative that we do away with it in all its forms. There can be only one course of action:

[1] Incidentally, there is also a medal named after Pierre de Coubertin, a sportsmanship award. Since its inauguration in 1964 it has been awarded to 18 men and one woman. Women, evidently, are lacking in sportsmanship as well as sporting prowess.

[2] Ben Gordon doesn’t count since he grew up in America: he was caught young.

[3] I therefore propose that men’s and women’s basketball be merged and that games be extended from 48 minutes to four hours.

“I Don’t Even Celebrate That Shit”

Basketball, Semiology, and Pax Americana

Expansion, as the ‘Wisconsin school’ of American historiography has demonstrated, has been at the very core of the American experience. Empire constitutes the habitus—the dispositions that generate perceptions, practices and policies—of US elites. Imperial outlooks permeated the US as much as they did the European imperial societies where empire is a past that has never really or entirely passed. The United States emerged as a nation state in a global political economy of empires. Its expansion was conditioned by the overall expansion of the Euro-Atlantic imperial system. Notwithstanding American exceptionalist mythologies, expansion was founded on concepts of racial and cultural differences that were common to all the nineteenth-century empires. — Josh Howard

In 2008 a video surfaced in which Josh Howard, filmed during the performance of the American national anthem at Allen Iverson‘s “Celebrity Flag Football game,” looked into the camera and declared, “I don’t even celebrate that shit. I’m black.”

In the wake of Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests, and in light of the various comparisons that have been drawn between him and other principled,  politically aware athletes like Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Craig Hodges, I wanted to draw some attention to—and express appreciation for—Josh Howard’s less celebrated and more succinct critique of American patriotism.

While Howard did (eventually) apologise for his remarks, it wasn’t an especially convincing apology. Already a pariah in the eyes of fans and journalists due to his open marijuana use (which, as he has correctly pointed out, is his own choice and did not prevent him from doing his job), Howard probably understood that there would be no pleasing white America regardless of what he chose to say. Interestingly, during the same press conference at which he formally apologised for “disrespecting” the USA, Howard was asked what he thought about the prospect of playing alongside newly-acquired point guard Jason Kidd, a serial spousal abuser who would go on to drink-drive his car into a telephone pole in 2012 (behaviour apparently warranting back-to-back sportsmanship awards for “ethical behaviour” and “integrity”[1]).

Following his anthem scandal, Howard would play only one more full season of basketball in Dallas before injuries effectively derailed his career. This conveniently eliminated any need for the NBA to actively blackball him like it had Abdul-Rauf and Hodges (although Howard, a former All-Star and indisputably talented scorer, has apparently been attempting—unsuccessfully, so far—to make a comeback, so it’s quite possible that he is being frozen out after all).

Had he known how things would turn out, I’d like to believe that Howard, understanding that he had nothing to lose, would have stuck to his guns and refused to apologise. After all, what exactly was he apologising for? He hadn’t broken any rules or laws, and, moreover, he was expressing a view that is perfectly rational and correct.

With some notable exceptions, a great deal of the print and airtime devoted to Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests has focused on form rather than substance. The pressing issues, according to establishment sports media, are whether white America is ready to have its beloved sports politicised, or whether Kaepernick’s kneeling will be sufficiently effective in ending racism. Missing from this narrative are, of course, the “bodies in the streets” that Kaepernick has cited as prompting his disobedience, and the fact that “[police] are being given paid leave for killing people.”

I don’t want to waste any time recounting what Kaepernick and other athletes are currently doing (I’ll assume that if you’re reading this you’re familiar with the situation). Nor am I going to belabour the point that Kaepernick is, of course, completely right about police brutality. Not only are racist cops all over America regularly rewarded for shooting innocent black people with impunity, they are punished if they don’t!

Colin Kaepernick has done a tremendous job drawing renewed attention to one of the most serious problems plaguing American society, and has at the same time made white conservatives deservedly uncomfortable. He has sparked a public debate, and I intend to contribute to that debate. The focus of my (constructive and well-meaning) critique of Kaepernick’s position will concern not police brutality but the brutality routinely inflicted on civilians all over the world by the military forces of the American Empire.

Following the discovery of his initially discreet and unremarkable protest (Kaepernick began by sitting down during anthem performances and only started kneeling to appease the belligerent turbo-patriots who control the NFL and American sports media), Kaepernick was grilled by journalists on the specific meaning of his disobedience. Predictably, he was asked what he thought about the American military, and, regrettably, he capitulated immediately: “I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. […]. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone.”

While some have argued, understandably, that it was something of a non-sequitur to request that Kaepernick issue a statement outlining his position on the military, it was—unintentionally, I’m sure—a salient question. First, it demonstrates a recognition that one cannot condemn American police for killing innocent people without also condemning the American military for perpetrating worse crimes on a far, far larger scale. Second, it inadvertently reveals the true and precise meaning of the American flag and national anthem: empire.

The development of publicity, of a national press, of radio, of illustrated news, not to speak of the survival of a myriad rites of communication which rule social appearances makes the development of a semiological science more urgent than ever. In a single day, how many really non-signifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before the field; it is true that it bears no message. But on the bleachers, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, sign-boards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me. — Roland Barthes

According to Roland Barthes, a sign (in this case The Star-Spangled Banner) is composed of both signifier (particular lyrics sung to a particular tune) and signified (military adventurism, white supremacy, capitalism). Likewise, the sign that is the American flag is composed of signifier (a piece of cloth) and signified (military adventurism, white supremacy, capitalism). We know that this is what the flag and anthem signify because these are the things that the American public scrambled to defend. Nobody accused Colin Kaepernick of disrespecting jazz, breakdancing, or Tom Waits, because the American national anthem does not signify these things. Rather, it signifies the overthrowing of democratically elected leaders and the installation of dictators; it signifies the plundering of resources; it signifies slavery; it signifies genocide. That an assortment of bellowing white men leapt to defend the American war machine in the wake of Kaepernick’s anthem protests tells you all you need to know about what it means to be an American patriot.

The Star-Spangled Banner doesn’t just signify racism in the semiological sense; the lyrics themselves are overtly racist! What I’ve outlined above isn’t just what America represents in some abstract sense—it is what the American ruling class has undertaken every single day for centuries. America’s empire surpasses all previous empires in its cruelty and destructiveness. If territorial expansion and the “removal” of indigenous populations falls within the settler colonial norm, the institutionalisation of domestic despotism is, according to Philip S. Golub, a singularity of the liberal American state: while the European imperial states exported their violence and subjugated peoples overseas, the United States applied despotism within large areas of its constantly expanding sphere of continental sovereignty. Slavery is one of the major distinguishing features of the early American empire.

We needn’t spend long dwelling on specific instances from America’s endless list of sins—this is a basketball blog, after all—but the following two examples are representative of America’s despotism at home and abroad. Speaking about the Native American population in 1868, beloved American war hero General William Tecumseh Sherman remarked: “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” Two years later, Sherman, evidently in a lighter mood, wrote, “the more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization are simply ridiculous.” In the twenty years that followed, the US army waged—in the words of General Philip Sheridan—a “campaign of annihilation, obliteration and complete destruction” against Native Americans.

Not content with spreading freedom and democracy at home, the United States’ military applied itself abroad in the same spirit. Senator Alfred Beveridge considered the conquest and subjugation of the Philippines (1899–1902) a necessary step to “establish the supremacy of the American republic throughout the East till the end of time.” Admonishing those of his peers who recoiled at the atrocities being committed by American forces in the archipelago, he advocated the extermination of all nationalist Filipino insurgents: “The Philippines are ours forever. […]. A lasting peace can be secured only by overwhelming forces in ceaseless action until universal and absolutely final defeat is inflicted on the enemy. To halt before every guerrilla band opposing us is dispersed or exterminated will prolong hostilities and leave alive the seeds of perpetual insurrection.”

But all of this is old news, ancient history. From the early 1950s until today, the United States has either been at war, supporting war-making, or sustaining predatory states almost constantly in one or another part of the empire: the Philippines, 1948–1954; Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Indonesia, 1955–1975; Congo/Zaire, 1960–1965; Cuba, 1961; Brazil, 1960s; Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, 1963–1975; Chile, 1973; Angola, 1975–1992; Nicaragua, 1980s; Grenada, 1983; Panama, 1989–1990; Afghanistan, 1980–1988; Iran–Iraq war, 1980–1988; Iraq, 1990–1991; and so on and so on. The notion that following the conclusion—by gratuitous nuclear genocide—of the Second World War, a period of peace, a Pax Americana, has spread across the globe, is an utter fantasy.

The vast and informal sphere of American Empire has always rested on a planetary security structure established during the Second World War whose forward points, the archipelago of land-based and floating military platforms disseminated throughout the world, constitute the mobile frontiers of American sovereignty. These platforms can and should be understood as the territorialised nodes of empire. The potential and often actualised violence of the security structure secures the wider informal sphere and allows the US, in the worlds of former Pentagon official Alberto Coll, to “move the international order in a favourable direction.” — Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf

The American ruling class still conceives of the United States as an empire, and their actions reflect this. America has polluted the world with military bases which, once established as “lily-pads” (what a pleasant euphemism!), grow aggressively, like tumours. The inherently expansionist character of America’s self-perpetuating military-industrial establishment requires, in the words of sociologist C. Wright Mills, “war or a high state of war preparedness” and a state of “emergency without foreseeable end.”

By the end of the 1990s, journalists (stenographers) and academics (propagandists) routinely compared the United Sates to “the greatest empires of the past,” and influential forces began dreaming of a new “American Century” along with a renewed and much expanded “American Peace.” In 1998, soon after an American bombing raid on Iraq, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asserted: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America.  We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” In a particularly telling act soon after the George W. Bush administration was sworn in, the Office of the Secretary of Defense commissioned a still classified comparative study of ancient and modern empires to ascertain how they had “maintained their dominance.”

America’s commitment to permanent strategic supremacy cannot be considered a response to September 11. It was articulated in the early 1990s and is a state-centric approach that has nothing whatsoever to do with any presumed threat from transnational terrorism. No large-scale mobilisation was required to deter or destroy so-called “rogue states.” For that, pre-existing military capabilities were, as Afghanistan and Iraq proved, largely sufficient. Rather, America’s military adventures are invariably undertaken to further the economic interests of its ruling class. As Dick Chaney explained while testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 1991: “In addition to southwest Asia, we have important interests in Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and Central and Latin America. In each of these regions there are opportunities and potential future threats to our interests. We must configure our policies and our forces to effectively deter, or quickly defeat, such future regional threats.”

War is just a racket. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I served two years with the Navy, and during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. — David Robinson

The problems that Colin Kaepernick identifies regarding the US military—that veterans returning from war don’t receive adequate support or treatment for mental health issues, and that the actions of racist police dishonour their “sacrifices”—barely scratch the surface. The military and the police exhibit many of the same problems in America: both are thoroughly corrupt institutions whose criminal behaviour and attempted cover-ups have been exposed for all to see. Both put guns in the hands of aggressive young men without providing them with adequate training or education, and both are utterly opaque and accountable to no one.

When questioned about his protest, Kaepernick cited “bodies in the streets” and cops “getting away with murder,” yet he doesn’t acknowledge the fact that these complaints can—and should—be levelled at the American military as well. Civilians all over the world are brutalised, raped, and killed by US military personnel daily. The ever-increasing militarisation of American police has simply given US citizens a taste of what people outside America have experienced for decades.  Kaepernick must interrogate why he has “respect” for this institution, and why anybody who disrespects it is excommunicated.

 

I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. […]. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone.

Police are slave catchers; soldiers are gangsters for capitalism; Colin Kaepernick is Yanis Varoufakis. A popular and charismatic pseudo-Marxist career politician, Varoufakis continues to promote a bizarre and incoherent critique of the EU that both acknowledges the impossibility of democratising it while at the same time proposing to democratise it. Varoufakis will no doubt enjoy a long and lucrative career giving TED talks to imbecile Guardian readers, perhaps even making his way back into mainstream politics, but his self-serving Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 is a pointless red herring that will serve only to waste everybody’s time and energy.  Similarly, Kaepernick, in maintaining that the United States can live up to its own myth without ending imperialism, presents a critique of American patriotism that is of severely limited scope.

Despite his shortcomings, Colin Kaepernick has shown infinitely more courage than the soft and obsequious Stephen Curry, who refuses to protest the anthem at all despite his coach’s blessing, and who has publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, the candidate of Silicon Valley. But when discussing or celebrating the various anthem protests that have followed Kaepernick’s, it is crucial to acknowledge not just the informal backlash of marginal racist sports fans, but the official backlash of the various sports leagues themselves. The NBA has so far successfully conspired to prevent any kind of salient political statement from reaching its audience, replacing real protest with cowardly and depoliticised gestures that mean absolutely nothing.

Sevyn Streeter, for example, was told at the last minute that she would not be permitted to perform the national anthem on opening night in Philadelphia simply because she’d decided to wear a shirt that displayed the words “we matter.” Streeter later explained, “I…felt it was important to express the ongoing challenges and ongoing injustice we face as a black community within the United States of America—that’s very important to me. Yes, we live in the greatest country in the world, but there are issues that we cannot ignore.”

Yes, we live in the greatest country in the world.

The USA is a backward and oppressive country where to publicly assert that black people matter is obscene and forbidden. It is not great, or good, or even average. Streeter isn’t alone in citing this peculiar fantasy about American greatness in the face of indisputable evidence to the contrary. Even the more thoughtful responses to Colin Kaepernick’s protests have framed him as some sort of true American patriot bravely representing the real values that America stands for. But this is just more of the same delusional American exceptionalism that underpins the arguments of Kaepernick’s racist and conservative critics. To pat the American public on the back and assure them that Colin Kaepernick is fighting the good fight like a real American hero is to elide the reality of its brutal crimes against humanity, and unwittingly kills any serious and constructive discourse.

America is not a land of freedom-dispensing soldier-heroes who work tirelessly to promote democracy throughout the world; nor is it a bastion of free expression and progressive ideas. Rather than fighting over ownership of a phantasmagorical America that never actually existed, those prepared to challenge American empire must abandon any notion of patriotism and understand that to be labelled “un-American” or a “traitor” is a great honour.

The NBA, which likes to portray itself as a relatively progressive sports league, will do all it can to squash dissent and wring any political content from its players’ anthem-related demonstrations. To anybody anticipating a fresh wave of protests now that the NBA season is underway, understand that the NBA is not your friend; Adam Silver is a cold-blooded reptilian plutocrat whose words are emptier than the Smoothie King Center.

Radical NBA players need to take their cues not from acquiescent American football players, or from false prophets like Stephen Curry, but from real human beings like Josh Howard—people who say what’s in their heart and speak uncompromisingly. A protest isn’t really a protest if it’s sanctioned by the NBA. If your team tells you that you’re not allowed to wear a shirt with a particular slogan, wear it anyway. If your team tells you they don’t want you to sit during the national anthem, set the American flag on fire and boycott the league.

Until next time, death to America.

[1] I’m aware that the award is for “ethical behaviour” and “integrity” on the basketball court, but NBA teams each select one player from their roster to be considered for the award. Why even nominate Jason Kidd for an award like this? Were the rest of the Mavs and Knicks so unsportsmanlike? Are we really to believe that Jason Kidd, while he may regularly beat his wife and endanger people’s lives by driving drunk, is in all other respects a really nice guy? It is evident that the NBA conducts damage-control for its stars, provided they’ve only committed a mild transgression like abusing their wife for years on end, and nothing serious like sitting down.

 

Scooter Barry and the Eye of Power

Basketball, Solutionism, and Medium Theory

Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in wearable sports tech! — Scooter Barry

So we went down the bank of the foul ditch,
Going a little further into the pit
Which is stuffed with all the evil of the universe.

I recently happened across a video by BBALLBREAKDOWN creator and fellow communist Coach Nick in which he and Scooter Barry attempted to entice their viewers with the SOLIDshot smart sleeve. SOLIDshot, headquartered in Mountain View, California, have apparently created a compression sleeve—made from imported, high performance Italian fabric—that incorporates electronic sensors and promises its users “instant feedback + analytics.” The sensors in the sleeve track the movement of your arm, recording your shooting data, telling you whether your form is good or bad, and suggesting adjustments you may wish to make. Your data is stored on the sleeve, but you are encouraged to use the SOLIDshot app in order to “sync your data to the cloud.”

Sounds useful. So what’s the problem? Before we get into that, I’d like to make it absolutely clear from the outset that I am not anti-technology. I’m quite aware that quaint theories warning of the inherent evils of new technologies have been formulated (and invariably dismissed) since at least the fourth century BCE when Plato cautioned in the Phaedrus that the advent of writing would cause people’s memories to atrophy. Neither am I about to suggest that the use of such technology is a form of “cheating.” Media, as defined by Marshall McLuhan, can be “any extension of ourselves”—glasses, for instance—or “any new technology.” Professional basketball has always incorporated such things: players wear shoes, uniforms, headbands, mouth guards, use fitness equipment, etc. That basketball players make use of new technologies to augment their bodies is not of concern (although players who engage in body modification surgery in order to gain a competitive advantage must be policed more vigorously).

We can clearly see how this new smart sleeve has evolved from a long line of familiar low-tech ancestors (including an eerily similar product peddled by Scooter’s own father), so if its forerunners are merely harmless gadgets, what makes SOLIDshot’s latest product so dangerous? To invoke McLuhan[1] again, the medium is the message: “the personal and social consequences of any medium…result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs.”

The “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The SOLIDshot smart sleeve did not introduce surveillance or data-collection into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of basketball players. — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 8.

And it is precisely in terms of scale, the sheer quantity of data collected and shared, that these new-fangled smart devices—that is, any device with sensors that harvest data—differ from their predecessors. NBA players already operate under the all-seeing eye of the SportVU camera (another Silicon Valley innovation), which tracks and records their every move while on the court. The media establishment was swift and uncritical in its gushing endorsement of the SportVU system, hailing its leaguewide adoption as a revolution. Now, three years on, the unremittent surveillance of NBA players, the hoarding of data by teams—data to which players have limited access and which teams use to make personnel decisions—has been completely normalised. And we should not doubt for a moment that smart sleeves and other similar devices will soon become equally ubiquitous at the professional level. If the notion of players wearing smart tracking devices during live games sounds implausible to you, head on over to SOLIDshot’s FAQ section:

It will not be long, maybe a decade, before full-body smart suits (perhaps funded by EA Sports, the better to realistically capture and render player movements for their games) are adopted as part of the NBA’s compulsory uniform code. Just think of all that extra space for corporate logos! These suits, combined with the camera’s gaze, will provide an unprecedented quantity of data to be harvested and put to the service of private interests. Such innovations will not be limited to the professional sphere, either; amateur and recreational players will continue to mimic the pros, generating staggering amounts of data, most of which will be utterly meaningless to them and will no doubt be sold on to third parties without knowledge or consent.

We have, after all, been given every incentive in today’s nightmare hell-world to self-surveil wherever possible: sharing our location and our interests will allow us to view more relevant and personalised content online; diet and fitness apps will help us live healthier lives if we let them track us; “personal assistants” like Google Now or, more recently, Allo’s Google Assistant[2] will afford us more free time if we simply surrender all of our personal data, and so on. The basketball community in particular has been carefully primed to accept such concessions to Silicon Valley tech companies, viewing them as inevitable—even desirable.

Observers of the NBA cannot have failed to notice the swift rise of so-called “analytics” in recent years, as well as the accompanying rhetoric of efficiency, disruption, and other Silicon Valley jargon. While there are legitimate reasons to be sceptical of the kind of mass surveillance engendered by SportVU cameras and smart sleeves—its potential consequences for contract negotiations, for instance—these are rarely discussed. Instead, professional straw man Charles Barkley, the de facto leader of the NBA’s counter-analytics contingent, has plunged the discourse into the depths of the figurative toilet bowl with his inane blathering: “All these guys…who talk about analytics, they have one thing in common: they a bunch of guys who ain’t never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school.”

More circumspect and critical observers have either had their voices drowned out by a parade of anachronistic technophobes and chauvinistic macho men or are reluctant to speak up for fear of being associated with this crowd. Who, after all, would want to align themselves with Charles Barkley? His analytics tirade on Inside the NBA could have come straight from the script of Moneyball, a film in which Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill harness the arcane power of analytics to outwit and ridicule rooms full of befuddled old-school scouts, constructing their improbable super-team by reducing baseball to a maths equation. Disruptive!

You’re not even looking at the problem.

The language in this scene is particularly interesting. Of note is the focus on solving problems by thinking differently: the film is a transparent love letter to the solutionists of Silicon Valley. The solution that Brad Pitt has in mind does not, of course, involve collectively addressing the systemic problem that “it’s an unfair game,” that the uneven distribution of wealth precludes certain teams from competing. Rather, in the style of the glib tech nerd in his t-shirt and jeans, the solution our protagonist is searching for is wholly superficial, a stopgap measure that may work for his team, and for a time, but ultimately does nothing to promote parity in baseball (it is perhaps worth noting that since Billy Beane took over as general manager of the Oakland As in 1997, his team has managed to win a total of one playoff series). Likewise, the “solution” Silicon Valley has proposed to remedy the stagnant wages, unemployment, and obscene inequality inherent to capitalism is for workers to engage in increasingly precarious work, front all of the costs that would previously have been covered by their employer, and work incessantly for poverty wages. Your day belongs to you.

To reiterate, with Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the NBA itself all insisting that analytics and the invasive data-gathering techniques that fuel it are bringing about a new golden age of basketball, there is unlikely to be any real resistance from players or fans when the time comes to introduce smart uniforms. NBA teams will soon be granted access to a pool of data drawn from every complicit player on Earth, and once that happens they will inevitably contrive an arbitrary set of criteria for prospective players (must replicate a particular shooting form, possess certain physical qualities, take x number of shots per day, etc.). This predictive scouting will usher in a horde of counterfeit Stephen Currys, the original’s own movements and habits having been digitally captured and rendered as a formula for basketball greatness. The Curry blueprint[3], which will be sold to every other NBA team, and then to college teams and international teams, will serve as the standard for all incoming players, against which they can be measured “objectively” by algorithms.

Here we run into the perennial problem of algorithms: their presumed objectivity and quite real lack of transparency. We can’t examine Amazon’s algorithms; they are completely opaque and have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Amazon claims, perhaps correctly, that secrecy allows it to stay competitive. But can the same logic be applied to basketball? If no one can examine the algorithms—which is likely to be the case as predictive-scouting software will be built by private companies—we won’t know what biases and discriminatory practices are built into them. — Karl Malone

If the word “algorithm” doesn’t immediately fill you with dread, consider the fact that the supposedly objective algorithms increasingly utilised in the American criminal justice system have turned out to be blatantly racist tools of oppression. What, then, are the implications of predictive scouting for basketball? Firstly, it will erect a new and expensive barrier for entry into the world of professional basketball. Aspiring players will need to purchase costly basketball suits and other smart devices to monitor and record their body’s every move and function, and they will have to adhere to whatever strict regime has been determined—objectively, remember—to produce the best players. Those who cannot or will not submit to such invasive practices will simply drop off the basketball radar. Just as you are considered a deviant today if you do not maintain a social media presence, refusal to plug yourself into the basketball matrix will undoubtedly be viewed as evidence that you have something to hide.

As for those who are lucky enough to make it to the NBA in this grim dystopia, they will all play the same—most efficient—way for coaches who all coach the same—most efficient—way, rendering basketball games bland and joyless. Kemba Walker will languish on the bench; DeMar DeRozan, last of the dunk contest purists, will be excommunicated; John Shurna will be given an NBA contract (after using the SOLIDshot smart sleeve to fix his shooting mechanics, of course). “Nudging” and “incentivisation” will inevitably produce a particular kind of basketball subjectivity. Not only will all players be encouraged to master only one of a limited selection of skillsets, they will not have had cause to cultivate any sense of flair or creativity at any point in their playing lives (streetball and even idle practice having also been subordinated to the dictates of predictive algorithms). The NBA of tomorrow will penalise players who are short, inefficient, and who love to isolate. Who is such a system likely to exclude?

Solutionism is an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental, and narrow-minded solutions—the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences—to problems that are extremely complex, fluid, and contentious. […]. It’s not only that many problems are not suited to the quick-and-easy solutionist toolkit. It’s also that what many solutionists presume to be “problems” in need of solving are not problems at all; a deeper investigation into the very nature of these “problems” would reveal that the inefficiency, ambiguity, and opacity—whether in politics, sports, or everyday life—that the newly empowered geeks and solutionists are rallying against are not in any sense problematic. — Allen Iverson, Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech, 09/09/2016.

But what about the Spurs? Perhaps you enjoy watching five basketball androids dispassionately firing the ball around the court until they can find the best shot. Perhaps you can live without seeing Pierre Jackson score 30 points per game. Let’s examine the likelihood that the new analytics order will in fact deliver on its promise of crisp, efficient basketball.

Consider Uber, that ubiquitous and villainous taxi service posing as a technology company. Its standard sales pitch has always been that it offers individualised services (for the sacred bourgeois individual), and that these services are more convenient and efficient than anything the bloated government bureaucracies can hope to offer by way of public transportation. However, Uber has been able to provide its services at such competitive rates only because its backers are prepared to operate at a (staggering and unsustainable) loss in order to maintain their stranglehold on the market. Moreover, Uber has been quietly moving away from its individualised services, offering customers various incentives to walk to “unique pick-up spots” rather than have a driver come directly to their location, and to share rides with other passengers.

If Uber customers end up waiting at designated pick-up spots and catching rides that they share with other passengers, in what way will Uber’s service differ from public transport as it is currently deployed? Could it be that those responsible for administering public transport for decades did in fact know a thing or two about efficiency and sustainability after all? For all of its blustering about efficiency and personalisation, Uber has proven itself to be nothing more than a cuckoo in the nest, supplanting existing forms of public and private transportation without actually improving on their services in any appreciable way. What we’ll soon be left with, then, is the same expensive and inefficient transport system most of us are used to, only it’ll be run by a private monopoly, utterly opaque, unaccountable, and profit-driven. If you have any doubts whatsoever about the very serious dangers of letting private monopolies handle essential public transport, I invite you to catch a train in the UK.

By the same token, we should be suspicious of the transformative rhetoric issuing from the sports media establishment concerning the rise of analytics. Could smart suits help NBA teams uncover talented players that would otherwise have slipped through the net? Certainly this will be the pitch from the grinning Silicon Valley ghoul as he reclines in Vivek Ranadivé’s office. You want the next Stephen Curry? Our algorithms will find him for you by matching his data against our index of player profiles from around the world.

One, two, three, NICK ROCKS!

[1] McLuhan was a big fan of electronic mass media and probably would have loved the internet, and possibly even the Silicon Valley perverts who wish to colonise it for themselves: “Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree” could, with a little tweaking, be Facebook’s new slogan. But insofar as medium theorists like McLuhan invite us to consider more thoroughly the profound effects that new media can have on all aspects of a society, their work remains extremely valuable.

[2] Google Assistant promises to save you time by reading all of your messages, learning to mimic the way you communicate, and then replying to your messages on your behalf so that you don’t have to interact with your friends. I’m not making this up.

[3] Followed to its logical end, the current paradigm will bring us cybernetic body suits that can be programmed to imbue the wearer with the playing style and abilities of specific NBA players. The most talented basketball players will no longer compete professionally: a small elite will provide the suits with their abilities and professional basketball will be played by only the biggest and most athletically gifted people. Basketball will subsequently become a tactical game in which one’s strategy consists in determining when to deploy a particular player’s skillset: driving? Activate James Harden; shooting free throws?  Activate Stephen Curry; committing a personal foul? Activate Giannis Antetokounmpo. But enough of this—I don’t want to give tech leeches any big ideas. If you want to make this into a big-budget dystopian sports film, get at me.

Lin in the Art of Archery (Part 2)

Basketball, Postcolonial Theory, and the Mystic East

What is Zen? There can be no final and satisfactory answer to this question in intelligible words (except in my books). Zen is the conquest of dualism and the inward realisation of the Buddha-nature which is the raison d’être of all things. The true essence of all things is the Eternal Principle of which all phenomena are manifestations—in Sanskrit it is called Tathata (Suchness) and it is quite impossible to apply to it any form of logical analysis. — Phil Jackson

A wise man once asked, “What purpose is Phil Jackson serving?”

Phil Jackson is known in the basketball world as the “Zen Master,” but what does this really mean? Naturally, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Zen. Rather, the nickname is derived from Jackson’s consumption of popular culture: Jackson claims to draw inspiration from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a bestselling New Age self-help manual named after an older and even more fraudulent work of orientalist trash. Jackson even offered his own trite contribution to the genre with the publication of his book Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior in 1995, profiting handsomely from his association with a legacy of dubious scholarship stemming from the likes of D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts.

So what is this “Zen,” and how/why did it come to be commodified by cantankerous basketball coaches? My friend, grab a cup of matcha, settle down on the dirt floor of your elegantly austere hut, and I will dispense satori.

Our story begins in the seventeenth century, at the dawn of the political and ideological project known as the European Enlightenment. It was at this time that significant changes occurred in the way that religion and science were understood in Europe: challenges emerged—both for Christian theologians and for secular scholars of religion—in the form of empiricism and cultural pluralism. For the theologians, empiricism introduced the problem of verifying all truth claims with empirical evidence, while cultural pluralism made it impossible for them to ignore non-Christian traditions, or to blithely assert the superiority of their faith. Scholars of religion, on the other hand, had to come to grips with the knowledge that “religion” as a category was itself a cultural product. Furthermore, they found themselves having to field challenges from experts in other academic disciplines claiming to possess the necessary tools to analyse religion, and thus threatened their job security. And so it was in the hastily constructed category of “mysticism” that European intellectuals found a refuge from the distressing verities of historical contingency and cultural pluralism.

The adjective “mystical”—derived from the Greek root mūo, meaning “to close”—can be used in everyday language to describe any object, person, event, or belief that has a vaguely mysterious aspect to it (such as LeBron James’ hairline, the Sacramento Kings’ front office, Bruno Caboclo), to religious experiences, the supernatural, the magical, and the occult. “Mysticism” is, of course, a term which arose in a specific cultural and historical context. Like “religion,” it has no ready equivalent in many foreign languages. But no matter!

Modern conceptions of mysticism place an emphasis on so-called “mystical experience.” William James and Rudolph Otto both provided influential definitions should you care to read about them. Another important component of mysticism as we’ve come to understand it is the theological position known as perennialism, according to which all religious traditions, regardless of where or when they occur, share a common essence, invariably described by its advocates—such as Aldous Huxley—as “mystical.”

In contemporary academic usage, “the mystical” can, on the one hand, be understood to denote certain experiences that transcend the range and scope of ordinary sensory experience (the hot hand, for example). On the other hand, it can be taken to refer to the ineffable—that about which one should not and cannot speak. Proponents of mysticism thus sought to reframe popular conceptions of the religious, such that a core of spiritual and moral values would survive the inevitable headlong clash with secular philosophy, science, and technological progress. They were led, conveniently, to posit an “essential core” of religion, conceived of as a private, veridical, ineffable experience inaccessible to empirical scientific analysis.

The search for the “essence” of religion or the various religions, or of “mysticism,” is misguided since it is operating under the aegis of the essentialist fallacy that the phenomena included in the category of religion (for instance) must have something universally in common to be meaningfully classified as religious. The claim, frequently made from the methodological stance of the phenomenology of religion, that religion is sui generis—that it is a fundamental category of its own—is often put forward as a defence of the autonomy and irreducibility of religious phenomena in the overwhelmingly secular institution of the modern university. — Jerry Krause

And so it was Zen that came to the rescue of counter-Enlightenment scholars, appearing on the scene at precisely the right historical moment. The allure of Zen, as it was presented to its Western audience, lay in the fact that it appeared to confirm the fashionable theories of mysticism propounded by Otto, James, Huxley, and their intellectual descendants: here was an authentic mystical tradition of considerable antiquity that clearly articulated the crucial distinction between unmediated mystical experience per se and the culturally determined symbols used to express it. The purported anti-intellectualism, anti-ritualism, and iconoclasm of Zen were ample evidence that it had not lost touch with its mystical and experiential roots. Zen, it was declared, is immune to Enlightenment critiques of religion precisely because it is not a religion in the institutional sense at all; it is, on the contrary, an uncompromisingly empirical, rational, and scientific mode of inquiry into the nature of things.

Zen was not introduced to the Western imagination in the usual way, by the efforts of orientalist scholars, but rather through the activities of an elite circle of internationally-minded Japanese intellectuals and globe-trotting Zen priests, whose missionary zeal was second only to their vexed fascination with Western culture. These Japanese Zen apologists emerged, in turn, out of the profound social and political turmoil engendered by the rapid Westernisation and modernisation undertaken by Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912). With new ideas and technologies flooding the country and the Meiji government tasked with constructing a coherent national identity for Japanese people, Buddhism was caught in the crossfire, cast as both a foreign “Other” and as a corrupt and superstitious creed incompatible with modern scientific and technological advancements. The influence of the late nineteenth-century European zeitgeist had permeated university campuses in Meiji Japan, and Japanese scholars, seeking to bring their nation into the modern world, were naturally drawn to European critiques of institutional religion, to the rationalism and empiricism of the Enlightenment.

It was in response to this intellectual climate that a vanguard of Buddhist intellectuals, drawing upon popular Darwinian evolutionary models of religion, argued the case for Japanese Buddhism, suggesting that it represented the most spiritually pure and evolutionarily advanced form of Buddhism in Asia, and painting Japan as the sole heir to the spiritual and ethical heritage of the East precisely at a time of heightened imperial ambitions and military adventurism. This successful discourse was subsequently adopted and further refined by adherents of Japanese Zen. It is crucial to understand that these Japanese representatives of Zen abroad were invariably products of European-style educations, formulating their understandings of Zen and of mysticism in a European intellectual context: when D. T. Suzuki or Nishida Kitarō emphasised experience as the central feature of Zen, it was as a result of their exposure to the works of Western scholars of religion like James and Otto.

Suzuki, the most influential and well-known of these Zen proselytisers, was also quite the nationalist. Theories purporting the uniqueness—and, by implication, the superiority—of the Japanese were referred to as nihonjinron. Famous examples of nihonjinron literature include Nitobe Inazō’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan and Okakura Kakuzō’s Book of Tea, both of which were published in English around the turn of the century. Thus, a generation of unsuspecting Europeans and Americans were subjected to Meiji caricatures of the lofty spirituality, the selflessness, and the refined aesthetic sensibilities of the Japanese race.

Phil Jackson and D. T. Suzuki share more than a pathological conviction that Zen consists of pure and unmediated (except by them) experience; they also possess surprisingly questionable credentials. Jackson famously stole his entire coaching philosophy from Tex Winter and fraudulently portrayed it as something mysterious and undecipherable. Dennis Rodman let the cat out of the bag a couple of years ago when he said of Jackson’s triangle offence that it could be learned in just fifteen minutes. “It’s not that difficult,” he continued. “It’s a triangle.”

As for Suzuki, he was never ordained, and his formal monastic education was desultory at best. He never received institutional sanction as a Zen teacher, and, despite emphasising the importance of Zen in the sphere of Japanese arts, conceded that he had absolutely no business talking about such things: “To speak the truth, I am not qualified to say anything at all about the arts, because I have no artistic instincts, no artistic education, and have not had many opportunities to appreciate good works of art.”

Throughout his career, Suzuki exhibited a preoccupation with nationalistic nihonjinron ideology and the dichotomy of Occident and Orient, authoring book after book with titles like Zen and the Character of the Japanese People (1935), Zen and Japanese Culture (1940), More on Zen and Japanese Culture (1942), East and West (1948), The Revival of the East (1954), The Oriental Outlook (1963), and so on and so on. Suzuki’s lifelong project of exporting Zen to the West was bound inextricably to a studied contempt for his new audience, whose cultural arrogance and imperialistic inclinations Suzuki had come to know all too well. Having lived through the military humiliation of Japan at the hands of the culturally inferior United States, Suzuki would make it his mission to prove that Zen is mystically superior to Christianity—indeed, that it constitutes the highest form of mysticism! This strategy had the felicitous result of thwarting the Enlightenment critique of religion on the one hand and the threat of Western cultural hegemony on the other.

Names like St. Augustine, Origen, Cyril and Tertullian are not unfamiliar. They are Japanese. More pertinent to our subject is the fact that what today we call Greek or Western philosophy is copied from the indigenous Japanese philosophy of “Zen.” All the values of Zen were adopted by the Greeks and Ionians who came to Japan to study, or studied elsewhere under Japanese-trained teachers. These included Herodotus, Socrates, Hypocrates, Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle and others. Are we not taught that Socrates is the first man to say “Man know thyself?” Yet this expression was found commonly inscribed on Japanese temple doors centuries before Socrates was born. — D. T. Suzuki

Despite making no attempt to disguise his distaste for the West, Suzuki’s Zen proved to be an ideal export to the disaffected but spiritually inclined Westerner searching for an exotic alternative to institutional Christianity in the religions of the “Mystic East.” Suzuki’s jingoistic propaganda thus served both to bolster Japan’s prestige abroad and to tantalise a legion of disenchanted Western intellectuals with the dream of an Oriental enlightenment they would ultimately never grasp. You can’t help but admire him, really.

One such disenchanted Western intellectual was German philosopher and Nazi sympathiser Eugen Herrigel, whose 1953 book Zen in the Art of Archery (based on his 1948 essay Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschiessens, or The Knightly Art of Archery) set the gold standard for derivative orientalist writing, and, rather worryingly, remains one of the most widely read studies of Japanese culture. Before its Japanese translation and publication in 1956, Japanese archery (kyūdō) had not been associated with Zen at all; it was only after Herrigel’s book, in which he recounts his experiences learning archery in Japan as a means of spiritual training, that such a connection was assumed to exist.

This was by no means the first example of such mischief: so-called “Zen gardens,” to give another example, are essentially Japanese versions of the Chinese landscape gardens that were popular among the Song aristocracy. The earliest reference to the notion that the dry-landscape gardens associated with Zen temples are manifestations of Zen realisation is found in an English-language guide to Kyoto gardens written in 1935 by Loraine Kuck (oddly enough, a one-time neighbour of D. T. Suzuki).

Despite Herrigel’s emphasis on archery as a mode of Zen training, his archery instructor, Awa Kenzō, had no experience or interest in Zen at the time he and Herrigel trained together. This, of course, was but a minor inconvenience to Herrigel, who, having been introduced to Zen through the writings of Suzuki, arrived in Japan determined to undertake a mystical journey aided by the practice of a traditional Japanese art. This was a recipe for misunderstanding. We now know that the complex spiritual episodes recounted in the book were either the products of Herrigel’s fanciful misinterpretations (aided by his interpreter’s intentionally liberal translations), or the result of interactions for which no interpreter was present. Awa, for his part, was probably flattered to have a distinguished foreign scholar as a disciple, and would have been prepared to indulge Herrigel’s curiosity for all things Zen. Thus, while there may have been a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding throughout this collaboration, both parties got precisely what they wanted in the end.

I could go on, but by now I’m sure you get the picture.

The kind of orientalism I’ve been describing in this and the previous essay deviates somewhat from Edward Said’s original notion of “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The “European superiority over Oriental backwardness” is inverted in the case of Zen, producing what Bernard Faure has termed “secondary orientalism.” Orientalism, we must conclude, always involves a degree of intercultural mimesis and can therefore never represent a unilateral projection of the Western imagination onto a colonised and passive Orient.

Japan was never colonised (at least in the conventional sense; it remains littered with American military bases today), and Germany had no Eastern empire to manipulate and dominate. Popular discourses about Zen were concocted as much by the Japanese themselves as by Westerners, and ignoring the role played by Japanese scholars in the construction of orientalist discourses surrounding Zen and mysticism serves only to perpetuate the myth of the passive Oriental. By moving beyond the automatic association of Orientalist discourses with Western colonial aspirations, one avoids the tendency to deny agency to the colonial subject, as well as the tendency to see colonialism as a peculiarly Western disease (a view that is itself a form of Occidentalism). Ultimately, the seemingly felicitous convergence of Eastern and Western intellectual and spiritual agendas prevented those on both sides from recognising the historical mischief entailed in the radical decontextualisation of the Zen tradition.

Yet in all cases, whether the “Oriental” or “primitive Other” is caricatured or idealised, the ethnocentric and orientalist premises of Western discourse are similar. One signature of orientalist writing is a preoccupation with the past, usually grounded in an evolutionary history of humankind. “Oriental” cultures are conceived of as throw-backs to the childhood of civilisation; while Europe and the New World were undergoing enormous social and political changes during the Enlightenment period, other societies seemed—from the outside, at any rate—to have remained unchanged for thousands of years, representing a crucial example of static archaism with which the dynamic modernity of the West could be successfully contrasted. We can observe this habit even in the sympathetic writings of enthusiasts like Herrigel, who describes his beloved kyūdō as “a time-honoured and unbroken tradition,” and, later, Alan Watts, who portrayed Asian systems of thought as “very old, very wise.”

The irony…is that the “Zen” that so captured the mind of the West was in fact the product of the New Buddhism of the Meiji. Moreover, those aspects of Zen most attractive to the Occident—the emphasis on spiritual experience and the devaluation of institutional forms—were derived in large part from Occidental sources. Like Narcissus, Western enthusiasts failed to recognise their own reflection in the mirror being held out to them. An excellent example of the instability of colonial discourses can be seen in the case of the Ezourvedam, a spurious French “translation” of a Hindu Veda. Voltaire used this text to demonstrate the subtlety and superiority of Indian thought in comparison to a decadent Christianity. The text, however, was a fake originally composed by Jesuit missionaries in Pondicherry to demonstrate the inferiority of idolatrous Indians in comparison to Christians. Discourses, therefore, cannot be controlled once they have entered the public arena and become subject to contestation, appropriation, and inversion by others. — Drake

By choosing to concentrate, as Phil Jackson does, on a supposed mystical essence common to all religions, one endorses the globalising ideologies of a literary (and largely male) elite. Such ideologies might fit in well with the modern Western (and capitalistic) emphasis on internationalism and globalised interaction in the economic, cultural, and political spheres, but it is important to realise that the “world religions” as they are usually portrayed are idealised and largely theoretical constructs that bear some relationship to—but are by no means identical with—the actual religious expression of humankind.

And so we arrive in Silicon Valley once more, home of the “California Ideology,” a noxious combination of the myopic and culturally impoverished worldview of the nouveau riche tech nerd and the pompous faux-enlightenment of the Bay Area’s former New Left. This poisonous synthesis has given rise to, among other crimes, “Knightman,” a plastic robot that patrols the Sacramento Kings’ carpark so that Vivek Ranadivé doesn’t have to hire human beings and pay them a living wage. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism, and if we don’t put a stop to it now we will all die under an avalanche of derivative self-help books penned by our magnanimous tech gods: The Tao of Capital; The I Ching of Things; The Smart of War; Zen and the Art of Disruption.

It is for the reasons outlined above that I will never call Phil Jackson “Zen Master”—not because I’m bitter about his success (I’m not especially impressed by all those rings; wake me up when he wins something without the aid of Michael Jordan or Derek Fisher), but because in cultivating this “Zen” persona he is, in a roundabout way, providing ideological sanction for the technofascist tendencies of Silicon Valley’s most dangerous villains.

This is worse than Allan Houston, potentially.

“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.