Put Down Your Race Card, LeBron

You know what I dislike more than people not taking responsibility for their actions? Because while I can't stand that, what I can't stand even more is when some sort of celebrity or sports star doesn't want to take responsibility for their actions. And what I dislike even more than that is when anyone goes blaming something on race that is so clearly not about race. LeBron James, I'm talking to you.

As you may or may not care to recall, back in July, LeBron James turned making a simple choice into a one hour spectacle on ESPN titled "The Decision" when he announced what team he had chosen to play for next year, as his contract in Cleveland was up. The thing was, he had already decided where he was going to play. He was going to go to Miami and play for the heat along with his buddies Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh and, hopefully, win a title. He had orchestrated this whole thing to put himself on what he considers the best possible team which could win a championship. And he did so in a fashion that made him look like a self-important d-bag.

That sort of egocentric behavior didn't go over well with a lot of people. Couldn't he have just announced his choice via a press conference like a regular athlete. Oh, don't give me that crap about him not being "regular". He's a person who plays basketball really, really well. And we all know it. We don't need him to stage some one hour long "special" where he called all of the shots and all of the questions that were asked of him were giant softballs. We didn't need it, but he, apparently did.

Lately, LeBron has been feeling a little bit of the backlash from his decision to not stay in Cleveland. People were not happy that he left and took the only realistic chances that Cleveland has to win a title with him. People are also not happy that he, basically, got together with Wade and Bosh and decided that they should all play on the same team together, instead of against each other. And look, I can see why he did it. What NBA player doesn't want to win a championship? They all do. I get that. But what ever happened to competing against each other in order to prove your greatness in your quest to get that title?

But if LeBron thinks that he felt backlash for "The Decision", he's really going to be surprised when people react to his take on WHY there was a bit of a backlash. Of course, he doesn't think it was because he made a d-bag move with that one hour ESPN special. No, he thinks that the problem that people have with him (wait for it) is because of his race. You may now scream at the top of your lungs.

Race?! RACE?! You think that people don't like what you did because of your RACE?! You, sir, are a complete moron! Do you really think that? Apparently he does. According to The Huffington Post, James was speaking with CNN's Soledad O'Brien and she mentioned to him that his "...brand and name were "tarnished" because of his decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers in such a public fashion". I would have thought that the words "in such a public fashion" would have been reason enough for people to not be happy with him, but I guess that Soledad needed to kick it up a notch (because that would have simply been too boring) and continued her inquiry by asking "...if race played a role in the backlash." Good Lord. Well, I guess I hate her, too.

WHY on earth would you jump to that conclusion? Why?! Is it JUST because he's black? It has to be because there's no indication AT ALL that ANYTHING that has come out of his way of handling things has been because of his race. But he heard that and saw the chance to jump on it and he did when he responded, "I think so at times...It's always, you know, a race factor." Go eff yourself. Sir. And don't go eff yourself because you're black. Go eff yourself because you're a freaking moron to make such an idiotic assertion. Screw you.

And that's my reaction. Now let's look at how some of the NBA's legends reacted to "The Decision". Let's start with Michael Jordan who said, "There's no way, with hindsight, I would've ever called up Larry [Bird], called up Magic [Johnson] and said, 'Hey, look, let's get together and play on one team...But that's ... things are different. I can't say that's a bad thing. It's an opportunity these kids have today. In all honesty, I was trying to beat those guys."

Hmmm. OK. We've heard from MJ. How about if we hear from another MJ? That being the great Magic Johnson who said that he would not have done what James did because you don't join your rivals. "We didn’t think about it because that’s not what we were about...From college, I was trying to figure out how to beat Larry Bird.”

Maybe LeBron took up the old adage, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Because that's exactly what he did. And you know who else wasn't real happy about it and thought that it was kind of a wussy move? Charles Barkley. And whenever Sir Charles opens his mouth, you know you're going to get an earful of honesty. He said, "I thought that his little one-hour special was a punk move. I thought them dancing around on the stage was a punk move, and I thought he should’ve stayed in Cleveland. Him joining Dwyane Wade’s team was very disappointing to me … That one-hour special, them jumping around on stage like punks, that wasn’t cool to me. From a basketball standpoint, I wish he had stayed in Cleveland."

OK. So we have Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley chiming in saying that that's not how they would have handled things and that the competition between rivals is very important to them. Hmm. What do Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley all have in common other than having been in the NBA? Oh, that's right! They're BLACK. Do you want to explain that, LeBron? No, he doesn't. Oh, but it's because of race. Of course. Just for that comment alone, LeBron, I hope you never win a championship. And if you don't, go ahead and blame that on race, too. That will draw people back to your side again. Sure.

Los Morons

And the ridiculousness just keeps right on going in Arizona over their illegal immigration law (which is no different than the Federal immigration laws that have been in place for years). Only this time, it's taken a whole new twist. This time, we have the idiocy over protesting this new law and it has been combined with sports. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong with that sort of a combination, right?

See, according to ESPN, the NBA's Phoenix Suns wore " "Los Suns" on their jerseys in Game 2 of the Western Conference semifinals on Wednesday night." Uh, what? Now, if that kind of sounds like a language other than English, you'd be correct. That would be a touch of Spanish. Technically, I would have thought that the jerseys would have read "Los Soles", as "soles" is the plural of "sun" which is "sol", but if it's the name of a team or something like that, you leave it alone. Why you're allowed to Spanish-ize part of the name, but not the other part isn't exactly clear to me. But that's the reason why it was "Los Suns".

This ridiculous idea was the brainstorm of the owner (or propietario) of the Suns, Robert Starver. He said that it was "...to honor our Latino community and the diversity of our league, the state of Arizona, and our nation." Uh-huh. Never mind that you need to read, write and speak English to become a citizen. Never mind that language is one of the key elements that holds together a society. Never mind all of that. Go right on ahead with dividing people up into groups based upon race and not upon citizenship. What could possibly go wrong there?

See, when I first heard that they were going to do this, I wasn't all that concerned about it because I didn't think that there was any way in hell that David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA, would let it happen. You can't just make your jersey say whatever you want, can you? Apparently you can. That's because David Stern told NBA.com "We think it's appropriate what the Suns are doing." You do? How on earth is it appropriate for a sports team to make any sort of a political statement? You're not politicians. You're not activists. You're sports guys who get paid a ridiculous amount of money whether you win OR lose. If you want to express your dislike for the new law on your own time, that's your business. But for you to want to do it when you're at work? I have a hard time seeing how that's appropriate.

And I guess that I'm never going to understand how it's appropriate in the mind of David Stern because his mind clearly does not work like that of a sane individual. That's because, according to NBA Fanhouse, "...on Monday (Danny) Ainge tossed a towel skyward" during a playoff game. It didn't hurt anyone. It didn't obstruct any play or anything like that. But according to someone named Terrence Moore, Ainge was "spitting on the so-called "integrity of the game" -- which Stern and other commissioners of other leagues always say they must protect." Yep. And that's why Danny Ainge "...has been fined $25,000 for creating an unauthorized distraction and for conduct detrimental to the game." Wait. What now?

Danny Ainge gets fined $25,000 for throwing a towel in the air, but the Phoenix Suns are allowed to change their jerseys so that they read "Los Suns" and that's perfectly OK?! How is that NOT an unauthorized distraction? Is there some sort of clause in the NBA rules that says that making a political statement on the court is an authorized distraction? What a maroon.

I would like nothing more than for Phoenix Suns season ticket holders to give up their seats. Let those who are in the country illegally purchase them for next season and see how that turns out for them. I'm going to mention AGAIN that the majority of Arizona residents are in FAVOR of this legislation. It's not like it's unpopular amongst the masses or anything. It does seem, however, to be extremely unpopular amongst the uninformed and the clueless. That seems obvious.

Celtics Win + Willie Randolph Fired + Black French Love Obama

The Boston Celtics have won the NBA Championship in a blowout, 131-92, taking the series 4 games to 2. It's the franchise's 17th championship, and first in 22 years. Coached by Doc Rivers and led by longtime veteran Paul Pierce, the series MVP, and new acquisitions Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, they outplayed and successfully defended the Los Angeles Lakers, whose overhyped star Kobe Bryant faltered at the end of the game's last two quarters.

The victorious team

MVP Paul Pierce, whose teammates made up for his weakest championship game

Kevin Garnett, one of the key people behind the Celtics' victory

The stats say it all.

Congratulations to the Celtics!

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And now for one of the hugest debacles of the baseball season: the New York Mets' firing of manager Willie Randolph.

What I wrote to Bernie and others was basically a summary of what everyone else has said, but I'll reprint it (with one change) anyways:

Really classy move, Mets. In the middle of the night, after sending the poor man out to California! Is it Randolph's fault that so many of his key players are aging and injured, or that the ones who're on the field are underplaying? Are the Mets that far out of first place? No. Do they have that poor of a record? No. Did he assemble all these overpaid has-beens (including Carlos Delgado, who is gorgeous but has the mobility of a grain silo)?

Bring back Willie and FIRE OMAR MINAYA!

***

On a different note, I posted Michael Kimmelman's New York Times article to the CC list:
"For Blacks in France, Obama's Rise Is Reason to Rejoice, and Hope." (Is it in the Arts section because Kimmelman's a well-known art critic?). Here's a snippet:

A new black consciousness is emerging in France, lately hastened by, of all things, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States. An article in Le Monde a few days ago described how Mr. Obama is “stirring up high hopes” among blacks here. Even seeing the word “noir” (“black”) in a French newspaper was an occasion for surprise until recently.

Meanwhile, this past weekend, 60 cars were burned and some 50 young people scuffled with police and firemen, injuring several of them, in a poor minority suburb of Vitry-le-François, in the Marne region of northeast France.

Americans, who have debated race relations since the dawn of the Republic, may find it hard to grasp the degree to which race, like religion, remains a taboo topic in France. While Mr. Obama talks about running a campaign transcending race, an increasing number of French blacks are pushing for, in effect, the reverse.

(Even the failed Socialist presidential candidate, Segolène Royal, is a fan; she even attended one of his speeches in Boston.) The excitement and enthusiasm goes far beyond France....

Tuesday Dribbles

This is my 900th post! Not that that's particularly important, but I decided to look at Blogger's stats before starting this entry, and that's what it says, so I thought why not mention it?

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Today was my final lecture of the quarter, and the last day of spring classes. Reading week starts tomorrow, and exams begin next Monday. I started off telling my class that I couldn't believe we had reached the end of the term, because the end of March and the first class are still vivid in my mind--so great was my anxiety about this class that I have experienced sciatica on the left side of my body, which culminated in almost paralyzing hip pain a month ago, and aoregeiria, or waking up too early every morning--and because we'd covered so much ground. But this was it, and after a few comments about the final exam, I spoke about Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the last book on the syllabus, and attempted to show how it broached all of the many thematic and formal concerns we had been discussing from modernist and Modernist moment forward to post-modernism, which we had focused on beginning with Donald Barthelme's "The Glass Mountain," reading backwards to Nathanaël West and Robert Lowell. (It helps, of course, that Díaz, with his limitless gifts for irony, invokes one of the central figures of Anglo-American pre-modernism and the exemplar of Aestheticism in the novel's title.) In order to leave them with some fairly current scholarship, I briefly touched upon Édouard Glissant's poetics of relation and the concept of "opacity," citing both the novel's poetic epigram from Derek Walcott's "The Schooner Flight" and the untitled prologue, as a way of thinking through the play of modes, genres, idioms, linguistic registers, languages, and language itself in the book, and also as a means of situating it within the context not only of American literatures, but also Caribbean, Latin American and African Diasporic literatures. Its Carnivalesque richness and capacity for creolizing and archipelagoizing American literature is something I'm sure someone will take up, if this hasn't occurred yet, but its many other concerns link it to everything we had read before. As I reread it last week, I could hear the echoes of Hughes and so many others--and I hope the students heard them as well.

And so the quarter is over...almost. I have another exam to give, another thesis to read, meetings, and much to wrap up before I head home and get some rest and back to my own work, but I can say that despite the amount of work, the class was pleasurable beyond belief, and working with the brilliant TAs, from English and African American Studies, and the many dozens of students, has been worth it.

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Recently, for a forthcoming art book a friend is publishing, I translated a very short prose introduction by the distinguished French poet Yves Bonnefoy, who had been one of my friend's teachers in graduate school, and whom I had the honor of meeting, briefly, some years ago when he read in New York. ("Je te nommerai désert/nuit ta voix, desolé ta visage....") Its difficulty surprised me; my French muscle, at least in terms of speaking and writing, is still functioning, but after so much Spanish (and somewhat less Portuguese), I did struggle with Bonnefoy's elliptical, elusive syntax, which demanded something beyond the adequatio approach to translation that has long been decried. I realized that most of the French texts I've translated, nearly all prose fiction except for Alain Mabanckou's poems, are far more straightforward, and even when infused with a great deal of figuration and idiomatic language, especially prose, they are not trying to express something ineffable, which is, of course, one of the aims of Bonnefoy's poetry in general. The piece, however, is done, and my friend is happy, but I do keep thinking, I could spend weeks on those two paragraphs, if I had the time...

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So long to Yves Saint Laurent and Bo Diddley, who recently passed away.

C and I particularly love David Teboul's 2002 cinema verité documentary on Saint-Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris, which shows him in his couture rooms, examining and working on new outfits. Catherine Deneuve and LouLou de la Falaise, along with Saint Laurent's longtime partner and business associate Pierre Berger all make appearances. To hear Saint Laurent whisper repeatedly and raspily with utter delight "ravissante" as several the models brings life to his art is worth the entire documentary.'

Mississippi native and Chicago product Diddley, one of the creators of the global music now known as Rock & Roll, should be best remembered aurally, I think. So here're some clips to check out. Start with the eponymous "Bo Diddley," and then check out "I'm a Man," "Who Do You Love," "Pretty Thang," "I'm Looking for a Woman," and "Diddley Daddy" if you don't know his work, though its echoes run like tributaries throughout so much subsequent rock.

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Bernie asked whether I and others were going to root for these people

Kobe Bryant, #24, passes to Pau Gasol, #14 (AFP/Getty Images/Stephen Dunn)

Kobe [Narcissus] Bryant (AP Photo/Hector Mata)

or these:

Kevin Garnett and Kendrick Perkins (Photo by D. Lippitt/Einstein/NBAE via Getty Images)

Ray Allen practicing 3-point shots recently (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

in the championship matchup that is inducing spontaneous orgasms in TV sportscasters?

Although I gave up (on) the NBA after the last lockout/strike nonsense, I've decided to choose and root for the latter, something that I, having lived in Boston and witnessed Celtic fans up close never thought I'd do, but then again, I never thought Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen would be playing for the Celtics, so there's always a new day for everything.