LeBron and His Haters

There's a terrific article up at the brilliant new website The Undefeated about LeBron James and the (to me) inexplicable hostility that he has engendered among fans. Note to everybody: go check out The Undefeated. It's wonderful: it's sports and culture and race and reason all mixed together and shaken up.

Anyway, I've always believed that most of the fans who dislike LeBron do so out of, well, racism. Not necessarily burning crosses on the lawn, White Power, swastikas tattooed on the neck racism, but a more subtle, unconscious form of the disease. LeBron's big sin for these people is that he is a strong, oversized black man who decided to bypass the traditional framework of white ownership of black athletes and determine his own future.

LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh got together - eschewing any interference from the white men in suits who generally comprise the general managers of the various teams of the NBA - and decided that they were going to join forces and see what they could accomplish on the same team. I'm not sure if this move was completely unprecedented in the history of American professional basketball, but it is certainly a rare occurrence and, insofar as it was a direct attack on the logic of white ownership over dynamic and athletic black men, it presented a problem to many white people.

Again, in a vain attempt to soothe the hurt feelings of self-styled non-racist white LeBron haters out there, I am not saying that you are a Klansman, nor am I implying that you are a David Duke fanboy. Racism is rarely that overt. Racism often takes the form of the unconscious reactions that we have to external stimuli, the nagging discomfort that we get at a novel situation that threatens to undo our preconceived notions of how members of different groups of people are allowed to behave.

LeBron's sin, in my humble opinion, was that he dared to act like a professional man and grab the reins of his own destiny. The status quo of professional basketball in America to that point had been that white owners and general managers of teams have the God-given right to determine the future of the black players in their employ. Sure, players can earn their status as free agents and may decide to take their talents to any team in the league, and this is mostly uncontroversial these days. What LeBron, Dwayne, and Chris did, however, is to seize the role of general manager for themselves and to decide without interference how their team was going to be composed.

LeBron's sin, in other words, was to defy the racist hierarchy of the NBA and, by extension, the racist hierarchy of American society. And this is a sin for which many white people will never forgive him.

The City of Brotherly Love

Philadelphia has taken the wonderful step of adding two Muslim holidays to its school calendar. Next year students in the Philadelhpia school system will be learning about and also getting the days that correspond with Eid al-Fitr, which is celebrated following the month-long observance of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha, which celebrates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his own son in submission to God's will.

Expect heads to begin exploding at Fox News any moment now.

Donald Trump is a Dangerous Dumbass and His Supporters Are No Better

In attempting to explain the inexplicable rise of Donald Trump from annoying reality television star to a possible extinction-level event, many pundits have suggested that Trump is channeling the rage of people who feel as though they have been left behind or even left out of the new global economy. He is, these pundits tell us, a populist rabble-rouser, a truth teller who instinctively understands the economic anxieties of a group of people that society has forgotten.

This, of course, is completely bullshit.

Donald Trump and, by extension, his supporters are not angry because of economic struggles. There is absolutely no evidence that Trump supporters are pitchfork-waving mad due to existential worries stemming from the effects of globalization. Rather, the unifying characteristic of his supporters is that they are unable or unwilling to deal with the changing face of America. To put it simply, Trump's supporters are more racist, more Islamophobic, more homophobic, and more sexist than the average American.

I'll let Kevin Drum explain it.

Everything You Need to Know About the Terrifying Relationship Between Vaccines and Autism

Finally, somebody has taken the time to compile every last piece of evidence proving the link between vaccines and autism. I thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for sending us this brave young man, and I consider him to be a hero of the highest magnitude.

Gorilla Lives Matter

Wouldn't it be wonderful if all of the people who are so outraged over the shooting of Harambe - the gorilla from the Cincinnati Zoo who was shot in order to protect a young boy who mistakenly wandered into the gorilla enclosure - could work up some of the same unhinged anger when, I don't know, human beings were shot and killed with much less justification?

The Agony with No Ecstasy: Never Trump

A few days back Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the conservative Brookings Institution, penned a brilliant and important essay entitled This Is How Fascism Comes to America

Scholars and pundits and assorted talking heads of the American news gaggle have spent the last several months quibbling over whether or not fascist is an appropriate word to use when describing Donald Trump and his ascent to the doorstep of political power in America. The truth is that I don't know if what Trump is neatly fits into the complicated definitions that we have of a word that has proven difficult to define.

Another, more important truth, is that it doesn't matter if Donald Trump is an actual fascist or not. I've read various rejections of the idea that Donald Trump is an honest-to-goodness fascist: he doesn't have a group of organized brownshirts following behind him and doing battle in the streets with political adversaries; there's no Trumpian equivalent of the Hitler Youth; Hitler had a history of political involvement that Trump lacks; Mussolini was at one-time a communist so something or another.

These ideas are so juvenile as to barely merit a response, but I'll give it a shot regardless. A serial killer is somebody who kills three or more people. It doesn't matter if he devours his victims like Jeffrey Dahmer or buries them in the basement like John Wayne Gacy. A fascist is somebody who whips up nationalistic, anti-minority fervor, someone who cloaks himself in the flag and promotes a sort of lawless military adventurism, someone who race-baits and sanctions violence against his political opponents.

Is Donald Trump an actual fascist? Again, it doesn't matter.

What matters is that his ascent heralds a startling and troubling new age in American history, an age where all of us must do battle with the very real possibility that our democratic institutions might not be as powerful and as durable as we once thought. Will Donald Trump tear down American democratic institutions if elected to the Presidency? Not likely. What is likely is that he will degrade them to the point of irrelevance through his corruption and his willingness to use the legal arsenal at the disposal of the executive branch.

Trump doesn't like Jeff Bezos, so perhaps he'll discover a new love for anti-monopoly sentiment, at least insofar as it concerns Amazon. Trump feels that Hillary and Bill Clinton wounded him too deeply during the Presidential race? Perhaps he'll instruct his Attorney General to investigate the Clinton Global Initiative.

Donald Trump is a bad man with a lot of really bad ideas. He is a dangerous man with a lot of dangerous ideas. He is a small, insecure, ill-tempered, insecure demagogue with a rabid following of the angry, ignorant, and incompetent from throughout the country, and his Presidency would, in one way or another, spell the beginning of the end for America.

Do not let this tragedy happen. Fight against Trump. Fight against fascism. Fight against authoritarian demagogues who threaten the survival of the country and the world. Fight, fight, fight.

Is It Even Possible

I read a post a few days back about somebody complaining that she was trapped on an escalator. When someone attempted to correct her, suggesting that it was, in fact, an elevator on which she had found herself stuck, she affirmed that it was, indeed, an escalator.

I am hoping that this is all a practical joke, but my faith in humanity has never been all that strong anyway.