Tag Archives: False Idols

Fandom and the False Belief in Transcendence

31 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports

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Trinity jumping across the street clip (GIF), The Matrix (1999), January 31, 2020. (https://gfycat.com/; https://youtube.com).

I don’t know who needs to read this, but no matter how talented someone is, no matter how often someone had triumphed in their field, no matter how popular they are, and no matter their level of celebrity status, that person is not necessarily transcendent. Many of these folk are assholes. Yet we Americans use the term so often that all one would have to do to transcend in this country is film themselves with an iPhone 11 in slofie mode while jumping from one building to another in The Matrix series (either as Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity or Keanu Reeves’ Neo) to sell themselves as such. Or, to just not talk about the realities of the ugly and oppressive world in which we all inhabit while selling sneakers and entertaining millions.

So, let me be clear. The death of former NBA player Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna Bryant, John and Keri and their teenage daughter Alyssa Altobelli, Sarah and her 13-year-old daughter Payton Chester, Christina Mauser, and the pilot Ara Zobayan is nothing short of painfully tragic. Kobe Bryant, of course, played for the Los Angeles Lakers for 20 years. He won five NBA Championships and two Olympic gold medals as part of the USA Basketball team, was an 18-time NBA All-Star, and at the time he retired in 2016, was the league’s third all-time leading scorer, at 33,643 total points. LeBron James only passed Bryant on the all-time scoring list the night before the tragic accident. At 41 years old, Bryant was only into his fourth year of post-NBA life, supporting the WNBA, investing himself in girl’s basketball, winning an Oscar for a five-minute short. This polyglot, this nerd whom experts often mention in the same breath with Michael Jordan and LeBron and other all-time greats, is truly one of the greatest professional basketball players in the history of the sport, full stop.

But, does that make Kobe Bryant “transcendent beyond his sport,” as I have heard the commentators say this week, and have read the sports and culture columnists tweet and write this week? No, absolutely not. We each all have the responsibility to put our lives and our times into perspective, to take a panoramic look at the world in which we inhabit and to dig deep into the soil and rock of that world for meaning. If not, we risk idolizing the first person who comes along to rock our world, and in the process, becoming as short-sighted and as narcissistic as the celebrities, entertainers, artists, athletes, and politicians we worship.

And that has sadly been the case with Bryant. The news and sports media has been paving over the potholes and sinkholes in Bryant’s life faster than The New York Times newspaper plant in College Point, Queens can ink and fold a million hard copies. Bryant’s semi-admitted raping of a 19-year-old in September 2004 (the “incident” was in 2003) has suddenly become a full-throated mea culpa that apparently was unprecedented in the annals of American sport and celebrity. Not one that the rape survivor or any other person who has ever experience rape or sexual violence (yours truly included) should acknowledge, or believe that it would ever make up for the rape, but hey, what do I know?

But my case against transcendence hardly begins or ends with Bryant as a one-time alleged rapist. As great a basketball player as he was, for the bulk of his career, Bryant was a selfish ball hog. By comparison, Bryant made AI’s (Allen Iverson) one-on-five scoring attempts and successes look like Iverson had no choice because he was on the court by himself a lot of those times (which for half of Iverson’s career, was pretty close to the truth). Bryant’s last game in the NBA was one where he scored 60 while taking 50 shots, and he in fact owns the most field goals attempts in any single game of any player this side of Wilt Chamberlain! If this were Rucker Park and not the NBA, maybe transcendence would apply in terms of athletic ability. But as someone who saw how MJ could regularly get 30 while taking only 13 shots (and making 15 free throws) in the second half of his career, great, but not transcendent, from even within the sport of basketball.

Speaking of, the transcendence case really breaks down in terms of cultural influence outside of basketball. Some argue that Bryant was an ambassador of the game and made it international. Really? Two words in response. Dream Team! And, two more words. Michael Jordan! Without the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, and with MJ and Magic and Larry and Patrick and Hakeem, et al. among 11 future Hall-of-Famers, Bryant’s overseas efforts would’ve been like selling the current brand of NFL football to the world (no one likes weak tea made from sewage water, by the way). Also, if one wants to know two more names from different sports who have MJ-esque transcendence or higher, try Tiger and Serena (I don’t even need to use their last names)!

How big was Jordan, and how big does Jordan remain? His Air Jordans are still among the leading earners for Nike in 2019, 16 years after MJ retired, and nearly 36 years after Nike started making them. Air Jordans went well with hip-hop gear and in rap lyrics and videos — for decades. MJ’s shaved head and goat-tee became fashion trends (one could argue the same for Bryant’s messy Afro look, I suppose) that remain with us to this day. But so does MJ’s reluctance to speak out against racism, homophobia, sexism and misogyny, something that Bryant inherited and adopted in shaping his public persona as well.

And it’s this last piece that truly makes the case that the late Bryant was not and could not be transcendent. LeBron James, for all his greatness, has also put his weight and words into Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, police brutality, and calling out White supremacists. Certainly athletes from the recent past, from Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe to Jim Brown and Althea Gibson, and of course, Jackie Robinson, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, fought oppression with the very lives they lived and the barriers they dismantled. All of them had flaws, but none of them had PR machines in their prime to cover up their mistakes and probable crimes, either. Heck, even O.J. Simpson for better and certainly for worse in transcendent in this social justice and injustice sense.

Now, could Bryant have “transcended basketball” if he had live to, say, 60, 70, or even 80 years old? Maybe. But probably not. His image mattered too much to him. The world outside of basketball and family, not so much. And that’s okay. That doesn’t make his death and the deaths of the other eight — especially the three teenagers — on that helicopter any less tragic. This doesn’t make the pain or sadness any fan feels for him and his family any less real. But maybe, just maybe, those who are just fans and members of the media should check themselves before putting Bryant on a pedestal or altar. As tragic a death as it is, death is part of life, after all, and Bryant had as full a 41 years as anyone could expect. Just not a transcendent 41 years.

The Progressive’s Karl Marx Altar

22 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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A portrait of Karl Marx, age 57, approximately August 24, 1875, by John Jabez Edwin Mayall, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. (Quibik via Wikipedia). In public domain.

A portrait of Karl Marx, age 57, approximately August 24, 1875, by John Jabez Edwin Mayall, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. (Quibik via Wikipedia). In public domain.

For so many things ideological in the US, there are more similarities than differences. That’s why the difference between most “liberals” and most “conservatives” is more issue-driven than an overall difference in philosophy or intellectual outlook.

On the issue of ideological altars, there are more similarities than differences as well. Democrats specifically — and leftists more broadly — often poke fun at conservatives and their constant invoking of Ronald Reagan as their intellectual guru and mascot. The idea that Reagan was a pro-life, anti-immigration and evangelical Christian conservative is as ludicrous as seeing Alexander the Great as a socialist muse. There’s no way that the once living-and-breathing Ronald Reagan would ever get along with most conservatives today, who tend to use his name in vain.

But if that’s true of American conservatives, many progressives are just as guilty, just as myopic, just as delusional. For them, though, their guru and intellectual Father has been Karl Marx (1818-1883), a Prussian-Jewish political philosopher and activist who found himself kicked out of Prussia, France, and Belgium before living out his final three decades in the UK. Of course, the father of Marxism makes sense, since class struggle has always been the very definition of being a progressive, a liberal, a leftist, no?

Well, class struggle has not always been at the center of being a leftist or a progressive. Standing against injustice and inequality, though, has. That is the distinction that most progressives — especially White progressives — all but refuse to make. Though Marx’s great intellectual and literary works were all about class struggle and the need to overthrow capitalism and return to the pre-classical, pre-imperialist days of communal living and economic equality, he left so much out. About the world outside of Europe, about slavery and women’s suffrage, about forms of inequality that weren’t just explained by human civilizations and class struggle. Not to mention, many of his predictions were just plain wrong.

Is your glass half-empty? - Optimism Quiz, August 2012. (http://oprah.com).

Is your glass half-empty? – Optimism Quiz, August 2012. (http://oprah.com).

A question at the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians Conference last week reminded me of this over-reliance on Marx. At a plenary session on progressive public intellectuals, a graduate student asked a question about Black public intellectuals (particularly the freshly ordained Ta-Nehisi Coates and others identified by Michael Eric Dyson in The New Republic earlier this fall) and some idea about the need to return to Marxism. If I’d been on the panel, I would’ve responded, “Why Marxism? Why is this the only choice progressives, liberals, and leftist believe they have?”

Marx and his -isms don’t speak to me. I never thought to worship at his altar. I’ve almost always found White progressive attempts to make me see systems of racial inequality and discrimination as all part of class struggle ridiculous. I never saw Marx as having an answer to issues like intersectionality and Black/Latino/APA feminism, or in dealing with cultural imperialism (which is embedded in Marx’s own writings) via multiculturalism.

Stacks of money, April 13, 2008. (Allureme via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 License.

Stacks of money, April 13, 2008. (Allureme via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 License.

Plus, why do progressives need a White guy born in the nineteenth century as their utopian guide toward a twenty-first century revolution, anyway? Anybody ever heard of W. E. B. Du Bois or bell hooks, Edward Said or Erykah Badu? At this point in my intellectual life, Baduizm, Saidism or Sonia Sanchez-ism all fit where I am much more than Karl Marx. For me, Marx is just as much a false idol as Ronald Reagan and Baal.

Not Praying At The Civil Rights Altar

27 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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A facsimile of the JFK, MLK & RFK painting that used to hang over many a Black home's mantle, August 27, 2013. (http://robertktanenbaumbooks.com).

A facsimile of the JFK, MLK & RFK paintings that used to hang over many a Black home’s mantle, August 27, 2013. (http://robertktanenbaumbooks.com).

The legacy of the Civil Rights Movement a half-century removed from the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech remains a mixed bag, especially for poor Blacks and other persons of color. This, of course, isn’t to say that the Civil Rights Movement and those who fought, bled, and died for civil rights and Black equality aren’t to be honored by us. After all, White supremacists assassinated, bombed, jailed, beat up, hosed down and sicked dogs on scores of civil rights activists and innocents, especially in 1963. But the fact that I needed to add this disclaimer is a significant part of the problem of the movement’s legacy. The knee-jerk kneeling and crossing of ourselves on behalf of the Civil Rights generation has all but obscured the fact that what mostly remains of the movement’s successes are mere symbols.

It remains beyond strange that we bow to the recently dead and the still living instead of to the long-dead who did the backbreaking work in paving the road for the Civil Rights Movement in the first place. From escaped slaves to lynched Blacks, from Nat Turner and Martin Delany to Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, their sacrifices were so much greater, and for so little in their own lives. Yet the Civil Rights generation enjoys honors as if they somehow generated the milestones of integration, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 out of thin air. As if the movement’s victories were the equivalent of a modern-day Jesus walking on water.

For those who may well have witnessed these miracles, this is tantamount to civil rights sacrilege. But for millions of us – especially those who remain in poverty – the civil rights legacy is a mirage of symbols. More than twenty years ago, the late civil rights law professor Derrick Bell wrote about a character named Jesse B. Semple (a character originally invented by Langston Hughes) in his best-seller Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992). Semple, in response to Bell’s claims of significant strides made during the movement, said, “most whites and lots of black folks rely on symbols to support their belief that people have come a long way since slavery and segregation to the present time.”

Two decades later, and Bell’s words through Semple ring even truer today. With Black unemployment at 14 percent and one in four African Americans living below the poverty line (including two in five Black children), it seems that the reach of the Civil Rights Movement has long exceeded its grasp. The MLK Holiday and President Barack Obama’s election and re-election, while hard-won battles, are mere symbols out of efforts to address the racism and poverty that ordinary Blacks and other people of color face every day, as both are on the rise. Even the two single biggest achievements of the movement — the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – have been weakened over the past three decades by all three branches of our increasingly anti-civil rights government. They stand as symbols now. They are hardly pieces of landmark legislation that would provide a path out of poverty and discrimination.

The real beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Movement have been Blacks on the cusp of the American middle class in the 1960s and 1970s, the ones with the education and social pedigree necessary to become part of the American elite over the past forty years. The same folks who’ve said repeatedly in the past couple of decades that those Blacks who remain undereducated, in poverty and likely to go to jail are in this predicament due to hip-hop and rap or because they wear saggy-baggy jeans. More symbols, but this time, to persecute rather than to uplift. It’s their fault they’re in poverty, say the Bill Cosbys and Don Lemons of this group. This despite the fact that the ladder to the Black elite has been pulled up by both the eroding of the civil rights victories from a half-century ago and the huge wealth gap between rich and poor, Black and White that has become a gulf in recent years.

To turn around and then say that folks who have benefited little to zero from the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement should then take on this mantle now is a bit disingenuous. No, I don’t think that I or anyone who was born far too late to march with Dr. King in August 1963 owe the altar of civil rights any prayers, libations or tithes. If we need to be activists in this age, we need to move beyond relics, symbols and elitist notions of civil rights triumphs.