He Knows He's Losing: Trump as Mike Tyson

The most obvious thing to me about last night's toxic sludge fire of a debate is that Trump knows he's losing. Bigly. And he has no idea what to do about it. Many pundits are confused on this point, because they treat Trump as a conventional politician or as a media figure rather than as a psychiatric patient. And if you don't view Trump through the lens of his maladies, you misunderstand him. Trump is not a serious politician. Comparing him to other Republican presidential candidates doesn't help you understand him. This is not Mitt Romney. Let me compare him instead to someone Trump does resemble, deeply: Mike Tyson.

Back in 1997, just before Tyson's infamous rematch with Evander Holyfield, the Boston Globe's boxing columnist, a guy named Ron Borges, predicted that if Tyson couldn't beat Holyfield in the first three rounds, he'd try to disqualify himself. Tyson no longer had the stamina for a full-length championship bout, Borges explained, although he still had a furious opening attack that had won him some matches, and even a heavyweight belt, with early knockouts. But if he couldn't knock out Holyfield by the third, Tyson had no chance. He would only get weaker as the match stretched on. So he'd try to disrupt the match and get a DQ instead.

Holyfield won the first three rounds. In the third, Tyson bit off part of Holyfield's ear.

What people forget is that Tyson bit Holyfield's ear twice, because the referee didn't stop the fight after Tyson had actually chomped off part of his opponent's ear. (If you want to make a comparison to last night's debate moderation here, feel free.) So Tyson bit Holyfield again.

This was crazy, but not spontaneous. It was Tyson's plan. He actually came out for the third round without his mouth guard, which is a crazy thing to do if a heavyweight contender is about to punch you in the mouth over and over again, but efficient tactical preparation if your plan for the upcoming round is to bite some dude. The ref made him put it back in. Tyson came out of his corner looking to get thrown out of the fight. When biting didn't work, he kept biting until he got thrown out. Then he threw a tantrum blaming the referee.

What we witnessed last night was an attempt to bite off the opponent's ear, to look for a DQ rather than take a public beating. Trump destroyed the debate because he had no legitimate way to win, and he knew it. He can't stand on a stage with Joe Biden for ninety minutes in a conventional, legitimate debate. I mean, what would he talk about? His record? He can't afford to do that. Trump has no affirmative case to make for his presidency beyond childishly obvious lies. So his goal was to keep Biden from talking. His handlers talk about how he was trying to goad Biden into some gaffe, and maybe that's part of the truth, but I think Trump's handlers don't understand the real goal: keep Biden from talking so Biden couldn't score any points. Trump couldn't beat Biden, so he tried to derail the match so Biden wouldn't be seen beating him.

This strategy only intermittently worked. Sometimes Biden was rattled, because it's hard to have a serious conversation while a floridly symptomatic mental patient shrieks at you. But when Biden got a chance to breathe and focus for 45 seconds, especially when he spoke directly to the camera, it became very clear why Trump couldn't afford to let Biden speak for any longer than that.

Here's the thing: this is not a strategy for a candidate who's behind, and Trump is behind. Keeping Biden from gaining more ground on him isn't a win. Biden's ahead by 7 or eight points. Trump needed to use the debate to close some of that gap, and ruining the debate, getting the DQ, doesn't do that. (To switch sports metaphors briefly, it's the equivalent of trying to get the last innings of a baseball game canceled when the other team is ahead. If you're losing after six innings, you don't want the last three rained out, because then you lose.) So this was less strategy than pathology.

Getting DQ'd out of the Holyfield match was not to Tyson's advantage. Getting disqualified is not better than losing. It's actually much worse. Not only did Tyson forfeit the match, he lost his boxing license and got fined millions of dollars. It would be much better to fight through the next twelve rounds, take his lumps, and lose honestly. But that would have meant Tyson letting people see him lose. Instead, no matter how high and insanely self-destructive the cost, he preferred to end the match and keep the option of pretending he might have won. Tyson was willing to throw his career in the toilet in order to shift blame for his defeat onto the ref.

Trump, like Tyson, can not accept or admit defeat. He would rather hurt his campaign than have the experience of letting Joe Biden beat him on live TV. But doesn't that invite the even greater humiliation of having Joe Biden beat him on Election Night? Yes, but here's the thing: Trump knows he can't win the election either.

Let me say that again: Trump knows he cannot win this election. He knows he cannot get more votes than Biden, that he will lose the popular votes by millions. Listen to him, if you can stomach it: this man who constantly boasts never boasts about the vote count he's going to rack up, because he's read the polls. He knows he's losing. No one associated with the Trump campaign talks about the popular vote. They have given up hope of winning it.

They barely, if ever, even talk about the Electoral College. Trump doesn't brag about which states he's ahead in. Because he doesn't have a strong lead in any state with more than about 11 electoral votes. He's way behind, playing defense on most of his map. He's going to have to defend Georgia and Texas.

Instead, Trump talks about voter fraud and Supreme Court rulings and voter intimidation. He's shouting that it's going to be stolen, because he knows he's losing.

We should take this very seriously, because it represents a genuine threat to our election. He's shouting that the election is going to be stolen because he wants to steal it if he can.

But even more important to Trump is ruining the election itself, disrupting it the way he disrupted the debate. Even if he can't hold onto power, he wants to avoid the humiliating spectacle of public defeat. Trump knows he can't win. He's looking for the DQ. You saw him last night. He's already taken out his mouthpiece.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

 

Against Rock Stars

This summer, I went to a Cleveland Indians game which involved a pregame celebration for Johnny "Johnny Football" Manziel. [Full disclosure: I am a lifelong Boston sports fan living in Cleveland. Although I sometimes go to the Jake just to watch the Indians, I was there that night because my Red Sox were in town.] Everybody in the building seemed to be deliriously excited about Johnny Football. Everybody was making his little money-fingers gesture. Between the Browns drafting Manziel in the first round and Lebron James returning to the Cavaliers, Cleveland sports fans were feeling that suddenly the wheel had turned in their favor. I heard people say, without irony, "Cleveland is looking like the place to be." I heard people say, completely seriously, that this would "turn Cleveland's economy around."

Yesterday was the Superbowl. The Browns came nowhere near it. The new-look Lebron Cavaliers are in the middle of the playoff pack, not doing as well as the old-look Lebron Cavs used to do. While Johnny Football self-destructed (and helped take the end of the Browns' season with him), the Superbowl featured a quarterback drafted in the 3rd round and one drafted in the 6th round. It was won in the last minute by a rookie who hadn't been drafted at all. Today Johnny Football's handlers announced that he was going into rehab.

I don't want to pile onto poor Manziel just when he's decided to get help. In fact, the news of his alcoholism makes a lot of his frustrating behavior this season understandable. The poor preparation, the lack of discipline, the inability to learn the playbook, all turn out to have come from a bottle, which is sad. And there's a strong argument to be made that Manziel doesn't have the necessary skills to start in the NFL anyway, that he's one of those college standouts who aren't cut out for the pros. What's more interesting is Cleveland's desperately eager embrace of him before it all fell apart. That includes the Browns front office, who seem to have pressured the coaching staff to play Johnny, and the star-struck Cleveland fans, who explicitly pride themselves on their down-to-earth blue-collar values.

The starting quarterback for most of the Browns' season (because Johnny didn't work hard enough to win the starting job in camp and never really learned the playbook), was a guy named Brian Hoyer -- possibly the most Cleveland pro quarterback humanly possible. Not only is Hoyer a Cleveland native (who once played for local high school powerhouse St. Ignatius), but he embodies all of the virtues that Cleveland holds dear. He's an unflashy but hard-working and dependable player, all careful preparation and team effort. And, not for nothing, he won the Cleveland Browns every single game they won this year.

But to hell with that, apparently. Johnny Football is a rock star. He has endorsement deals. He has a Heisman Trophy. He hangs out with celebrities. And he was treated, by fans and Browns executives alike, as a person who could turn the entire franchise around with his star power. He has yet to throw a single touchdown in the pros. But he has been intercepted twice.

What the Johnny Football story illustrates is the danger of believing in rock stars. There's a deep need to believe in a single exciting individual who will turn an entire complicated enterprise - a company, a sports franchise, a political party, a Rust Belt city - around single-handedly through his (almost always his) personal charisma and specialness. But that's a fantasy. The heroes we look up to, whether as quarterbacks or CEOS, are leaders of talented, hard-working, and highly focused teams. The rock stars who believe their own hype and go it alone, thinking they can make things happen by sheer force of will, become disastrous failures. That's ugly on an athletic field. It's much uglier when a company or a city are on the line.

The Johnny Football experiment has set the Browns back as an organization, costing them their offensive coordinator and making it hard to see how the Browns can hire a talented replacement. They have been set back by at least two or three years. Talent does matter, but never simply one person's talent. Letting one star or self-described genius drive off the rest of your good people is a disaster. Tom Brady is a talented quarterback, but he only got his fourth Superbowl ring because an undrafted rookie from a Division II college diligently watched a lot of Seahawks game film and then made an inspired play.

Meanwhile LeBron James, who is certainly a tested and reliable NBA star, turns out not to be able to will the Cleveland Cavaliers to a championship through his sheer personal gifts. This is treated as a surprise. But why? Lebron James could not will the Cavaliers to a championship by himself last time. Why would this time be different? Lebron originally left for Miami because he knew he needed to join with other stars in order to win it all, and this turned out to be correct. Lebron in his second solo career turns out to be exactly like the old version of Lebron, but less so.

(And Cleveland's downtown is struggling toward a revival, but that struggle began well before Lebron came back and is about complicated, unsexy things like tax credits for rehabilitating historic buildings. The last time Lebron was here downtown was in decline and his magical influence didn't do a damn thing about that. It turns out having a future basketball Hall of Famer playing at the Q isn't a big deal for your urban revival. Finally getting a supermarket on East Ninth Street is a much bigger deal.)

The belief in rock stars is ultimately about avoiding thinking about complicated problems. It allows you to put all your faith and hope in a person rather than thinking through a plan. We see it in sports, but also in politics and business and the arts. It's pervasive, but fundamentally childish, because it's about abdicating your own responsibilities and putting all your faith in the Dear Leader. There seems to be a deep and widespread human need to believe that someone else is fundamentally superior to us. If that were only neurotic, it would be bad enough. But it's worse because it's inaccurate. Those fundamentally superior people, better than ordinary mortals, aren't really out there.

People love rock stars. People long to find a rock star to lead them. But leader who actually believes himself to be a rock star is the worst thing that can happen to an organization. The only thing you can really count on a rock star to do is trash the place.

cross-posted, and comments welcome at, Dagblog

Donald Sterling, Big League Sports, and the Free Rider Problem

Can the other 29 NBA owners force Donald Sterling to sell the LA Clippers? Let's put it another way: can the other 29 owners be forced to remain Donald Sterling's partner? Of course, private citizens shouldn't be forced to sell privately owned businesses. But how much of Sterling's business exists if you take away his association with those other 29 private businesses? If you take away the other 29 teams, what does Sterling own?

Sterling's real business isn't the basketball team itself, but his partnership with the rest of the owners. Donald Sterling didn't "make the league" as he has put it. The league made Donald Sterling an owner. The league has made Donald Sterling very, very rich, while Sterling has never made any money for the other franchises. Can his 29 partners, who have indirectly subsidized his business for over 30 years and who are now worried that Sterling is going to cost them untold millions, be forced to stay in business with him?

What would happen if the NBA owners decided that they couldn't make Sterling sell the team itself, so that the only way to get free of him was to expel the whole team from the NBA? Sterling would still own his business: a basketball team named the LA Clippers. He'd have that business's assets and its debts, hold its leases and its contract obligations. But the other NBA teams wouldn't play the Clippers. They would be free to find other opponents. But who would pay to watch that? Who would pay to advertise at those games? Who would put that on TV?

A Clippers organization cut loose from the NBA would never bring in the profits Sterling has gotten used to as an NBA owner. It wouldn't be able to bring in enough revenue to pay the players' existing contracts. Without its league connection, the team would go bankrupt. Without the NBA, the Clippers organization does not exist. The other 29 owners are Donald Sterling's business.

The truth is that Sterling's membership in the NBA has always involved both indirect and direct transfers of wealth from the other owners. The Clippers have been a notoriously terrible organization for most of Sterling's tenure; that they have actually been winning the last two or three years is an almost flukey interruption after three decades of futility. (And that fluke was directly engineered by the last NBA commissioner, who forced another team to trade a star player to the Clippers instead of the Lakers.) To put it very simply, Sterling has spent 30 years as the owner of a basketball team that people don't want to see. He has basically gotten rich as the owner of the Washington Generals.

Sterling has made money because his team that people don't want to watch holds one of the 30 exclusive licenses to play the basketball teams that people do want to watch. Sterling's business has not been putting on the Clippers' home games but hosting the other 29 teams' away games. Sterling has been granted a special license to sell tickets to Lakers, Spurs, Bulls, Pistons, Celtics, and Heat games. The other 29 teams are obligated to play on Donald Sterling's floor 41 times a year, no matter what. And they are obliged to host the Clippers 41 times a year, no matter how low the demand for those games.

Most of those teams, most of those years, could do as well or better by playing someone beside the Clippers. Fans happily paid to see Bird's Celtics, Ewing's Knicks, Jordan's Bulls, and generations of championship-bound Lakers teams play Sterling's Clippers over the years. But they were paying to see those teams, not the Clippers. And when your team was having attendance troubles, you never got a boost when the Clippers came to town. On the other hand, Sterling could always count on selling extra tickets when better, more popular teams came to town. Sterling has profited off generation after generation of visiting basketball stars, from Magic and Bird in the 80s to LeBron and Durant today.

Now, running an also-ran team for 30 years, with only rare and brief playoff appearances, means that your team doesn't get much time on national TV. But that's okay for Donald, because the league has a formula for sharing out its TV revenue to all of the owners. So Donald Sterling has gotten a slice of the Lakers/Celtics money, the Bulls/Jazz money, the Spurs/Heat money. In the same way, league revenue sharing means that Donald gets some money from every NBA hat, jersey, and official knick-knack that gets sold, although nearly all of that merchandise has some other team's logo. LeBron's jersey puts cash in Donald's pocket. The cash other owners have gotten from the sale of Lamar Odom and Danny Ferry gamers doesn't even begin to match the revenue Sterling has made from Jordan, Magic, Shaq, and the rest. The number of kids who've bought an NBA video game so they could play as the Clippers might actually be the square root of -1, but Sterling has taken a split from every XBox cartridge.

The other 29 NBA owners haven't been hurting, and they haven't missed the cut that goes to Sterling. But for the last 30 years and more, they have been subsidizing him. They have put money in his pocket, and he hasn't put any in theirs.

You'd think that Sterling would be grateful. But, well. Only a few years after buying the Clippers, Sterling moved them from San Diego to LA (which, you may have heard, has another basketball team) despite being forbidden to do so by the league. Instead of building up the league by strengthening the San Diego market, Sterling took the NBA out of that market entirely. Instead, he went to a city where his team added nothing -- and indeed could add nothing -- so he could feed off the existing market created by the Lakers organization. Sterling could not possibly build LA's interest in the NBA; a better owner had already built a deeply beloved franchise there. Years later, NBA Commissioner David Stern would actually reward Sterling by forcing Chris Paul to go the Clippers instead of the Lakers. Sterling couldn't attract stars to his business, so the NBA gave him one. Sterling's relationship to the NBA has always been parasitic.

Sports fans love to hate the big-spending owners who don't give smaller-market teams a chance. But fans give a free pass to owners like Sterling, who exploit their membership in the big-league club to get a lucrative free ride. Every major sports league has some owners who have decided that they can get rich fielding mediocre teams and making a buck off the stars that better owners pay. Attempts to restore competitive balance with revenue sharing don't fix this free-rider problem; they make it worse, because they make it even easier to profit off your association with better-run businesses. Some of these owners are in smaller media markets, but it's not just about the size of the market. Donald Sterling runs his crappy business in Los Angeles.

George Steinbrenner took a lot of heat over the years, and I talked smack about him myself. But Steinbrenner put money in the other owners' pockets. Every team the Yankees play this year is going to make money marketing Derek Jeter's farewell; every team they played last year made money from Mariano Rivera's farewell. Yankee Stadium doesn't get to market the farewell tours of beloved Royals or Indians Hall-of-Famers. The Yankees don't have paid attendance double when the Padres come to town. And they don't double the ticket prices for spring training games against the Florida Marlins. Other teams do charge extra for spring training games against the Yankees; they make a profit off Steinbrenner's payroll. Free-riding owners are at least as big a problem for competitive balance as free-spending owners.

One of the jokes about Sterling's self-immolation is that he castigated his girlfriend for "broadcast[ing]" her association with Magic Johnson. But associating with Magic Johnson has always been good for the NBA's business. He has always made them money and always improved their brand. (Magic is a likeable version of Hyman Roth -- he always makes money for his partners.) The other owners literally want to broadcast their association with Magic; they want him associated with the NBA on TV. The essence of Sterling's entire business model has been to broadcast his association with Magic Johnson, who has put fans in Sterling's seats and dollars in Sterling's bank account.

The rest of the league has carried Donald Sterling for over 30 years, and the value of his NBA franchise has increased twenty-fold in that time; that increased value has been created by the other 29 franchises, not by Sterling. Now Sterling's craziness has threatened those other 29 owners' businesses. Advertisers don't want to be in business with Donald Sterling. TV networks don't want to be in business with Donald Sterling. So the rest of the owners simply cannot afford to be in business with Donald Sterling. They're considering making him sell, at a ridiculous profit that has nothing to do with how Sterling has run his business and everything to do with how the other owners have run theirs. If Sterling fights in court, it will be likely be on anti-trust grounds; major American sports leagues essentially do operate like trusts or cartels, and need to. The joke is that if the NBA didn't operate like a trust, Sterling's Clippers would not exist at all.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Jonathan Martin Does Not Need Your Nonsense

A few weeks ago, an NFL player named Jonathan Martin, offensive left tackle for the Miami Dolphins, walked off the team and sought counseling for emotional health issues. This has led to the suspension of his teammate, the incongruously-named Richie Incognito, on charges of outlandish workplace harassment; an official NFL investigation into the team, now reaching to behavior by the coaches; and the kind of publicity you just can't buy. Plenty of NFL players, sports pundits, and armchair tough guys have denounced the 6'5", 312-pound Martin as soft and weak and proclaimed that outsiders just can't understand what goes on in an NFL locker room. While I don't accept that locker rooms are sacred spaces that outsiders have no right to criticize, it is true that we don't have a great sense of what is going on inside them. Maybe Miami's locker room is unusually dysfunctional, and maybe it's dysfunctional in ways that every NFL locker rooms is. But in either case, Martin may not be any weaker than the other players. He may simply have more options.

Martin played for Stanford and majored in classical history. He's a 6'5" behemoth who's fluent in Latin. His parents are attorneys who met at Harvard, and he turned down a chance be a fourth-generation Harvard student in order to play for nationally-ranked Stanford. (It's worth noting that Martin is bi-racial and the longest Harvard legacy in his family is on the African-American side, going back to a great-grandfather in the 1920s.)

Those facts may lend themselves to a familiar narrative about the privileged kid who isn't used to doing things the hard way. But playing football for Stanford is not really the easy way. Martin played on a top-ten, nationally ranked team; that team could not have competed that successfully unless the football training was extremely rigorous. Playing football for Harvard, on the other hand, would be much easier. The football part of playing football for Stanford isn't significantly different than playing football for Nebraska, Mississippi, or UCLA. What is different is that Stanford football players (and excuse my pride here) also have an extremely rigorous academic program, comparable to any Ivy League school's. At Stanford, football practice is like football practice at Nebraska and class is like class at Harvard. Which part of that sounds like the easy way?

But Martin's background does give him options that many other NFL players don't have. I don't think Martin is the only player who's felt like he can't take the abuse any more. The difference is that most other players have to take it anyway, even when they can't. Where else are they going to go?

If Jonathan Martin never plays football again, he will certainly not see NFL-style money for many years, and possibly never earn as much over the course of his working life. The NFL is paying him seven figures a year. But the total sacrifice of lifetime income may actually not be that large, and there is a real possibility that over the next thirty years Martin could make as much outside the game as he would if he stays in the NFL. He is one of the players most likely to replace his football income by other means. That money would come slower and be less glamorous. But if he went back to Stanford to finish his classics degree and then went into law or finance, he might make upper-middle-class money or better very quickly, and potentially pull down seven figures a year near the end of his career. Instead of making millions for a few years in his twenties, and then some lesser income, he could make a lesser income and then a huge one. Or he could decide that making a six-figure salary in a workplace where no one calls him a "half nigger," talks about "shit[ting] in his mouth," threatens to gang-rape his sister, or shakes him down for $15,000 is better than making millions while being relentlessly extorted and degraded. Jonathan Martin can afford, in the most literal sense, not to put up with that shit.

The average NFL player, on the other hand, does in fact need to take that shit. A great many NFL players cannot afford to walk away. They do not have the choice between making their NFL salaries and making a dignified living as an affluent professional somewhere else. They have the choice between making millions of dollars, no matter the cost to them personally, and making working-class money. If they left the game, many of them would simply be large men without college degrees. For many, their partial college educations were not a genuine preparation for any other field. For most players, there is no other plan. It's the NFL or nothing.

Nothing is more human than resenting someone who is free to walk away from abuse that you have to accept. It isn't reasonable or fair, but it is very, very human. If you have to take as much as your coaches and teammates dish out without showing that it bothers you, and you've developed whatever coping strategies you need to keep accepting that mistreatment, there's no one you hate more than the guy who doesn't have to take it. You can't afford to hate the people who actually beat up on your body and your mind. You have to tell yourself you don't. So there's lots of resentment waiting to be transferred to the guy who decides he's too good to take the abuse that you have to take. What makes him special? It isn't fair. And actually, it isn't, although it's not the guy who's refusing the mistreatment who's to blame.

And let's be very clear: people defending Incognito's behavior or denigrating Martin's have talked about the hazing and bullying, always in vague generalizations, as necessary "toughening." But when you get down to the specific behaviors involved, it's never about making the younger player tougher. It's about making them compliant and docile to authority, beating them down and forcing them to accept any abuse whatever petty tyrant in the locker room decides to dish out. Being "tough" in this context means being a better victim. No one who demands that you give them $15,000 so they can take a trip to Las Vegas is doing that to build your character. And forking over the money does not make you strong. It makes you a chump. That is what the hazing in Miami's locker room was designed to do: not to make the younger players strong, but to break their will, to make them pushovers, terrified to miss a "voluntary" extra practice, afraid to do anything that would displease a coach.

Most of our public conversation about the NFL lately has been about concussions and brain damage. But we cannot have any serious conversation about player health when the players themselves have been cowed this way. An NFL culture that prizes obedience above anything else, that demands players accept any abuse they receive in silence, can never protect its players' health. The whole system is designed to destroy them.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Why It's Hard to Smear Jason Collins (and Not as Easy to Smear Keynes)

cross-posted from Dagblog

It's been a tough week for elite gay-baiting. First Howie Kurtz, hack journalist extraordinaire, lost his job at the Daily Beast because he badly botched an attempt to smear NBA center Jason Collins. Part of what Kurtz botched was the facts, claiming that Collins had concealed the fact that he had once been engaged to a woman when Collins had "concealed" that fact by explicitly stating it in his Sports Illustrated coming-out article. ("When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged," is pretty straightforward.) Kurtz, to his credit, has made a full apology.

Then, Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson (also a columnist for the Daily Beast) was also forced to apologize after publicly gay-baiting landmark economist John Maynard Keynes. Ferguson decided to tell an audience that Keynes wasn't interested in long-term policy effects (itself a gross distortion of Keynes's position) because Keynes was a homosexual in a childless marriage. Yes, really. That's the standard of logic and evidence to which Ferguson holds himself.

It's heartening that both of these outrageous pieces of queer-baiting blew up in the queer-baiters' faces. Both Kurtz and Ferguson were using well-established, traditionally effective gambits for smearing homosexuals, moves that Kurtz and Ferguson clearly expected to work because those moves have always worked before. (In fact, many other people, including Ferguson himself, have used Keynes's sexuality as a slur that supposedly discredits his economic thinking; Ferguson thought he'd get away with it because he'd gotten away with it other times.)

Let's look at Kurtz's attack in detail. His claim was that Jason Collins (of whom I myself will only say Stanford Pride) had been dishonest about the fact that he'd been engaged to a woman and deceived that woman. It's a classic anti-gay smear: gays are called dishonest because they've been in the closet, as if the source of dishonesty was not the institution of the closet itself, and the sometimes brutal social penalties for open gayness, but something intrinsic about gayness itself. Force a bunch of people to lie about their sexuality, denounce them as liars if they actually start telling the truth, and then claim that the people you've stigmatized deserve to be stigmatized because they're all naturally dishonest. The only logic here is a social logic, through which nearly any charge will stick to the despised group.

As part of this attack, Kurtz offered Collins's former fiancee as the wronged victim, whose plight the news coverage had unfairly overlooked. The basic motto here is "Won't anyone think about the poor straight girls?" Now, I would never recommend misleading a romantic partner. But it's also the case that closeted gay men have long had various kinds of relationships with women and that many gay men who've deceived their female partners have also deceived themselves on some level. (That John Maynard Keynes was gay does not mean that he did not love his wife.) But the gay-baiter's move is to play up the wrong done to the straight person in order to smear the character of the gay person, and by extension the character of gayness itself. This is how prejudice works, especially in people who don't consider themselves prejudiced: sympathy flows swiftly and easily to people in the favored categories, but is quickly withdrawn from people in stigmatized categories. You become quicker to accept negative ideas about a stigmatized person, and slower to let go of them. Here, the idea is that everyone sheds a few sentimental tears for the poor straight white girl and then turns their resentment upon the duplicitous, untrustworthy gay who did her wrong.

It didn't work, which is progress. But one reason that it didn't work is that Howard Kurtz picked on the wrong guy. Too many people are still quick to believe bad things about homosexuals. But lots of influential and powerful people are actually reluctant to believe bad things about Jason Collins personally, because they know and like him. They are quick and ready to sympathize with Collins as an individual, sexual orientation notwithstanding, because he's already part of their social network. He was inside the charmed circle before he came out of the closet, and he's staying in that circle.

The failure of Kurtz's attack validates the wisdom of letting Collins be the standard-bearer. Collins is clearly a Jackie Robinson figure, not in terms of sheer athletic talent (Collins is merely a superb world-class athlete, one of the top few thousand physical specimens on the planet; Robinson was in a level above that.) but in that, like Robinson, Collins has the social bona fides to blunt attacks on his character. Robinson had gone to USC, been a contender for the Heisman, and held a commission in World War Two. Collins is a Stanford grad. But Collins is even more of a Jackie Robinson type than Robinson, or any other black man in the 1940s, could have possibly been. Collins is socially wired in a way Robinson never was.

Collins is a college friend of Chelsea Clinton. Bill Clinton knows him personally. His college roommate was Joe Kennedy III. And those are just the highlights. Collins is enormously wealthy in social capital, meaning connections and beneficial relationships. He is black. He is gay. And he is firmly a member of the upper class. You can't just roll up on Jason Collins with some bullshit smear and make it stick. He has his people.

On the other hand, Keynes has been a punching bag among certain circles for a long time. Ferguson had to expect his queer-Keynes slur to keep working the way it always had because people were ready to have a gay man slurred but also because they were ready to have John Maynard Keynes slurred. The right wing has made a serious commitment to the idea that Keynes is disreputable. The commitment to making Keynes ridiculous was so strong that you didn't have to bother to have the charges against him make even minimal sense. (The idea that gays have no interest in posterity suggests that there would be no gay sculptors, painters, or writers. Perhaps you've heard of some.) That Ferguson was forced to apologize (this time) suggests that bigotry against gays is weakening somewhat, so that if you want to smear them you have to make it good. But it may also suggest that at this point in our ongoing depression, kneejerk rejection of economic stimulus is starting to wear thin. Maybe at this point, with austerity leading only to economic contraction, you're no longer allowed to backhand Keynes unless you make it good. One can only hope.

Balotelli e Io, Balotelli and Me

cross-posted from Dagblog

I've spent the last month or so in Rome; our last night in the city happily coincides with the 2012 Euro Cup final, with the hometown Italia Azzuri taking on defending champion Spain. (And that's a happy coincidence, too: a rematch of each team's first game of the tournament.) Naturally, we're going out to watch the match. And just as naturally, I bought a game jersey (from a pile at my neighborhood supermarket). Tonight I'll be wearing Mario Balotelli's number.

It might look funny to the Romani; in fact it certainly will. Balotelli is black, born in Palermo to immigrant parents from Ghana. I am so pale that it's faintly ludicrous, born from generations of Italian-American intermarriage with fairer, blonder spouses. His hair color is closer to mine now that he's bleached his mohawk, but it doesn't really further the resemblance. And of course, neither of us looks "Italian." Our names don't go with our faces.

If you ask some people, of course, Balotelli isn't Italian. Simply because he was born here and grew up speaking Italian as his native tongue, simply because he was adopted as an infant by the Italian parents whose family name he took when he was eighteen and because he became an official Italian citizen as soon as he reached adulthood, that doesn't make him Italian to everyone's satisfaction. For some he can never be Italian, because he's black. And certainly, Balotelli gets more than enough reminding of that.

But that's why I like him best. Because Balotelli stands for all the other things that make a national identity: loyalty, affinity, personal upbringing, rearing. He is Italian, in part, because he chooses to be, and the act of choosing his nation, declaring his loyalty as an adult, makes him more rather than less fully Italian. Balotelli is a volunteer. He wouldn't change if you asked him. If that makes him less "naturally" Italian, Italy has never had any natural, spontaneous national identity. "Italy" has always been a conscious choice and an effort of the will. Being Italian has always meant having to volunteer a little. Ask Garibaldi.

And of course Balotelli's decision wasn't just a choice. It was a recognition of a truth that can't be changed. Balotelli grew up an Italian. He lived an Italian childhood, with Italian experiences. Declaring that he doesn't belong, that he is "really" from some other country where he was not born or raised, does not give Balotelli another history or another childhood. He is who he is. And when he goes to Britain to play for his club team, he's a black Italian in the UK. There's no going back. Balotelli, without trying to, asks his fellow Italians to move forward with their own history, to think about an Italianita' for the global age, not grounded in race or skin color but in something greater: an Italianita' of the heart and the soul.

I don't know who will win the final tonight. I don't know whether Balotelli, who is brilliant but volatile on the pitch, will have a triumph or end up a goat. But I won't wait for my verdict on Balotelli himself, win or lose. E' genio. He's my guy. He's brilliant. Viva Italia, and Viva Balotelli. Balotelli, sono io.

Cleveland Is Okay. Seriously.

Friday morning, I was in Cleveland, where all the news was about LeBron James. That afternoon, I got on a plane and flew to Not Cleveland in order to attend a wedding. Now I'm back.

The wedding was delightful, except for one thing. Several people I spoke with were firmly convinced that the city of Cleveland was basically on fire. They were grateful that I had gotten out of town "before they burn it down." I blame ESPN for this.

My friends in Not Cleveland had clearly seen coverage of a few sports-bar yahoos setting their $400 LeBron replica jerseys on fire, always within three yards of an obliging TV camera, and come away with the impression that the city had erupted into wide-scale mayhem. Let me assure all my friends in Greater Not Cleveland, wherever that may be: nothing like that happened. Seriously. Everything is fine. And don't be a schmuck, okay?

Cleveland is peaceful and green this afternoon, and a bit cooler than it was when I left it. One big billboard of King James got some stuff thrown at it. That's pretty much the story. Cleveland, seriously, was safer on Thursday night than Kenmore Square is after a Red Sox win.

Where'd my friends get this idea? One slice of the blame, I'm afraid, might go to the idea that cities with large black populations are prone to civic violence. Of course, most of the yahoos burning their authentic replica game jerseys outside bars Thursday night were whiter than the foam on a Coors Light, but facts don't matter here. Some people do something stupid in a city that's perceived as black, and suddenly the rumor goes around that there's a huuuge riot in the hood. Since most people who relay these rumors are terrified of black neighborhoods anyway, and are persuaded that they will be stabbed to death the second they set foot in one, they never ever find out that the dangerous riots never happened. But seriously, my beautiful integrated soul-food-friendly neighborhood looks perfectly lovely today. Maybe the outer suburbs are undergoing some terrible convulsion, but I'm not going out there to check.

More of the blame goes to the sports media, for blowing this story so grievously out of proportion. ESPN, j'accuse. anybody who'd been watching a sports channel was clearly under the impression that LeBron personally founded Cleveland in 1787, that our entire economy was built around his three-point percentage, and that he was the sole donor of the rare blood type that keeps every area child alive. Of course, only the blood-donor part is true. And how could there not be rioting, if we were losing such a civic mainstay? If LeBron left and Cleveland didn't riot, that would mean that ... that ... that the whole LeBron story hadn't been as a big a deal as everyone on TV said it was!

I know it's hard for sportswriters and sportscasters to accept that LeBron doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things, because then they would be forced to accept that they themselves are a bunch of silly, pompous, and inconsequential people making a gigantic hullabaloo about games designed for children. Naturally, no one wants to see himself or herself this way. But nothing proves that you are a silly, pompous, and inconsequential person like making a gigantic hullabaloo about games designed for children. I love sports, too, and sports writing. Sports are part of a city's history and its mythology about itself. But have a sense of proportion, dudes. LeBron James is not an actual king. Seriously. When you treat a routine contract decision like it's the Battle of Waterloo, you're proving that you're just a goofball.

And alas, part of the blame has to go to my adopted hometown of Cleveland itself, for participating in the hype and for turning this thing into a big, soppy aria. Shame on every Clevelander who actually went around acting like LeBron personally founded our city, sustained our economy, and kept our children alive. And more shame still on the Clevelanders who still go around acting that way. Acting like Cleveland has nothing going for it but a single celebrity is a slander on the city, and a logical contradiction while we're at it. (If the only good thing about Cleveland were really LeBron James, why would he stay?) But acting like LeBron leaving is the worst thing that ever happened to this city is a great way to convince the rest of the world that nothing good has ever happened here, or ever will. And when people from other places believe that, it seriously get harder to make Cleveland a better place.

(The perfect takedown of this self-destructive behavior can be found here, courtesy of E. from the CLE.)

Now, in the interests of fair disclosure, I am an adopted Clevelander, and the Cavs aren't my primary sporting loyalty. I still root for the teams I grew up rooting for, and give Cleveland teams the leftover love. If that rules me out of this conversation, so be it. I don't actually believe that LeBron owed it to anybody to stay, or that moving to a new city is "disloyalty." If I didn't believe that people were entitled to change cities for career reasons, I wouldn't be in Cleveland to begin with. But I was disgusted by LeBron's arrogant and narcissistic hour-long TV special dedicated to his own self-importance, and once he announced his little Personal Announcement Special I was happy to see the back of him. But that said, let me clue you in on a little adopted-Clevelander secret:

None of the Clevelanders moaning and wailing about LeBron leaving are really disappointed.

None of the people who are complaining about his disloyalty are surprised. They have always been utterly convinced that he would leave them, and now that it has finally happened they are secretly pleased that they were right.

I have heard people in Cleveland talking about how LeBron was going to leave since the first week I got here, back before his previous contract was signed. Some people here have been talking about LeBron leaving since before the Bush/Kerry election. And now they're finally right.

I hope they're happy. Seriously.

Patriots' Day Follow-up (Boston Marathon)

2:05:52? You've got to be kidding me! 2:08:41 is only good for fourth place?

That's amazing. Two American men run sub 2:10 marathons, and that gets them fourth and fifth? Tough, tough race.

Let me say congratulations to Robert Cheruiyot the Younger for absolutely smashing the Boston course record set by his namesake, Robert Cheruiyout the Slightly Older. That's an amazing achievement, and a great day for Boston and for sport. Congratulations are also in order for women's champ Teyba Erkesso, in her first Boston ever. Well done!

But at the same time, let me also express my distress that Ryan Hall broke the American record at the Boston Marathon today, and still came in fourth, with Meb Keflezighi behind him in fifth. That's heartbreaking.

Am I being a big jingoistic nationalist about this? Should I just revel in the wonder of the world's greatest marathon, and the incredible heights of competition, without weeping in my Gatorade over Ryan and Meb? Maybe, but today I have to do both. It's Patriots' Day, after all.