Dennis Loo's Open Salon Blog

Is Indiana Trying to Lose to Miami?

Tue, 22 May 2012 22:05:37 -0400

I stopped watching it early in the third quarter because it's too painful. The game plan for the Indiana Pacers in tonight's game five in the best of seven Eastern conference playoffs reminds me of the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale in the 1980s against George H. W. Bush. Is Indiana trying to lose to the Miami Heat the way Mondale took a dive in the 1988 race?

There is no way that the Heat should be dominating the rest of the series when Chris Bosh is out and Indiana has the distinct advantage in the paint. If they lose it will be because the Indiana coach didn't recognize what should be patently obvious about their advantage inside and allowed the players to struggle and continue to launch bad 3 point shots from the perimeter that lead to Heat fast breaks and those damn Wade and James' dunks.

What Andrew Bynum Should Have Said

Fri, 11 May 2012 02:05:27 -0400

After being embarrassed by the Denver Nuggets tonight in Game 6 of their first round NBA playoff series, with the Nuggets winning the last two games to tie the series at 3 all, Laker center Andrew Bynum was asked in the locker room why the Lakers - with the notable exception of Kobe Bryant who scored 31 points despite suffering from the stomach flu that required two IV's before the game - did not come out with the intensity that the Nuggets did.

Bynum said "We'll have to figure that out."

What Bynum should have said was: "That's on me. I didn't come out with the intensity that I should have. And it's on me. I'm not going to make that mistake again. I guarantee it. We are going to win game 7 in LA and I'm going to make sure of it."

Yes, Nuggets coach George Karl is a coaching genius and yes, Karl came out with a game plan that his players implemented perfectly to immediately double-team Bynum as soon as Bynum touched the ball in the post, neutralizing Bynum, but if Bynum had played like the game mattered then he could have overcome Denver's defense.

You don't lose games like the Lakers with their talent level unless you are being out hustled. And while Mike Brown is not the equal of George Karl as a coach, the Lakers should still win ... if Bynum does some growing up between now and Saturday's Game 7.

That's a big if because Bynum has not yet shown that he has matured enough to shoulder the responsibility that his talent and size provide him.

Teams (and societies) don't rise to the occasion and triumph over adversity and prove themselves to be champions unless their leaders step up and put the team on their shoulders. Kobe does this but you don't win NBA championships without a one-two punch (as Shaq put it the other day). Bynum is the guy who has to step up.

(As for Pau Gasol, I don't know what's happened to him. He seems to have given up trying to take the ball to the hoop and settles all too often for an outside jumper which he doesn't even make often enough.)

Burning Qurans and Burning Empires: Afghanistan in Turmoil

Sat, 3 Mar 2012 15:03:47 -0500

In today's New York Times (3/3/12) the paper writes about the February 21st burning by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan of Muslim holy books, including at least four Qurans, which has sparked nationwide riots, citing the conclusions of a joint commission of three Afghan security officers and an American official:

"the military personnel involved in making the decision to get rid of the Korans and those who carried out the order did not set out to defile the Muslim holy book.

“'There was no maliciousness, there was no deliberateness, there was not an intentional disrespect of Islam,' he said."

I wonder if the writer of this story, Alissa Rubin, and/or her editors, are aware that this distinction that the joint commission is trying to make is a distinction without a difference. If you have already made the decision to "get rid of the Korans" by burning them in a big pile of books (over 1200 confiscated holy books and other books, taken from the prisoners being held by the U.S.), then where does the lack of "deliberateness" even enter the picture? How is the fact that the actors in this drama might not have "intentionally" meant to disrespect Islam change the fact that they decided to "get rid of the books" in the first place and thereby showed their disrespect by their actions?

Let us consider this from the perspective of fundamentalist Christians: suppose it is they who are being held captive by Muslims who are an occupying army in a heavily Christian nation. The Muslim authorities find that some of their American Christian prisoners have made marginal notes in English in their Bibles, which their Muslim captors can't read, and the prison authorities suspect that these Christians may be actually passing notes to each other and "organizing." The Muslim captors confiscate the Bibles and other holy books and decide to burn them.

What would the response be of the other fundamentalist Christians in the occupied Christian nation? If one of those under occupation was a certain Rick Santorum, who nearly vomited when reading JFK's speech asserting the centrality of the separation between church and state, what would be his response, since he thinks that his holy book, the Bible, contains the literal words of God? What would all of the other fundamentalist Christians do who also think that the Bible consists of the literal words of God, just like their fellow Abrahambic Muslim bretheren who think that the Quaran contains the literal words of God? Would they not respond in a similar manner?

Would Santorum's near vomiting result in his being force fed by his Muslim captors to ensure that this prisoner, this terrorist, was not signaling to his fellow terrorists that he and they should carry out a protest/hunger strike?

For the rest of this essay, please see DennisLoo.com where this was first posted.

Jeremy Lin, "Coming from Nowhere," and Hiding in Plain Sight

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:02:36 -0500

When a player is playing that well, he doesn’t come out of nowhere. It seems like he comes out of nowhere. Go back and take a look, and the skill level was probably there from the beginning, it’s just that we didn’t notice it.

– Kobe Bryant on Jeremy Lin after the Knicks beat the Lakers on February 10, 2012

As everyone who pays any attention to sports knows by now, Jeremy Lin has been burning up the town. In New York point guard Lin has become a huge sensation, breathing major hope into New Yorkers’ dreams of glory for the Knicks, at long last and after many years of frustration. Spike Lee, a fixture at Knicks’ games, was positively giddy recently doing take-offs on Lin’s name in rhymes.

In his first four NBA games as a starter he scored more points than anyone since they started compiling stats on the NBA in 1976-1977, exceeding Allan Iverson, Michael Jordan and other prodigies of basketball. In his first six games he has exceeded the gaudy numbers put up by Shaquille O’Neal in Shaq’s first six NBA games.

Since Lin started for the Knicks at point, they have won six games in a row. In the fourth game of that series he outscored (and outplayed) future Hall of Famer and the best active player on the planet Kobe Bryant 38 points to 34.

If Hollywood wrote a movie script with these facts no one would believe the tale.

Like Lin, I’m a Harvard grad and Asian-American. Like him, I also love basketball and I used to be pretty good at it, although not anywhere near his ability. At 6’ 3” he’s six inches taller than me and I’m no great leaper. (Michael Jordan has a brother who is also 5’ 9” who I have heard Jordan talk about as being just as determined a ball player as him, but unfortunately, a good foot shorter than his Airness.)

If I were still young enough to play the game with others a lot younger than myself, I’d say that Lin’s emergence is wonderful because I’d be taken more seriously right off the bat by others in pickup games on the U.S. mainland who used to look at me before and think, “this guy must not be a player, he’s Asian, and he ain’t tall” and so when I gave up the ball to someone in a game, I wouldn’t get it back unless I stole the ball on defense.

I can’t tell you what it feels like to see a fellow Asian-American starring on the court in MSG, the most famous arena in sports, and hearing the crowd chant “MVP, MVP, MVP.” Watching the NBA is a different experience for me – and I’m a long time avid NBA fan - now that Lin’s in the game, in a way that it wasn’t when Yao Ming was playing. I couldn’t really relate to Yao who is physically so dramatically different from me and also because I was a guard like Lin. It’s hard to describe how different it is. It’s just that I feel more in the game and the rest of the players look different to me than they used to.

But that’s not mainly what I want to talk about. I want to talk about why it was hard for so many people – in fact, everyone in the NBA in authority who had a look at him on their teams – to recognize what they had in Lin. Even now, after six games in a row, including hitting the winning shot with .5 seconds left on the clock last night against Toronto, swishing a three-pointer from the top of the key, ice in his veins as he dribbled the ball waiting for the clock to tick down to nearly nothing, you have so-called sports experts, as some retired hockey player on ESPN last night said, “I’ll believe it when he’s done this over sixty games, not just six.”

What?!

Lin was undrafted, despite being the star on the Harvard squad and leading the team to a near upset of perennial powerhouse UConn, and he spent time on the Houston Rockets and Golden State Warriors with little playing time before being released and ending up on the Knicks’ bench. He was only brought onto the floor as their starter out of desperation: Mike D’Antoni, the Knicks’ coach, had no one suitable for the point position. On ABC’s morning show today, Lin was incorrectly described as a “late bloomer”: Lin led his Palo Alto high school team to the state championship and actually wanted to go to Stanford to play but scouts showed little interest, despite his being named the player of the year. Harvard was his second choice.

So why didn’t people who should know better notice it? Why are some people still skeptics?

I’ve only seen Lin play one whole game, his game against the Lakers on Friday, but this is what I saw: a guy who plays a lot like two-time MVP point guard Steve Nash but who can penetrate the lane more aggressively and consistently. His ability to handle the ball, to stay on top of his feet and in balance, to see the whole court and open teammates, to make the right decision at the right time (pass when he should and shoot when he should, as Coach Jeff Van Gundy has said), and to break down defenses, are all there. He doesn’t have extraordinary speed but neither does Nash, who I think is actually a tad bit slow by NBA standards, but because he and Nash both move with great agility, they are able to get away from others and get to where they want with surprising ease, almost as if they’re operating in a different time zone than their opponents.

Why wouldn’t the experts see what Lin could do? Why wasn’t this evident on the practice floor to the coaching staffs? D’Antoni, who Lin describes as an “absolute offensive genius,” is as astonished as anyone.

Some were saying before the Knicks met the Lakers that teams would adjust to Lin and find ways to neutralize him and that his jumper was suspect and that his extraordinary results for three games in a row were therefore going to come back to earth. The data’s in. They’ve attempted to neutralize him with specific game plans and haven’t been able to: Lin is a legitimate star. His game is so fundamentally sound that you can’t say that somehow these last six games have been a fluke. His only weakness so far has been to commit turnovers and his D isn’t the greatest, but if he can keep leading his team to victories, then who’s to argue?

The fact that Ivy League basketball is considered second class next to Kentucky’s, where the 2010 number one NBA draft pick John Wall played and who Lin outplayed in the summer league, has to be a major part of the answer of why he’s been overlooked and also, and probably more importantly, the fact that Lin is Asian-American. Lin’s high school coach originally dismissed ideas that racial stereotyping was in play with Lin being overlooked, but he later changed his mind when he saw the way an African-American player was courted by recruiters who did not have anywhere close to Lin’s talent.

“[T]hroughout his career, Lin has had to deal with suggestions that he doesn’t fit the image of a baller. Lin’s high school coach, Peter Diepenbrock, frequently tells the story that the first time Lin was selected for the annual Pro-Am exhibition at San Francisco’s Kezar Pavilion, a security guard told him he was in the wrong place: ‘No volleyball here tonight, sir — it’s basketball.’ He dealt with racism from across the line, even in Ivy games, with crowds and opposing players talking about Chinese take-out and suggesting that he should be playing violin instead of hoops. Even now, when people talk about his ‘sneaky, unexpected athleticism’ and ‘high IQ,’ there’s a feeling that these terms are being used to push him back into the box that he’s threatening to explode.” (Jeff Yang)

Right after Lin led the Knicks to victory over the Lakers on Friday, there was this:

“Then this was tweeted:

“Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight.

“That racist remark came from Jason Whitlock, a Fox Sports columnist. Whitlock later apologized for his attempt at humor. But it was another reminder that racism is still very much around us.” (Edwin Torres)

In two incidents recently Asian-American soldiers have died due to overt and relentless racism aimed at them by their fellow soldiers and commanding officer, including fellow soldiers hurling rocks at one of them. So it would be wrong to underestimate how racism has been a major factor in the disregard of Lin as a baller until he was finally given a chance in a third game in a row for a weary and depleted Knicks team by a coach who is supposed to be the very best in the game at using pick and roll offense schemes and who therefore should have seen that Lin was exactly what the doctor ordered for his team.

But I want to mostly talk about why it’s hard to see things when they’re there but they’re not there until you see them.

People mostly see the world through the lens of what already is, not what could be. It is much harder to see something in embryonic form or imagine what could be, even when the evidence is there, when you’re accustomed to seeing things in a certain way.

Lin’s been overlooked because people didn’t see the usual package – a Black or White player - and therefore his abilities on the court were not properly recognized. According to Mike Brown, the Lakers coach, Mitch Kupchak, Lakers’ GM, was interested in Lin, but Brown didn’t know anything about Lin so they passed on the opportunity to sign him when Houston released him and before the Knicks picked him up. This is particularly unfortunate for the Lakers given that Lin is exactly what they need and what they tried to get when they signed Chris Paul only to have the deal nullified by NBA commissioner David Stern.

Just as so many so-called experts have not recognized the mad skillz that Lin has and had, people also fail to see whom they should be paying attention to and what they should be seeing in politics and other affairs. It takes the ability to see beneath the surface appearance of things and penetrate to the essence to really know what’s going on.

One need only consider the déjà vu that people ought to be having now that the U.S. government is preparing the ground to attack Iran using the same basic playbook they used in the run up to the war upon Iraq. They are trying to scare the people with “They’re going to use NUKES on us!”

Oh, scary. Oh, I’m so afraid. Oh, but of course – let’s bomb ‘em out of existence! American and Israeli lives are more important than Iranians. Yay team America and team Israel! Woo hoooo!

The suppression and oppression of the people under the existing political and economic system creates a system in great dynamic and ongoing tension. The underlying forces in play aren’t apparent on the surface unless you’re basing your analysis on the centrality of this underlying tension. What is possible is a dramatic turn of events and profoundly different alignment of political power, but this prospect needs to be seen while it is still embryonic – e.g., the Occupy movement – to take advantage of what is there in situ. The people’s widely felt sentiments in opposition to what is and who rules and how must be focused and unleashed.

Then, a different scene can unfold, sweeping away this exploitive system that rests for its continued existence upon systematic lies and brutal force. Like Jeremy Lin, the Occupy movement arose out of seemingly nowhere. But if you’re paying attention, you could see that this is not something surprising at all, but something that was hiding in plain sight.

"Changing the behavior and nature of public policy, et al requires a structural change, and said structural change must be led by individuals who enlist the support of others to supplant the existing leaders and the existing structures. Change, in other words, requires leadership and groups of people acting in concert with each other and under that leadership... The bottom line, the fundamental division in our society, is between, on the one hand, those whose interests rest upon dominance and the drive towards monopolizing the society and planet’s resources and, on the other hand, those whose interests lie in the husbanding of those resources for the good of the whole rather than the part. The startling evidence of the neoliberals’ bankruptcy surrounds us everyday, and grows starker as time moves on. Their attacks on the people grow more vociferous and damaging by the day. The prospect of a radically different future from that spreading nightmare exists in embryonic form today.

"Which path will be taken? The world awaits. The future beckons. Who will answer the call?" (Globalization and the Demolition of Society, p. 357)

First published at DennisLoo.com.

Occupy: What It's Done and What Remains to Be Done

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:02:00 -0500

Originally posted at DennisLoo.com:

Yesterday (February 9, 2012) David Carr at The New York Times wrote an article about Occupy entitled: “The Occupy Movement May Be in Retreat But Its Ideas Are Advancing.” He points out that Obama’s SOTU address took up the rhetoric of Occupy and quotes an Occupy participant, “Brendan Burke, a protester, said the president’s State of the Union speech ‘was all our message. It was great. I mean, he didn’t mention Occupy Wall Street, he doesn’t have to. The conversation in the culture has changed now, over four months, and it’s a blessing.’”

As I’ve written previously, OWS did win a major victory that will last into the indefinite future: it has changed the conversation by substituting the 1% v. 99% frame for what was there before – “I’ve got mine, don’t you envy me?” This is enormously important and points to the significance and power of social movements such as Occupy and how paltry or useless by comparison hitching your wagon to electoral campaigns is. Obama would not have made economic fairness the centerpiece of his SOTU if Occupy had not happened and if instead progressives had devoted themselves to lobbying the White House and the Democratic Party.

The 1960s’ social insurgencies changed the conversation in a similar fashion:

In the 1960s, liberal elites argued that concessions (e.g., the War on Poverty) needed to be made to the insurgents lest a conflagration result. Conservatives argued that concessions would only fuel the fires of insurgency and a crackdown was what was needed. The Sixties insurgency breached the public agenda ordinarily generated by elites. A society-wide debate raged over whether the key social problem was crime or social injustice.

The crime issue, as authored initially by conservative elites in the Sixties, was challenged largely successfully by social movement activists who argued forcefully that social injustice, not crime, was the central social problem of the day. This is one of the key reasons—probably by far the most important reason—that the public did not adopt the elite discourse that crime and social protest were one and the same. The Sixties’ insurgencies created significant splits—for a short time—within elite ranks. The insurgencies’ influence prevented crime from emerging at the top of the MIP [Most Important Problem in the Nation] polls during the Sixties, because the public was split in its views and its loyalties, with the majority faction favoring the insurgencies. (Globalization and the Demolition of Society, p. 113)

While the ascension of the 99% vs. the 1% motif is very important – you can’t mobilize people and you can’t change things if you can’t create a competing interpretive frame to the dominant one – at this point the only thing that the Democrats are doing is, on the one hand, trying to co-opt the movement with their rhetoric, with their actual actions on the policy front to be negligible, and, on the other hand, forcefully suppressing the Occupy Movement’s protests. The recent violent crackdown on Occupy Oakland is a sterling example of this, as was the prior co-ordination by the White House and DHS of the evictions of the Occupy encampments and Obama’s signing of the National Defense Authorization Act. Obama is at his best when he can sound superficially wonderful. But that is where it stops. He is not going to do anything more than sound superficially good if he has anything to do with it and he isn't absolutely forced to do otherwise.

It's worthwhile going into more depth on this last point.

See DennisLoo.com for the rest of this article.