My Way, Which Is God's Way

The other day I had one of the more unpleasant cinematic experiences I've had in years: I saw Evan Leong's documentary Linsanity, about Jeremy Lin, the Chinese-American pro basketball player who exploded into fame like a supernova a couple of years ago.  Because Leong began working on the film before Lin became famous (while he was playing for Harvard, if memory serves), I hoped it would be intelligent, serious, thoughtful.  It turned out to be the sort of thing you'd expect to see on ESPN, a hagiography about a young American of humble origins, seeking and finding his dream.  The main difference, I think (I don't watch enough TV to say for sure), was Linsanity's stress on Lin's Christian faith. That wasn't news to me, of course, but it quickly became obnoxious, combining fundamentalism with Culture of Therapy and Sports Cult jargon for a truly toxic mix.  It culminated in a sequence of Lin making a shot on CGI water, which ought to be blasphemous (JL = JC?); it was followed by Lin himself saying that with enough faith he could walk on water.

Leong and Lin both had to grapple with the inconvenient fact that God had made Lin's career pretty rocky.  When he broke his ankle before his senior year of high school, which stopped his team's progress toward the state championship, he explained the injury as divine chastisement for his pride and ego.  Couldn't it have been a stumbling-block put in his way by Satan to frustrate God's plan and keep Jeremy from his messianic destiny?  In any case Lin remained sure that God was watching his every move, and had a plan for him, but it didn't necessarily involve a successful career in basketball, however much Lin tried to convince himself it did.   At one point he said that he wanted to play basketball "my way -- which is God's way."  Funny how often believers tend to equate the two.  "God's way" apparently turns out to be a return to obscurity, as the New York Knicks gave him up to the Houston Rockets, where his performance was less than stellar.

After Lin began his hot streak, Satan (or God) threw another stumbling block in his path, when his opponent Kobe Bryant of the Lakers was asked by reporters what he thought of Lin.  Bryant replied that he had no idea who Lin was.  So the game was framed as a one-on-one between the two titans, and after the Knicks' victory, a reporter asked Lin what he had to say to Bryant.  Lin tells Leong that he'd thought about what he would say, and considered something like "Has he heard of me now?" but then asked himself what Jesus would do, and decided to go with something milder.  ("You'll have to ask him," or words to that effect.)  This made me giggle.  Jesus, according to the gospels, loved snarky comebacks to his opponents when he didn't merely threaten them with hellfire.  "Has he heard of me now?" sounds quite Christlike to me.  One of my favorite examples is Luke 13:31-33: 

³¹ At that very hour some Pharisees came, and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” ³² And he said to them, “Go and tell that fox, ‘Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I finish my course. ³³ Nevertheless I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following; for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem.’"

If Lin were really serious about his faith, he'd ask himself whether Jesus would play professional basketball; I think it's a safe bet he wouldn't.

And hey -- isn't Kobe Bryant a Christian too?  Turns out he's Catholic.  I imagine most professional athletes in the US are at least nominally Christian, even if they don't all flaunt their religiosity as publicly as Tim Tebow.  And that's why I find the story of Lin's faith so obnoxious: in order for him to achieve his dream, someone else has to fail, to lose, to be defeated.  Lin's god takes sides in the vast corporate multibillion dollar world of professional sport, and that's not a god I'd want to encourage.  Nor do I think much of those who worship such a god.

The university cinema was almost full that day, mostly with Asian and Asian-American students and families.  That saddened me.  Sure, in one narrow sense it's good that Lin broke through to professional basketball.  Every stereotype should be broken, and watching the movie boggled my mind all over again at the racism of American sport, which found it surprising that a Chinese-American kid could play basketball at the highest level.  (To say nothing of Chinese in general.  It occurred to me as I watched Linsanity that Yao Ming had already broken that stereotype, and to my surprise, Leong actually interviewed Yao for the film.)  If I'd thought about it before, I'd have guessed that Asian Americans had better things to do with their time and energy, but it never would have occurred to me that they couldn't play well if they worked at it.  But Lin's rise to notoriety shocked the sports world, and typically, many Asians celebrated Lin's success as their own.

R U Ready 2 Riot?

I can hear the yowling of the students across the street, so the IU-Kentucky game must have started. City authorities have been preparing for this one: there will be no parking on the main student avenue, to make it less likely that cars will be overturned by celebrants, as happened in December; and to make it easier for police to "control" the crowds. But don't worry, the police don't use billy clubs or tear gas or tasers on students who are high on Hoosier Hysteria. They don't even arrest a lot of them.
The front page of the local newspaper on the right (you can click on the picture to enlarge it) is dedicated to tonight's game, though an item below the fold describes the increased police presence arranged for the downtown area and campus. That includes the fountain in the photo below, because it's a campus tradition to steal the dolphins from it when IU wins an important game.
I'm not just venting because I'm a cranky old man who wants to deprive students of the only meaningful memories they'll have from their college days (though I wonder how much they'll actually remember anyway, given the level of alcohol consumption expected tonight). I live far enough from the free-property-damage zone that I probably won't hear the noise. As I wrote before, what bothers me is that the same people who denounce the Occupy movement for violence, disorder, and filth just smile benignly at the greater disorder that routinely accompanies college and professional athletics.

UPDATE: If you follow college basketball, you probably know that Kentucky defeated Indiana, 102-90. Last night around 1 a.m. I heard a bunch of young men screaming "Fuck this shit! Fuck this shit!" outside on the street. They were at a student-inhabited house across the street, and when I peeked out I saw that they were throwing trash-can lids down on the sidewalk to express their anguish at the loss. Unfortunately the lids were plastic, so they didn't make much noise, and one or two of them, bawling "Fuck them!" broke a couple of beer bottles. "Guys ... c'mon," one of them exhorted the others. After a couple of minutes they moved on. Poor babies, they didn't even get to overturn a car. Whatever happened to justice?

This reminded me that a week or so back I was awakened in the middle of the night by a chorus of male voices chanting rhythmically, "Fuck the Boilermakers, Fuck the Boilers!" as they walked home from the downtown bars. Too bad, it looks like Calipari creamed on Crean's face last night, har har har. It's the sort of thing that made America great. ... I am so relieved that IU is out of the competition; it could only have gotten worse as they moved to the finals.

UPDATE 2: I just found this post-loss lamentation on the student newspaper's website:

It just wasn’t the same.

The Bloomington Police Department cars were there, the crowds were there, the cream and crimson shirts were there, but it just wasn’t the same.

Four months ago, the last time IU Coach Tom Crean and his Hoosiers took on the Kentucky Wildcats, this street had to be closed to vehicular traffic because an army of Hoosiers had stormed the intersection of Kirkwood Avenue and Dunn Street.

Four months ago, cars were destroyed, music blared out of apartment windows and fans jumped and sang and danced and shouted.

But this time, after IU fell to Kentucky 90-102 Friday night, fans held their heads low and migrated from Nick’s English Hut and Kilroy’s on Kirkwood to go back home after a long, hard evening.

Let me hear ya say "Awwwwwww...." Poor babies.

Cavalcade of Sports Fans

I'm not sure which of these celebrations of college Basketball is more repulsive. (Tom Crean is Indiana's coach; John Calipari is Kentucky's. Just in case you were wondering if "Crean" was a spelling error.) But when I passed them on my way downtown today, I had to record them for posterity.

I just finished reading quite a good book, A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science, Technology and Development (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997) by the Indian sociologist Shiv Visvanathan. (I gather from his writing that he was originally trained as a botanist.) There's a lot of good stuff in the book, but this aside is relevant here:

Have you ever listened to [Indian journalists’] commentaries on cricket or hockey? There is hysteria in every sentence as if there is a deathblow in every ball. Most of India lived the war through newspapers. Between the evening video thirst and morning tea, the audience went war mad. The media was to blame. They drove the Hindu need for the killer instinct from the sports page to the front page headlines. They wanted the [Mizo National Front] eliminated immediately. These journalists saw a Pol Pot in every educated peasant but did not realize that Pol Pot was actually closer to them. They wanted to eliminate populations on behalf of all the right words -- the Nation, Security, Development, Progress [209].

Visvanathan is talking about the war for secession of the state of Mizoram, in Northeastern India, though I'm having trouble reconciling his account, especially its dates, with versions I find online. That's not why I quoted this passage, though. It was that bit about "hysteria in every sentence as if there is a deathblow in every ball." I've often said that sports are of no importance whatever, though fans (which include media commentators) think otherwise: not only that, they think the outcome of a game is of virtually cosmic significance. When you add the confusion of sports with war -- the use of war metaphors in sports commentary and of sports metaphors in war commentary -- it becomes wholly obnoxious. (To say nothing of the patriotic displays that go along with, say, pro football games and halftime shows.) Some apologists claim that sports are a safety valve for human aggression that might otherwise turn into war fever; I think sports keep the us/them mentality under steam, ready to be released when a suitable enemy is found.

Stuff like these sheets just increases my contempt for the whole business. Obviously the boys who live in that house have been watching too much gay porn, hence the bukkakke reference on the sheet on the left. (And remember the "teabagging" of a passed-out LSU fan by Alabama fans in a clean, well-lit sports bar two months ago? The symbolism is similar.) And connecting Kentucky to the notorious Ugandan guerilla Joseph Kony is beyond stupid in its irrelevance and viciousness. On the one hand, it trivializes real-life atrocities by connecting them to a sports rivalry of no importance; on the other hand, it inflates the importance of that sports rivalry-- don't believe any fan who tells you It's Just a Game, because fans don't think so. It's the kind of mentality that thought that the killing of Osama Bin Laden was as important as the Superbowl, and the killing of Muammar Gaddafy was as much fun as coming all over a porn star's face.

This ...

... is totally gay. And I mean that in the most positive, multicultural, lust-filled way I possibly can.

Even I haven't been able to avoid the Jeremy Lin phenomenon, best described by Andrew Ti at Deadspin as the way an "Asian player who, through a combination of circumstance, luck, timing, and some monster performances, has captured America's admittedly infantile and famously fickle imagination." Still, the first full article I read about him was Alexander Chee's slobbering encomium at Salon today, comments under which led me to Ti's article and from there to the clip above. Here's the thing. Sure, it's nice that another racial line has been breached. It might even make a difference to Asian-American kids who are currently the most-bullied ethnic demographic in the country, but anti-black racism is still epidemic despite the high visibility of African-American college and professional athletes. Jeremy Lin has earned his success, but it has no real importance or significance.

It occurs to me, though: what will happen when we finally get an openly gay basketball star of the same prowess?

His Eye Is on the Bulldog

My minister friend on Facebook is at it again:

Worship this morning was such a gift...amazing music by the choir...great hymns... Friend's college age son came and asked, on way to church, "Will this guy keep me awake?" Told her that was pressure. Meeting with a few key leaders over lunch...and then organ concert by Charles Webb tonight. I am thankful. (And Butler and Bloomington South both won big games!) God is good...and still adjusting my heart.

If Butler University and one of the local high schools won big basketball games, a person of faith can see the hand of God in it, and God is good. Not so good to the defeated opponents, of course, but they must have done something to deserve their losses. And it's all part of the plan, right?

My friend's god couldn't do anything to prevent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, China, or Japan, but that would be a lot of work. But his eye is on the Bulldog.

And, let me remind you, my friend isn't one of those Bible-thumping fundalits like Pat Robertson. He's a respectable Christian, the kind by whom I'm often exhorted to judge Christianity. I judge Christianity by other standard-bearers, like the Jesus of the gospels, but if you want me to judge the faith by people like my friend, so be it.