Douchebag of the Week (Week Ending 10/19/19): Lebron James

"Shut up and dribble. " - Laura Ingraham

It has become something of a tragedy that life in these here United States should be accompanied by the inordinate amount of attention paid to the least -intelligent and relevant among us. That, in fact, the less-intelligent and less-relevant you are, the more attention you should receive.

Americans were always known for thinking Big Ideas and then going out and doing Big Things, and very often these Big Thoughts and Deeds were indicative of a culture that was serious, concerned, vibrant, dynamic, smart, motivated by a desire to do good. Examples abound.

Americans have always sacrificed something of themselves (often, all of themselves) for the benefit of others.

Our Founders defied an authority that could have had them executed in the quest for Freedom for the individual. We have shed blood by the gallon on battlefields like Antietam, Baghdad, Casablanca, Gettysburg, Hue, Kabul, Manila, Midway, Normandy, Okinawa, Seoul, Vicksburg and Yorktown, most often for the benefit of others and for little other reason than because it was the right thing to do.

And so it is a great sin, a tragedy of our time, that at least some of the inheritors of these sacrifices, people have often done nothing in the slightest to validate or respect that noble bloodshed, nor earn the dividends it produced, should be given a public platform to do little more than to advertise their careless ingratitude and deliberately-cultured ignorance.

There are three varieties of these clueless, walking mouthpieces who have elbowed their way to a Prominence of Fucktard polluting our culture: the least-important (but loudest) is a new generation of leftist politician, usually the progeny of immigrants from all the waste places of the Earth, who befoul our public spaces with their unceasing whining about how hard it is to be them and how America could be made better by turning it into the Sudan or Venezuela (see: The Squad). The second is a parade of even more-useless mouths who's primary (and largely unnecessary) function is the entertainment of the lowbrow, with names like DeNiro, Baldwin, Swift, or DiCaprio. The last is a generation of "branded" (in the commercial sense) athletes who do things every society can easily do without, like catching touchdown passes, hitting home runs, or dunking basketballs.

The one common thread among all of these useless mouths is that they occupy a position -- socially, economically, culturally -- that is directly a result of the sacrifices of others, but disproportionate to their own, quantifiable contribution. The American Athlete, once great figures that stood for something, whether it was just the "integrity of the game", the idea that in America every little kid could be a slugger or World Champ, or something more-important, like a struggle for equality and freedom, has become, like the actor or the television "personality", not just a tragic figure, but a comic one. Because they have, just as their counterparts in politics and entertainment have, been given this stupid idea that anyone really cares what they think, do or believe when they aren't sweating in shorts for 20 or so minutes a night.

It's not as if we're talking about some of the real heroes in sports of my youth, here. The Lebron James' of the world did not have to struggle, and in the process, advance the character and quality of American Life by their example, like some of my childhood heroes did.

Lebron James is no Hank Aaron, suffering death threats for being good enough to threaten a cherished record, or being a -- maybe THE -- visible symbol of the pernicious, past influence of racism.

James wouldn't be judged worthy to hold Muhammad Ali's jockstrap, on his best day. He certainly couldn't make you think about a common humanity, couldn't be a universal symbol of hope, like Ali did and was.

Jim Brown would run Lebron James over and trample him into the dirt, demanding respect. Just respect.

James will never have the grace, the quiet dignity, or garner the universal love, of a Gayle Sayers.

In fact, James is most likely the visible symbol of the moral decay and decadence of the Modern Athlete, and symptomatic of the greater trend in society wherein people who obviously couldn't find their own asses with both hands and a road map consistently have microphones shoved in their faces with an expectation that they will -- as if by magic -- make some profound statement that will occupy the intellect and nourish the soul.

Because "they're famous", and the assumption is that fame carries with it some form of genius, some proof that by virtue of notoriety one vicariously ascends the intellectual and moral ladder until finding oneself upon the virtual Olympus of the Consequential with the likes of Einstein, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Archimedes, MLK, Hawking, Ghandi or Mother Theresa.

And so it was that Lebron James, inheritor of the sacrifices by which he is a free man, by which he has become the first "Billion Dollar Athlete", through which millions of young children dream of one day imitating his exploits on a basketball court, was somehow asked to make a comment regarding pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the NBA's response to them, and his personal views on the entire smorgasbord of self-interested douchebag that surrounds the entire production.

If you're not up to speed, here's a synopsis:

Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have objected to new laws introduced by the Chinese Communist government that will make it easier for the Chicoms to crack down on dissent, imprison critics of the regime, regulate (actually, eliminate) free speech in an age of the internet, spy on individual citizens, and subject them to a regime of official blacklisting based upon their social media content and activities.

Supporters all over the world have spoken up in solidarity with these protesters, who have come under increasingly-repressive and violent attack by the Chinese government.

One of these supporters was an NBA executive no one ever heard of who had (gasp!) the poor taste to take to Twitter and voice his opinion just as the NBA was beginning a lucrative series of exhibition games and public appearances in Mainland China. The Chicoms took exception; the NBA -- in deadly fear that the potentially-rich Chinese market might be closed to them -- smacked this executive down. NBA Players already in China for the exhibition readily piled on (after all, they want Chinese money for their personal "brands" as much as the NBA does).

All this has done is to make the NBA look like the cynical bunch of punk-ass cocksuckers they are. They could not find it in themselves -- either as individuals or as a league -- to speak up in favor of freedom and democracy, something which they enjoy in spades (no pun intended), and under the umbrella of which they earn outrageous amounts of money to play a game that, frankly, sucks ass and which is largely unwatchable, in my opinion.

One of the Most Fortunate People on Earth -- fortune that came to him through little effort of his own, for after all, all he does is shoot a basketball -- stood before the world's press and made the case that without all this bullshit about promoting freedom, democracy and common decency, he would have had an easier time and perhaps more fun in China; that the cause was not worth the potential loss of income; that people are being arbitrarily arrested in the streets, beaten by police, disappearing, even, was not something to get overly excited about.

This is the same Lebron James who only recently made common cause with the other dubiously-talented douchebag named Colin Kaepernick in his "struggle" for "equality and fairness", laboring under the false idea that he's been denied a starting quarterback job in the NFL because of his race (actually, Colin, it's because you suck; like James, you're a one-trick pony, and the rest of the league figured out to make you a no-trick-pony).

This is the same Lebron James who has attached himself to other causes that purport to have some affiliation with democracy, freedom, and equality.

Like BlackLivesMatter (really a movement that supports a criminal's imaginary right to go unchallenged by police, because racism).

Like MeToo (a movement to allow women to freely make unsubstantiated rape claims, while the accused are railroaded and ruined free of due process of law, because vagina).

James insists he stands with the forces of righteousness.

Until, of course, the circumstances of righteousness demanded that he make a sacrifice. With his wallet. And then he puked up a self-serving statement -- which cast him and the other NBA players as something of victims in this whole thing! -- and...came out against righteousness.

Which makes everything he's ever said on the subject of freedom and equality in other contexts completely invalid.

Not that he was worth listening to in the first place. He was always merely virtue signalling in the way that ultimately filled his bank accounts. This is a common theme among those Useless Mouths (or, as Lenin called them, Useful Idiots).

And while I'm at it, let me take this opportunity to say that the NBA became unwatchable quite some time before James even showed up on the scene. It is testimony to how bad the game had gotten (and how much worse it was to become) that James became "the greatest player evah!". He's only "the greatest" by comparison with his contemporaries, who, for the most part, don't play basketball.

A league without defense, after all, is not actually a sport.

The NBA of my youth had a cavalcade of "greats" that would have all put James to shame, run circles around him on the court, and then told him to go get his fucking shinebox.

Because in a world without Freedom and it's by-products of Human Rights, security from arbitrary punishment by government, free-expression, social mobility, and common decency, that might very well have been Lebron James' fate...that, or an orange jumpsuit.

This is what the people in the streets of Hong Kong are demanding. Something that Lebron James has and takes for granted, which was paid for by the blood of those who marched on Selma and stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima and which they demanded from both their society and government. They worked for it; they suffered for it, and no one gave them a billion dollars for it.

The Greatest Player I Ever Saw With My Own Eyeballs will always be Julius Erving. Jordan, for all the records, was fabulous, but playing a different game. Maravich, West, Reed, Kareem, Malone, Bird, Magic, Parrish, Ewing, these were basketball players. Their game didn't consist solely of taking a 30' run up to the basket (Erving got so much "air", and from shorter distance, they had to change the dimensions of the court. That's how good he was), or shooting from your own bedroom secure in the knowledge that no one can as much as breathe in your direction.

They certainly didn't make a billion dollars and have people asking them questions they had no answers to because not-too-bright, and only canned, produced-by-your-PR-guys-responses that make you look like a hypocrite.

Society can survive without what you do, Lebron. It survived before Naismith invented your retarded game; it will continue without it. You add nothing to the fabric of life by tossing a ball through a hoop, and serve about as much use as a flea does to a dog. In fact, one could make the argument (I certainly am) that when it comes to parasites, NBA players are at the top of the list.

What you do is not important. Therefore, neither are you.

And so, for being a colossally clueless idiot, an ungrateful and self-absorbed pile of shit, a hypocritical mass of contradictory pablum puked forth on cue by the dictates of your personal wealth, I present to you, Lebron James, this week's Douchebag of the Week.

Considering the level of pussy you've just displayed, you will desperately need it.