Jaylen Brown, USA men's basketball, and the concept of risk in our society

Friday 7/19/24

I understand why Jaylen Brown is pissed about being left off the men's USA basketball roster as it obviously had nothing to do with his play. Three Celtics are on the team--with one, in Derrick White, having been brought in as a late replacement--and he's not one of them? He's, at worst, the second best of the four. When it matters most, he's the best of the four. And yes, I understand you're building a team and not just looking for the best players, out-and-out. Guys have roles and you need people for different things. But that's not what the deal is here.

Nor is it that I'm some big Brown backer. The world, though, is very vanilla in spirit, but vanilla with the least amount of flavoring, so that it barely even qualifies as vanilla. The world has gone corporate. Individuals are corporate. We're supposed to be our own person, with unique internal lives, all of these parts to us that make us us and us alone. No. It's not like that now. We've devolved out of individuality and into the porridge of the pack.

Everyone talks the same, partakes of the exact same things, and are indistinguishable from each other. People are boring, risk adverse, simpler by the day, and without depth. People reject themselves. They reject their individuality, their identity. They shoehorn themselves into something they're not, which is to say, the same as everyone else. That's what they become. They disfigure and warp the self. It's like Sammy Sosa turning himself white, but at the level of a who a person is. Or was. Or should have been. Then they can't go back. They can't really go forward either.

They're just fucking there, and if you're just fucking there, I'd say why fucking bother?

But the very concept of risk is misleading, because what's often identified as risk isn't a risk at all, and being what people think of as risk-adverse is the real risk.

I would say, for instance, in publishing that putting out the same stupid shit-slop that no one wants and no one has ever liked and will ever like is a risk. That's why your industry is coming apart, publishing people. Your product, across the board, sucks.

You genocided readers--you wiped reading as a thing people do or have a worthwhile reason to do right out of our culture, out of the world, so that the only readers now are these broken, talentless people who just want to be a member of this sick, incestuous community because they have nothing else and can be nothing else, and they're not even really reading; they just want in, so they say they read this, they bought and display this stupid book and mention it on social media, they teach this shitty MFA drone of a writer who is also a shit-bag in life, etc.

Then you have an isolated subculture of a world that is of no interest whatsoever to anyone outside of it, which means the people of that world can indulge their very worst qualities, without censure, regulation, or sanity getting in the way, because of that total isolation; it's like a pack of sick people on some spaceship way out there in some distant galaxy.

That sounds like it would have been a pretty big risk to me, and it hasn't worked out.

But a publishing person would think a risk is publishing work that doesn't suck. Why? Because everything they publish sucks, so anything different gives them pause, but yet another thing that sucks doesn't. So they pump out the suck, and people can only write things that suck, and are taught to write things that suck, and teach others to follow the instructions to write things that suck, for no one who wants any of it.

Great system you got there. Can't see how you'd have any problems with it.

Brown isn't on the team because they--the league, Nike--want safe, bland guys who are all about money. When you have $400 million dollars, do you really need $410 million? I don't get it with people who have more money than they could spend in fifty lifetimes if they were extremely profligate needing more. For what? It's not even being used. To know it's there? That's sick. It's pervasive, though. And it's not like they're thinking about their family seventeen generations from now. Rare is the person who isn't only thinking about themselves. And why should that family all of those generations later get a free ride? What is this? Publishing, where people just sit around and pretend to be things they're not and dust off the old money left to them and wake up at ten in the morning?

Here's a novel thought: An interesting person can make you money. Whoa. Crazy, right? Not everything has to be the exact same boring ass thing. If Jaylen Brown is a bit different than a corporate shill like Jayson Tatum who is as memorable a person/personality as some slight breeze that occurred last week, then cool. There's money to be made there, if only in providing a respite from just how goddamn bland everything and everyone else is.

I put it this way because I don't think Brown is some smart, dynamic guy with important things to say and interesting ways of saying them. But he is a bit different compared to these other guys and that can be profitable as well. It certainly doesn't mean that you screw the guy over and leave him off the team. Someone might want to be like, "But Derrick White and defense!" Stop. Jaylen Brown can defend, too, and he's a competitor, which it seems to me you'd want in a tournament like this, not that I think the outcome is much in doubt either way.