Sunday, September 17, 2006

Fallow no longer

It is time to break Lamar's silence. In part caused by the general uninterestingness of the Lig this summer (is Bonzi Wells dead?) and in part due to increased workload now that school has rolled around, Lamar has been relatively reticent of late.

No longer.

Consider this the first post of a new era.
AI's denial by USA basketball has to rank either as the number one or two disaster of the summer. Agent Zero's injury/cut/subsequent explosion was bad, but not of the magnitude of the Answer being denied.

Dude busted his ass for Team USA in Athens and is repayed with a curt "Fuck you" when he asked, nay, begged, to be included in Colangelo's grand experiment on the international stage.
The Answer's snub reveals all that we should have seen coming. AI is the quintessence of Young, Black, and Fabulous. Even as he begins to decay, his conrows still hold the threat of unmitigated thuggery in its most primitive form. In short, he is still the most BAMF in the Association, perhaps more than dear Ronald because of his lack of explosion.

Latent energy is more potent than that exposed; his lack of explosion (save the "practice" speech) has dumbfounded a ruling class incapable of viewing Street as anything more than dealing crack and robbing old ladies.
Colangelo's Doctrine of Dominance runs counter to everything AI represents. He is not concerned with dominating the game with shock and awe--big dunks and the like. Rather, he is content to operate outside the normal boundaries of the law. Answer ignores the niche to which he should be regulated, drawing a healthy dose of hate from the right way contingent in process.
His transcendent ignorance is exactly what Team USA needed. It was filled by an essentially Right Way cast of characters--heady folk not as concerned with their stats as the functioning of the team as a whole. Their failure on a world stage is as much of an indictment of the Right Way as Athens was.

That's right, Athens.

Olympics 2004 proved what everyone should have already known. It proved that prejudice against prototypical Young Black Males is the most misguided sentiment of all time; Melo and Lebron barely tasted the floor, while Larry was content to watch his team struggle to adapt to the Right Way that he so cherished.

His inflexibility told us volumes about him and predicted his subsequent failure with the New York Knicks with stunning accuracy.
For all of importance on the world stage, Iverson also tells us about ourselves. He shows us the true nature of the underdog, the one we should all rally behind like so many moths to a flame. He shows us that no matter how big the heart, how big the fight in the dog, there will always be someone around to tell us to hate that dog because it makes them feel insecure in their White Anglo-Saxon Protestant manhood.

Iverson is everything that the Right Way folks tell us should be, but with a casing so repellent to their blinkered gaze as to make them blind to his glory.

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