Dennis Dale’s daughter purchased the right for him to post on Slog for a week through our annual holiday auction Strangercrombie, which this year benefited neglected children and the homeless. More info about our charity auction here. The views expressed in Dale’s editorials on Slog are his alone and have not been edited based on ideology.

Chastened into enlightenment by yesterday’s demands for brevity, coherence and, always, civility, I have decided on this relatively inoffensive post about sports, from last June, where it was originally published at my lonely outpost on the nether-net. Yesterday was exhilarating but exhausting, so excuse me if I don’t engage in the comment thread. I’m sure you’ll be just as kind in my absence as before. Hey I’m sorry, but it’s not as if I have nothing more important to do in the middle of the week but monitor some comment thread…

Jesus, I just realized that’s not true. Okay, if I don’t return it’s because I’ve found some sturdy rope. First one to seize on the “go ahead and hang yourself” retort wins the Presidential Medal of Healing Rhetoric Award. We shall have to come up with a word for the combination of nerve and obliviousness displayed by the uncivil proponent of civility—so far all I’ve got is “Chutz-duh.” Needs work I know.

But my favorite moment from yesterday: when one commenter suggested the responses were a tad overheated, somebody shot back (paraphrasing)—hey, this guy just questioned the value of civility, there’s no way in hell I’m going to give him any! Priceless. Back home and nursing my wounds I was reassured by a friend that the comparison between my writing and Loughner’s ramblings was unwarranted. Thanks, man. Dennis Dale—he’s no Loughner!
Until tomorrow, friends.

Discreetly tucked below the fold. Please to enjoy.

Basketball is Basketball, Equality is Excellence, War is Peace

Boldly now comes the WNBA’s television campaign for its new season, to accompany the NBA playoffs. Interspersing footage from both leagues the spot creates the illusion the men and women are playing together. For example, a WNBA player makes a pass; we cut to an NBA player hauling it in on his way to the basket. Several such iterations and the tag-line:

Basketball is Basketball

It is agreed. Basketball is basketball.

As a self-contained system of rules, the game is its own standard and ideal; its quality is its only valid measure. The players’ identities are incidental—they are only represented by their competitive success. Why would you concern yourself with who plays, as long as they play well? I offer this as the best interpretation of the WNBA’s slogan.

But how is this not precisely the WNBA’s problem? It is basketball we go to see, not basketball played by X. The WNBA has the unfortunate circumstance of competing with its far superior parent league in delivering to market basketball. The women are way out of their league. Yet here they are, at once drawing our attention to and contradicting the purely sentimental nature of their appeal. Basketball is basketball, sister.

Any league not open to all is a novelty act. Akin to a six-foot-or-under league, of which we would make no pretense of parity with the NBA. Why, then, does the WNBA exist? If there is some demand for off-season professional basketball, why not another open league (which in turn might not be too competitive for the better female players)?

But “basketball is basketball” can have another meaning besides that which I’ve assumed thus far. So just to be thorough. It can also mean:
discernment in basketball is unwarranted because quality is trivial or uniform.
If you’ve seen one game you’ve seen them all. Call it the “parts is parts” fallacy. This exhausts reasonable interpretations of the slogan at two, and they are mutually exclusive.

Thus we have a phrase that is literal nonsense yet holds in potential two contradictory meanings; it is and isn’t. What a perfect foil for the encouraged chaos of cut-and-paste. Here it blends together the superior with the inferior deliberately to conflate them, to the benefit of the inferior over the superior. As the advertisement’s visual creates the illusion of one game by splicing together two, likewise the text splices together one meaning from two. The WNBA offers, as needed, two fluid options to guide us to the Nirvana of egalitarian bliss: ignore inferiority or disregard excellence.

Not that anyone is paying attention, much less defending the integrity of the language, but the slogan, mild doublespeak that it is, is the inclusion argument boiled down to its essence; all the energy they concentrate in their concise palindrome backfires and only serves to reveal that equality degrades excellence (“equality” as defaced by the modifier “social”; alternatively “inclusion,” or “anti-discrimination”). In any given instance, more of one ensures less of the other. Yet we are conditioned to believe the effect is non-existent, trivial or even opposite. Why?

Our elite is divided between those invested in and those cowed by the advance of a federally administered regime of equality. Thus too-evident instances of of equality degrading excellence and impoverishing the common good are collective embarrassments, not only as individual failures of policy, but as evidence of the constant—equality degrades excellence. The more “equality” the equalitarian gets the greater its cost, the plainer its effects, the more he must hide. He is not alone, however; the need to conceal this corrosive process has as many allies as excellence has enemies, always ready to take up pitchfork and put torch to the affronts to vanity and pride that are Truth, Beauty, God. Only here the rabble is roused on behalf of power and the status quo. We have drifted into a historical novelty: we have an elite that demands disdain for tradition, custom, history. What then do they consider their mandate? A certain definition of excellence, ironically.

Meanwhile, the NBA is a singular story of merit by excellence overcoming social and sentimental bias, justly celebrated as a civil rights accomplishment yet, less noted, demolishing the queer premise upon which civil rights law and culture is based. That premise: American culture degrades and represses minorities and all groups are equally blessed with the host of human talents.

A group representing some seven percent of the US population (before accounting for age), setting out with every social and many legal conventions against it and armed only with exceptional ability, took one generation to to dominate professional basketball—transforming the game in the process. Today black American men still represent eighty percent of the NBA, even as they’ve made it so successful it draws talent from around the world. This attests equally to the unprecedented fairness of the league and nation on one hand and the racial diversity of human talent on the other.

Not only has white America rejected sentiment in favor of the superiority of the black game, the stunning display of racial disparity on display is itself largely responsible for the success of the league—white fascination with black physical talent as a superior and therefore good thing. A recognizably Western impulse. Western (and if the following carried negative connotations we would be allowed “white”) creativity propels the story through various media, its ingenuity delivers it in high definition to your home, its industry daily manages the logistics of filling arenas with the reverential. African athleticism made transcendent by American imagination and industry. Is there anything comparable in history? A little respect, please.

It is not forthcoming. The celebration of this story grows progressively shriller, as if in inverse proportion to the improving material condition of its beneficiaries. The narrative focuses almost entirely on the storming of the barriers—not of their creative dismantling. Taken as part of the larger civil rights narrative it is presumed the barriers remain, their latency here contingent on our militant stance against them, active most everywhere else. But the true lesson lies in the relative ease with which longstanding social prohibition gave way permanently to excellence.

But the broader cultural emanations from this frank display of what still seems like a mystical talent to white America transcend basketball, combining with black excellence in popular music to level an entire complex of traditional barriers to blacks; once habitually taken as inferior, now considered superior in many aspects; envied, emulated, exploited into cultural preeminence.
The milieu demands however the writer frame the cracker here, yet again: the nation is uniquely neurotic regarding race, what with all this fascination with it! This sort of thing often from sportswriters, as if to absolve themselves of that they so conspicuously ridicule or abhor, shocked, shocked. But the story is not told. Racist exploitation has made Black America a cultural colossus.

Indeed, it is not an imagined human uniformity but racial diversity, and its complementary nature, that acts as a catalyst to excellence in an exploitative process that nonetheless empowers the exploited. This could only happen in an overarching culture with the energy, creativity and fairness—the excellence—of America. Ironically, when we are compelled to pledge “diversity is strength” the meaning is opposite (roughly: diversity is our strength because we’re all the same and no culture is superior—a patent absurdity!) and the intention is to scandalize this reality in the popular mind, contradicting as it does elite convention—rather, convention prescribed for us by the elite.

Equality is a conceit only societies made wealthy through discrimination can afford (or a disease only wealthy societies contract). We have so long been wealthy and thus conditioned to humor this sentiment that it has become an unexamined article of faith. That conditioning is evidenced by the oblivious confidence of the accusation (women!) implicit in the WNBA slogan: that we aren’t giving the women a fair shot! They truly know not what they say.

None of this of course means the WNBA hasn’t the right to exist, or that its athletes aren’t worthy, or that it might not carve out an economic niche and justify the NBA’s subsidy; it just means we would do well not to allow them the affront that is this slogan. If people will create and nourish the WNBA God bless them. But that does not entitle them to abuse the language or logic. You can have your ladies’ league and I wish you well; but you cannot then have your “basketball is basketball” pretense. No ma’am.

As demonstrated by the NBA’s example, excellence and equality are at odds. In the case of the NBA’s wardship of the WNBA, excellence humors equality, because it can afford to. American history in aphorism! Long may she wave!

Pessimistic as we imagine we’ve become about the nation’s economic prospects, we nonetheless dutifully assume an endless summer of rising tax revenue to fund the ever-increasing cost of our condescension. We presume the creativity and industry of the resented will outrace the demands of resentment in perpetuity. This resentment is far more nurtured than confronted by our creative class, as jealously as if it were their own. Which it is, of course; as an artistic form, the civil rights genre now is where class bigotry goes to masquerade as enlightenment.

If it seems the narrative has become indulgent, pornographic even, that’s because it has. Self-interested but still less rational than emotional. We now have an elite that not only doesn’t care what is good for the common, it doesn’t know what is good for itself. Our modern inversion: an excitable, bigoted and irrational elite in need of the calming influence of a wise and engaged population. Ah, to have one!

Where might our defensive wisdom begin? By critical examination of just such Orwellian tropes as the WNBA slogan. The fact that it is merely an advertisement, or “just basketball”, shouldn’t pardon it. This is where merit should make its stand, out here on the front line of the assault on excellence, where language and logic are the collateral damage. Exposure, examination, ridicule; these are the weapons of the insurgency.

The WNBA’s egalitarian experiment is a tap stuck into the broad trunk of the NBA—the very bounty of human inequality—diverting a trickle for the purpose of sentimental inclusion. Embarrassed by this fact, the WNBA distracts from its inferiority through artful subterfuge and chides us for our bias even as it claims privilege. Is there a better model of the Token State?

Can it suggest something of the costs of that state and its definition of equality, out here in the world where the individual’s spoils are humbler and the collective consequences graver? After all, the law is the law, engineering is engineering, firefighting is firefighting, medicine is medicine. That disparity in quality the WNBA wants you to ignore isn’t an anomaly, but a small, exposed section of something vast and deliberately misunderstood.

Of course, what the WNBA is really about is making women more like men. Which prompts a whole new why?

92 replies on “And Now a Little Something for the Ladies”

  1. This is the sort of thing you write in a journal, forget for a year, then read again later only to ask yourself —

    “What the hell led my thoughts down that path? Thank god I didn’t publish that on a popular blog.”

  5. Wait, so that’s why the NHL is full of black people?

    This is pure drivel and full of stupid. This asshole’s daughter would have better spent that money on an editor for her idiotic father’s rambling fucktarded rants.

  6. You hit the nail on the head when you wrote “Any league not open to all is a novelty act”. And then you started banging away at your fingers.

  13. If that’s what you consider brief, coherent and inoffensive, we’re in for a long week here.
    I was going to try to give your posts a chance, but I’ve definitely changed my mind.

  17. Oh, and dear God, **PLEASE PLEASE** get Mudede to write a retort post to this. I stopped reading when we got to the white people prostrating in prayer before mystical black men flying around NBA arenas like Wudan masters.

  20. Uh, referring to a women’s sports league as a “tap stuck into the broad trunk of the NBA—the very bounty of human inequality—diverting a trickle for the purpose of sentimental inclusion.” is outright offensive.

    Did I read that right? Because this is what you sound like:
    “These equal rights for people are just bleeding me dry! When will these women stop diverting precious resources from our hallowed Men to satisfy their petty, sentimental feeeeelings?!”

    And insinuating that women play sports so they can be “more like men” is possibly the most ignorant, privileged nonsense I’ve ever heard. I know your penis probably can’t understand this, but sometimes, women do things for reasons that have *absolutely nothing to do with men*.

    You, sir, are a shitbag and you deserve everything you are getting.

  21. Of course, what the WNBA is really about is making women more like men.

    It’s true. Throwing a ball makes you grow testes.

    Please tell me you were high when you wrote this.

  25. The black dominance of the NBA cannot be wholly attributed to “superior black physique’. Any understanding of black athletic or musical dominance that doesn’t take the historically limited choices of institutionalized racism and connect it to the importance of role models for modern-day youth is severely flawed.

    Canuck, I think I’m going to join you and Gus in the shots-drinking. It’s the only way I expect to be able to get through this.

  26. I second “tosspot”. “Verbose” isn’t strong enough, though; this guy’s verbal diarrhea is overflowing the bowl. I read as much of the thing as I could stand and I still have no idea what he’s talking about other than “women’s basketball is dumb”, or something. What’s really dumb is torturing the English language this way.

  29. Wow. You and Seattleblues seriously need to hang out. Waiting for your Homophobia Manifesto, so you can join him in making a matching set of Wingnuts for my collection.

  30. “Strangercrombie is for the children, you can deal with this dreck for a week because it helped needy kids.”

    “Strangercrombie is for the children, you can deal with this dreck for a week because it helped needy kids.”

    “Strangercrombie is for the children, you can deal with this dreck for a week because it helped needy kids.”

    Repeat as necessary.

  31. Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Men are so honest, so thoroughly square; eternally noble, historic’ly fair; who, when you win, will always give your back a pat. Well, why can’t a woman be like that?

    I assume Mr. “women’s leagues are stupid” here thinks that women’s Olympic events should go away as well?

    His racial ideas are pretty flaccid too. This stuff is worse than tea party junk.

  33. Canadian Nurse, you can go the espresso route that gus favours, or join me in a mid morning jagerbomb…either way, bottoms up!

    gus, in addition to shots, I advise watching Map of Tasmania by Amanda Palmer to cleanse your palate…vid is on her website, apologies in advance for all the girly bits…

    Lissa, if those two get together, one can only hope that spotaneous combustion proves to be real.

  38. I really want to make racist and/or sexist jokes here, but I am much to sober to understand this rant.

    I am taking up a collection now, so I can be the guest slooger next year. If you donate to my campaign, I promise to post nothing but pictures of kitties and videos of fathers getting hit in the balls by thier kids. The only work I will write will be “discuss.”

    You’re welcome.

  39. @33: Jager is the devil. If we want to go non alcoholic, due to the earliness of the hour, may I suggest a little concoction we developed during my time of under employment as a Barista? The Starbux Speedball. Pull four shots into a cup containing a quarter inch of caramel sauce, add two pumps of hazelnut syrup, and top with whip cream and more caramel sauce. THAT will pop the pennies from your eyes.

  42. @25 for the most poignant retort so far.

    And I wonder who this girl is who reads The Stranger and thought it would be a good idea to buy this for her father. Perhaps she means to expose him for the extremely-overly-verbose blowhard that he is.

    These posts remind me of an Eggo waffle covered in an entire bottle of syrup. The substance isn’t that good to begin with, so it’s completely drenched in something obnoxiously obfuscating.

    Can I request that the next post be bullet points? Then we can really get down to parsing the man’s arguments.

  43. Canuck & Lissa
    -Shot of espresso
    -shot of Baileys
    -1/2 shot of Whiskey

    It won’t quite “pop the pennies from my eyes” but it tastes wonderful.

  49. reading this guys stuff feels like being spun around in a Disneyland tea cup.

    I keep trying to read it, but all I can hear in hear in my head is the Charlie Brown:
    “wamp wamp wamp wa wamp waa waaa wamp”

  51. I read the first sentence and then checked the length of the post. Clearly, sir, you have not been chastised into brevity quite yet.

    I too, Mr. Dale, have struggled with verbal diarrhea. I know the pain of watching the attention of your audience drain away like those last few chunks of food being sucked down a clogged kitchen sink. And I know full well the indignation that accompanies such a spectacle, and I know that cry in the back of your head that says “I use big words! My vocabulary is huge! I’m smart goddammit, so pay attention to what I have to say!”

    But alas, Mr. Dale. Ignore that voice, make your point quickly, and perhaps you wouldn’t be describing your personal blog as “desultory.” “Lacking in plan, purpose, or enthusiasm” is maybe not the effect you should be shooting for, unless of course you’re composing these essays entirely for your own amusement. But hey, at least your hit counts are up.

  52. Okay, I’m baffled.

    What possessed you do sign up for a week of this? It is clear you are not even close to the Stranger/Slog demographic. Did you think your mad writing skilz would convert all us communist liberals into your conservative mold? Are you (or your daughter) just paying for the privilege to troll at a higher level for a week? Was this a bad joke on your daughter’s part?

    Perhaps the reason lies buried in your 2000+ word screeds, but they are just too boring to wade through.

  53. I think WNBA is doing well, but wish that the quality level of women’s soccer would improve, so that the Huskies current play style was on a par with our UW status as a feeder university for women’s soccer and basketball, not just for men’s – even if we do well in CONCANF (never can spell that) participation.

    Plus, we need more pics. Come on, a really interesting jump shot or a spin kick if we’re talking soccer.

  58. Big fat troll. Which is surprising ’cause usually trolls aren’t that industrious, preferring just a blanket “hey, women are dumb” to actually writing words.

    Anyway. My guess for the rationale of the daughter is either (1) exposing the dad a-la 42’s explanation; or (2) she’s a computer science or linguistics student & has developed a robot blogger that she’s testing on us. Calling it her father is a little weird.

  59. @53, if you knew what CONCACAF stood for you might be able to spell it. Instead you dribble out jizz you don’t even know the meaning of. Why is that? You’re no better than Dennis The Mennis here.

  60. Perhaps, it is less about making women more like men, and more about “getting over” being women, which has been in the past and still is, to some extent, a serious impediment to full person-hood?

    It would seem Mr. Dale that you like to hear yourself talk. Perhaps, that is how you assure yourself that you are amongst the living and not invisible? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that you think yourself funny, too. To me, you sound like my father, impressed with yourself, enchanted by your own “voice”, and smugly secure in your position in society. Which is why I find your attempt to engage as being too full of hubris to create discussion, in my opinion. Less is more, and a bit of Proverbs 17:28 just might further your ability to engage others. Just my $0.02, you can disregard it.

  61. “Impulsiveness, confabulatory verbosity, grandiosity are associated with right frontal [lobe] disturbances.”*
    That part of the frontal lobe is also the first thing to go in the prodromal phase of schizophrenia, which phase can last for YEARS (as evidenced by Jared Loughner). This phase is characterized by grandiose, nonsensical rants, and a loosening of the strings of logic.

    There is also a frontal-lobe syndrome and a frontal lobe personality type for those who are not kindling away to schizophrenia. Loughner was clearly farther gone (I read all of his blog posts), but I do see the similarities here.

    *http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10420…

  62. Dannis the Menace thinks civil rights law is built on the premise that “American culture degrades and represses minorities and all groups are equally blessed with the host of human talents.”

    Are you fucking nuts? Civil rights law is built on the premise that equality needs to be explicitly protected because its absence permits injustice. Which the rest of us believe is immoral enough to prevent with the law.

  63. @ Josh Bomb — It’s nice to see you haven’t forgotten me, but I am not Dennis Dale. I find his writing to be just as pretentious and unreadable as most of you guys are saying. I also have no idea why a guy would waste the bully pulpit that is Slog by recycling old blog essays that were probably just as annoying the first time around.

    @ Dennis Dale — Just get to the point, dude. Too much prelude and not enough pop.

  64. Ok now you’ve been schooled by Matt Luby. Time to gather the tattered shreds of dignity you have left and retire from the field. You’ll be doing the livers of Slog’s Commentariat a favor, because seriously, many of the livers here were pretty spongy to begin with, and all these shots are going to kill us.

  65. Oh geez kim @ 60, I was saving “You probably think you are funny” as my reply for the next one… Still, I’m LOVING the coffee recipes, and I can always review the thesaurus for inspiration 😀

  67. Cynic Romantic.

    An iced recipe, as it is summer in your neck of the woods, and as a peace offering. 😉

    Iced Jamaican

    Ingredients (1 oz = 30 ml):

    1 oz dark rum
    1 oz Tia Maria
    3/4 oz heavy cream
    4 oz chilled coffee
    Crushed ice

    Preparation:
    Combine liqueurs, coffee and cream. Partially fill a wine glass with crushed ice, and pour mixture over ice. Serve.

    Cheers!

  68. This is more coherent than yesterday’s post, but still difficult to read. (and yes, I skimmed it, again.)

    I’m not going to address your writing skills; others have done so better than I.

    I think your inherent problem is that you have a philosophy, and then seek out a situation that will exemplify it, to justify said philosophy. This is actually quite boring. What grabs audiences is when the author honestly immerses themselves into something new, and then gives a fresh perspective on it. You have a heavy world-view, and you’re ready to slam it down on whatever is convenient. Today it’s the WNBA, tomorrow it could be steampunk. This is about as exciting as crushing ants w/ bricks. Ho-hum, time wasted.

  72. “Chastened into enlightenment by yesterday’s demands for brevity, coherence and, always, civility, I have decided on this relatively inoffensive post about sports, from last June, where it was originally published at my lonely outpost on the nether-net.”

    How the fuck are you showing that you are chastened enough to be brief??? We got punked a second time.

  75. Kim in Portland:

    No peace offering required (you did me no wrong 🙂 ), but the recipe is gratefully appreciated.

    Has there ever been a Slog cookbook?

  77. 246 words to say — ‘You’re all mean bastards for suggesting that my writing sucks.’ Which it does. 246 words to say what 10 could have done well. Please, daughter, stop him. Do not encourage him. Next christmas give him a writing class.

  78. Could barely get through the initial post, much less anything at ALL after the jump, but the comments make it worth it. Ten points to Luby for the schooling, hot damn.

  79. What 68 said. Also, ALL advertising is base and manipulative (and often offensive). That is how it works; it tries to manipulate you to get you to buy basketball tickets. Why are you bothered so much by “basketball is basketball” in particular. I mean, I know you explained it. I just don’t understand getting so worked up about it. If you don’t accept their advertising premise, just don’t watch the WNBA.

    Also, I like men’s basketball better too, but that doesn’t mean the WNBA should not exist or that, in its infancy, it should not rely on the (tiny bit) of financial help from the NBA. Geez dude, sports are important to women and girls too. It’s fun and healthy, who wouldn’t want complete ACCESS to that in their life? Personally, I wouldn’t want to take away a source of inspiration to young female athletes.

  80. Wait, the guy who needs charity to get published thinks the WNBA gives women athletes an unfair hand-out? (I’m kind of skimming here.)

    Slog is Slog, sister. Someone here is way out of their league.

  81. 25. Not to mention cultural differences between Blacks and Whites. I would go further and argue that the differences in athletic ability are IN NO WAY related to race per se, since there is no such thing (genetically-speaking). Differences in the size of the farm/feeder populations for a sport accounts for a lot, since it is all a statistics game if you are taking the tallest and fastest 1% of young basketball players, say. If the young basketball players coming up are mostly Black (due to cultural reasons), the NBA will be mostly black. Dennis seems to be conflating race and culture (although I’m not entirely sure).

  82. 81. 25. Not to mention cultural differences between Blacks and Whites. I would go further and argue that the differences in athletic ability are IN NO WAY related to race per se, since there is no such thing (genetically-speaking). . . . Dennis seems to be conflating race and culture (although I’m not entirely sure).

    Ha. HAHAHA. No, I think Dale just observes that race exists in a more meaningful way than you think.

    Dale, what the crap am I commenting here for? What have you done? Stop messing around in the sheep pen and get back in the house.

  83. 82. (You could leave 25 out of this; he’s been pretty non-partisan.) OK, how does Mr. Dale think about race then? I am truly curious.

    Also, I don’t understand. Sorry, what was Mr. Dale doing in the sheep pen in the middle of the night? I’m a little confused by that comment.

  84. @6: haha, indeed. That fascinating contradiction generated enough amusement to propel me at least three paragraphs further than I otherwise would have bothered. Sadly, in the end, he could’ve been as funny as Carlin and it still wouldn’t have been worth the time.

  85. Hey Roma, I’m sorry if that comment came across as sarcastic, this thread has been pretty caustic (to say the least) and I suppose I’m now just snapping my teeth at everyone. Anyway, here’s Dale’s post from yesterday: And Now a Little Something for the Ladie…. Dale’s writing style is obtuse, but if you can bear to read through the whole thing, there are some real gems of misogyny and racism.

Comments are closed.