Exits: The black hole of exceptionalism

The contemporary condition of hostility to criticism, and the Lakers as entity, American Dream.

Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread.

— W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

"We all know what the Lakers is,” JJ Redick said in his end of season presser. Awkward syntax aside, it was an apt answer to the question of whether Redick knew what he’d decided to coach. Not just the team, but the entire edifice.

Something else in that syntax: menace, maybe? The feeling like the entity, The Lakers, was there, watching from the back, creeping closer, waiting to be appeased. The feeling wasn’t coming from team GM Rob Pelinka, who sat with his patent, well-practiced by now neutral expression beside Redick, eyes occasionally shifting into the middle distance, fidgeting lightly with his watch or mic the way powerful men who like to signal busyness are fond of doing.

Redick’s energy, so cowed compared to the spectrum of grandiosity and caginess he whiplashed between throughout the season when up in front of a room of reporters. So much so that I wish the follow-up question was: Is The Lakers in the room with us right now? But of course the answer is yes. Always, yes. Unceasing.

To engage with the NBA — as product, as environment — is to understand the Lakers as vital component, barometric. More than the league’s original teams like the Knicks, or their own historic rivals, the Celtics, the Lakers have been made to be vital. First through branding, aptly selling a southern California dream, and then when that dream, of wealth, leisure, stardom, and the guise of power granted through each, took hold of the wider American psyche.

As such, there is no American sports franchise as emblematic of American aspirations than the Lakers. Pervasiveness mistaken for relevance, grandiosity as reputation, a cyclops’s perception of gaze or better still, a populist panpanopticon. To always look out, never in. Gilt, glamour, turning the mundanity of a game’s musculature into occasion. Conflating bravado and confidence to make excellence, an alchemy of ego.

In darkness and light, whether timing or luck, the Lakers made themselves vital by becoming symbolic of American exceptionalism.

The trick of exceptionalism is that it requires an ever-replenishing suspension of disbelief. On occasion it also requires feats, moral and physical, but tangible. It does project these to larger than their naturally occurring size but until recent decades that projection felt reasonable, within context. A 10x zoom compared to 100x, like now, with any recognizable outlines blown into erasure. How can you identify a fake, cry foul, if you can’t be sure what you’re looking at? A good trick.

Contrary to the Wizard of Oz-style rigging now needed to keep the exceptionalism machine running, the original was not averse to criticism. If anything, criticism could prove another kind of fuel, propelling into proof from doubt.

Watching Redick, throughout this season and certainly as it drew to a frustrated end, was an exercise in witnessing the real-time transformation of criticism (as an action, a form of witness, even an articulation of care) against our shifting societal reality.

Criticism has turned from ballast to burden; sugar in the gas pipe of the exceptionalism machine. It’s gone from a forward facilitator — think of all the tests you’ve had to pass, and did, in pursuit of your life’s momentum — to stifling weight. At the barest whiff of criticism, like a weather system rolling in, its recipients are now likely to run or else lash out. What’s heard first is here’s my problem with you, instead of, here’s how this could be better.

An American administration so averse to criticism that it doubles down at every chance to bully, harm, and throw its mean, crude weight around isn’t helping.