David Roth's Weak In Review: Talking Back In 2015

There is a small white wicker-ish thing, I don't know what you call it, in the downstairs bathroom in my parents' house. There may not be a name for this particular furnishing, but it seems to appear as if by magic in the homes of older people. It always has a long-expired bottle of Bayer in it, and there will be light curls of gray dust on top of it that date back a Presidential administration or two. Open the one in my parents' bathroom and you will find a copy of a book called The Baseball Hall of Shame.

The cover, a bright cartoon caricature of various baseball dirtbags in the style of Police Academy VHS boxes, has been missing since I was in middle school, but the book and its sequels were my favorites for a decent stretch of my early life. My relationship to baseball-related content, any baseball-related content, more or less mirrored that of plastic Hungry Hungry Hippopotamuses and the marbles they love not wisely but too well. I chugged any and all baseball that I could find, I shotgunned baseball card factoids, but Baseball Hall of Shame was different.

As Matthew Callan wrote in what I think is the definitive appreciation of the books, they were different in how they happily deflated baseball's ridiculous sepia pomposities. That was great, and it certainly was different, but these books were transporting in a broader sense. The people in the Hall of Shame—here was a pair of Yankees pitchers openly wife-swapping, for instance, or the buxom Kentucky woman who made a minor name for herself by running on the field during games and kissing players—seemed to come from another, more fluid universe that was hornier, sillier, and more excitingly overstated than the one I sat inhabited.

There were still plenty of public grotesques in the world I knew, but they all ran in the same dull direction. There had been a period of time when this country and its athletes had been of different minds about how and who they wanted to be, and what they wanted to do with their uniquely public lives, but it was over. Whatever conflict or curiosity had existed, whatever weirdnesses once animated the world, had all been settled.

Michael Jordan had answered all those questions. The thing to be was a brand, a collection of aspirational and consumable values that had a face, and generated statistics. The unevennesses and unpredictabilities that define people as such could not be eliminated, of course, but they were to be minimized, if only because they were self-evidently inefficient. They confused the message and created disjunction where singularity and seamlessness were the goal. The culture is prone to overeating, and capitalism abhors the vacuum of a sellable thing without a price tag on it, and this sort of flattening out tends to happen to famous people; they become somehow more uncanny and less convincing the more we see them. The jarring part, with Jordan and then after him, has been to see people choose this and pursue it vigorously.

The game, since then, has been about refinement—Jordan's brand consisted of his face and success; LeBron's enfolds his family, his city, his state, and more struggle than a billionaire demigod should be able to pull off. Little bits of LeBron the non-brand peek through—sometimes in unflattering, Mario Chalmers-belittling ways, and sometimes in political stances that, while tentative, seem authentically felt. For the most part, this is what we get from our public figures, now—sometimes, sparingly, some intimations of a ghost in the machine, but mostly a wider-than-ever selection of machines that are bigger and more brilliant than any before. The idea that there was ever a world in which public people acted otherwise seemed strange to me even as a kid.

But that world did exist, though, and this week two refugees from it, Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, spoke up in ours. As is the trend, they took the opportunity to tell Donald Trump to fuck right off. They did this as Muslims, and they were of course right to do it. Right on the merits, I'd say—Trump is an odious bullying dope, a national disgrace currently managing the oafish feat of running an accidentally fascist campaign for President. But also, elementally, right.

This is not new for either of them. Kareem has always asserted himself, and his late-life blossoming as our tallest public intellectual has been a delight to watch. Ali, simply, is the most revolutionary athlete ever to live, not in the sense that he changed his sport or touched lives or Inspired or some other marketing-implicated phrase. No, revolutionary in the sense that he said and did revolutionary shit—he not only refused to join the Army during Viet Nam, he did it like this:

Ali can no longer speak due to Parkinson's; his rejection of Trumpism and defense of his faith arrived via a prepared statement, which read in a voice inevitably not quite his own. Ali still travels the world, and in his silent senescence has inevitably become something of a brand himself—an ambassador not only for Islam, but for a sort of ecumenical grace. He's a symbol of human possibility, now, which is something he has earned more than most people alive, but something also hilariously unfair to the complicated—and, of course, not always admirable—human being that he is.

To become a brand is to submit to just that, and to subsume that contradictory and fascinating and spiky human thing to the demands of a system that demands something simpler and smother. It is hard to fathom anyone willingly making that choice. It gets easier when you remember that, now decades deeper into a world that seems so much tighter and angrier and both more abstracted and more impatient than the ones that came before, no one really perceives it as a choice at all. Donald Trump is a brand, too, after all. He performs his slapdash spray-tanned values and crab-assed narcissism innately; nothing could possibly be more predictable than his ostensible unpredictabilities.

Trump's is a brand for this crueler and more finished-seeming world of ours. All the choices he offers are false ones: he offers only submission and himself, a chance to be on the side of the oppressor. If it's inspiring to see Kareem and Ali point all this out and call him by name, it's doubly so because, in a world of brands—logical, self-interested, heartless as a piggy bank—that kind of absolutely essential impoliteness is so rare.