Your Thoughts Exactly

Remember last blog when I said there hadn’t been much Anti-American sentiment in the commentary of the Australian broadcasters? I think Channel 7 must have gotten note of my sentiments, and decided they weren’t getting the message across. Anti-American sentiment reached its apex with the Australian basketball team “The Boomers,” playing the Dream Team. “Prim donnas or Performers?” asked the lovely studio announcer.

It's not surprising that the Dream Team would inspire so much vitriol from Australia: they are rich, they are cocky, they aren’t white. They are the antithesis of the amateur/Cinderella Olympic spirit that is milked by the television networks and the International Olympic Committee itself (even though both the TV networks and IOC want the professionals there.)
But it goes beyond that: the Dream Team inspires hate because they are American, and they represent something about Americans that foreigners don’t like; our sense of entitlement. The idea that we are so powerful, we can just assemble a team 5 weeks before the Olympics and assume victory. I draw a parallel with the War in Iraq: we will decide on shaky grounds to force a regime change and invade a country. Well we’ll just shock and awe our enemies by showing how many missiles we have and then just waltz right into Baghdad. Well both reshaping Iraq and winning the Gold Medal in basketball have proved harder than first thought.
So we pay for this arrogant attitude; in Iraq with the lives of soldiers and Iraqi civilians, in the Olympics with embarrassment on an international stage, in the world with growing antagonism towards us from all corners of the world.

I wrote in an earlier blog that tempering that arrogance was important for future developments in the field of international relations. But for the Dream Team, and perhaps for other parts of American life, I want to see that arrogance refocused. A subtle shift from “we can just show up because we are better,” to “we are better because we worked harder, and we aren’t going to pretend like you can compete. We are going to show you just how much better we are.” I want to see our players playing stifling defense like it’s the NBA playoffs, not letting the opponents get comfortable or breathe, talking shit as we complete a fast break to put us up 25, as the announcers chide us for poor sportsmanship. Loser talk in other words.

As the only remaining superpower, foreign nations are going to complain about our behavior no matter what we do. Sometimes, their complaints are justified. Sometimes, the complaints can be chalked up to jealousy or envy, or just someone barking at the big dog to prove his stature in his own country (see: Chirac, France.) You can’t stop people from doing that, and you can’t get too upset when it happens. If you get upset, just remember who they’ll be asking for help if they’re country gets invaded. Or ask them if they would have preferred living in a country that was a Soviet satellite.

We need to temper our arrogance to move forward, to build peace, to avoid stagnation. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be proud of what we are good at, or the good our country has accomplished. And we are the best at basketball, by far. And I want us to prove it. And if we happen to piss a few people off while doing it, all the better.