They Call Me Blockhead

El Vez has a quick reminder before you start Doin' It.

It's not really brunch without cocktails, and if you, like me, don't like either orange juice or champagne, then the bloody mary is your brunching cocktail. Of course, I don't get the feeling that Willie Nelson's done a lot of brunches.

Like gypped, gypsy itself is a slur. Broadly it applies to any of the non-landed peoples of Europe (and indeed, some rights workers prefer the term because of the wide tent), but generally it applies to the Roma who emigrated from South Asia and landed in Europe in the fifteenth century. Since then they have faced forced labour, suspicion, violence, poverty, general exclusion from society and genocide. During the Nazi Holocaust the Roma were the fourth largest victim by number, after Jews, Soviets and Poles. By percentage, between one quarter and one half of all Roma were executed, other than the Jews, no other group comes close.

Sixty years later, life for Roma has scarcely improved. The same poverty remains. There exists a lack of access to education. Most worrisome of all is that some European politicians have no problem casting the blame for the countries woes on them.

This is reaching a particular fever pitch in Italy at the moment. The current Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has been in and out of office and faced (and is facing) myriad charges of corruption, including ongoing trials for which he's hoping to pass a law giving him amnesty. He regained political power in the 2008 election with a coalition that includes a number of extreme right parties including "anti-immigration" parties like the Northern League. These include modern manifestations of the nationalism and ethnocentrism of the Nazis. Last summer when I spent a couple of weeks in Rome, I was shocked at the number of graffiti swastikas that dotted my neighbourhood. Just as disturbing was the number of political posters that, as best I could translate, were marked with virulent xenophobic propaganda.

So with an "allegedly" corrupt prime minister looking to distract the public from his attempts at self-protection partnered with an openly racist political party, the subject of the day has become crime. Of course, those responsible for it are the Roma (well, maybe, there's no real evidence for this, but they've been scapegoats for crime for centuries, so why let facts get in the way of tradition).  So the Government is purging those who don't have citizenship papers (and they've been non-citizens of any country for most of history, so that's easy), while stoking the public to take care of the rest of them.

Today the government took the next step towards preparing labour camps, ordering the mass fingerprinting of Roma children. There has been some strong condemnation, particularly from Italy's Jewish community (who do not wield a ton of political power, but WWII is still fresh enough on the minds of Europe). Meanwhile the government is unrepentant, claiming it is for the good of the Roma children.

There is some good news. There are Roma advocates, from legal organizations to Soros's Open Society Initiative to a European initiative called the Decade of Roma Inclusion (focused on Eastern Europe). At the same time, this whole series of events has been remarkably disturbing.

Borges says that time favors symmetries. Consider this: several years ago I bought a car to move across the country. A combination of lesser need for a car and the lack of space aggravating my back have caused me to sell my car in advance of my moving across the country. 

Followed, however. Past tense. There's a reason for this and it's the reason you normally hear from grey haired retirees calling in to sports call in shows, and you can hear them shaking their fist over the air. You see, my basketball fandom reached its highest pitch in the 1990s. While most of the country was falling for perhaps the best player in NBA history, Michael Jordan, I was devoutly cheering for the best team in the NBA at the time: the New York Knicks. It was a fool's conceit, however, as Jordan and the Bulls were able to beat them in the playoffs every year, but damned if it wasn't close.

I know that some will come out and say, well Pippen and Rodman rounded out the Bulls, and they definitely did, but the Bulls played superstar basketball, Pippen and Rodman and all were there to set up and back up Jordan. Some point to the Knicks and say, hey, what about Ewing, and Ewing was the superstar, sure, but the Knicks played team basketball: it wasn't Ewing's Knicks. It was Ewing's and Starks's and Oakley's and Mason's. They set up and backed up as a unit.

And it was the erosion of the team that eroded my interest. I watched as Mason, then Starks, then Oakley all got traded away, to name only the three that stand out most painful in my mind. By the time the final nail was hammered into the coffin and Ewing was sent to Seattle, my interest had faded to passive following when something came up on the radio. I just couldn't invest myself in a team that wasn't going to look the same a few years later.

My interest in basketball has sufficiently waned, but vestiges still remained. If there's a game on in a bar, I'm more likely to watch than any other sport (I'm pretty much unlikely to watch Football, Baseball can catch my interest for flashes at a time, Hockey will draw me in, but not sustain interest, NASCAR... whatever). I still recognize all the team names, even the newer teams. I even have a sense of some of the bigger players, which I can't say about football beyond the Patriots and that was a result of living in Boston.

The game doesn't look the same when I tune in. It seems like every team is playing superstar basketball, worse there's a premium on the fast break and setting up a shot seems a lost art. Lob the ball down the court, throw it up, hope it goes in, rebound and repeat. Maybe the sport has left me, or maybe it's a lingering bitterness.

But there's an interesting twist with the finals coming up. Lakers vs. Celtics? This triggers something deep within me, memories of a young boy, first developing an interest in basketball, sitting around not just with my nuclear family, but sometimes my extended family to watch the finals. 

That was thrilling basketball. Any number of sports writers will do it better justice, and there's bounds to be loads of history columns up by now. This was the greatest rivalry in my lifetime in any sport. Not only were the teams at the top the game, but they were two different styles representing two different cities. The LA Lakers with what was then considered a flashy style of game play, representing a major city. The Boston Celtics playing a basics-heavy ball game, from a second city. Showbiz vs. Blue Collar.

Of course, there was the racial undertones as well. When you hear "blue collar" that's usually a tip-off. It probably wasn't the intentions of the Celtics management, after all this was the team that played the first African-American in the NBA, had the first African-American head coach, was the first to start an all African-American side. Circumstances, such as the death of Len Bias, and the unbelievable talent of Larry Bird, lead them to be what was seemingly the last largely-white team. Meanwhile the Lakers not only were lead by by "Magic" Johnson, but their lineup included Kareem Abdul Jabar, who converted to Islam to reconnect with his African roots. Add in to the mix the fact that further down the Green Line in Boston you had a baseball team whose hard luck had more to do with keeping a white team than it did with any trade made decades prior, and city that received a visit from a school in Tennessee to teach them about integration, and it's safe to say that Boston, and much of White America, didn't mind too much that their Celtics were considered a "white team." I didn't pick up on this at the time, being in elementary school, I just liked seeing Magic dunk and Bird throw no-look passes on the mark.

So I'm tempted again to watch the finals, and I'll probably tune in tonight. At the same time, I'm full of conflicted feelings.

No, this doesn't relate back to my beloved Knicks, not this time. There are two teams in the NBA whose names fill my stomach with bile: the Bulls and the Pacers. They aren't involved and unless it was the Bulls vs. the Pacers (which couldn't happen), I'd happily root for the opposing team. My conflict comes from a different place.

In the Celtics you have a Boston sports team. Years of living in Boston has made me loathe Boston sports fans and therefore want to see all Boston sports teams get to big games and lose. Just losing won't piss people off: nobody cared about the Patriots before they started winning Super Bowls, just like how the Celtics barely even got Dunkin Donuts endorsements (and DD endorse everything Boston) until recently; Celtics t-shirts reflected the Bird era, never the contemporary one. I used to be ambivalent about baseball, until obnoxious Red Sox fans made me hate it. As such, I just can't bring myself to root for the Celtics.

Now the Lakers are a case of cast. In particular, the team star. Yes, I'm talking about Kobe Bryant and the rape case. I have a hard time getting past what seemed to blatant to me at the time. Throw in the fact that the Lakers' management traded away O'Neil while the case was underway, signifying that they intended to build around Bryant. Then came the settlement, and I have to suspect (although have no real basis for this and can't be arsed to research) that the Lakers' management put in some of the cash. So I can't bring myself to cheer for the team that supported rape either.

Add in to the mix the problem that basketball no longer looks like basketball to me, and I wonder if I'm just setting myself up for disappointment. Will we be seeing the court generalship of old or the shotgun style of today? No matter what, we won't be seeing the same fundamental heavy style of Bird and Jabar, even if we still see the fundamentals. I fear I'm just setting myself up for disappointment.

So here I am, a man who wants to love Basketball, left watching a sport I just can't love.

Here's what may well be an earlier, more bitter take on the same song:

QUESTIONS ARE A BURDEN TO OTHERS

ANSWERS A PRISON TO ONESELF