May 11th, 2005

Though it now all seems like a brief but horrible memory, there once was a professional (NBA) basketball team in Vancouver. The Vancouver Grizzlies, they were, and watching them play was, well, a grisly experience. Through a series of moments of over-thinking, bizarre politlcal decisions, and sheer incompetence, the Vancouver Grizzlies never had a chance because of the terrible team management. There are many post-mortems about the team, like this one, so I won't go into details.

When the team left I didn't care very much; I just couldn't appreciate the game itself. Lord knows, I tried: I went to a couple of games, forced myself to watch a few more on television, even when I was so agitated from boredom that I wanted to jump up and run around in circles screaming ... no matter what happened, I just didn't care. Basketball seemed to be a great game for those short of attention (with scores like 110-106, it seems stupid to cheer for each basket).

And the game is full of especially character-less people ... worse, even, than NFL players. These folks glamourize violence off the court, rape, gun-play, and overt displays of excess riches. They are seriously inadequate people, more or less inversely proportional to their basketball skills. That is, the more points they can get on the court, the worse their crappy little shallow personalities are—generally speaking, of course.

Also, the lockout—and the nastiness bandied about by all sides during it—didn't help, either. Even the great NHL lockout of 2004-5 doesn't have the same missing-link thug gangster thinly-veiled violence of words that the NBA lockout had. The NBA is full of ugly awful people, and they are idolized ... which threatens and alarms me to no end. Another sign of the decline of the Western Empire. When criminals and personality-challenged boobs who just happen to be able to throw a few baskets become the focal point of peoples' idolatry, we might as well pack up the tent and all go home.

* * *

Why do I dredge this crap up now? Well, because of something I heard on a television commercial last night. The voice-over said something like, "Hey, Canada: We've got what you want," and I bristled at that. I hate—absolutely loathe—being addressed by my region/country/city or consumer class. "Attention shoppers!" "Good evening Vancouver!" etc.

So I was reminded of one of the Grizzlies games I went to. The players came running out onto the court and the announcer bellowed, "On your feet Vancouver!" And I muttered to myself (buried by the noise of the people around me): "Don't tell me what to do!" And I stayed seated, though I was very alone in that.

I guess that a discovery was made that if you talk to people as though they are one large blobby mass of humanity they will start to act that way. Since the beginning of time it has been observed that crowds behave as though they are single entities, low in intelligence and potentially very dangerous. It is no surprise that someone also discovered that, since we humans are predisposed to congregate and fuse into one amorphous entity anyhow, we could easily be encouraged to do so by being addressed as something we might be able to feel a part of. Hence, "On your feet Vancouver" becomes a rally cry to turn the individuals sitting in their seats into a single stupid blob of cheering, jumping flesh.

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