Reconsidering Joakim: Sublime Slayer of American Pragmatism?

Last night, David Stern bowed to the hegemony of the final thrust of March Madness (probably because NBA games couldn’t get advertising during its commercials if it went head on with this prolonged American ritual), leaving the Florida – Ohio St. game as the only show in town (which is euphemism for ‘on television’… so po-mo). We feeble viewers witnessed a three-headed hydra slay King Kong and co. And at the center of it all was the most problematic and troubling figure in pop culture this side of Sanjaya: Joakim Noah brazenly danced and screamed and blabbered a post game interview incomprehensible to all states, both red and blue. Strange days we be in. It seems we as a people are united in the revulsion young Joah Joah Binks Noah. Why is that? And what does it mean?

Looking beyond his literal ponytail to all that it embodies, I believe it’s his Frenchness that upsets so many. There are but 3 points on the French ballplaying map: Tony Parker, Boris Diaw and now Joakim, who has a French (and Cameroonian) father and Swedish MILFish mother (phrase swiped from the brilliant Shanoff).

Let’s channel a little BShoals and locate each of these ballplayers in France’s other export to the West, French academic theory. Tony Parker, with his pending union to America’s own Eva Longoria, seems easily adopted into our cultural approval by becoming a celebrity beyond basketball, much like Jacques Derrida. Parker destabilizes opposing teams with his inversion of the margins and the center (Derrida’s famous theory) by scoring in the paint from a point guard position that normally facilitates from the margins of the court.

Boris Diaw, on the other hand, represents the theoretical underpinnings of Jacques Lacan. Diaw (whose meager box score makes him a horrendous fantasy play) plays like the human unconscious, a force structured like a language and at odds with the conscious work of STAT (who happens to accumulate mad stats).

So, TP3:Derrida::Diaw:Lacan::Joakim:_______. Fill in the blank. (If any state schoolers are somehow still reading, well done!)

Pejoratives aside, and returning to the point… America hates Joakim because he catalyzes a feeling of Lyotard’s sublime,an experience of pleasurable anxiety we experience when encountering something wild and threatening. America’s image of Joakim is dancing after victory (what hubris!). He’s been insinuated as gay or female throughout the blogosphere. But I contend, however, he’s actually threatening and wild, something that cannot be easily comprehended by the rational American mind. And the dude, with considerable help from his teammates, just slayed the great Greg Oden, the apex of American pragmatism and biological idealism. Oden, while crushing his individual matchups with Noah/Horford/Richard/Speights, lost the war and the pen with which history is recorded. So often do we hear Oden compared to the great centers of the past (Robinson, Hakeem, Wilt, Tree Rollins…sike!, etc.) that we implicitly understand copying is one mode of knowing (a tenant of American pragmatism, or so my roommate once tried to explain). This Darwinian force of nature, while still a force, no longer authors the Grand Narrative we as a viewing public demand; the micro-narrative revolution of diversity sings sweetly along with a mulatto Frenchmen momentarily at the helm. Strange days indeed.

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