Letters from home

New York and the Knicks show the world the joy of multiculti city life

Via.

I have a friend of many years who lives in Berkeley and has gotten into very Berkeleyesque things, like open music jams and clothing swaps and such like. To see her in her breezy colorful outfits you might think she’d lived there forever — though when she opens her mouth, her rapid-fire thinking and speaking are a giveaway that she has not. Like me she had a substantial New York tenure. We both came in from the influence zone — she, North Jersey; me, Bridgeport — and as soon as it was practicable rented our shoeboxes, got in the shit, and did our work.

When the Knicks got on this run, my friend was right on top of it, regaling me with thumbnails of the starters and post-game highlights. Turns out she had been sort of following the old home team through all her changes and really zoomed in on these playoffs.

The Mets are more my jam, but when I lived there, like most citizens, I paid attention whenever a local team was on a championship run. Fortunately you don’t have to know much about the game, whatever game it is, to climb aboard the wagon. (I recall, the day after the Mets’ amazing Game 6 in 1986, WPIX’s Jerry Girard, the darkest of our local sportscasters, telling the viewers about a friend who told him it was the greatest game he’d ever seen — adding, in an undertone and with the corners of his mouth tucked, “guy started watching baseball two weeks ago.”) You just have to let yourself be buoyed by the home team’s fortunes.

My friend and I talked about the Knicks’ lean years and last finals we’d seen. I recall watching games at Joe’s Bar (back when there was no blackout for playoffs, kids), and hearing on the radio from the back of a company car coming home from Coney Island (long story) reports of John Starks heaving brick after brick.

Back then I followed as best I could, learning team details from the play-by-play, getting into it, loving Patrick Ewing carrying the team like a stevedore, talking back to the TV as if I actually knew something. I was disappointed when they didn’t pull it off, but I knew the real fans were feeling it worse.

Well, New York ain’t feeling worse now.

In this age of slop I can’t fully trust many of the videos on social, but there are plenty that are obvs legit, including those taken by my friends on the scene (including Steven Thrasher, whose excellent new book I’ll be telling you about soon), showing the streets blowing up.

Some of the scenes weren’t totally spontaneous; that guy with the trash barrel on his head does that shit regularly, I hear, and Fogo Azul (which is dope, I love women’s drum corps) were already warmed up from playing Pride. But that’s New York, City of Artists — coming out with your act on special occasions is like other people putting on their shoes and socks. The performers are the people and vice versa. The victory made it more special, but it was all special already.

There’s some great commentary out on this, including from John Ganz:

I can’t help rejoicing with the whole mass of New Yorkers, without inquiry into their pedigree. That’s what the Knicks can do like no other team: they fuse the whole city into one single spirit. We saw in the spontaneous celebrations that our town still has a spirit, an identity, something greater to which we all want to belong.

Ganz contrasts the New York celebration with Trump’s UFC jamboree this weekend — which, at this writing (I’m sure there are more humiliations yet to come from it), is exemplified by the guy staggering and vomiting at the weigh-in and dirt bikes zipping through the air like hillbilly Blue Angels. Not to speak of the bare-knuckle slugfests on the White House lawn.

I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum; I wouldn’t turn up my nose at a monster truck rally. But one of the ironies of the contrast is that Tubby’s birthday party is a command performance — a tasteless grifter looting tax receipts to stage gladiator matches for his own delectation — which most of the Americans he’s supposed to represent think is a stupid waste; while New York is happily celebrating, under its socialist mayor, the victory of a team that has genuine support and even love from its citizens because they reflect its spirit and its values.

Which brings us to race and xenophobia. Ganz:

And while white nationalism is the governing ideology in D.C., the celebration of basketball, whose greatest athletes and whose culture is black, feels defiant. As Washington retreats into parochialism, narrowness, and hate, and falls to grappling and pummeling each other senseless on the ground, New York, not just a metropolis, but the cosmopolis, a city of immigrants and 800 languages, leaps and bounds over it.

People who hate New York hate that, specifically. The pig-eyed MAGA freaks seethe to see all those dark-skinned, foreign-accented people, who they are accustomed to accuse of eating the cats and eating the dogs, kvelling with joy, and wonder why the white people are celebrating with them instead of calling the police. Tubby for sure hates it, which is why he regularly gets his B-movie villain border czar to threaten the city with ICE raids.

Yet people watching last weekend’s victory dances, performed to every kind of music by every kind of people, must know that New York’s multiculturalism is a thousand times more American that the dotard’s white supremacist spectacles. You don’t have to be a New Yorker to say it: They hate us because they ain’t us. But the good news is anyone can be.