Are we really ok with Steve Bannon being in jail right now?

Pining for a scrappier time in America

Photo by Frankie Cordoba on Unsplash

I grew up in the 80’s and 90' in a small Rust Belt town, which was considerably less rusty at the time but on its way, and it wasn’t yet among the swingiest of swing districts in a super-swingy state but would soon be. My bedroom was the entire 2nd floor of the 1378 square foot, two-story Rust Belt palace where my working class family of four would stake their stake in the American dream. Having the entire 2nd floor wasn’t as glorious as it may seem, though, because I could only stand up in the very middle of it. It was only maybe 15 feet across, and at the edges the slanted roof met the substructure as the ceiling height faded to zero. I think it’s properly called a “one and one half story”, actually. And like most Midwest 2nd floors, it was hot as balls in the summer time and cold as hell in the winter.

Despite having to duck to avoid it at all times, the underside of the roof that formed the ceiling to my bedroom provided ample canvas to hang all of the expressions of identity and objects of worship that adorn most teenagers’ walls. Among mine was a life-size poster of Michael Jordan, and also one of the 1993 Chicago Bulls. My ex-Marine father who worked at times in the steel plant that once defined our town wouldn’t let me get a poster of Dennis Rodman when he eventually joined the team, for obvious reasons.

Michael Jordan, if you haven’t heard of him, is perhaps the most famous American athlete of all time. He had balls the size of coconuts that helped him hit too many game winning shots to count, and his competitiveness was legendary bordering on pathological. I spent many hours in the evening screaming at our 200 pound 20 inch TV from our thick family room carpet, watching the Bulls eeking out victory after victory. Like many 90’s kids, indelibly imprinted in my consciousness is the image of MJ breaking Bryon Russel’s legs with a crossover before securing their 6th championship with a 20-foot jumper.

The end of an era, in more ways than one.

After that shot, NBA championship teams would no longer hail from cold, hard-scrabble cities in the thriving manufacturing core like Chicago and Detroit. No longer would their fans and players be gruff but well-meaning men with mustaches like my father and Mike Ditka (Jordan even had a mustache at one point if I remember correctly. Where have all the mustaches gone?). The next era belonged to international cosmpolises like Miami and LA and San Francisco where residents wore sunglasses and talked about “taking their talents” from places like Cleveland to sexier locales. Yes, San Francisco has a basketball team. Really?

All this brings me to Steve Bannon, of course. Bannon is, depending on whom you ask, either the consigliere to a once and future dictator who will undoubtedly usher in the end of the world, or one of the very few powerful people paying any attention to the forgotten people who built the greatest nation on Earth.

I won’t take a position on Bannon the man in this post, but I will say this: Imagine you were a die hard fan of the Utah Jazz in 1997 or ‘98, or any of the other teams the Bulls dispatched on their way to becoming a dynasty in the 90’s. Imagine you had posters of Karl Malone and John Stockton covering your little Utah bedroom and you cheered as hard for the Jazz as I did for the Bulls during those games. Would you be looking back at those games with the same nostalgia if, say, the Salt Lake City police had locked up Phil Jackson right before the start of the finals, and kept him there until the last few minutes of Game 7, because he had refused to rat his friend out for something the Utah police believed his friend did, and your Jazz beat the Jackson-less Bulls in a series half the country believed to be rigged?

Regardless of your politics (and mine are infinitely more nuanced than you might think after I spent a paragraph talking about Steve Bannon without calling him Hitler), I don’t think many self-respecting NBA fans would be comfortable with this, for many reasons.

First, you don’t rat on your people, period. Whether you’re a Washington politician, a West Baltimore hustler in The Wire, Fredo Corleone, or Joe the Plumber, you don’t rat. Especially on your own people. Refusing to rat makes you a stand up guy, rather than a bad guy, right? That’s still the rule, right?

Second, beating the Bulls without Phil Jackson, or Trump without Bannon, would be, well, un-American. Nothing to do with knee-jerk patriotism and hoorah flag-waving. Just that, if nothing else, we purport to believe in fair fights Here, in a level playing ground where anyone from Irish peasant immigrants like my dad’s kin to Cuban refugees in Miami can scrap their way up. The American system rewards cunning and hard work, contrarian thinking and courage, and the type of competitiveness MJ embodied. It celebrates, rather than undermines, threats to the establishment and shocks to the system, giving us a dynamism and resilience that is the envy of the world. Right? It still does that, right?

I know nothing about Bryon Russel, but I’d like to think that if you asked him, he’d say he’d rather have his legs broken by MJ in front of millions of Americans than beat a Bulls team that had one hand tied behind its back on the way to an asterisked championship*. I’m certain MJ would be disgusted by such a prospect. I honestly wonder how many Americans would still agree.