Many thanks to everyone for reading!

Here’s my website, which will soon have a ‘news’ section. Come over!

LeBron James as a Cavalier

Big Caveat: When I wrote this earlier today I hadn’t watched, and didn’t plan to watch, what became the LeBacle, which I thought would be pretty formulaic: A bio segment, some highlights, some analysis of scenarios, a few words about the decision-making process, LeBron expressing the requisite gratitude towards the fans and city of Cleveland, the big announcement, a little postgame, and done. This was just a basketball piece; “brave” was tongue-in-cheek. I didn’t realize a human disaster had just occurred. Apologies for any seeming indifference/obtuseness.

When LeBron James chose to play in Miami with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, he made the right decision, and he made the only potentially transformative decision.

It’s a truism at this point that talent dilution has badly damaged basketball over the past fifteen years. I’d say it’s easily damaged basketball more than anything else.

I grew up in Philly, and I wasn’t quite old enough to fully grasp the specialness of the ‘82-‘83 Malone-Erving-Toney-Cheeks-Jones Sixers, but I was old enough to live and die by them, and I took as a given the frightening arduousness of their postseason hero’s journey: To get to the McHale-Bird-Parish Celtics, they would have to get past the Sikma-Cummings-Lucas Bucks, and the reward for those conquests was the Kareem-Magic-Worthy Lakers. (The Sixers killed everybody.)

Those were historically elite teams. NBA champions should be historically elite—every team in the Finals should approach historical eliteness. They’re ostensibly the world’s best teams. But look at the ‘98-’99 Knicks, the ‘01-’02 Nets, and James’ own ‘06-’07 Cavs. Those weren’t Finals-worthy teams. In the last fifteen years maybe two losing Finals teams deserved their spots: the ‘92-‘93 Suns and the ‘96-through-‘98 Jazz. The parade of lambs to the Finals has diminished the meaning of the NBA championship. (The East-West power imbalance has aggravated but not caused the problem.)

LeBron James, the greatest player of his era, has chosen to play with another Hall-of-Famer, a player who could end up on a top-five all-time list. Historically great teams need a transcendent nucleus, and Wade was the only other transcendent player out there.

At the 2008 Olympics, James, Wade, and Bosh made what then seemed like a comically boyish pact: they would all play together someday, and if they each had to take less money to do it, they would. In a culture of extreme, team-hostile self-interest and impossible market constraints, James has just made good on that pact, and allowed us to envision a different NBA. The way you get around talent dilution is by internationalizing the league to expand the talent pool and doing exactly what James, Bosh, Wade, and Pat Riley did. Otherwise you have Scott Boras ruining the NBA like a developer ruins wetlands.

One criticism of James’ choice is that he has exploited a rare circumstance (great free agent class, much cap space) to assemble a superteam that will manufacture championships—winning will be so easy as to render his rings meaningless. On this theory, his tilting of the playing field is almost cowardly. It’s a strange idea. This new Miami team could have been assembled in a bunch of ways. And it would be hard to call a championship win meaningless if it entailed beating a very good, Dwight-Howard-led Orlando Magic team, a tough, healthy Celtics team, a Bulls team with a core of Derrick Rose, Carlos Boozer, Joakim Noah, and another all-star, and, in the Finals, a Lakers team with Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol, Andrew Bynum, and Lamar Odom.

The more common objection is the opposite: James has fallen into a terrible trap by mistaking talent for team. He is overestimating the limits of his unselfishness. Here are the supposedly insurmountable obstacles to Miami’s success: Wade and James won’t be able to share the ball. Wade and James will bicker over who’s going to control the game in the last two minutes. They’ll fight over who’s going to take the last shot. Miami, now cash-poor, will never be able to assemble a serviceable supporting cast. The whole thing will be revealed to be a personal-brand-enhancing sham. Also, the sky over Miami is known to be brittle and prone to cracking and falling.

James and Wade have crazy assist numbers for superlative scorers. How will they share the ball? Passing. Who will take over the game in the last few minutes? The player who’s having the best night. Who’ll take the last shot? The player who gets the best look. The solution is team basketball, 2008 Olympics–style. James, Wade, and Bosh are betting that they can play good team basketball.

The person building this team is Pat Riley, one of the best team-builders ever. Here is one non-monetary recruiting incentive he can offer prospective players: a chance to play on one of the greatest teams in NBA history.

The great Walt Whitman

Mark Sanford, John Ensign, Eric Massa, David Vitter, high-level S&M-loving RNC staffers—Walt Whitman has thought of you! He has thought of you while taking ferries from Manhattan to Brooklyn in the mid-1850s! “You that shall cross from shore to shore years hence,” he wrote, “are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.” Fallen politicians, “consider whether [he] may not in unknown ways be looking upon you”—and then dispense with your scripts and guises! Expand! Will you not soon enough be “furnish[ing] your parts toward eternity”? Of course you will!

From ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fell,

The dark threw its patches down upon me also,

The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,

My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,

I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,

Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,

Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,

Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,

The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,

The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,

Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,

Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,

Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,

Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,

Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,

Played the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,

The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,

Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

The Texas Tech Double-T

This is the sensational allegation against Mike Leach, head football coach at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock: During practice, Leach ordered a team trainer to lock a player who had just suffered a concussion in a lightless electrical closet for several hours. The player, Adam James, son of former NFL player and ESPN analyst Craig James, was not allowed to sit down. A “guard” was posted outside the door. Adam James subsequently released footage of the closet interior that he took with his cell-phone camera.

Mike Leach’s account: Leach told his trainer to take Adam James to a safe, dark place, because the paramount considerations when a player suffers a concussion are light sensitivity and the risk of an additional blow to the head. The “electrical closet” was in fact a “sports medicine garage,” in which James could receive fluids and remain out of the light. The “guard” was a trainer who checked on James every fifteen minutes.

The James family filed a complaint, and with extraordinary rapidity Leach was fired “with cause,” meaning the school was not obligated to pay the remainder of his contract. Leach had secured the contract a year earlier after threatening to leave Texas Tech. In ten triumphant years there, he had gained tremendous leverage. An idiosyncratic law school graduate obsessed with pirates, Leach had lifted the school’s previously anemic football program to national prominence by using an unprecedented offensive attack that changed the way the college game was played. (Michael Lewis wrote a beautiful article about this in The New York Times Magazine.)

During the contract negotiations, Texas Tech administrators mistakenly assumed that Leach’s threat was a bluff, and were ultimately forced to accept his terms to keep him. Leach’s victory, though, engendered suffusing bitterness that only grew with time.

This past season, Leach struggled to discipline and earn the allegiance of his players. Adam James complicated the problem. He was, Leach says, a lazy kid with an outsized sense of entitlement who frequently flaunted team protocol.

Craig James, a ubiquitous presence on ESPN, apparently phoned Leach and his position coaches regularly, demanding to know why Adam’s minutes had fallen off. (The answer, Leach says, was a combination of laziness and limited ability.) James was also calling high-ranking administration officials and powerful alumni. Leach and his staff eventually stopped answering James’ calls.

Leach has filed suit against Texas Tech, which he says has chosen to “deal in lies.” Texas Tech has undertaken an accelerated search for a new coach.

Did Leach torture Adam James? The team trainer initially affirmed Leach’s story, but then criticized his conduct in an affidavit taken by Texas Tech lawyers. At least one of Leach’s assistants considered Adam James a disruptive player who undermined his coaches. Some of Leach’s current players have said that Leach behaved tyrannically this season and that his treatment of Adam James was not anomalous.

The first problem for Leach now is that his reputation has been damaged to the point of probable unhireability, and the only people with firsthand knowledge of the situation are beholden to Texas Tech. Leach’s public support will come obliquely from other head coaches and former head coaches (see Lou Holtz), former players (see Wes Welker), and fans.

Leach’s second problem is that the Jameses cannot back off their positions. They got the man who built Texas Tech football fired. They can’t equivocate now.

Finally, even if Leach clears his name through compelled legal testimony, it may not help him much professionally, because the near-grotesque allegations against him will have hung in the air of plausibility for so long.

In this miasma, it’s interesting to contrast Craig James’ ESPN interview with Mike Leach’s. One man, dispensing with politics and protocol, seems to be making a desperate, earnest attempt to convey what he knows to be true. The other, cautiously and uncomfortably evading certain questions, seems to be reciting talking points supplied by advisors.

Opium poppies

In 2006, Afghanistan harvested a larger illegal narcotics crop than any nation in modern history. Colombia, Mexico, and Burma together issue fewer drugs than a single Afghani province (Helmand, in southern Afghanistan). The U.S. rates the heroin-stained politicians of Afghanistan on a venality scale, hoping to work with “acceptably corrupt” officials (President Hamid Karzai falls short). Like the FARC in Columbia, the Taliban participate in and extract funding from the heroin trade. As the 2009 presidential election unfolds, opium remains the overwhelming political force in Afghanistan. The value of the election results may lie in their ability to help us calibrate the magnitude of the force.

But here I’m interested in a narrower question raised by magnitude: How do Afghani drug lords spend their absurd earnings? It’s an intermittently vexing problem. Control of the heroin trade is divided among about twenty drug lords, who split an annual take of (at least) several billion dollars. Afghanistan, though, has trouble absorbing spending on this order: The country’s per-capita GDP is $429, the lowest on the Asian continent. A world-class paucity prevails there—of luxuries to buy, professionals to employ, penthouse suites to reserve. The infrastructure situation makes leisure travel incommodious. (There is  one golf course, the Kabul Golf Club, restored after the fall of the Taliban by its proprietors, who cleared landmines, Soviet tanks, and rocket launchers to make it playable. It’s a nine-holer.)

The first step in disposing of drug money is, of course, automatic: operating expenses are considerable. Afghan drug lords rule areas as big as Maryland and Switzerland. Their territories contain river systems and mountain ranges and endemic species. Drug lords maintain large private militias. Haji Jumah Khan, the now-imprisoned former overseer of Helmand Province, commanded 15,000 fighters.

Heroin producers also employ convoys of armed jeeps and SUVs and fleets of cargo ships. Interfering palms along trafficking routes must be oiled; highway robbers must be killed. And there is the pre-shipment labwork. Refineries are crude—mud huts staffed by local men, usually very high, presiding over plastic-drum vats of boiling chemical solutions—but expensive nonetheless. There has been a little cost spike recently as a result of intensifying NATO antidrug operations; producers have felt compelled to build labs into the backs of Toyota pickups for quick relocation.

Still, there is a lot of money left. Afghan drug lords sock it away in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, to which countries they travel with some regularity, for business and pleasure. They also fly to reliably corrupt regional destinations like Quetta and Kabul. But living abroad is unrealistic, even behind walls of payoffs in autocratic oil states. A drug lord is safest in his native stronghold, the best drug-empire management is on-site management, and many producers (I imagine) simply want to make their material success manifest in their homeland.

So Afghanistan’s drug lords import loaded Lexus Land Cruisers with tinted windows and video entertainment systems. They throw parties. Haji Jumah Khan’s parties were highly alcoholic, lasted all night, and featured prostitutes flown in from Russia. Mainly, though, they build stuff—they remake the country to accommodate their acquired appetites. The pioneering Khan bought a town (land, buildings) in southern Helmand Province and transformed it into a rejuvenating way-station for his drug runners, who could pause after their travails and walk, self-reflectively, along the shores of a big artificial lake.

“Narcotecture” is the term used in Afghanistan to describe what the drug lords build. The Sherpur neighborhood in Kabul has the greatest concentration of narcotecture, but the phenomenon is national. Square blocks are razed, ancient family compounds are razed, and narco-palaces, sometimes several on a single vast lot, go up. The mansions may have twelve bathrooms, four kitchens, and rooftop parking lots. Many are fenced and armored; all are guarded.

Stylistically, narcotecture is incoherent and dizzyingly busy. Residences are composed of clashing globe-spanning elements: Asian pagoda tiers and eaves curving to points, Greek temple columns, mirrored skyscraper glass, medieval-castle balustrades and parapets, Persian pillars and arches, arabesque wrought-iron balcony railings, confectionary plasterwork. Some are straight imitations: a White House is under construction in Sherpur.

Inside: three-thousand-dollar Italian chandeliers, basement swimming pools, neon lighting systems that saturate floors. One mansion, according to Monocle magazine, has neon floors in alternating colors: blue on the second floor, pink on the first floor, and a “tutti-fruiti mélange” in the basement.

These structures look down upon, usually, squalor, the condition in which most Aghans live. A private residence with fourteen bathrooms may occupy the same unpaved street as tin-sheet huts and bomb-wrecked, squatter-occupied buildings exposed to unchanneled flows of sewage.

The narco-palaces also look down upon, and displace, history. Herat, for example, features a lot of narcotecture, but also the enormous eloquent citadel built by Alexander the Great in 330 BC, a stand of minarets above the fifteenth-century tomb of Queen Gawharshad, empress of the Timurid Dynasty, and a medieval mud-brick souk whose tea shops line alleys designed for two-way camel traffic. There is talk of clearing space in central Herat for a shopping mall.

It’s hard to say how great a threat narco-culture and narcotecture pose to the cultural traditions and indigenous architectures of Afghanistan, to which every Afghan has a natural right. A few years ago, the reporter Declan Walsh interviewed a construction worker standing outside a half-built narco-palace. “The owners,” the man said, “are the ones who killed our people and drank our blood, but at least they are providing us with work.”

Another possible (if paradoxical) consolation: Narcotecture is, historically speaking, perishable. It’s hard to find good contractors and architects in Afghanistan. Out-of-plumb doors in the most princely mansions fail to close. The concrete used to make narcotecture foundations and facades is said to crack quickly, and sometimes to crumble within years of being poured. Construction quality in Herat is so anemic, one local architect recently said, that an earthquake would cause half the city to collapse.

(An excellent narcotecture photo album, with sharp commentary, by T/S contributer P.J. Tobia. Two narcotecture video tours: by Robert Greenwald, of Rethink Afghan, and Rachel Morajee, of Monocle.)

SOURCES: Monocle magazine; Declan Walsh in The Guardian; the Congressional Research Service; Gretchen Peters, author of The Seeds of Terror, on NRR’s Fresh Air; P.J. Tobia in True/Slant; Wikipedia