Queen of the Bondo

Ha ha just kidding. It totally is about Lebron James.

"Bye bye Cleveland."

For those of you who waste your precious pennies on fancy cable, tonight is an exciting night. At 9 pm EST you’ll get to witness the most important event in Cleveland history: a basketball player deciding the fate of our city on national television.

Regardless of Lebron’s decision, I guarantee that Cleveland will be a smoking ruin on Friday morning. Clevelanders have been waiting for an excuse to smash and destroy everything in sight for years now. It’ll be like the ultimate knock-down, drag-out fight with that live-in, on-again, off-again significant other who we secretly resent for being better than us/smarter than us/sexier than us. It’ll be cathartic. King James doesn’t know what he’s dealing with. Cleveland needs to get pissed. If he tries to make us happy, it’ll just backfire.

Mark my words, this’ll happen. I’ve already booked my midnight Megabus ticket outta here. Not only that, I’m fully prepared to get caught in the Lebron Riots of 2010 — as I write this, I feel I am hurtling toward my destiny. “I’ll be waiting for the train at Tower City when it happens,” I nervously told a friend this morning. She politely suggested I outfit myself with some makeshift riot gear. I looked around my house to see what could possibly protect me but all I came up with was a couple of badminton rackets, but I got them at Big Lots so I doubt they’re really riot-quality.

But seriously, I know there are a lot of people who are sick of hearing about Lebron, and annoyed that Clevelanders can’t seem to concentrate on important things. But if you allow me to be annoying and academic for a moment, I might argue that the Lebron saga is about the most important thing of all: the search for meaning in an age without myths and heroes.

In the 1988 Power of Myth interview, Bill Moyers asks Joseph Campbell what happens to a society that has no myths and heroes. And Joseph Campbell says, “We’re living that now. Just look at the newspaper. It’s a mess.”

Our celebrities, our movie stars, our bigshot athletes — they are what Hercules and Achilles were to the ancient Greeks. Figures to gossip about, speculate about, tell stories about in front of the campfire. Only now we are downing cheap beer instead of swigging from a jug of retsina, watching the whole thing unfold on TV instead of in our imaginations. Can you imagine Hercules Twittering?

As with those ancient heroes, we ascribe powers to Lebron that render him not just “more than a player,” but more than a mere human, capable of destroying entire cities with a single word. And we project our own secret wishes and deepest insecurities onto him, like a sort of archetypal movie screen. If we insist that Lebron is just an egomaniac who’s looking for the most money possible, maybe we’ve just revealed our own thwarted career ambitions. If we feel that Lebron is a traitor for fleeing the Cleve, maybe we feel guilty for wanting to leave the old hometown ourselves. I am not immune from this either: in my personal reading of the Lebron myth, I see the limited opportunities in Cleveland for people who are really good at what they do. I see his internal struggle, feel his conundrum.

What it boils down to is that the Lebron saga is such a classic manifestation of our regional character, a moment so infused with hope and fear and outrage and the most quintessential of Cleveland emotions — resentment — that I just can’t fault anyone for obsessing over it. We need to occupy ourselves with these trivialities, if only to place ourselves in the vast scheme of things — and keep ourselves out of trouble.

Speaking of which, if anyone has an old bike helmet I could wear on the bus tonight, I’ll gladly accept it.