Link Banana

Tommy Craggs — with good reason — thinks that the whole “Redeem Team” shtick is nothing but the most insidious marketing campaign the NBA has ever waged.

The Redeem Team’s greater triumph in these Games, though, has been one of marketing, branding, and message discipline. With assistance from Nike, which partnered with NBA Entertainment to make a five-part Team USA documentary called “Road to Redemption,” USA Basketball has relentlessly peddled the notion that this new bunch has embraced the virtuous and selfless habits of international ball.

You know, the one that cast LeBron James as King Kong and Gisele Bündchen as that distressed blonde Fay Wray. Or not. Wesley Morris thinks it’s much less interesting than the rest of us did.

I, for one, have racism fatigue. I’m wiped out. Between the outrage over Obama’s Jeremiah Wright problems and Bill Clinton’s unbelievable mutation from American’s first black president into Karl Rove, I don’t have the bandwidth to fight Anna Wintour. Seeing that cover as purely racist doesn’t give the people looking at it enough credit. It dates Vogue for relying on the allusion but it also dates us for going crazy over it. Racial hysteria is the old black. Maybe it’s so old it’s avant-garde—veryVogue.