Let's be frank. Olympics basketball is as much of a farce as the idea that our world is becoming multipolar or will become multipolar within the next few decades, Brazil (what a coincidence) and India often being named as the new up and comers (any day now!) to join the already existing “superpowers” Russia and China (superpowers with the tragic inability to project power generally anywhere other than in nations directly bordering them).

This is, of course, the sort of alarmist rhetoric designed to sell books with titles like "The Rising Dragon" and inspire Tom Clancy's ghost writers, and similarly I would write this Olympics basketball column telling you that some sort of competitive equivalence existed between USA basketball and the rest of the world, some chance of an actual entertaining game where the score remained within at least ten, but all of these things would be as much of a lie.

Short of the occasional Vietnam War or Manu Ginobili led Argentine basketball revolution, American hegemony in basketball and in the ability to ruthlessly project power both remain completely unchallenged. This leads to an empire of complacency, balanced in between small periods of alarmism to wake us up from the mid-R.E.M. panic attack. The athletes of the NBA are just far too many tiers above in terms of their pure physical and creative abilities, despite being a Canadian invented sport basketball remains an American sport. Gains have certainly been made around the world, basketball gaining traction with solid fanbases in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, but at the end of the day the stronghold of basketball is the United States.

List the top fifteen players in the world and at this point probably every single one of them would be American, considering Dirk Nowitski's falloff (despite still being a valuable piece to this day) emblematic of aging European stars from aging European demographics. The likes of Tony Parker, Marc Gasol, Pau Gasol, Dirk Nowitski, Luis Scola, Manu Ginobili, Boris Diaw, this generation of European ballers has all but nearly aged out of the golden era where they could call themselves competitive with the rest of the NBA's superstars.

We can gaze with hope at the next generation of European stars already being paranoidly debated in internet fanbase coffeehouses, with their own meme teams, but such talk is more hope for the future than anything in the now that can actually make Olympics basketball seem potentially thrilling or competitive. Their time has not yet come, if it ever will, it is disheartening witnessing some of these demographically aging nations and their inability to regenerate an old generation of basketball players with a surging new youth wave. True, young foreign players litter the cosmos glimmering with that lure of potential stars, but in places like Argentina it does not appear like a new youth movement has formed to replace the soon to be retiring legendary oldies.

This remains the American century, even if we as a nation can finally smell the scent of our own rotting loins. The disintegration is happening, maybe, but at a slower pace than global warming, to many of the bourgeoisie it remains merely theoretical and perhaps thrilling (the mumbled to-be escapades of pseudo-anarchic “revolutionaries” and alt-right trump dumps). We operate in a sort of dream state, struggling in the now, hypnotized by it in the small spaces we subsume and in the media that we consume, only occasionally awakened for a moment from this soma daze by some sort of tragedy.

These momentary shocks from complacency only usually result in a temporary cure. USA basketball can get boring fast, like any sort of prolonged effortless domination, and this complacent rot infects players as much as fans. The longer the term of American dominance in Olympics basketball continues, with every sixty point blowout, elite players and basketball viewers begin to ask themselves “Why even participate in this? Why bother? It's always the same...plus, I'm not getting paid.”

And so inevitably it happens, as consistently as the lunar cycles, we field a team of bored semi-mediocre demigods who should in theory defeat the competition but end up facing a plucky but determined underdog that uses its wily skills to deface the seemingly unstoppable American monolith machine. The last sort of Pearl Harbor shakeup was the mid to early 2000s, that legendary Argentinian team led by the crafty basketball wizard Manu Ginobili that faced a mediocre American team with barely any shooters and only a few true legendary level elites. It was a volunteer army in an era where most Americans couldn't be bothered.

So this late Roman Empire gets shook up, we awaken from us sleepwalking, enraged, emboldened, suddenly united. Never again! Never forget! Remember the...insert here. And we are for a period certainly more aggressive, a late surge of patriotism leading people to finally enlist for the national cause. Though even in 2016 the American team lacks the top two players in the world, LeBron James and Steph Curry, who both had better things to do and I'm sure we as Americans can sympathize and understand their shrugs. We won't need them, anyway, at least this year.

2016 in Olympics basketball has been the sort of uninspiring international basketball a follower of the USA team instinctually fears and detests. Not only are Chinese and Venezuelan teams being effortlessly blown out by 50-60 point outcomes, but highlights from the Americans are few and far in between. This is the sad truth of the matter, we can blunder around the world, playing poorly, missing shot after shot, and yet this angry sleepwalking drunk of a nation still usually wins it all.

There's not much fun to be had watching a team so dominant that it can have a pisspoor shooting night and still annihilate their opponents by at least forty points. Like repeating rifles against spear-bearing natives, eventually the empire starts unconsciously rooting for the underdog, following that self-destructive yearning that comes with imperial ennui.

Witness the sort of colonial neoimperialist attitude that fuels the exotic peril headlines we're consuming these days about how disgusting and inconvenient the Brazilian Olympics are, the same sort of offhanded mustache-twirling otherism that is behind casual American interventionists who propose surgically involving themselves in every Middle Eastern crisis with the subtlety of a game of Operation.

Headlines abound about Rio's water and facilities, fueling a City of God-like white man's fantasy of a polluted favela. My unnamed source on the scene was quick to disabuse me of such thoughts, having visited Brazil during their preparation for this year's Olympics. They expressed disgust with the image brewed by the international press in comparison with their reality of Rio, which was one of friendly accepting people and a clean wonderful ocean.

Stay salty, America.

U.S.A. Basketball Update

Paul George (forward-Indiana) has his big fat American tourist moment as he discovers that waterboys (i.e. Manservants to provide you with water and clean up your trash) are not in fact provided in the Olympics. And they use what kind of toilets?!

Paul George just realized the hard way that he's not playing in the NBA right now. https://t.co/zxpO3m8GXh
— Eric Fawcett (@Efawcett7) https://twitter.com/Efawcett7/status/762807482381111296