A Tribute to LeBron James as Pathological Liar

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LeBron James is lying again. You’ve seen the threads, at this point, of LeBron’s greatest hits in his career as a the NBA’s resident pathological liar. There was a time when Lebron’s flair for the dramatic was a Twitter deep cut, an inside joke between the most terminally online of NBA fans. A remember when. By now, it has transformed from a fact of life to something even more authoritative: a meme template. As with all memes, it will quickly lose its punch.

Until LeBron’s addiction to massaging the facts remains un-played, though, I feel it deserves celebration. Among the most troubling dynamics in NBA fandom (which, of course, is just the designated manifestation of celebrity/entertainment culture for a disproportionately, but not exclusively online male cohort) is the inability of fans to actually identify the subjects of their obsessions as human. Fandom is premised upon a distance that often makes its hosts appear other-than-human: they are multimillionaires, they perform apparently superhuman feats every night, they inhabit as best possible the abstracted celebrity role. This sort of idolization is a far cry from dehumanization, but it’s an unnatural, agency-denying perception all the same. It’s the mental process that turns athletes into disaggregated units of currency in the world of entertainment, which in turn allows people to project themselves fully upon them and deny them a very real part of their humanity.

You see the uglier implications of this athletic-celebrity culture rear its head from time to time, from when players are prevented by one thing or another from delivering the expected results to fans or, on a somewhat fraught note, when players fail to express the pre-determined, acceptably liberal politics or stances that fans have talked themselves into expecting from them. More often than not, though, this a-humanization renders itself through complete mundanity. It’s the type of shit that Kevin Durant claims he’s attempting to puncture, for instance, when he engages with fans and shit-talkers on Twitter. There’s a human behind this screen and wearing this jersey, he claims to say; the fact that this is probably a galaxy-brained justification meant to cover up the fact that he, like the rest of us, is just addicted to shit-talking on Twitter is immaterial. NBA players seem forced to trade, with or without their will, a sense of their personhood in exchange for millions and inhabitance in the sphere of celebrity.

Against this backdrop, I find LeBron’s lying heroic. LeBron James has accomplished more, by any stretch of the imagination, than a human being could reasonably dream of accomplishing. If life could be won, he has won it. He, perhaps less so than anybody alive (or at least in the NBA), has nothing to “prove.”

And yet, stick a microphone in this man’s face, this man who has done it all, and he will lie about the most insignificant fact of life imaginable. Takeoff died? I was listening to him before he even released music. Peter Crouch was a legend of the soccer team I literally own? I knew that. This Final Four game might go to overtime? Suggs.

Lebron’s lies aren’t just funny, although they are that. There is a methodology to the lies – the brief smile, the snap to focus, the dreaded bridge words, “I actually…” Here is a man who cannot pass up the opportunity to fib, to make a situation about himself, to prove something. What’s more human than that? That this pathology exists even in somebody who is idolized by millions, who makes news just by speaking on a topic, and who has accomplished all he conceivably could is something of a radical proclamation of the human spirit. LeBron is a liar, which means he’s just like us. The memes will come, they will make you laugh, and then they will not: that’s fine, but do not forget the deeply human beauty of all this stupid shit.