Here at OMT, we don’t mind telling you that we’re sick and tired of having to endure all of the hype surrounding Jeremy Lin, the point guard with the New York Knicks. Granted, the story of his rise from apparently out of nowhere — having been cut by two other NBA teams before joining the Knicks and becoming an overnight sensation among Knicks fans and basketball fans at large for his performance both on and off the court — was an inspirational one and came at a time when the NBA could use someone who was actually worthy of the admiration of young people. He’s Harvard-educated and is apparently so Christian that he gives Denver Bronco’s quarterback Tim Tebow a serious run for his money for the admiration of those legions of fundamentalists for whom religion is mostly about entertainment anyway. And the fact that he is Taiwanese-American in a professional sport which is dominated by people who are … well, not, gives him an even greater publicity boost than his Cinderella story and his aggressive playing do.
It has even brought out the litigators, as one might expect, bottomfeeding their way to a potentially big payday. There’s currently a legal tussle going on about who first coined the word “Linsanity”, a word that has been seized upon by the sports press in a way that makes us want to take the gas pipe. And Reuters recently reported that a trademark battle has erupted between Nike (who else?) and a sports ball manufacturer from eastern China that registered Jeremy Lin’s trademark back in 2010 when he was an unknown, for the paltry sum of 4,460 yuan ($710 American).
Yes, it’s all very nauseating, and we are getting tired of hearing about it. Of course, it was sportswriters who showed the way to the kind of overdrive when covering a story that wipes everything else off the front page, which news journalists have since employed in everything from O. J. Simpson, to Anna Nichole Smith, to Michael Jackson, to … well, you get the idea.
And our loathing of all of this “Linsanity” business isn’t just because sports don’t exist in our world, something regular readers of OMT already know. In fact, at one time we were very much into basketball. It was the only sport we ever thought was worth bothering with. And, ironically, back then the New York Knicks were our favorite team in the NBA. But those were the days when the Knicks had players like Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Dick Barnett, Dave DeBusschere, Cazzie Russell, Bill Bradley, Dave Stallworth, Mike Riordan, and Nate Bowman. There was none of this “three point” business, and players wore uniforms that actually looked like something that you could comfortably play basketball in for an hour, and didn’t make you look like a some kind of slob. Players were gentlemen both on and off the court, behaved like responsible adults, spoke like educated men (which they were), and weren’t sporting so many tattoos that they looked like they’d been set upon by a group of marauding taggers.
But we digress.
The latest Linsanity-associated story, though, not only plays to the tiresome saturation coverage of Jeremy Lin, but it also brings to it the shameless opportunism of commerce and the overreaching actions of the politically correct, whose eventual appearance in this story was inevitable, we suppose, given Lin’s other-than-Caucasian ethnicity.
Ben & Jerry’s, those purveyors of artery-clogging toxic-sludge-in-a-carton treats, jumped on the “Linsanity” bandwagon with their usual aplomb, introducing a new flavor with a name that suggests that they might have been better off holding back until they’d come up with something catchier. “Taste the Lin-Sanity” is vanilla frozen yogurt with lychee honey swirls, and comes with a waffle cookie on the side.
At least that’s it’s recipe now.
As first introduced, “Taste the Lin-Sanity” included pieces of fortune cookie to give the concoction something of a crunch. This was a bad move for two reasons. First of all, the fortune cookies became all soggy and the result apparently rendered what was an otherwise marginally adequate treat an ugly mess.
More importantly, however, the inclusion of fortune cookie pieces in a flavor associated with a Taiwanese-American resulted in a serious backlash from the customer base, who declared that the fortune cookies represented “ethnic profiling”, revealing if nothing else, that indignation sometimes gets you in the arena if not exactly the right seat.
We understand the connection between fortune cookies and Chinese stereotype, of course, and we abhor it, especially when a company like Ben & Jerry’s uses it to cynically exploit Jeremy Lin for monetary gain. We’re just not sure that it exactly constitutes “ethnic profiling”. Poor taste, yes. Stupid from a marketing perspective, absolutely. Racially insensitive, without question.
But “profiling” is one of those incendiary words that is best reserved for the ugly and unacceptable acts of racist, overzealous cops and moronic, power-mad Transportation Safety Administration screeners, not for ice cream makers who unthinkingly try to give an oriental flair to their nauseating, fat-laden treat by including a few fortune cookie crumbs. When we allow our “big gun” words to be appropriated for minor infractions — for playground fights instead of the front line battles for which they are intended — they are cheapened, weakened, and watered-down to the point where they’ve lost their edge. Soon, when people hear a story about “ethnic profiling”, they’ll think of Ben & Jerry’s and say, “oh, is that all”. And as a result more and more genuinely bad behavior seeps its ugly way through yet another one of society’s ever-widening cracks and becomes acceptable by default.
But the customers knew that they should be angry about something, and so they lashed out at B&J with enough fury that the fortune cookies were dispensed with in short order.
And, happily, the removal of the soggy fortune cookies actually improved it. Win-win.
We’re hoping that this is the last “Linsanity” story we’re likely to hear, but we know that’s not going to be the case.
We can tell you, though, that it’s the last time you’ll hear about it here.
Unless, of course, something else about it pisses us off.
