It's May Day In Niketown

At the risk of detracting from our very serious discussions of not-very-serious sports things, it's worth noting that today is also May Day. Which is a day with a great deal of history, but also one on which a certain type of history is being made right now. Here in New York, we are working on the chapter that involves outsized police response to peaceful and eminently justified civil disobedience, and which features as villain a tiny, colossally vain plutocrat heedlessly cribbing some moves from the worst regimes on earth and grimly breaking out the zip ties as a response to people chanting things that might irritate financiers. Hopefully it is different in your town, although of course on the main it isn't really all that different anywhere.

But, as you might expect, this May Day is a little bit worse in the Pacific Northwest, if only because of that region's natural abundance of Black Bloc buttheads. Hilariously overhyped FBI actions notwithstanding, these fuming doofuses aren't really a threat to anyone or anything that isn't made of plate glass, most certainly up to and including The System. Still, smashing windows and loopily spray-painting adolescent things on other store windows is pretty much the opposite of what Occupy is about, and certainly conforms to the giddiest and most opportunistic right wing caricatures of what seems in most other ways to be an important and authentic and broadly very inspiring movement that arose at a propitious moment. All that said, we have to hand the skinny-jeaned anarchists of Seattle this: they may be the worst, they may make it easier to dismiss a movement and series of ideas that deserve-unto-demand to be heard, but there's something about this particular picture of black bloc types going to work on a Seattle Niketown.

Good luck to the good citizens of Niketown in cleaning up a mess they didn't make, and also didn't quite not-make. And not that we need to tell you all this, readers, but don't get arrested, please. There are NBA Playoff games tonight.