But What About Baseketball?

Matt Yglesias writes the finest post regarding the nearly-inseparable topics of basketball and international relations that I've ever read. This is one of those times when you have to stop reading my drivel, click on the link, and then come back for whatever commentary I can muster. You won't regret it.

Seriously. Go.

I mean it.

Okay, back? Excellent. I don't have much to add to Matt's most-insightful musings, but I will add this. Matt writes

The truth, however, is that an alternative does exist: liberal internationalism or, as they say in the sports world, basketball (hockey, of course, represents a dystopian vision of Canadian global hegemony, I don't know anything about soccer, and cricket is the rotting corpse of British imperialism)

I, being the tomato-growing, basil-smoking coutercultural intellectual that I am, am trying to push this metaphor as far as possible.

To that end, I can only surmise that Ultimate is the 'give peace a chance' foreign policy represented by a hypothetical world in which President McCarthy, riding high after sweeping the corrupt Nixon administration out of the White House, extracts US troops from South Vietnam, ends the Israeli/Palestinian conflict with the revolutionary 'a shishkebob in every pot, and a cedar in every year' plan, then settles the Cold War over a bowl of borscht and several bottles of vodka with, well, whoever was running the Soviet Union at that point in time. Leonid Brezhnev? Whatever.