Matt Taibbi / Rolling Stone

“The Decision” was simultaneously the most painful and most hilarious television show I’ve seen in a long time. Its entertainment value rested almost entirely in its scope — the same way a person goes to the Niagara Falls or to the Grand Canyon for that take-your-breath-away moment when the heretofore unimaginable vastness of the vista is first perceived, I watched “The Decision” in breathless awe of the sheer scale of the narcissism involved.

By any measure it was a landmark moment in the history of human self-involvement, eclipsing previous peaks in the narcissism Himalayas (Nero’s impromptu fiddle concert as Rome burned, the career of the prophet Mohammed, Kim Jong Il publishing “The Popularity of Kim Jong Il”) mainly because it was a collective effort. You can understand the citizens of Tsaritsyn cheering the decision to rename their city; if they didn’t like “Stalingrad,” they were getting lined up and shot.

But what was our excuse? The weird thing about this LeBron story is that seven or eight years ago, he seemed like a nice kid. All he did was step into a media machinery designed to create, reward, nurture, and worship self-obsessed assholes. He was raw clay when he went in, and now he’s everything we ever wanted him to be — a lost, attention-craving narcissistic monster who simultaneously despises and needs the slithering insect-mortals who by the millions are bent over licking his toes (represented in The Decision by the ball-less, drooling sycophant Jim Gray).

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