Think Piece Thursday: Donald Sterling
Happy Think Piece Thursday, everyone! As a blogger, I love to use my god damn #brain to #think. The human brain is one of the most powerful tools that we have at our disposal, and unfortunately, most people fail to complete dispose of their brains. They sit at home watching television and sucking down memes without stopping to consider the power they hold as potential bloggers. Not me, folks. I’ve got convictions and an internet connection, and I’m here to blow your minds.
This week I want to talk about Donald Sterling – the racist old white man that owns a basketball team. Unless you’ve been living under a rock – actually I don’t want to use that terminology in case I am inadvertently offending rock dwelling folks. Let’s say, in case you haven’t heard, but not because you might be deaf, which is perfectly okay, but because you are simply unaware of current events, Donald Sterling is in a lot of trouble right now. He scolding his girlfriend for Instagramming a selfie with Magic Johnson, an AIDS patient who is also black – which, if you don’t know, is a serious condition in which you stand a 25% chance of being incarcerated and your life expectancy is lower than the rest of the population – and on top of that he has AIDS.
Well, everyone got mad. The NBA had to respond and they have, and now he’s losing his basketball team. They’re banning him from the NBA.
My question is, so what? You know who else is banned from the NBA? Me. You. Probably everyone you know. It’s a highly exclusive organization – only super wealthy people can own basketball teams. This isn’t a win for anti-racism so much as it’s a minor inconvenience for a rich guy. Go ahead, take his basketball team away. He’ll probably just hop in his private jet and skywrite the n-word over a soup kitchen. He’s fucking rich. Oh boo hoo, you don’t own a professional basketball team anymore! What’s next, the Faberge eggs? Will they exclude him from the transatlantic dirigible race? No more imported truffles to accompany his Richebourg as he wipes his ass with money? It’s true that money can’t buy you friends, but it can certainly silence your enemies.
We’re satisfied with this result because it seems like a kind of swift and efficient justice, but really it isn’t a big deal at all. This is just a bad day for Sterling, but to us, it’s the end of his life. This is based around a psychological principle called Billyzaneitis. When something bad happens to a rich person, we analyze the consequences as if it were happening to us non-rich folk, and we incorrectly assume that they would take it as hard as we would. Think about Billy Zane’s character at the end of Titanic. You would think that he would be devastated at the loss of Rose, and the audience is left feeling that love won out in the end, and the bad guy got his comeuppance. Not at all. He is still responsible for Jack’s death, and I guarantee you he found another Rose the very next day. Shit, do you have any idea how much sympathy pussy he probably got by going around milking a sob story about losing his fiancé on the Titanic? Zane won. Sterling won. They always win.
That’s why I don’t support the idea of taking Sterling’s team away from him at all. That just gives him something in common with regular non-team owning folks like me. I don’t want to associate with a racist. I don’t want to be in the same social class as Donald Sterling. I don’t want him to be ‘humbled’ down to my level as if he were also a blogger that only earns about 250k a year. How about instead of taking his basketball team away we just force him to convert the team into monster trucks? Make him buy a Nascar. Keep him doing rich guy shit but make it more appropriate. Or better yet – make him keep the team and only let him hire white players that are also racist.
That’s what I didn’t understand about that Duck Dynasty fiasco. Why take the homophobic duck man’s show away? Why not just make his homophobia a central theme of the show? We’re already gawking at a hillbilly that washes his beard with fowl blood and an old white man that acts like an old white man, let’s just put the two of them on display, keep them in the public eye, and highlight their racism so that we can feel superior to them despite the fact that they live much, much better lives than us?
These people will always be rich, and we will always be poor. Let’s stop counting shit like this as a win and just focus on mocking the man – that’s all we have.
I just realized it’s actually Friday. 
