Where Have You Gone, Benoit Benjamin?

Like the rest of the world this week, I of course was shocked and saddened when lifelong horrible racist Donald Sterling was exposed as a lifelong horrible racist. What kind of a world are we living in when a white multibillionaire who is also over 80 years old can somehow find a way to lose touch with modern cultural convention and the expected niceties of post-Selma America?

I try to cut the guy some slack because Donald Sterling isn't like the rest of us. Donald Sterling is essentially a time traveler. A time traveler from another world. Like Doctor Who, except one who is a racist and gets lots of poon.

Seriously, how are we even supposed to begin to relate to someone who is old enough to remember where he was when he heard Hitler had shot himself? What are we to expect of these people? Right now you're thinking yes, there are some of those people left who are actually some of the most courageous and morally upright people, many of whom have fought and bled for the cause of racial justice and against the self-scourging impulse to separate and demonize that has been written into our DNA since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. But none of those people are Donald Stern. Or my grandpa. Not really a scientific sampling, I will grant you, but it's what I've got to work with.

I was being less facetious than usual when I said he comes from another world. He actually comes from two of them: one is Unreconstructed Racist America of the Past and the other BillionaireLand, neither of which have much of a foothold in 2014 reality. The problem when you put those two things together, you get someone with really shitty ideas surrounded by people who are paid specifically not to point out the shittiness of his own ideas. It's an old-timey version of the disease that lets poor Justin Bieber believe he's good at basketball. It turns out if you have more money than you can spend, the corresponding likelihood increases that those around you are in some way on the payroll, along a line graph that swells upward in lock-step with one's net worth.

It's been known for a long time that Donald Sterling has what is commonly referred to as fuck-you money. And the minute he made one dollar more than whatever the inflation-adjusted threshold was at the time to put him into fuck-you money territory, all the diseased mosquito-blood DNA in his thorax was frozen in amber with the rest of the carcass his skeleton seems so desperate to slough off, leaving him exactly who he was, only way way worse because now he was above correction. Anyone who is/was a threat to any of it he could cut off or ignore, as part of exactly the same process that lead to Howard Hughes living alone in a giant room with jars of his own pee.

A lot of people are lumping the Sterling story together with the Cliven Bundy racist rancher story. This is because people are lazy. Cliven Bundy is an ill-informed hayseed dipshit with a dangerously tenuous grasp of history, logic, justice, legality and the way basic words function when you string them together. Donald Sterling has been a phenomenally successful attorney and real estate developer in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world for over 50 years. He has all the tools and resources to know better. But this is the life he's chosen.

I've actually got something invested in this as my eldest boy has lost his fool mind over NBA basketball over the last two years, and the Clippers specifically. It's the first thing that's really his that he's thrown himself into as I could mostly give a shit. I love sports, but I always shied away from the NBA because out here in SoCal a) there's nothing more fucking insufferable than a Lakers fan and b) the Clippers have always, always been awful. Right when we're at a point when lots of young people are attaching themselves to the team in this same way, on an unprecedented run of success, something like this happens and we're left asking: what do we tell the children?

I don't pretend to speak for everyone, but what I tell my children is: fuck that guy. And then we eat pizza and watch the game. I don't know, what do you want from me? The world is a complicated place.