Well, This Went Well

The Warriors retired Chris Mullion's jersey last night, and Warrior Fan decided to show their appreciation for the current owner... um, not at all. Bad Warrior Fans! Just because the franchise has peed all over you for decades and called it rain, just because they ran off a guy you really liked (Monta Ellis) for 40 cents on the dollar in the form of a broken-down center (Andrew Bogut) which means that they are pulling yet another tank job, and just because the new coach is only popular among his ex-ESPN co-workers and people who get turned on by Cookie Monster... wait, where were we again?

Oh, right. Chris Mullin was having his night. And you people ruined it by treating Warrior owner Joe Lacob as if he were a WWE heel, when he is in fact so much worse. You were so mean that Mullin and Rick Barry (who, just in case you were wondering, has spent the past few decades being a professional asshat in Bay Area sports talk, and might be booed on the merits for that) felt they had to take up for him and also get tarred by association.

Having said all that... I'm not going to defend Warrior Fan's right to trash Lacob. Oh, wait, actually I would. Lacob's moves haven't worked out to date, and the honeymoon is officially over after the Ellis sell-off. Meet the new Chris Cohen. Same as the old Chris Cohen. The Bay Area remains a massive and wonderful market for NBA hoop, served badly by a single franchise. They'd sell out the building just for the fans of the opposition; these are people who pay to watch Nate Robinson, for pity's sake. That doesn't mean they need to be *happy* about it.

No, rather, I'd like to address Lacob, who could have *easily* avoided making Mullin's night a front-page spectacle by just doing what parasitic rich men should know to do by now: keep well, and I do mean well, hidden. Just because everyone you meet in you day to day life licks the wing tips does not mean that you've got carte blanche from the lumpenproletariat. This is America in 2012, six months after a movement with no money and no leaders managed to make a couldn't be ignored nuisance of itself from coast to coast, 18 months since poor white men with guns took over the political party of rich white men with security staffs, two years after banksters got away with the theft of this or any other century. If you are fabulously wealthy right now, you are guilty until proven innocent anywhere outside of the increasingly irrelevant news media. And amen to that, since that's the way it always should have been, since that is, well, reality.

You can buy a team. It's a free country. But you can't buy the love, acceptance, or even tolerance of the customers. And if you want to address stadium filled with your adoring public... pay them all for the privilege. Rather than the other way around. Until then, accept the high third finger and full-throated disapproval for exactly what it is...

A brutal, degrading, but ultimately accurate assessment of your worth as a human being.

Shame you can't buy truth, isn't it?