Of course it would be California:
The first thing I want to quibble with, which is a minor aspect of all of this, is calling the Staples Canter “iconic.” I mean, maybe it is to Los Angelinos. I doubt the building itself has much to do with that. A lot has happened there, of course. Five NBA champions played there, two Stanley Cup champs, with some of the best games in either league having played out there. That’s more a coincidence than anything. Having been there, it always felt like an airport terminal without the gates, and a big, cavernous middle, which doesn’t make it any different than any other arena built in the last 25 years. It’s hard to paint anything with an advertisement as its title “iconic.”
Perhaps it’s just a connection to my youth that the old L.A. Forum or Boston Garden or Chicago Stadium are iconic, and these newer generation buildings will reach that with enough time.
But that’s hardly the point of all this.
I’m not going to claim I have any idea what cryptocurrency is, other than the cursory knowledge most have. When it comes time that I have to, someone will probably tell me. What I do know is that rich people love it, which almost certainly means it’s a great way to bilk poor people out of money and transfer more of it to rich people. I guess I don’t know that it’s a scam, but I also don’t know that it isn’t. It seems another alley with which people convinced of their own genius simply because they want to be are under the impression that they’ve beaten the system, or want to convince others that they’ve beaten the system in order to grift them. It doesn’t appear to have any center to it.
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Maybe it isn’t morally repugnant to then accept one of these modern medicine show’s money in order to rename your arena, especially when they’re coughing up a ton of it to do so. Perhaps having an arena in their name won’t legitimize what still could be a societal virus and make it even more destructive, either because it actually isn’t, or it’ll collapse on itself and hopefully not take a wide swath of the population with it, or people just won’t buy it. I’m not going to count on the last one, because the last few years have taught us that you can get a large number of people (though not nearly as large as the media would have you believe) to buy into just about anything if you yell it loud enough, connect it to Jesus, or appeal to their selfishness, or some combo of all three.
Still, there’s something icky about all of this, which I guess makes it a perfect fit in California, where some of our most galaxy-brained thinking comes from, like the original anti-vax plague. I suppose part of the charm of California is that it’s always thought it had a better way of going about things, or was proud of the different ways it did them. That occasionally, naturally, it will slip into weirdness and then various forms of witchcraft. Please, please no more California songs.
But I suppose in a sports world that keeps presenting itself for any gambling site that’ll have it, this isn’t too much of a further step into whatever abyss we will wake up in one day soon.
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