The sins of the father

And so we come to another day of the irrational in America, a country that has come to a place in which a particular madness has eradicated common sense.

No, we are not talking about the gibbering creature in the White House, whose rationality hourly seems to be jittering apart like a badly made toy.

This time we are talking about a word. It starts with "N." You know the rest.

It is a word no one with any manners should utter, but particularly no white person, for reasons that are too obvious to explain. Suffice it to say that the weight of its history is great and that history should be respected by white people in particular. This is not "political correctness," which in most cases simply describes behaving like you were raised right. No. Refraining from using that word, especially if you're white, is nothing more than common decency.

That said, what has happened to Conor Daly in regard to that word is as irrational as the latest spew from the creature in White House.

The back story is this: Last week long-time Colts play-by-play man Bob Lamey, who is pushing 80, announced his abrupt retirement. Very soon after that, it was revealed that Lamey had dropped the Word In Question in front of an African-American co-worker, who protested to management. Lamey knew he shouldn't said it, because he asked first if the mics were off. So he's got no cover here.

However ...

However, context does matter.

In this case, the context was that he was repeating a story from his days covering the Indianapolis 500, in which a driver fresh off the boat from Ireland used The Word In Question in an interview. So it wasn't Lamey using that word. It was Lamey describing someone else using that word.

Still. He knew better.

But it wasn't over there. A couple of days later, it was revealed that Derek Daly, former driver and now racing reporter for a TV station in Indy, was the source of the story. It happened in the early 1980s, more than 30 years ago. Daly was summarily fired. He protested that he'd used the word not knowing it had a different connotation than it did in his native Ireland, and he was "mortified" to learn otherwise and never used it again.

This might be true. On the other hand, the etymology of the word in Ireland is much the same as it is in the U.S. Which is to say, it's a slur there, too. The British used to call the Irish "White The Word In Question" back in the days when the British thought it was cute to do things like deliberately let the Irish starve during the Great Famine. So maybe Daly isn't being quite so forthcoming after all.

This brings us to Conor Daly, Derek's son.

Who was a little boy when his father used a word he shouldn't have.

Who has Type 1 diabetes.

Who was therefore about to make his NASCAR debut in an Xfinity series stock car sponsored by Lily Diabetes.

Not so fast.

A couple of days ago, Lily Diabetes announced it was dropping its sponsorship of Conor Daly. Its reasoning was no more rational nor defensible than anything in this tale. Somehow it thought sponsoring the son of a man who (perhaps unknowingly) used a racial slur almost four decades ago would distract the company from its core message of raising awareness about diabetes treatment.

Which of course is absurd.

But there you have it: Conor Daly lost his sponsorship not because of something he did, but because of something his father did (again, perhaps unknowingly) a long, long time ago. It had nothing to do with him. It has nothing to do with him. And yet he is being punished for it.

Irrational. Totally, incomprehensibly irrational.

And so very American these days.