Suspicious Minds

Suspicious Minds
(on Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong and George Bush)
by Marc Leeds
3/14/2006

This is a column about sports. Or is it politics. It could be about the wonders of medical science or just about our willingness to overcome our sense of wonder. But above all, this is about Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong and George Bush.

Let’s see if we have this straight. Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong never failed a drug test. The San Francisco Chronicle reporters who claim to have the goods on Bonds and his alleged steroid use can only retell the stories of those who have implicated themselves in baseball’s steroid abuse scandal. They have no explanation for Bonds’s ability to pass all those drug tests.

Nevertheless, many believe that the sanctity of America’s pastime requires Commissioner Bud Selig suspend Bonds from playing this season to protect the records of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. A suspension would be the equivalent of a death sentence on Bonds’s career, based on nothing more than well-written suspicion. There is the matter of Barry’s terrific musculature, but that is beside the point.

The real point is that the allegations against Bonds cover a time period prior to baseball having any rules governing steroid use. Even if Bonds used steroids, and there are still those pesky tests he passed, he didn’t break any baseball rules. He may have broken U.S. law, but it is not Major League Baseball’s business to act as the government’s surrogate and impose penalties that keep a man from pursuing his chosen profession.

But he is Barry Bonds. The press hates him, fans are at best split in their opinions about him, and he shows little interest in voluntarily surrendering his Fifth Amendment rights and coming clean—whatever the story may be. But they are his rights.

Then there is the case of Lance Armstrong. Everybody loves him. Except the French. But that just adds to his badge of honor because America’s unofficial position is that we hate the French.

Armstrong won seven consecutive Tours de France bicycle races, all after enduring surgery and grueling chemotherapy treatments to defeat testicular cancer. His daily menu, similar to those of most world class athletes, is largely composed of multisyllabic nutritional supplements.

The French have tested Armstrong a gazillion times, no doubt due to the rules of their beloved race but probably moreso because they are incredulous that a testicular cancer survivor, a guy who sits on a rock-hard splinter of a bicycle seat, can so regularly blow away the field. They haven’t said so, but the French probably feel Armstrong enjoyed an unfair advantage by having one testicle removed. He’s not exactly straddling the seat they way his competitors do.

The point is that Lance never failed those drug tests. Armstrong has his detractors who claim to have assisted him with illegal doping, but those pesky tests still say otherwise. Either a guy who rides a bicycle all day is smart enough to hire evil genius chemists to outwit an entire country, a country that is a member of the exclusive nuclear club, or else he beat the tests because he didn’t cheat.

That brings us to George Bush. He was under the impression that Iraq was bulking-up on weapons of mass destruction. All the tests the United Nations ran proved otherwise. He took us to war without proof. He also believed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he said that our military could win with reduced forces because our technological superiority made us more nimble yet more forceful than in years gone by. Grateful Iraqis offering tea and flowers would quickly greet our troops. Didn’t happen.

If George Bush were a French bicycling official, his suspicions may have thwarted a well-tested Lance Armstrong from setting a record that few believe will ever be beaten or equaled.

If George Bush were commissioner of baseball, his suspicions would probably demand that he suspend a well-tested Barry Bonds from achieving home run immortality.

But Bush’s suspicions have proven worthless and self-defeating. He circumvented process (the United Nations’ inspection committee looking for WMD in Iraq; the U.S. Constitution concerning warrantless wiretaps against the nation’s citizens, secret torture prisons around the world, and bogus military tribunals) and could be censured by the senate if it shows any spine and respect for the nation’s laws.

In retrospect, Bush’s suspicions were unfounded but he was still free to take action. There are plenty of suspicions in Florida and Ohio that Bush actually lost his two presidential elections. Interestingly, there is no chance of taking action on those suspicions. Apparently, not all suspicions are created equal.

For journalists and conspiracy theorists of all political stripes, a suspicion is a terrible thing to waste. Nevertheless, leave Barry alone. For the moment, the proof is on his side despite whatever his neck size may be. And leave Lance alone. He’s retired from cycling and proved he’s twice as good as his competitors with just half the equipment.

Bush, well, he’s another story. His proven falsehoods distracted the nation’s attention from more vital threats and flaunted the Constitution. Still, there is no recourse for Bush’s flops.

Sports records exist as single line entries in record books and now databases, once in a while with asterisks. Historical records are written with extensive footnotes and documentation, nuanced by partisans. In the end, sports legacies harm no one. The same can not be said for political legacies.

Copyright (c) 2006 Marc Leeds. All rights reserved.

American Unhistory (or Bombing Iran)

Marc Leeds
Friday, April 14, 2006

If you think Americans have trouble with math, that is nothing compared with how terribly stupid and blind we are concerning history. This is not an indictment of the American educational system, that’s for another occasion. This is about our inability to learn from history.

Oh, how tired this topic is, and we haven’t even gotten to the subject of the hour. Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker magazine reports that the United States is making contingency plans to preemptively attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment and support facilities before they can develop weapons grade nuclear materials. Hersh may not be liked in many establishment quarters, but his reputation for breaking stories from My Lai to Abu Ghraib is unassailable.

Expert military analysts believe this could slow down Iran’s efforts for anywhere from two to five years. Then what? Does the United States launch another attack? Wait for a more agreeable government to be democratically elected, one that will neither pursue nuclear enrichment nor threaten Israel? Or do we repeat America’s 1953 mistake of organizing a coup and installing a government of our choosing? That last option gave us the Shah of Iran, and that eventually led to the 1979 student riots in Tehran resulting in the overthrow of the Shah and what is commonly referred to as the Iranian Hostage Crisis. That 444-day ordeal helped elect Ronald Reagan president and solidified a hard-line theocracy in Iran, the seminal moment in creating the current staredown between Muslims and the Western world.

It’s too easy to blame Islamic extremists for all the various crises coming out of the Middle East. That is not to say that Islamic fundamentalism is without fault. Fundamentalism of any stripe is dangerous, just look at the assault on personal freedoms by the politically savvy Christian right wing in the United States. And wasn’t it a sitting four-star general and Army Chief who proclaimed, in uniform, that “our God is stronger than their God.” That’s the kind of thinking that starts rock throwing, except that generals with such mindsets have really big rocks they can throw.

So getting back to the matter of bombing our sand-bound, oil rich, nuclear capable, anti-Christian nemesis forward to the year 2011 (the estimated outer limits for their full nuclear recovery after our muscle-flexing), what do we do then? What would Jesus do? That’s really the question our right-wing government should be asking itself, but Jesus did not wear robes with embroidered patches from sponsors in the military/energy-industrial complex.

History must be our guide on this point. We failed to make friends in Iran in 1953; we lost the ethical high-ground achieved post World War II with our persecution of Vietnam; we failed to make friends in South America when we supported Pinochet; and our embargo against Fidel’s Cuba is a failure. Our decision-making capabilities have proven shortsighted at best, and that’s putting it mildly. The reality is that our leaders’ narrow views are bound by the election cycle and the deep corporate pockets that help candidates pander to a religiously hijacked right wing that continues to vote against its own best interests.

If our current predicaments, from oil dependency to poorly chosen political alliances, are to be resolved with the prospect of greater economic, political, and human justice outcomes, then perhaps we can look back to the poignant lessons to be learned in History 101 and the words of President George Washington’s Farewell Address. Among many other wise pronouncements, Washington (with input from James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Chief Justice John Jay) tells America to “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.”

For some it is cliché to recall the words of our founding fathers this way. Many would argue that the world has so radically changed that such maxims of the past no longer apply as they once did. Three-cornered hats may be quaint for the tourists, but such philosophizing is no longer the strength of America. How sad. The nation was once enraptured by the prospect of liberty and equality. It’s cliché to bring up such matters now unless it is in the context of the theater or the study of antiquities.

We need to learn that we cannot bomb our way out of the prospect of a nuclear Iran. If our desire is to ward off nuclear proliferation, then not only must another way be found but we must be prepared to apply more enlightened strategies with other countries wishing to develop such technologies—because surely there will be others. And perhaps enlightenment is what we should be studying. It’s another one of those quaint notions that eventually gave rise to the American Revolution.

Copyright (c) 2006 Marc Leeds. All rights reserved.