Steroids and professional sports

I've been spending a lot of time, lately, given the troubles for Roger Clemens, to get my head around what I think about this whole steroids scandal in baseball and professional sports.

Intuitively and for all kinds of good reasons, I think Congress and the justice system has been long overboard in their criminal investigations of steroids use by baseball players. Not because it is not illegal, obviously, since it most assuredly is. But because I am not clear, at all, that it should be illegal and I am quite opposed to the idea of roughing up Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, metaphorically, for that purpose. It's classic burn the village to save it mentality and it is a sad reflection on America, its lost sense of real purpose, and the willingness of some to do anything to justify their power and their roles in government and in life.

Andrew Sullivan shares my general outlook in his recent piece on the matter.

"Many of you objected to my pooh-poohing of Congressional investigations into steroid use. You pointed to articles like this one about the unseemly and alarming death rate of pro-wrestlers, caused, almost certainly, by rampant steroid abuse:

USA TODAY's examination of medical documents, autopsies and police reports, along with interviews with family members and news accounts, shows that at least 65 wrestlers died in that time, 25 from heart attacks or other coronary problems — an extraordinarily high rate for people that young, medical officials say. Many had enlarged hearts.

That's awful, but why should it be any business of the government? These are grown men, aware of the risks, and taking them, and dying young. It's their choice, their lives, their bodies. Leave them alone."

That is exactly my outlook. And attempting to ruin the lives of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens to prove some kind of point about this matter or even about the rule of law seems the mentality of those whose outlooks on law and on steroids and any decisions that adults make with their bodies to take both the law and the opinions about how to use the law far too seriously relative to the freedom of every person, professional athletes included, to self-determine their own lives.

If the sports involved, whether they be baseball or wrestling or track or cycling or whatever want to take action that creates some kind of mild deterrent for steroids use that prioritizes the ability of both athletes and fans to watch athletes demonstrate excellence in the sport over some self-righteous notion of how athletes bulk up for such excellence, I don't necessarily have a problem with that. I do think an effort that talked with athletes and said, "Look, our most serious problem is not what you do to your own bodies. Our most serious problem is 1) the distorting impact that steroids have on a clean sport and 2) the influence you have on young people to take the same route, one that is fraught with real dangers to their health," I do think such an effort would be much more effective, long term, than the current piling on, which has both seriously distorted that conversation and brought us news stories of renewed abuse of steriods by some young people, and one that has more respect for the sports heroes involved and more decency and honest handling of this question.

Do I really want to see Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens not to be able to play the game just so I can have a clean game? No. An emphatic no. And all efforts in that direction seem to me to be a serious distortion of sports enthusiasm that loses track of what really counts and matters in the game, namely the ability of the athletes to demonstrate their developed excellence and for us to enjoy watching them do so.

Would I have liked to watch baseball rail down Babe Ruth for his violations of prohibitions against alcohol in his day? Obviously not. For that matter, do I think it was appropriate to ban the Chicago Black Sox from baseball forever for their violations? Definitely not.

The whole exercise simultaneously takes the games too seriously and takes watching excellent sports figures and offering them an opportunity to demonstrate excellence not nearly seriously enough.

And, sadly, the Congressional investigation into steroids in baseball has very little to do with steroids, per se, but with a failed drug war that its proponents cannot accept is failed because it means coming to terms with limitations around law and power, generally, that they are not prepared to come to terms with. And if Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens have to go down to ward off the gripping fear that many Congresspeople, politicians, prosecutors, judges, journalists, scholars, and others have that without law having effective control over behavior in liberal democratic (and illiberal and undemocratic) societies, the world will go to hell in a handbasket, then so be it, they reason.

Sadly, very, very sadly, it is all much tragedy for no good reason. Because the limits of the effectiveness of law and power to control human behavior exist whether we want to come to terms with those limitations or not.

And in the meantime, some good men and some excellent athletes, are treated like characters in a national politics and morality play for our amusement. Their tragedy becomes our tabloid cover story, amusing our foolish and impossible notion that we can rid ourselves of more problems by the rule of law than is, in fact, possible.

And if Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Marion Jones and anyone else has to go down to prove that we are serious and proving something that we will never, ever be able to prove no matter how much we try, then so be it, we reason. It is worth making a point that will never, ever be made in any final, ultimate way, no matter how many times we try to make it - because the rule of law never compelled conscience and never will, no matter how much we may try and have tried over the course of the history of humanity to make it do so - because the last thing that its proponents would ever want to admit, no matter how much it might be true, is that they were wrong, that all of this tragedy was for naught, and that they might share some responsibility in that sad fact of life.

Ironic, isn't it? The very people most insistent on teaching Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens responsibility for their behavior are the ones most resistant for taking responsibility, themselves, for their own behavior during the same time.

And that is the sad, cruel fact of teaching responsibility by force. The people most likely to advocate it are those least likely to practice responsibility more honestly or whole-heartedly. And since the beginning of human history they have been responsible for the greatest share of humanity's tragedy and needless death and destruction all in the name of avoiding responsibility on this matter.

If Roger Clemens was my friend, I would tell him to hang in there. And that history will be much kinder to him than his Congressional investigators, and not so kind to those investigators, though it will be kind to them, as well, because we really don't have much choice if we are too look back at our foolish past as better people rather than the cruel and ignorant and foolish lot that we are today and in perpetuity.

Why do I know this?

Because history does not generally move in a more cruel and repressive direction, no matter how many ways this current political era tries to cover for its honest trajectory.

We, generally, become more decent people. And this era will not be different. And more decency will not be remembered as more prison terms or threats thereof to the likes of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. More decent people will look back at this obviously failed war on drugs, and the war on steroids as a function of that other, larger failed war, and wonder why it took so long for its stubborn advocates and those too power obsessed to think of anything other than to prop it up, to give up the jig.

And the clear answer at this point is: they wanted the power. And the idea that people would determine their own lives, especially in directions they found foolish or they disagreed with or they felt insulted the honor of the game or whatever millionth reason that people just can't seem to get straight that another person's life and conscience and choices are not their own, was so anathema to that desire to control others that they could not possibly imagine what naive innocents would ever create a society where each man and woman would, ultimately, be responsible for themselves.

The truth is that for all of our talk about freedom of conscience and freedom of thought and free will as the basis for morality and life, noone really believes all that fairy tale talk. Cold, hard power. That is what makes us run, we reason. At least in our more cowardly moments.

This political period is one such moment. And I guarantee you that we will not look back on it with pride. Except for those few for whom pride, meaning a stubborn attachment to the obviously wrong, is the only way they know how to live, for fear of taking their own conscience more seriously.

Cowardice and power capture the imaginations, for a moment, many, many times throughout history. It is always and forever only for a moment. Reason wills out because we cannot live without it for long. And we look like damned fools trying. And we will write histories of the future to capture what damned fools we are in the present.

I am tired of watching men and women live through misery so that we do not have to admit that we are damned fools, which is a fact of life whether we want to admit that fact or not. I am tired of watching Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds and Marion Jones being used for our national morality play that is so out-of-whack with any realistic notion of people and their attitude toward their liberty that could ever be taken seriously. I am tired of the pretending by the enormously huge pretenders that their efforts to rid the world of the scourge of steroids and illegal drugs has actually done any good. I am tired of the bullshit and the lying and the pretending and the stubborn failure to admit when the jig is up.

It is not Roger Clemens who needs to acknowledge that the jig is up, right now. It is Congress. And the proponents of this ugly, repressive period in democratic politics.

Force is not freedom. They are obviously mutually exclusive, in fact (though, the purpose of my work around principles of least possible necessary aggression is meant to account for the role of force in a free society, assuming that a free society is still the kind of society we want to live in; I, for one, will settle for nothing less).

But the idea that any group of people would ever be able to sell to the world that force is freedom has got to give Mark Twain a good chuckle and have George Orwell wondering why he wrote those books for, in the first place, if we were never going to use their lessons.

For me, it just makes me enormously sad that people like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemems and Marion Jones get used for our amusement to teach our children lessons that our own examples, for the most part, would not bear up scrutiny for.

Humanity is an enormously cruel and foolish lot. And it is the only lot we have, sadly.

Perhaps we can get it turned around.