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America on
Steroids
A Bill Moyers Essay
12/23/07 "PBS"
-- - There's been talk all this week about that stunning
report from former Senator George Mitchell revealing that Major
League Baseball players, including some of the sport's biggest
stars, have been using steroids for years. The findings prompted
my fellow journalist and friend Dick Starkey to recall an
important insight into America by the eminent social critic,
Jacques Barzun. A Frenchman by birth, now 100 years old and
living in Texas, Barzun, like his illustrious ancestor Alexis de
Tocqueville, has been a canny interpreter of the American
character. "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of
America," he once wrote, "had better learn baseball."
So what do we learn about ourselves from the Mitchell Report?
That something is flowing through our veins other than red
corpuscles. It turns out owners, players and the players' union
were complicit in ignoring the growing use of steroids and other
illegal drugs in our national pastime. But suppose our national
pasttime has become our national pathology? Ours is a society on
steroids, and we're as blind as baseball's owners were a decade
ago.
In our drugged state, we cheer the winners in the game of
wealth, the billionaires who benefit from a skewed financial
system -- the losers, we kick down the stairs. We open fire
hoses of cash into our political system in the name of "free
speech." Television stations that refuse to cover government
make fortunes selling political bromides over public airwaves.
Pornography passing as advertising assaults our senses, seduces
our children, and pollutes our culture. Partisan propaganda gets
pumped up as news. We feed on the flamboyance of celebrities.
And we actually take seriously the Elmer Gantrys who use the
Christian Gospel as a guidebook to an Iowa caucus or a battle
plan for the Middle East. In the face of a scandalous health
care system, failing schools, and a fraudulent endless war, we
are as docile as tattered scarecrows in a field of rotten
tomatoes.
As for that war, you may have heard that a quarter of the
heavily-armed ‘shooters' working in the streets of Baghdad for
the Administration's mercenary Blackwater foreign legion are
alleged to be chemically influenced by steroids or other
mind-altering substances.
The other day, before Mitchell issued his report, the former
pitcher Jim Bouton was holding forth on the importance of a
level playing field in the sport at which he had long excelled.
Were he playing today, Bouton said, he wouldn't want to lose his
livelihood because his competitors had an unfair advantage.
You don't get a level playing field with performance enhancing
drugs, any more than you get an honest government with political
action committees and bundled contributions, or a fair economy
with some derivatives, hedge funds, and private equity managers
taxed at rates lower than their janitors. You get a level
playing field only when the fans demand it. Suppose people
stopped attending games in large numbers, stopped watching on
TV, stopped buying the products hyped by the icons. The leveling
would happen, or baseball as a money-making business would die.
It's not likely to happen. If we can't organize to stop a
brutal, bloody war in Iraq, or rectify an economic system that
divides us further every day, we can hardly expect collective
action from baseball fans.
There was a lesson in George Mitchell's report that I'm not sure
even he recognized. The day Americans don't feel strongly enough
about the need for level playing fields to fight for them -- the
day when cutting corners and seeking an edge become the national
pastime -- is the day democracy will be lucky even to find a
seat in the bleachers.
Published on December 21, 2007
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