The Mark of a Liar

If anyone out there is shocked, simply shocked, that Mark McGwire took steroids when he broke all of the home runs records, then I'd like to direct your attention toward the Brooklyn Bridge which I am currently offering for sale. If there's anything to be shocked at, it's probably just that he finally admitted it. For some reason, being hired as a hitting coach for a major league baseball team warrants owning up to what everyone already knew that you did.

I've said for a long time that if you have done something that is so incredibly obvious to everyone, it doesn't matter what you say or what you don't say because everyone knows the truth. No one is being fooled. (We all know that OJ did it, regardless as to what he says. We all know that Richard Heene knew his kid wasn't in the balloon, regardless as to what he says. We know these things to be self evident.) No one is misled. The only thing missing from the equation is having it down in print somewhere. That's it. Just because Mark McGwire had never said (up until a couple of days ago) that he took steroids doesn't mean that we all had a looming question in our minds as to whether he did or not.

I'm sure that it says something about us (the collective "us", "us" as a people) that we didn't question how abnormally freaking large McGwire was during his fake run at the home run record. I totally remember watching him hit the record breaking home run. (I remember it because I remember what I was doing at the time and it's nothing that can be repeated here of all places.) And I also totally remember watching him stand there at the plate and thinking to myself, "My God. His biceps are the size of my thighs." Behold!

Yeah, that's not normal. I guess we thought that it was possibly something that was normal back then, but now that we know that there was steroid use involved (and even before we knew, but after we had heard rumors of), we think it's absolutely ludicrous that someone could look like that normally. Let's look at Mark McGwire when he was a rookie. Behold!

Yep, I was right. That's not normal. One more time....rookie year....

And in comparison to the 'roided up years...


Again, so not normal.

Here's the thing: Mark McGwire admitted he did steroids...and he should have just left it at that. At least then we could have gone about our ways thinking (if we actually cared to think about this loser ever again) that he had finally owned up to what we had all figured out. (I mean, seriously....after he was testifying before Congress back in 2005 and was essentially asked about his steroid use and he replied that he wasn't there to "talk about the past", was there any question after that point? I don't think that there was. And if I'm wrong and there was, please see my earlier reference to that bridge I'm currently offering for sale.) But then he went off and talked to Bob Costas.

Over there at MLB.com is an interview that McGwire did with Bob Costas, seemingly immediately just making the steroid admission. Let me just say right now that he should have quit when he was ahead. Rather than just letting it lie (he seems good at lying) he had to "explain" and "elaborate". He had to blather on and on about how he just took steroids "...for health purposes" and that "...At that time I was using steroids thinking it was going to help me. It was brought to my attention that it was going to help me heal faster, make my body feel back to normal." Really?

Tell me something, sir...when your body was "healing faster" and you started hitting home runs like crazy, moreso than you did before, did you really think that was "normal"? Really? Because we're not stupid here. (Well, those folks lined up to buy my bridge aren't exactly geniuses, I'll give you that. But I'm talking about the rest of us. Do we look that stupid?) And once your body was "healed", it's my understanding that you continued to take the miraculous, all healing steroids, is that correct? Of course it is. Oh, but you were just taking them because you were healing faster. Right. So, if you were all healed, what were you taking them for? Oh, that's right. Because you were a cheater.

Here's my favorite part of his tearful and crying interview with the revered Mr. Costas. (Yes. Crying. I thought there was no crying in baseball!) Bob (I call him Bob) "Asked repeatedly...if he believed that his statistics and records were legitimate in light of the disclosure" and when he did "...McGwire did not budge." Wait. What now?

That's right. He had the audacity to say "Absolutely. I truly believe so. I was given this gift by the man upstairs." And sooooo....because you were given that....(gift, was it?) that gift and instead of accepting the gift, you decided to do steroids because the gift wasn't good enough? Am I understanding you correctly? Am I also understanding that you're really going to try and drag God into all of this? Puh-lease. Please just spare us any references to God, got it? It doesn't help. It only makes you look like more of an ass than you already do.

He also said that "The steroids that I did were on a very, very low dosage. I didn't want to take a lot of that. I didn't want to look like an Arnold Schwarzenegger or Lou Ferrigno...I took very, very low dosages just because I wanted my body to feel normal." Huh. He wanted it to feel normal. He apparently wasn't too worried about it looking normal, though. Clearly, he did not look normal. He looked massive. And while I find that statement semi- interesting, I'm still left with the feeling of "whatever". See, at this point, it doesn't matter what you're claiming the doses were because we don't care. So just please stop talking. Please stop talking now.

Mark McGwire is a liar and he wasted everyone's time by having us all interested in whether or not he was going to be able to do something that no one (since Roger Maris in 1961) else had been able to do. And by being a liar and a cheater, he opened the door to other a-holes to do the same thing. (Hello? Barry Bonds? Hell-ooooo?) And I guess he didn't realize that by admitting that he did steroids, that people would suddenly realize (as if we didn't before now) he really didn't hit all of those home runs on his own merit and that they would subsequently discredit him for what he had appeared to do (the record breaking and all). So it must have been at that point that he decided to throw in all of the obvious crap about how he knows, he knows he would have been able to do everything he did even without the steroids. Uh-huh. Pipe down, Mark. We're done with you.

See, whether it's true or not, you cheating liar, we're never going to know. There's no way for us to know and you know what that means, you cheating liar? That means that there is no way for you to know. I find it hard to believe that if you felt that you could have hit all of those home runs without using steroids that you would not have done so. If you honestly believed that you could have done it without the steroids, then you must be dumber than a box of hair to have gone ahead with the steroid use even after you were "healed" and continued to use them. Any respect that you might have garnered from your long overdue admission is completely gone. You're never getting into the Hall of Fame, which seems rather appropriate considering you haven't done anything legitimate in order to get there. Your name will be asterisked whenever and wherever your stats appear. You haven't done anything in your professional career other than cheat and lie. And you're now nothing more than a hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals, and that seems about right. Good luck with that. Oh, and please stop talking about this. You're making yourself look worse now than when you were testifying before Congress. And that is a feat that I would have thought to have been difficult to top.

Taser Humor + Steroids 'R Us + One Laptop Per Child

Watching TV today as a way of diverting my attention from this cough that is drilling straight up through my throat, I had to turn off CNN, after watching correspondent Fredricka Whitfield giggling like a teenager on whippets over a video clip of University of Florida student Andrew Meyer screaming out the phrase "Don't Tase me, Bro!" just before out of control security guards Tasered him this past September 17. His transgression, you may remember, was pressing that hapless boob Senator John Kerry at a university forum. Anchor T. J. Holmes had initially responded to the Meyer cry clip, which he announced had been named the year's most memorable quote by the Yale Book of Quotations, by pitying the rambling, incoherent reply Miss Teen South Carolina, Caitlin Upton, gave at this past year's Miss Teen America competition. But he quickly joined in the giggling as well. Last night, I saw WPIX anchors Lolita Lopez and Jim Watkins chuckling heartily over the same clip. Assuming these people are not all psychopaths, is watching someone being violently assaulted by cops wielding a potentially lethal electrical device that funny? Are these people that jaded and desensitized, is Tasering people that passé? Yes, I know that we're living in a time in which not only police brutality, but state-sanctioned brutality and torture, have become so normalized they barely merit public comment, let alone outrage, but still, the drollery disturbed the hell out of me. Which makes me wonder: am I being too sensitive, serious? Or is it that the detached, zombified, overpaid media bobbleheads emblematic of so much that's wrong with our media and our society?

UPDATE: Digby notes another appalling CNN moment, this time involving anchor Kyra Phillips, who indifferently described and downplayed the fact that police were attacking the people protesting the Department of Housing and Urban Development's plans to demolish several longstanding housing projects in New Orleans. She then slanted her on-air riff to openly defend the police, using tortured and disengaged language to describe the assaults on the protesters. (I should add that my great uncle has worked for HUD for many years, and is none too fond of the clown now running it, the scandal-plagued Alphonso Jackson, the other Black person in W's Cabinet of Horrors.) One of the commenters in the Digby thread points out that the New York Times's architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff recently penned an excellent piece criticizing HUD's terrible plans. Ourousoff argues that HUD is failing not only to recognize the value of the architecture it seeks to destroy and replace with shoddier, less hurricane-worthy housing in a misguided fantasy of suburbanizing the city, but also to acknowledge the symbolic and social violence of the plans as well. He writes:

The agency refuses to make distinctions between the worst of the housing projects and those, like Lafitte, that could be at least partly salvaged. Nor will it acknowledge the trauma it causes by boarding up and then eradicating entire communities in a reeling city.

In an eerie echo of the slum clearance projects of the 1960s, government officials are once again denying that these projects and communities can be salvaged through a human, incremental approach to planning. For them, only demolition will do.

The difference between then and now is what will exist once the land is cleared. If the urban renewal projects of the 1960s replaced decaying historic neighborhoods with vast warehouses for the poor, HUD’s vision would yield saccharine, suburban-style houses. And the situation is likely to get worse. The government has identified some other historically important public buildings for demolition as part of its push for privatization. Charity Hospital, an Art Deco structure built downtown in the late 1930s, was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, and its fate is uncertain.

I cannot say it enough, but the crimes against the city and people of New Orleans embody everything that is wrong with this administration and this country we're living in.

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I've passed on commenting on Major League Baseball's very flawed Mitchell Report, which despite its flawed methodology has revealed that a far wider array of major league baseball players than previously assumed were using various kinds of performance enhancement drugs, while the owners, the players union and other players, and the MLB hierarchy looked the other way. One immediate effect of this news, and subsequent reports, should be that fanatical sportswriters need to issue a collective, stentorian apology to Barry Bonds, who has been crucified in the media for denying being a roider, and then to Sammy Sosa (at right, from the Monaga Blog) who until the most recent news about pitcher Jason Grimsley's affidavit, had not been tied conclusively to any performance enhancement drug use.

The false shock and piety, which is to say, sanctimony, from people in the baseball world, including former baseball owner and public welfare maven George W., was totally predictable. What I'm still waiting for some of these folks to admit is how much baseball benefitted from the bulked up stats, and the fact that players began earning outsized salaries compared to other professions in the early 1980s if they made the major leagues and could sustain even a modest career, so there was every incentive to juice up. There still is. For hitting a ball around a field or getting it over the plate, baseball players earn more than most CEOs, who are grossly overpaid as it is. The truth is, an entire era, up through now, will have to be viewed with "enhancements" as the norm, rather than the exceptions. This new realization must be taken into account with all of the stats and records set or none of them. Before steroids there were amphetamines, which still exist, and who knows what someone is cooking up in a laboratory even as I type these words. "Clear" was out there for a while before track and field's authorities discovered it, and only they did so as quickly as they did only with the help of whistleblowers. So long as the financial incentives exist to cheat, people will do so. My question is, who really believes that baseball is the only sport where this is a serious problem? What about the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, and every other sport where chemical enhancement gives athletes an edge? Could the Beijing Olympics possibly be clean? I doubt it.

Which leads me to this link, from the Dallas Morning News: "More professionals, students using brain performance enhancing drugs." Business people, musicians, professional gamers, students...it's definitely not just pro athletes, but our society in general that needs to undergo more thorough self-analysis and critique....

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Yesterday brought a pleasant surprise: an XO computer arrived in the mail, though I'd hardly expected to see it anytime soon. The computer is the result of my participation in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, the brainchild of visionary MIT professor and Media Laboratory founder and former head Nicholas Negroponte, who decided to develop affordable, networkable computers to empower children in the developing world. The original prototype, which I blogged about here two years ago, has been modified to some extent, but the model I received is a robust, fully loaded little portable machine containing an easy-to-figure, Graphical User Interface (GUI) atop a Linux platform. The software includes a browser, a writing program, several layers of music-making software (which I sampled right away), a recording studio with a camera (for photos, videos and audio--that's me, at left, on screen, photographing myself photographing myself), lots of games, a basic programming tutorial, and the means for children to network with others very easily, either in class or outside it. In fact, I could see children getting started on these machines swiftly and learning not only to write, but to create group projects, make music and visual art projects, create mathematical and statistical programs, write software programs, and even learn to repair their computers and troubleshoot hardware problems.

The XO has great Wifi capability (in fact, its literature say it's a fulltime wireless router), and after C added its MAC address to the base stations here, I was on the Net...in less than 5 minutes. It also easily links to local networks and fosters their creation. It has ports for a microphone (in), headphones (out), and USB-connective devices, a slot for memory upgrades, no harddrive, and only two internal cables--and it saves all projects unless you delete them. The computer's CPU suspends its CPU operation selective, allowing it amazing power savings, or about 1/10th of what a standard laptop consumes. This aspect of the computer mirrors its battery, which lasts between 6-8 hours with average use and can be recharged using a variable energy powercord, as well as via a crank or a solar or wind-powered source, to facilitate use in the many countries where electricity is a premium. The screen rotates so that it can function as an e-book, and the overall machine is compact enough that it can fit in a backpack and appears to be fairly robust, though real world use will probably assist its manufacturers in making it even more so. The only drawback I can see so far is the tiny keyboard, which is perfect for children but a challenge for anyone with larger fingers--but that's the point, this is a computer for children, though I can foresee someone down the road creating something along these lines, affordable and very robust, for adults as well. I certainly hope someone does, because the XO is a sweet little machine.

All in all I think Negroponte's idea was a remarkable one, and I'm very interested to see how the OLPC program unfolds. So far, from what I can tell, it has worked out pretty well where it's been implemented. The computers have been piloted in Nigeria, Brazil, Thailand, Peru, Uruguay, and India, and I sincerely hope that they can be offered to children in many more countries. Here's a quote from one child in Nigeria:

“I use my computer very carefully so that it will not spoil. I use it to type, I use it to write, I use it to draw, I use it to play games... I'm using my computer at home to type assignments.” — T. (Primary 4), Galadima School, Abuja, Nigeria

If you'd like to learn more, you can click on the link above, and if you think you'd like to contribute to the program, donate a computer or volunteer your time and services, click here. If you know of people who write open source, educationally-oriented software that might children can use, please urge them to contact OPLC as well.×