Bleacher Report, CA
Oct 27 2006

Just Saying, Is All…Plausible Deniability

Written by Ryan Alberti
Friday, 27 October 2006
I always said those Frogs had to be good for something.

Here’s what you need to know, minus the standard geopolitical
hullabaloo: Between 1915 and 1917, a bunch of Armenians died in
Turkey. Actually, it was the Ottoman Empire then, not Turkey…and it
was a million-plus Armenians who died, not just a bunch. But still,
Bubba, facts is facts: Armenians, Turkey, death, not necessarily in
that order. Easy enough, right?

Not quite.

Some folks – Armenians foremost among them – are intent on calling the
thing a genocide. Other folks – including (surprise) the Turks – want no
part of such stark language. And that, Bubba, is where the lilly-pad
crew comes in: Earlier this month, the French National Assembly voted
to criminalize the characterization of the deaths in anything other
than genocidal terms. Which maybe wasn’t such a hot call, if you’re
into silly little bagatelles like free speech and open dialogue…but
here at the Just Saying desk we’ve always taken pride in our
narrowness of vision, and more than anything else we can’t get over
the sublimely stifled crossover appeal of it all:

What if we could do the same thing in sports?

Not slaughter innocent Armenians, of course (Jerry Tarkanian, please
return to your seat): What if we could make it a crime to gainsay the
truth? What if we could mandate the frank and earnest admission of
fact, in a sports world where half-real rhetoric is more or less the
coin of the realm? What if, Bubba, my goodness gracious what if, what
if, what if:

What if it were illegal – actually honest-to-George-Washington
illegal – to call a spade anything other than a spade?

It’s not an entirely absurd notion, really – not in a country whose
favorite President-slash-avatar-slash-lap dance financier couldn’t
chop down a plain old cherry tree without having to come clean about
it. (Also not an absurd notion in such a country: ethical logging
practices. But anyway.) And God Bubba, imagine the possibilities:
Imagine the national sporting landscape if everyone had to tell it
like it really was. Kenny Rogers would be in hot water. Scott Boras
would be out of a job. Pete Rose would catch a lot less flak for his
autograph epigrams. And O.J. Simpson, well –

O.J. Simpson would be that much closer to finally finding the real
killers.

But we could play like this for days. The truth, as conventional
wisdom has it, is not a thing to be trifled with; it’s a high-white
idol, the single most sacred pillar of any civil society. Man without
his word is hardly even Man at all, and so if we’re going to go
around separating sports fact from sports fiction the least we can do
is start where it matters, with the one issue that we can never, for
the life of us, manage to be all-the-way candid about:

The least we can do is start with the drugs.

Which I know, I know: Not again, right? Not another riff on the
performance-enhancement thing – especially not in an article that
opened with something about Turks and Armenians. This is a snow job,
a Trojan horse (a Turkish horse?): a quarter-assed attempt to milk an
old story, no matter what the sports sheet says about Shawne Merriman
and four-game suspensions. We’ve done it before, is the problem, and
it didn’t do any good, and so let’s please just move onto something
else, to something different; let’s please just move onto something
that doesn’t feel, you know, so wholly and hopeless stale –

Well relax, Bubba. I’m here to freshen things up.

You see, there’s a valuable lesson to be gleaned from the new French
law, and it goes something like this: Truth is what you make of it.
Such is the bottom line in this postmodern age of ours, where the
information revolution has shown us a world that doesn’t make sense
through any lens except the one we apply to it. We – All of Us – are the
only authority that counts anymore – and so a genocide is only a
genocide if we say it is, same as a sports scandal can only touch us
if we decide to let it. Which means, of course, that we – All of Us,
Bubba – could be done with the sports-and-drugs problem once and for
all, if we’d only have the stones to make like the Frogs and quit
denying three points which oughtn’t to be denied. To wit:

First, the Merriman case shows that drug use in professional American
sports isn’t going away. No sir, no how: We’re stuck with
pharmaceutically-altered superstars, no matter how ardently George
Mitchell and Henry Waxman claim to be getting a handle on the
problem. On the scale of mind-blowing revelations, this one ranks
somewhere just north of No Duh territory. The sooner we quit denying
the obvious – that athletes will continue to do anything and everything
they can to get an edge on the competition – the happier we’ll be.

Second, the use of performance-enhancing substances is not, if
current statistical trends can be trusted, The End of the World As We
Know It. It’s been two years since the drug issue got pushed to the
front burner on the national culture scene, and the sky has not
fallen. Our social institutions have not collapsed. Our children are
still the same spoiled, lethargic, Ritalin-addled Xbox-junkies
they’ve always been. More to the point, fans are still shelling out
sizable chunks of their weekly paychecks to get into the games, thus
proving that the tainted-pro-sports model is an economically viable
one. Everything might be different in the post-BALCO world, but
nothing much has changed – and pretending otherwise isn’t doing anybody
good. Selah.

Third, and finally, there’s the most important point of all: Once you
cut through all the aimless furor of the BALCO fallout – once you get
past the angst and the indignation and the absurd Kabuki pantomime of
the thing – we’re still just us. We have, as a nation, ranted and raved
and achieved not much of anything at all, mostly because there was
never frankly anything to achieve in the first place. Again, Bubba,
learn from the French: Truth is what we make of it, and until we stop
denying that the universe can only ever be what it is – until we stop
denying that the pill-and-needle habits of very large strangers do
exceptionally little to change the incontrovertible nature of our own
collective existence – we’re bound to keep grasping at the formless
shadow of nothing in particular. Which maybe isn’t the most vile
pastime in the history of the world, that grasping, but somehow it
seems like a waste, doesn’t it?: It seems like an underutilization of
resources, really, because God if we could only just recognize the
power of self-authorship, and cop to the fact of our uniquely
personal capacity to determine what’s real and what isn’t, then,
Bubba – then – then –

Then we could finally get down to only just saying, c’est tout…

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress