Vélo moralitas

Yesterday I droned on and on about how cycling is more than a sport and how, even though the sport of professional cycling is currently mired in an agonizing act of self flagellation, there is redemption through the recognition of the value of the bicycle in leisure and transportation. I believe that. But it’s also true that I am somewhat in morning for the sport I love. I’m not saddened by the realization that the heroes of the sport are cheaters, as may be the case with many of my fellow fans. What makes me sad is that the sport has to endure this punishing mea culpa, this melodrama, this masochistic show of faux humility for the benefit of the same type of hypocritical audience for which every witch hunt is enacted.

USADA discovers doping in the pro peloton.

Though we may find it unfortunate, mere mortals are incapable of performing superhuman feats. Period. Sure, the equipment manufacturers would like you to think that their increasingly stiff bottom brackets can give any weekend suburbanite the ability to dance up the Tourmalet without breaking a sweat; likewise the marketers of training systems and nutrition supplements, the shoes with carbon fiber soles and the wind tunnel tested jerseys. But it’s all bullshit. Anybody who has ever spent any time on a bike knows that performance improvements just don’t come in exponential leaps and bounds. And anybody who can make sense of a graph ought to know that athletes long ago far exceeded the limits of human physiology.

But we Americans are eternal virgins; the descendents of Puritans, endlessly capable of re-growing our moral hymens, of regaining our innocence. We forget that the year before Armstrong started winning we had the Festina affair or that the sport has been riddled with cheating from the very beginning. How do we do it? How do we continue to believe in fairy tales despite all evidence to the contrary? And maybe more importantly, why would we want to? How can we be so naïve?

We have the same problem with so many of our societal problems, it blows my mind and makes me think psychosis is an integral part of the American character. And what should disturb us is that our false belief in moral purity, in Plato’s form of the good, causes actual damage. Our righteous moralizing blinds us to the true flawed nature of our species and as we point our accusatory fingers at the Other, we somehow manage to ignore the horrors right in our own houses. 

If we are able to pretend that people can stop wanting to get stoned, we can just spend ridiculous sums of money putting enormous numbers of non-violent citizens in jail, thereby destroying families and whole communities. Yet global pharmaceutical companies make obscene profits keeping the rest of us drugged up and we don’t seem to have a problem with it as long as insurance covers our antidepressants and boner pills.

And if we can pretend that priests and scout masters and coaches and teachers can stop abusing children, that they are some sort of rare aberration, a extraordinary satanic abomination, instead of admitting that such admittedly abhorrent behavior is well within the bounds of common human behavior and then putting processes and policies in place to actually protect children. 

We substitute a desire to pretend we’re not all perverts of one stripe or another while we let the dangerous ones, the real predators continue to diddle the youth. Why? Because we can’t admit to ourselves that wanting to get blasted and have sex is central to the human experience, but that some of us color outside the lines and we have to keep them within the limits of healthy, non-destructive self expression. Instead, we clap the deviants in irons, pretend that good and evil are absolute and wait to be surprised by the next incident.

I just wish we could be honest about the whole thing, rather than burning down the entire village to eradicate the witches and pretending the purge will make us pure again.