I knew there was trouble when my son started walking around the house muttering, “I can’t believe Barry Bonds took steroids.” This is coming from a kid who has, to my knowledge, never seen Barry Bonds play an entire game of baseball. Like many of us, he is reacting to the firestorm of media that is present at the beginning of the season. It’s a pleasant enough diversion from the Dubai port deals and the flowering of democracy across the Middle East.
How can this possibly matter? If a consenting adult male chooses to inject himself with bovine growth supplement, why should I care? He’s breaking the rules, right? We should care about that. The rules say no steroids, so if he says he didn’t take steroids and he did, then he’s a liar and a cheat. If he didn’t, well a lot of very hard working journalists (who just happened to pick the opening of spring training to release their torrid account of Barry’s evolution from the spindly rookie who broke in with the Pittsburgh Pirates to the two hundred thirty pound ball-crusher that stalks the National League today) are going to look awfully silly.
Still – we’re at war, right? Aren’t we supposed to be concerned with weightier matters just now? State governments across the country are limiting access to abortion and outlawing gay marriage. Barry Bonds chose to inject himself with a banned substance. Lance Armstrong dined on human stem cells before each and every stage of the Tour de France. George Clooney uses a special cream made from the fat of baby yaks to give his eyes that special crinkly look. Or not. Barry Bonds may have the world’s best training regimen, and he may just be the genetic mutant that has been created after years of pain-staking research but without ingesting a single anabolic steroid.
Or not. In the meantime, let’s get back to the lies that matter, shall we?
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