Feet of Clay

Thank you, Lance, and thank you, Oprah. The cat, as they say, is out of the bag. Our world has been rocked. Now what?

Shouldn’t we be a little used to hearing about the fatal flaws of our heroes or pillars of the community? Lance is just the latest in a pretty long line, of course. Many of the recent ones are from sports, like Jerry Sandusky. Politics? Arnold Schwarzenegger. Entertainment/media? Jimmy Savile of the BBC. Finance? Bernie Madoff. Part of us must enjoy seeing the mighty fall – but there’s the other part that yearns for someone absolutely flawless.

I’ve always believed that Human Being 1.0 comes with a “worship chip.” That’s why we invented religion. Atheism doesn’t fix this. If we don’t have religions or churches in the traditional sense, we make them up. The Baseball Hall of Fame. The Oscars. American Idol.

Americans in particular, as I have often said, turn everything into an Olympic sport. If you look at it from a distance, the whole notion of putting singers with widely differing talents – or actors, for that matter – into some kind of competition is a little silly. I knew the Last Days couldn’t be far off when I saw a similar competition on one of the food channels about who made the best cupcakes.

But we do have to have our winners. Those who get close to the top often feel the most pressure to get there and stay there. They know that no one is going to remember them if they only win the Silver Medal. Or become First Runner-Up. Or the last to be voted off the island. So they do bad things – in the case of Mr. Armstrong, some pretty awful things. Once they get to the top, they get into an almost life-and-death struggle to hide anything that would threaten that status. The tragedy is, those within striking distance of the top have extraordinary talent long before they dope, cheat, lie or commit other unsavory acts.

Once they’re on top, the majority of us want to keep them there. Investigative reporters go against the grain. They try to give us the truth. Someday, the majority of us are grateful, but for a long time, we just don’t want to hear it – which is why it takes extraordinary courage to do that job. The criers in the wilderness face scorn, financial ruin, and even threats of death.

When one of our idols is actually toppled, we’re ready to fix blame, but as usual, the idol wouldn’t have been on a pedestal quite as high without our help.

BTW, I write this under the influence of a performance-enhancing drug, which you may have heard of: caffeine. I leave it to you to decide if the performance was actually enhanced.

Choose Your Weapons

The BBC’s call-in radio program, “World Have Your Say,” featured a fascinating pro-and-con about gun control. The pro-gun guests were especially interesting. An American gun shop owner allowed as how he never leaves home without carrying THREE guns on his person. One of the three, he observed, is particularly good for going to the movies with. As you might expect, he believes that if members of the audience in that Aurora, Colorado movie theater had been armed, lives would clearly have been saved, because someone would have quickly dropped the shooter. He was silhouetted against the screen and would have made an easy target. Plus, the gun shop owner added, if the Colorado shooter knew ahead of time that the audience was packing, he would certainly have been deterred from doing his thing.

Unfortunately, that scenario seems a little counter-intuitive to me. What it sounds like is bullets flying in multiple directions fired by a lot of semi-trained individuals. As for an armed populace discouraging a crazy person from launching an attack in the first place, well, uh…he’s CRAZY, right, so would that have stopped him?

Another guest on the BBC show was a woman who decided to train her daughter at an early age how to use guns. The woman said she bought the child two rifles and a shotgun – pink guns, befitting a girl – for her eighth birthday. The daughter was not issued any ammunition until she was adequately trained in the use of the weapons (the family has its own shooting range). The earlier guest on the show, the male gun owner, said children who are trained early on in the use of weapons have much more respect for them than kids whose shooting experience is limited to video games.

Not to change the subject here, but why do I have this sneaking suspicion that some of these kinds of parents are a lot slower on the draw when it comes to sex education? All children are issued “weapons” which often become “loaded” before anybody teaches them responsible usage. True, these weapons don’t generally kill anyone, but improper use can certainly have life-changing consequences.

OK, maybe that’s unfair, but I couldn’t resist.