August 2, 2009

• A Culture of Cheaters

  I guarantee you I am not the first person to use this title. Put it in quotes and Google it. It’s true though, much as I would prefer not to confront it. We (as in the USA) are a culture of cheaters.

  The most glaring example in our society is the sport affectionately known as our national pasttime, baseball. Major League Baseball has been plagued by evidence of players using what are collectively called “performance-enhancing drugs” or PEDs. Most people equate PEDs with anabolic steroids, but the category can include HGH (human growth hormone) and other substances. MLB only started testing for steroid use in 2003, which was well after records had been smashed repeatedly from the late 1990s to that point. Evidence of use became so abundant that the period of the 1990s and first half of this decade have come to be known as “The Steroid Era.”

  So basically there are two groups: those who are believed to have been using PEDs before 2003, whom can only be judged by preponderance of evidence against them, and then from 2003 on, those who have actually tested positive. After 2003, there was a list compiled of those players which had tested positive in the initial round of testing. There are 104 names on that list.

  This spring, before the beginning of the season, the most prominent name on the list was “leaked”: Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod didn’t deny it, but gave a half-hearted apology in which he admitted to wrongdoing but then qualified by saying it “was, you know, kind of the culture back then.” Then Manny Ramirez was suspended for a postive test result. He didn’t protest it, apologized weakly– mainly to his teammates– served his 50-game suspension, and then came back, to thunderous applause in his home park in LA, and boos elsewhere.

  Last week a report came out that both Manny and first baseman David Ortiz, who still plays for Boston, were on “the list” from 2003. This knowledge casts the World Series championships in 2004 & 2007 won by the Red Sox in a different light. Some say these titles are now tainted. Are they?

  I say no. It’s totally wrong that these two players, and likely others on the team we don’t yet know about, were cheating by using PEDs. However, the sad truth of the matter is that they were hardly the only ones. The pervasiveness of the problem may never be fully known. Jose Canseco, one of the most blantant “juicers,” wrote a book after retiring that exposed the names of several players he claimed to know used. He contends that the majority of baseball players– more than half– used PEDs at one point or another during this “era.” We have reached a point where there are no players who can safely be assumed to be “clean”– everyone who has played in the majors over the past 20 years is implicated, guilty by association. It was the classic excuse of “everyone is doing it.” It wasn’t hyperbole when A-Rod said “it was kind of the culture back then,” although that doesn’t make it one bit more right.

  Bottom line, since every team had players who were cheating in this way, in a twisted sense, the playing field was leveled. The titles aren’t tainted. because the Red Sox didn’t win them purely because they were cheating. They simply were the best cheaters those two years.

  So what does all this say about our culture on a societal scale? What does it say that fans have hardly stopped buying tickets to games, buying team merchandise, watching on TV? That Ramirez is still loudly cheered in Los Angeles, just as Barry Bonds was cheered in San Francisco to the end of his time there?

  It says that despite all the hue and cry over how horrible cheating in the game is, it’s all talk, an act. Baseball fans, and Americans in general, don’t really care. They want to sound like they care because they know that’s the moral high ground, but in truth, we’re all cheaters.

  Kids start cheating in school, everything from copying each other’s homework, to using cheat sheets on tests, and plagiarizing essays from the Web. They do it because they see adults do it. People cut corners. They do what they can get away with to get ahead. They don’t tell the whole truth if part of that truth would deter their advancement. They pad their resumes. They fudge their timesheets. They claim damages that didn’t happen for insurance payments. They claim exemptions and deductions they don’t have on their tax returns. They cheat to get ahead or make someone else fall behind. They cheat for the pseudo-noble cause that others have an inherent and unfair advantage over them and cheating is the only way to catch up. They cheat on their significant others. They cheat because everyone cheats and if they don’t, they’ll have no chance to compete.

  Why? Why have we developed and perpetuate this culture of cheating? The primary rationale that comes to my mind is the American cult of individualism. We believe, perhaps more strongly than any other society on earth, in the value and importance of the individual. Individual rights trump all others, including those of any group, class, school, company, or government. The upshot is that each of us believes, consciously or not, that he or she is entitled to everything and if anyone or anything gets in our way, well, we have the right to do whatever it may take to eliminate the offensive disruptor.

  to be continued…

  • 11:37 pm
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