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| "I did not nor have I ever used high-fructose corn syrup to enhance my performance" |
Just exactly why is Lance Armstrong being demonized? What exactly did he do that was so wrong? In actuality, very little. Let's run down the list.
1. Did Lance Armstrong get a PhD in chemistry and biology and start a pharmaceutical company that began researching, developing, then actively marketing these so-called performance enhancing drugs?
No
2. Did Lance Armstrong create the cultural system that actively markets, encourages, and even turns a blind eye to the use of performance enhancing drugs in athletes across a wide variety of sports (*cough* baseball *cough*) and then chastises and demonizes those very same athletes once they are "outed" to the public?
No
3. Did Lance Armstrong lie about his use of performance enhancing drugs throughout his career?
Yes (However, people shouldn't be upset that Lance Armstrong lied. He was trying to protect his own ass -just like anyone else- but he was also -whether he knew it or not- protecting all of us from ourselves. His life narrative gave us an inspirational narrative about a man rising over seemingly insurmountable obstacles and inspiring millions of other people, and now in the current social climate we're left with the story of a disgraced fallen hero, albeit one of our own making. What's better: a depressing truth or an inspiring lie? For a lot of smug fucks out there it's obvious they prefer the former.)
4. Did Lance Armstrong survive cancer and then go on to complete some pretty amazing feats of strength and endurance that pushed the boundaries of preconceived notions of the boundaries of human potential?
Yes
5. Did Lance Armstrong found and raise money for an organization that is doing important work to fight back against cancer, one of the most terrible biological assaults on human life in all of history?
Yes.
Lance Armstrong is a victim in all of this. He is the latest casualty in a cultural circle-jerk that is the result of a society plagued by widespread hypocrisy and clear lack of vision. Armstrong is -like all of us- a man of his time. Was he implicit in covering up the shady, apparently drug-laced underbelly of professional cycling? Most certainly. But that's as far as his responsibility and accountability go. He was part of a culture that pushes people to achieve their very best at any cost and push themselves harder and faster than anybody every thought possible, but then punishes people for trying to do just that.
And that culture is ours.
If you hate or have lost respect for Lance Armstrong, you actually hate and disrespect yourself and everybody else as well. The point that Armstrong's use -and indeed the use in general of PEDs- is not a moral or legal issue, but a philosophical one. How do we define what it means to be human? If we deny that Lance Armstrong did not complete the feats of human strength and endurance which are attributed to him, if we deny that they would have been impossible for any human being, then what we are really denying is Lance Armstrong's humanity. By these standards, Lance's feats were literally inhuman because Lance himself was not human.
It seems that the what we have is a battle between two schools of philosophical thought. One school emphasizes the importance of biological purity in defining humanity. We are human because we are born with human bodies determined by human DNA in a "natural" state. Human achievements only "count" if the agent of those actions was purely and thoroughly human, presumably without the aid of technology of any sort. The other school of the post-humanists and trans-humanists sees the biological body as a starting point, but not necessarily limiting to human potential, that there are other avenues afforded to us through technology to tap the unseen wells of human potential both physical and mental. Technology is our fucking gift. Lions have claws, sharks have teeth, porcupines have quills, gorillas have freakish strength and large testicles. Technology is humanity's evolutionary advantage, and in the grand scale of things, it turns out it beats the shit out of claws, teeth, or large testicles.
It's a matter of how we conceive of human potential. Are we limited by simple biological determinism, or can we rise above and shape our own future? For better or worse we've already proven time and again that we are capable of overcoming biological constraints. From something as simple as clothing to the invention of the airplane, humanity has proven time and again that it is capable of overcoming obstacles that we would otherwise not have been able to overcome had we been bounded by the constraints of biology. As for biology itself, we are already constantly tinkering with our biological bodies. Through the application of advances in dietary and medical discoveries we have actively raised the average life expectancy of the average person from 18 in the time of the Roman Empire to 67 (and even as high as 80 in some developed countries). In fact, if one were so inclined, one might argue that the same logic that is applied to PEDs could also be applied to antibiotics and vaccines. Both are technically upsetting the "natural" biological balance of humanity by providing us with an unfair biological "edge" over the competition. I would argue, however, that these technologies both represent and help unlock human potential
The fact is that PEDs did not win the Tour De France seven times. Lance Armstrong did. Drugs may have enhanced his performance, but you need a biological starting point. You need that potential to be unlocked. PEDs are not going to grant every random cocksucker on the street the strength of Hercules and the testicular fortitude of Mohammed Ali, otherwise people would be popping pills and winning Tour de Frances left, right, and centre. Everybody is overlooking the fact that Armstrong didn't just take some magic injection and become instantly jacked like Captain America. The dude was a professional athlete and trained his ass off. The fact is that human history is replete with examples of people who were able to seemingly exceed the limits of their biological potential through sheer force of will. The point is that there are wells of human potential that have yet to be tapped, and as any athlete worth his salt will tell you, any sport is more a matter of psychological strength than physical strength. You can have the best tools for the job, but if you don't have the ability to use them or the will to hold on or push forward just that one more second beyond the quantifiably measurable limits that your body should be able to, then all the PEDs in the world aren't going to allow you to succeed. The potential, both physical and mental was in Armstrong the whole time.
And it's not only this ambiguity and indecision over the nature of humanity that's the problem. The problem is that we live in a culture that is, on the one hand, constantly pushing its member to run faster, push harder, jump higher, and fuck longer than ever before. Records are made to be broken, and unless you're breaking a record, your story isn't newsworthy. The thing is that as more and more details are coming out about Armstrong's use of PEDs, more and more details are coming out about how widespread the use of PEDs are not only in the world of cycling, but in all professional sports. The fact is that many (if not all) of the other cyclists that Lance beat were also using PEDs, which meant that the playing field wasn't as one-sided as some in the media might lead us to believe. For those who are looking for some kind of cosmic justice, your sense of righteousness might be appeased by the fact that a PED-using Lance Armstrong beat a bunch of other PED-using cyclists.
But even if that weren't true, even if Lance Armstrong were the only cyclist in history to ever use PEDs, what really is his crime? Is it really cheating? He was using every possible means at his disposal to win, which he did. Just because nobody else was willing to go to the same extremes wouldn't take anything away from Armstrong's accomplishments. You may not be willing to embrace his methods, but don't fucking chastise others for a) trying an alternative route than you'd try to reach your fullest potential as a human being while b) personally assuming all of the potential health risks. The simple fact is that athletes that use PEDs are not really physically hurting anyone else other than themselves (unless of course they're involved in boxing, MMA, or some other martial art, in which case they're probably hurting entire dojos full of people). All they're hurting is preconceived notions about the nature of humanity that we may not even have been aware we had.
The problem is that we as a society have yet to come to some kind of general consensus about how we view and measure humanity and hence human achievement. But don't blame Lance Armstrong. He is merely the latest victim of our cultural indecision. Until we pull our collective heads out of our asses and as a society make up our minds as to the nature of humanity, Lance and people like him will continue to suffer because of the mixed signals we are sending out.
The only apology that should come out of this whole affair is an apology to Lance Armstrong on behalf of the rest of us.
Sorry, Lance. (Just doing my small part.)
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