Giantism and the Chickens Clucking from the Bottom

"One day we will be as giants, stronger than the sun. But that day ain’t yet come."
--from M. Ward, "Poor Boy, Minor Key", Transfiguration of Vincent

I’ve been following the news about Lance Armstrong potentially having used EPO to boost red blood cells, and thus endurance, as far back as 1999 and win thousands of Tours de France. I’m not sure why. Aside from catching bits and pieces, I’ve never followed cycling. Maybe it’s the just the vulgar voyeuristic tendency to want to see heroes fall and get dirty that causes my finger to click on links to updates.

I don't want that.

When I was teaching remedial English composition, in the book I was given to use there was an essay on the shift of the hero in American culture. I used the essay in the remedial class and eventually in my other composition classes. The gist of it was that long ago, and not really so long ago, people like presidents and sports figures were seen as heroes, glorified as being superhumans who could accomplish just about anything.

We could take this back to the Greeks if you want, though of course there is the mischief of the gods and a vile, scandalous emperor or two to consider. Nevertheless, I thought Mary Lou Retton was superhuman. She was a perfect 10 gymnast, and the likes of that drove me to want to do great things and think that I should do great things. It was imperative to work toward something beyond me and beyond what was merely easy. I didn’t think about what dirty deeds she may or may not have done in the dark of night.

Now we get stories of rape, gambling, doping, theft, adultery—the dirt. When I was a little girl I still had superhumans to look up to, but someone who is, say, my brother’s age, 20, has had the superhumans and their dirt to look up to. Generally speaking, I had as a model at least some godly qualities; my brother had as a model the cheat and scam that got the godly to godhood, thereby making it not just ok but the standard for deeply flawed heroes to have achieved heroism by way of deep flaw, which we find out after the fact, or during.

It’s one thing to show the superhumans to the public to be merely human. At the outset, that might seem more of an inspiration than showing an impossible seven-time Tour winner, but what then is there to work toward. In the atmosphere of news of deviance, beyond showing the superhuman to be merely human, the thing to work toward becomes mutant. One might say then that that leaves a person to look to oneself for goal and drive, and that's important: one’s inner will and drive is vital to the motion both of chicken and egg. But still we learn from the start by observing others even when it doesn’t seem so, whether by mimicry, rejection of what we observe, or otherwise.

Becoming more candid, with regard to celebrities and parents, the media, might seem more true to task than clinging to false ideal portraits. I have always wanted truth. The impossibility of having the truth sometimes paralyzes me; other times it pumps recklessness and apathy. Seeing things for what they are may be half the battle, but what then. There we all are in our damned naked humanness. And at what age is a person ready to know god and then knock him off his lifeguard chair. Maybe there will be a bucking up and, with the dirt out for show in the forum, people will aim yet higher, for an 11. Maybe indeed I will levitate before I die.

Most of the students in my classes were about my brother’s age or younger and thought the essay was a bunch of crap, didn’t see the point of it, didn’t get it, or just plain didn’t read it, which is evidence for my point. There were also the few students who were older than I was, who had kids and witnessed the shift in hero first-hand. And some of them had shifted too. I could go on here, having been examining my own somewhat recent bout with apathy and degenerative mind. Also, there are many facets I'm leaving out, and I need to do some more thinking on all of this. That’s an ocean bottom for another time.

The "news" about Lance Armstrong isn’t even secured. The argument is in raw current going on in front of us. A kid, say, an aspiring cyclist may hear this and when he hears it hear that indeed Lance Armstrong's deific wins are manufactured and impossible; i.e., there's no use trying, at least not without the aid of some elixir. Let the giants be shriveled until we're sure that nothing is possible except by cheating; let not. On the contrary, that kid may have will strong enough, in the case when such rumors are true, to enact some version of "fuck that" and step ahead anyway. Or maybe that crag of hopefulness I hold onto is utterly naive. It doesn't have to be that way.

There is something exciting about being in the middle of news as it’s going on, but there is no insight upon reflection that way, no taking in the whole picture with objectivity, no balance in perspective. Everybody knows everything always in the present and chaotically. In this case it isn't news; it’s Gossip: the new hero, flimsy conjecture, dirty speculation, not real and not dynamic. Yet it bears a heavily influential club.