The Poet's Eye
commentary by Lightning Rod
The Poets' Eye is skeptical without being cynical, innocent without being naive and critical without being judgemental.
Cup Runneth Over
04-05-04
The tiresome subject of performance enchancing drugs in sports has reared it's ugly head once more. Even the President is piling on as if he had any moral weight in this area, mentioning it in his State of the Union speech. George Will interviewed Bud Selig, Baseball Commissioner, about steroid abuse among players on This Week on Sunday.
To attempt so called intelligent discussion about this subject strikes me as, to say the least, hypocritical. George Will doesn't have to take a pee test in order to be a television commentator and a columnist who reaches millions of people and George Bush doesn't have to piss in a jar before he makes his State of the Union speech.
I also found it amusing that while Will was interviewing Selig about the terrible moral damage that was being done to 'the game' by performance enhancing drugs, the commercial break was an advertisement for Cialis, a performance enhancing drug that boasts of side-effects such as "four hour erections."
You haven't heard too much about the War On Drugs lately because it has been supplanted by the War On Terror, another chimera. And while you are watching the blow by blow in this fictional, video game war on the nightly news, they are feeding you ad after ad about this or that drug in a purple or blue pill that you have to ask your doctor about. We live in a world that is saturated with drugs.
We have drugs to keep you from sneezing, drugs to eat the bad colesterol and leave the good colesterol, drugs to insure that you get the best out of life, drugs to help you forget your depression and your creative sex-drive. There are drugs if you've eaten too much and drugs to help you eliminate what you've eaten. There are drugs to keep you awake, to make you sleep and drugs to help you remember to take your drugs. And there are drugs that help you make a living if you are a pro athlete.
Periodically we get on a moral high horse about performance enhancing drugs in sports. This is like being morally outraged about violent movies and video games when we are bombing Afghans and Iraqis into the ground. I say we make people in critical jobs like Senator or Congressman or National Security Advisor take drug tests. Daily.
I'm a poet and a musicician, and it's no secret that I've taken my share of drugs. I've taken performance enhancing drugs like cocaine and morphine and a dozen others with underground brand-names like Ecstasy and Sunshine and Clear Light. I don't know if my performances were enhanced, but I had a great time.
Like George Bush, I can't claim to be a teetotaler on this subject. We are fishes swimming in the same sea. We both have powder around our nostrils. The only difference is that GW cuts his hair off and mine is nearly two feet long. They could tell with a strand of my hair what drugs I took in 1985. I'm thinking of shaving my head.
Drug tests are an invasion of privacy and a violation of Fifth Amendment rights. It is proper that the baseball players or any athlete or any citizen for that matter should refuse to submit to them. It's illegal search. My idea for a battle flag to replace the cut-up snake saying Don't Tread On Me-- a plastic cup with the red hazard sign over it--caption: Don't Piss On Me.
The Poet's Eye sees that we have a government on steroids. This is demonstrated by Bush strutting in a flight suit on an aircraft carrier declaring victory in a war that has barely begun or celebrating the fact that we had a third of a million new jobs last month while neglecting to mention that the qualification for those jobs is being able to say "Welcome to McDonalds." Let's make the President piss in a jar, I think he's on something.
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