Fool us once, fool us a million times.
Our modern-day heroes, the pearly-white toothed smiling faces lifting trophies, getting the girls, selling us razors, and making millions on the backs of their televised accomplishments are nothing more than a 42nd Street card trick, a slight of hand mirage to make us cheer in unison. It is all a lie.
This week, the yellow-shirted cyclist Lance Armstrong will finally admit to doping throughout his career. Ho-hum, you might say with me. Tell us something we don’t know. Armstrong will tell Oprah and the world that performance-enhancing drugs were always an integral part of his training regiment. Many will scowl and poo-poo him for it, Twitter will be a buzz with snarky quips and righteous condemnation, but make no mistake about it, we’ll be the fools once again. In a few years time, Lance Armstrong will pop up on some reality TV show, as the host of this or that, he will charm us like he did while peddling up, over, and through the hilly French countryside every summer, and most of us will forgive, if not completely forget, his cheating then and incessant lying since. The cycle repeats. And Stretch Armstrong goes back to being the reliable one.
There are no heroes on TV. Don’t kid yourself. The television is not the place for genuine heroism because the conceit is that to get on there in the first place, for longer than 15 minutes, corners had to be cut, casting couches soiled, and needles used. Cynical, maybe, but if this is a some grand chicken and egg problem I am attempting to solve, my justified cynicism came in 2nd.
I’ve never had a hero. Oh, I fancied myself a fan of Kirk Gibson, then of the Detroit Tigers, when I was a kid of 8 or 9. This was a fandom that manifested itself most memorably while I suffered through some childhood misery, like annual pediatric dental examinations. I would think to myself, I’d actually say these words in my own head while laying horizontal with my mouth propped open by a latex gloved hand, that “Kirk Gibson gets through this, he goes to the dentist twice a year just like me, so I can do this!” Silly? Maybe, but it worked enough for no cavities ever and no braces. That was about the extent of my hero worship, dental self-help. My girls too seem to be growing up without a broadcast hero or heroine. There is positively no US Weekly star-fucking in this house, and that is by design.
My wife and I drew up a sort of parenting constitution when we conceived the Bear. I mean, not immediately after, ’cause that’d have been a super strange post-intimacy to-do. Shortly after discovering we had indeed made a child, we wrote down a list of things we wanted to do, or not ever do, and how we wanted to be as parents. This wasn’t a rigid document, like, say the constitution and say, the bit about gun-ownership, it was just the start of what we’d later call active-parenting — being aware and trying hard to do it right. For me, coming from and having been shaped by indie college music and then carrying that love of all things independent forward into the rest of my life, and having helped bands unload their gear from the back of beat-up vans, having booked hardcore rock shows in the basements of churches and in shitty holes-in-wall spaces in West Philly, I didn’t look at guys with guitars the same way my peers did. I never had stars in my eyes. And I was determined, even more so when we learned we’d have a girl, to teach my daughter to have respect for the skill and the craft but never in a million years place anyone on a pedestal, at least not one that rose up higher than the one you will stand upon.
The Lance Armstrong confessional this week won’t mean a whole lot to us as a family, but I reckon that to many a child and many a cancer survivor, it will sting badly. It probably isn’t even the cheating at this point, but the denials, and the lies upon lies upon lies. The lessons here are numerous, but one that sticks out to me is the need to raise our children with a healthy dose of cynicism. Being one in absolutely no hurry to rush my girls through their childhood, the effort to teach doubt and questioning is a delicate one, and it may be one that I am not mastering. Yet I try. It is, after all, all about the try. I want them to question me, question teachers, and everything and everyone else, yet do so with tact and grace and intelligence and with an appreciation of the emotions and authority that others do possess. At some point between the years your kids love the stuffing out of you, and when they, as adults, realize that you are alright and meant them well all those years, they may need to look up to people for some reason or another. With a foundation of George Carlin-esque questioning (video link is not child-safe, but the core message is child-essential) they may be better suited to navigate the dubious world of heroes and villains, televised and not.
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