Thursday's hearings on baseball and steroids featured everything except Kathy Bates shaking her finger at Sammy Sosa and declaring, "Steroids are the devil!" The whole thing was a joke.
Although the stated purpose of the hearing was to address the problem of steroids in baseball, it degenerated into a contest to see who could get Mark McGwire to admit to using steroids.
When members of the House Committee on Government Reform were not pleading for admissions to felony crimes, they were stumping for votes by denouncing the evil that is steroid use. More than one committee member openly wondered, "What message are we sending our children?"
I can answer that. You're sending them the same message you always have: Winners are great, losers are garbage.
Let's be honest, it isn't just baseball or even sports that sends this message. When people say steroid use sends the wrong message to "our children," they really mean "our male children." As of yet, there is no epidemic of performance-enhancing drug use in female sports.
The negative message steroids send to young men is the same negative message beauty pageants send to young girls. The government should go after the Miss America pageant. All it does is reinforce the idea that a woman's worth is based solely on her looks.
Of course there are other ways children of both genders get negative messages. Working at McDonald's has become a euphemism for failure in life. Why? Because people who work at McDonald's don't make a lot of money. And in our society, money equals success.
Conspicuous consumption is the new national pastime. Today's professional athletes are admired as much for their lavish lifestyles as for their performances on the playing surface. If steroids help them to live large, it's because society is willing to pay huge sums of money to support these winners' enormous salaries.
I have never seen anyone wearing a Carl Sagan jersey, but I can't go a day without seeing a puke-yellow rag with the name "Bryant" across the back.
Want to cut down on the number of big-time athletes using steroids? Arrest them. Put the vice cops to work doing something besides hassling lowlifes. No one ever accused a crack-head of being a role model.
The hearings did produce one poignant example of a bad message. It came from Donald Hooten, a man whose son committed suicide two weeks before his senior year of high school. Hooten blames the psychological effects of steroids for his son's death. Hooten blames baseball.
Hooten's grief is understandable, but his blame is misplaced. There is no good reason to believe steroids caused his son's suicide. Steroids are not psychoactive drugs, and the only evidence for such effects is anecdotal. It is more likely his son had underlying problems that led to the use of steroids in the first place -- problems that caused him to wrap his entire self-worth into his image of himself as a baseball player.
I saw Hooten the next morning on "FOX and Friends." He wasn't the same angry parent from the day before. The man who only 24 hours earlier cast aspersions of "cheater" and "coward" toward five men I doubt he had ever met couldn't identify any one of them as a particular role model for his deceased son -- saying instead his son idealized the life of a professional ballplayer.
Nice message, Don. When tragedy strikes, find a scapegoat.
Baseball has a steroid problem. It stems from the league's hypocritical enforcement of its own rules. It needs to clean up its act. Unfortunately, the problems with the messages "our children" are receiving don't originate in a syringe, and they can't be blamed on baseball.
Chris is an anthropology senior. Reach him at christopher.t.davis@asu.edu.
