As slugger Barry Bonds becomes the second person in seventy years to surpass the home run record of Babe Ruth, he has found himself the target of an avalanche of hostile commentary on the part of the sports media, team owners, and underemployed politicians.  The title of Bob Wing’s BC guest commentary last week, Hating Barry Bonds said it all.  Hating on Bonds, one of the greatest athletes ever to put on a baseball glove, has become a media endorsed national pastime.

Bonds is thrust into the role of negative icon, juiced-up jock and rich but ungrateful black athlete.  Bob Wing reminds us, however, that major league baseball

”…did not ban the use of steroids until 2004. The owners and the commissioner knew about their widespread use and refused to discourage let alone ban steroid use…

and that

”They made huge money from the steroid-powered home run binge and put their profits before the good of the game and the health of the players. To blame the players alone, let alone one single player, for the steroid scandal is blatantly ridiculous.”

Bob Wing’s points were not lost on BC readers.  David Johnson noted:

Pitchers use steroids and have been caught as often as batters.  It's also worth noting that pitcher is by far, the whitest position in baseball.  The percentage of pitchers who are white – approximately 70 percent isn't far from the percentage of coaches and managers who are white.  Why don't we see anybody comparing Roger Clemens' rookie photo to what he looks like today?

Despite the fact that elite pro jocks live in a different world than the rest of us, Barry Bonds has demonstrated an admirable grasp on ordinary reality.  According to David Zirin, when Bonds was hauled before Congress to testify on steroid use only four weeks after Katrina, Bonds told his inquisitors:

"I think we have other issues in this country to worry about that are a lot more serious. Talk about the athletes that are helping Katrina victims....You know what? There are still other issues that are more important (than steroid use in baseball). Right now people are losing lives and don't have homes. I think that's a little more serious, a lot more serious."

This is what white sports writers and baseball execs call arrogance.  But the breathtaking hypocrisy of their crusade against Bonds for “sullying the integrity” of the sport is most apparent when we stand it alongside baseball’s tolerance and even encouragement of mechanical and surgical optical enhancements to make players more competitive. In a very well researched but mostly ignored April 2005 article Slate’s William Saletan laid it out like this:

”… If the andro that helped McGwire hit 70 home runs in 1998 was an unnatural, game-altering enhancement, what about his high-powered contact lenses? "Natural" vision is 20/20. McGwire's custom-designed lenses improved his vision to 20/10, which means he could see at a distance of 20 feet what a person with normal, healthy vision could see at 10 feet. Think what a difference that makes in hitting a fastball. Imagine how many games those lenses altered.”

That’s the tip of the glacier, according to Saletan.  By now hundreds of white, black and other baseball, basketball and football players, and many top professional golfers including noted cabalasian Tiger Woods have had Lasik or lasik-type surgery to improve their vision to superhuman levels.  Even minor league baseball players are being encouraged to undergo eye surgery to achieve sharper than normal human vision in the hopes it will raise their performance that extra notch needed to make the Big Show.  Lasik’s web site even brags about it.

Basketball and football players with surgically or mechanically enhanced vision can read the eyes of opposing players from further away to track the unfolding of plays behind them and anticipate an opponent’s moves better than players with normal vision. Pitchers with superhuman vision can place their pitches more precisely than they can without it, and hitters with enhanced superhuman vision can hit those pitches more often.  Tiger Woods, according to Saletan “…lost 16 straight tournaments before his surgery, ended up with 20/15 vision and won seven of his next 10 events.” 

The question of whether individual athletes juice and whether it alters outcomes isn’t a new one.  It’s not even a question.  Babe Ruth is known to have been sidelined for a while after trying to inject himself with extracts from the testes of sheep.  The real questions are why team managers and owners, sponsors and hundreds of so-called reporters from local newspapers to the talking heads at ESPN winked at steroid use for decades and now refuse to discuss the wave of surgical augmentations sweeping the ranks of professional athletes.  Maybe big time sports are not about testing the human body and spirit at all.  Maybe they are just another business, about making profits for media monopolies and team owners, at whatever cost.  Maybe.  But that’s a conversation you won’t see on ESPN.  They’d rather just help you hate on that arrogant and ungrateful Barry Bonds.

An Applied Anthropologist Answers Freedom Rider

Last week’s Freedom Rider by BC Senior Commentator Margaret Kimberley on the disreputable business and leisure practices of the president’s forbears and associates opened a series of doors for our readers.

One whose name we didn’t catch wrote in disgust at Bush’s grandfather, who is said to have stolen the bones of Apache leader Geronimo.

Excellent piece.  It is just a shame that every unenlightened American who voted for George Bush does not have a chance to read this and to be enlightened.  I have American Indian ancestors.  Knowing this about the Bushes disgusts me very much, as does the knowledge that the family has had dealings with Nazis.  It makes me sick.  Again thank you for writing this.

Dr. Fred McGhee, an accomplished black archeologist as well as an historical and applied anthropologist offers BC these observations: 

Ms. Kimberley truly embodies the spirit of most Indigenous peoples and African-Americans when she observes that "The worst, poorest, most supposedly pathological black family would not let a child leave this world without a funeral. The term pathological seems to be applied only to the down trodden."

I often wish I could make the Texas (and too many other states) historic preservation community understand and appreciate the insight and wisdom contained in these words.  Why some archaeologists continue to insist that "science" outweighs the human right to a decent burial irritates me.

The nation's primary law dealing with the Native American dead is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, which empowers federally recognized tribes and others to seek and receive repatriation of the bones and associated funerary items of their ancestors.

Under the guidelines of NAGPRA's "museum" provisions, Yale University meets the definition of a museum.  An attempt by culturally affiliated Indian tribes to compel repatriation of Geronimo's bones back from "Skull and Bones" would certainly be the most interesting application of NAGPRA since the infamous "Kennewick Man" case.  The fact that the president's family is implicated only makes it that much more interesting.

Congressmen Harold Ford & David Scott Want to Take Away Your Phone Card

Between the time this issue of BC is finalized and its publication legislation is expected to reach the floor of the House of Representatives which will turn the relatively free Internet into a toll road managed by AT&T, Verizon and a few other telecom and cable monopolies.

Since the earliest days of the Internet phone and cable companies have been frustrated by their lack of control over the many-to-many communications it made possible.  They were distressed at the fact that users could use instant message programs to talk over long distances without paying long distance rates, and horrified at the notion of allowing people to send and receive unlimited quantities of email to and from anywhere else on the global network.  Why should they allow you the same access to Cousin Connie’s wedding pictures or overseas newspapers as they do to the latest content from Disney or Fox?

They never did manage to come up with a technical justification for charging for “long distance” Internet, or metering your email usage, because there isn’t one.  The global Internet is fundamentally a many-to-many medium, quite unlike the one-to-many models of print and broadcast radio and TV, and different too from the one-to-one model of telephony.  No matter.

Since this is a political culture that lets you rent the friends you need and buy the laws you want, the telecommunications monopolies subverted the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and have leased a contingent of black organizations and whorish congressmen whose latest additions include Tennessee’s Harold Ford, Georgia’s David Scott and Sanford Bishop, according to the latest “Dear Colleague” letter circulating in the House of Representatives.  None of these are surprises.  David Scott scored 2nd and 3rd lowest of all CBC members in the first two CBC Monitor report cards on the performance of Black Caucus members, and Ford is a man who has proven willing to defame his own grandmother for what he imagines to be the favor of confused white voters.

We were gratified to hear from the estimable Edward DuBose, president of the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP in response to BC’s article “The Black Stake in Network Neutrality”:

Thanks for an eye-opening article. I have long said that if we are to overcome the efforts of those who wish to take us back to the days of Jim Crowism, we must first address the issues of the bought out African American Leadership to corporate America and the self centered leadership that has taken a "ME FIRST" attitude rather than the unified effort that carried us over in the past.

We hope this doesn’t get Mr. Dubose in any trouble with the national NAACP, whose CEO is a retired Verizon executive.

The stake that millions of low income Americans and immigrants have in keeping the Internet free of corporate toll booths is massive, immediate and scandalously under-reported.  Millions of us obtain long distance service by purchasing cards which are universally available at gas stations, convenience stores and nearly everywhere.  The unspoken fact is that all those long distance phone cards route calls over the Internet.  If Reps. Bobby Rush, Harold Ford, and David Scott get their way with HR 5252, AT&T, Verizon and a handful of others will be permitted to block or degrade calls made with cards other than their own.  The monopoly on long distance phone traffic that AT&T enjoyed decades ago will be restored with disastrous consequences for us all.  It’s time to be afraid.  And very angry.

If you use long distance calling cards, you use the Internet.  Letting corporations milk the Internet for unjust and unwarranted profits is letting them milk you.  Visit www.savetheinternet.com and sign the online petition.  Call your senator, call your congressperson, and call David Scott toll free at 877-762-8762.  Ask David why he wants to take away your phone card.  Then call your mother long distance and ask how she is.  At the end of the conversation tell her David Scott doesn’t want you calling so often, and give her the congressman’s number too.

Disclaimer:

This column and most of BC is produced weekly with the aid of standard prescription eyewear, designed to raise vision to normal, but not supernormal levels, and without the aid of surgical or pharmacological enhancements. Send your responses to [email protected].