So which story do you think will get more coverage over the next few days?
A-Rod, a.k.a. Alex Rodriguez, who has kinda sorta almost not really admitted that he used steroids for a couple of years maybe and then probably not except for the fact that relatives kept randomly stabbing him in the ass with needles; or
R-Stand, a.k.a. Robert Stanford, who allegedly is behind a "massive ongoing fraud" for selling some $8 billion in uninsured certificates of deposit and who now looks like another Bernie Madoff -- and whose depositors seemed to think that the Caribbean island of Antigua was some sort of magical ATM machine.
I'm guessing the former, of course, which is completely and utterly ridiculous even if predictable. The icing on the cake, however, is this quote from Winston Churchill, which appeared in the NYT on Tuesday:
The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country.
Where did I find it? In a story about Stanford or Madoff? Nope. It was in the Times's baseball blog.
Perhaps Churchill got it wrong. Perhaps he should have said,
The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals -- and understanding who the real criminals are -- is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country.
To be clear, I'm not excusing A-PED, A-Rod. But his alleged crimes are both tiny and pathetic when compared to the audacity of Madoff, Stanford and their ilk. Some may argue that A-Rod is a role model, and that he should be held to a high(er) standard because of his influence and impact on the youth of America.
Please.
Ask yourself: why is A-Rod a role model? Because he is a star athlete? Or because he has made, and will make, something in the range of half a billion dollars? If we're honest with ourselves, it's the latter.
The reality is that we worship wealth, not talent.
A-Rod, R-Stand, and B-Mad are all crooks who cheated their way to big payoffs, and did so while thousands cheered them on. They were heroes -- masters of the universe, as Tom Wolfe would say -- at least until they got caught.
We all drank the Kool-Aid in the hope that what should have been so blatantly-obviously-completely-freaking-bloody-unlikely was somehow a new reality where everyone could rake in the cash in defiance of the laws of statistical probability.
The reality is that our entire economic, political, and even pop cultural landscape has become a series of Ponzi schemes: massive, patently unrealistic, and technically impossible frauds that we have ignored in the hopes that -- maybe, somehow, oh God please let it be so -- the iron laws of economics and politics and even baseball somehow had changed.
To put it another way, A-Rod wasn't the only one in denial about drug use. For the rest of us, the steroids came in different forms: housing prices that grew exponentially without apparent explanation; hedge funds that generated massive returns without any obvious reason; lines of credit that permitted a seemingly endless consumer buying binge without any consequences.
Sorry folks. Superman still can't fly. Athletes still can't consistently hit 50 home runs, much less 60. And the economy still can't generate new wealth out of the thin air.
What a great big honkin' mess of a country we have become.