Obfuscation

I sat down to read the local paper today and it hit me hard in the head how every story—from the health care bill to Afghanistan to the Mexican drug cartels—was only that, a story made up to obfuscate the issues that lie not so deeply buried beneath the rhetoric and lies. These issues cannot be talked about in public (language is institutionalized) because the house of cards that has been carefully crafted to keep the powers that be in power would crumble like salted crackers into the deep wounds they have inflicted upon our society. Maybe then things would change.
Let’s take a look at today’s stories, one by one: 1) health care “reform”; 2) Hilary Clinton’s meting with Felipe Calderon on stemming the flow of drugs from Mexico to the U.S.; 3) sex abuse in the Catholic church; and 4) the war in Afghanistan.

Health Care Reform
There can be no equitable health care reform until it is taken out of the hands of for profit insurance companies. During the long and excruciating “debate” on fixing the health care mess in this country a few people talked about health care as a “right,” not a privilege, like education, police and fire protection, and social security. Well duh, who pays for those rights. Society does, that’s who, through taxation for teachers, cops, firemen, and so the elderly don’t starve—just barely. In Canada, where they have nationalized health care, the cost is 10 percent of the gross domestic product. In the United States, where insurance companies cover only those who they think are healthy enough to not rack up too many hospital bills—by denying coverage for preexisting conditions—we pay 16 to 18 percent of GDP towards health care. That’s for all those folks who don’t have insurance and end up in public financed emergency rooms and hospitals, all the enormous bureaucracy that goes along with all the complicated billing, denials, referrals, and appeals that should be covered by a single payer, We the people. That’s what a society is and does: it levels the playing field by helping those who need it and by regulating those who don’t.

War on Drugs
The war on drugs was lost before it ever began. As long as drugs are illegal there will be an underground market that will stop at nothing to keep the flow of money across la frontera de los Estados Unidos y Mexico. Yes, while the drugs flow north, the dinero flows both ways: to Mexican drug lords and their hordes of couriers and into the country’s economy (the second largest money maker next to oil); and to the U.S. border guards, DEA agents, prisons, and Homeland Security. The illegal drug industry is big business over here, too. When NAFTA was implemented during Bill Clinton’s reign, making the price of tortillas sky rocket as Mexico had to import subsidized corn the U.S. was selling, destroying the local agricultural economy, how was anyone in Mexico supposed to make a living other than selling drugs or leaving for the U.S.? Hillary recently admitted that the U.S. does bear some of the responsibility for the violent deaths of thousands of Mexicans caught in the drug war crossfire because of U.S. drug consumption. When she puts up a sign in her office that says, “It’s the Mexican economy, stupid,” we may actually get somewhere.

Pedophile Priests
I can’t really talk about this one without devolving into a diatribe about the evils of organized religion (which I’ve already posted on this blog), but in an attempt to be more specific and to the point I will state the obvious: the Catholic church could go a long way towards reducing priestly pedophilia by allowing them to marry, by recognizing women priests, and forcing priests to be prosecuted for child molestation in civil courts. Let the priests marry and at least have a chance at gratifying their libidos, even if marriage itself isn’t going to entirely solve the problem of sex and/or relationships (see Marriage). And, of course, marrying a woman isn’t going to do much for the priests who prefer men (can you imagine the day the Church ever let men marry men??!!), but maybe the latent pedophiles who currently fill the priestly ranks wouldn’t be so attracted to the profession. Maybe they would be less inclined to preach their homophobia from the pulpit as a distraction from their deceit. It’s hard for me to understand why so many women want to become priests, and why they think they can deconstruct church hierarchy without abandoning the church altogether. If it’s faith and observance they’re after, why can’t they do it outside the confines of a church that has abused and ignored them since it’s inception? But you have to admire their persistence and their desire to bring down the priests who have done so much harm to so many.

The War in Afghanistan
I thought we’d already won the war in Afghanistan. Isn’t that what the neo-cons told us when they said it was time to invade Iraq? The Taliban were on the run, the Afghanis had elected a great guy who would do the U.S. bidding, and the women there could walk around town without covering their heads.Of course, a few of us on the left were not in favor of that first war in Afghanistan, either, including Susan Sontag who caught all kinds of shit in the pages of the New Yorker, and Professor Ward Churchill, who lost his job, for daring to point out that maybe we should first look at the political and economic reasons for jihad against the U.S. before we started bombing Afghanistan back into the stone age. Of course, western society thinks Afghanistan never left the stone age. So now, after more than seven years of occupation in Iraq Obama decides its time to send “our good men and women” back into Afghanistan, in greater number, because surprise, the Taliban is back (seemingly the only ones capable of providing goods and services to the poor villages in the hinterland), President Karzai is more corrupt than ever and an anathema to his people, and women are still be abused and repressed and kept out of mainstream society. I guess because we’re a postmodern society we can’t factor Afghanistan’s long and unfortunate history into any decision making process where it’s recognized that imperialist countries are never going to “save” or “liberate” it. But that’s not really the goal, is it. This poor, volatile, and oppressed country is necessary to our geopolitical goals in the Middle East (see Globalism) and that trumps everything.
So the obfuscation keeps getting written and the wars on drugs and people keep being waged.

Solution? Just what I quoted Rick Lowry saying in my “Global Dominance” post: “ . . . the embrace of the U.N., the ridiculous talk of global disarmament, the distance from Israel, the slaps at American hegemony.” Thanks, Rick, for putting it so nicely.

Marginalization

I’ve acknowledged before that living in El Valle involves both privilege and deprivation. The privilege is the fact that we’re not dependent on wage labor, i.e., a nine to five job in a designated location, and can therefore live where we want, in a relatively isolated community that is beautiful, friendly, and restorative. The deprivation comes from living on a very limited income, where we don’t enjoy the luxuries most middle class folks take for granted—that is, until the economy tanked again and lots of middle class folks have lost their jobs, their new cars (I’ve never owned a new car), and even their houses. So while I wouldn’t wish any of this on anyone, except the bankers, Wall Street traders, and complicit politicians who brought us to this point (that comes to a lot of exceptions), the trade off has definitely paid off.

But as the years go by, the privileged part of getting to live someplace out of the way is being assaulted by a world that, in its march toward collective consumerism (cities) and globalization (see Global Domination), apparently would like nothing better than to marginalize us out of existence. As the “home becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time—space compression (David Harvey)”, it seems we spend way too much time on the phone trying to tell a computer that there really is a little village in northern New Mexico where you can send a package to our mailbox or door. We have this rural mailing address that says Box 6 El Valle Route, Chamisal (where the post office is located), New Mexico. This address gets rejected by computers that recognize only addresses that have numbers and streets or P.O. Box numbers. So we tell the computer — or very rarely, a person — that it’s OK, just let the computer change our address to P.O. Box 6, because as long as the name of the town, Chamisal, is in the address, the postmistress, who knows who everybody is, will make sure it gets delivered by the highway contract mailman to that green mailbox number 6 sitting at the head of our driveway.

Even she can’t compensate for some confusion, however. We were once given a subscription to the Sunday New York Times by a friend. After finally verifying that we did indeed exist, we got our first issue on the Monday after the Sunday it came out. We were ecstatic. The next Monday, there it was again in the mailbox. The next Monday there was no paper, and it didn’t come Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, either. But there it was on Monday morning, along with the new issue that actually came the day it was supposed to. From then on, on Mondays we either had no paper, or two papers, but I guess the Book Review and Arts and Entertainment section are never really dated for us, as we have to wait for new books to get to the library anyway (and take our turn on the request list, usually about thirty spots down) and we don’t often get to New York to go to the jazz clubs (I think the last time was around 1995).

United Parcel Service is another story. The main artery for northern New Mexico deliveries is in Santa Fe. There used to be a branch center in Española, the town of any size closest to us, and the man who made the deliveries to all of our little villages picked up his truck there. He, like the postmistress, knew everyone on his route. It didn’t matter how mangled the address was, even as UPS tightened up its requirements on rural addressing, if the name was on the package, Wilfredo got it to the right house. Alas, Wilfredo eventually retired. I think it took us a year to figure out what the current UPS regulations required for shipping, but once we got it right it didn’t mean we got our packages on the stipulated delivery day. The package may get sent out from Santa Fe, but if there’s no other delivery in El Valle that day, the driver doesn’t want to drop by. If it’s been raining or snowing, which is usually the case nine months out of the year, and our well maintained dirt road is wet, the driver may decide not to stop by. If we finally get the phone number of UPS in Santa Fe (they only list a central 800 number in the phone book, where you end up talking to someone in India) and tell them to just keep the package there until we come in to get it, they send it out anyway and the driver doesn’t deliver it because we’re not home, we’re in Santa Fe getting the package that isn’t there.

But I have no right to complain, really, because if I have these expectations that means I should move to town where the rest of the folks in the industrialized world conduct business, buy things, and communicate with people around the world without worry or complaint. Except for when the U.S. Postal Service deconstructs, which it did a couple of years ago, and everyone in Santa Fe started getting everyone else's mail, getting mail two months after it was sent, or not getting any mail at all, and went ballistic. The New Mexico congressional delegation had to intervene to demand better service for its constituents. While all this wasn’t as bad as the current meltdown of the entire financial system, it’s another reason I think I’ll just stay here.

White Men in Suits

I sat in a room all day yesterday with white men in suits, and I’ll tell you, I can’t take it anymore. On my way home in the car I rolled down the windows, turned Aretha on full blast, and stopped for an Oreo ice cream bar to cleanse my soul and restore my sanity, or what’s left of it.

My poor compañera, the director of the anti-nuclear community group whose board I sit on, had to be in the same room with these white men in suits for two weeks straight while they bickered over the hazardous waste permit the state will be issuing to Los Alamos National Laboratory. How has it come to this, that these white men in suits can tell us it’s OK to burn chemical waste in the open air to rain down into our soil and water? How can they deny their fiduciary responsibility to clean up the mess they’ve made making bombs? How can they insist that their monitoring wells that have numerous structural problems can adequately tell if our aquifers are being contaminated?
Of course, I’ve also sat in many rooms with white guys in green uniforms telling me it’s OK to use herbicides on noxious weeds in the forest, that acequias need to get special permission from them—our friend the Forest Service—to work on our headgates or diversion dams even though the acequias predate them, and that ski area expansion are good because they provide jobs.

These white guys in suits and green uniforms are the professionals. Just because they’ve built enough bombs over the past 55 years to blow up the world a thousand times over and clearcut enough forests and suppressed so many forest fires that we now live in a tinder box waiting for catastrophic fire to burn us to smithereens doesn’t mean we have the right to question their authority or judgment. I can see it in the paternalistic roll of their eyes when we (brown people, women, white men in jeans) sit across the table from them, meaning, oh Christ, here we go again, what a waste of time this is when we know we’re going to go ahead as planned. They’re thinking, these people just don’t get it, they don’t live in the real world, while we’re thinking, these guys have created a world no one in their right mind would want to live in.
It’s a perpetual impasse, of course. It’s nothing new. It’s just the consequences are now so enormous and we all know they’re so enormous that apparently it renders us helpless. That’s not really a fair analysis, but that’s how it seems sometimes. Is our postmodern world so fragmented, so transient, ambiguous, and fetishized that we can’t figure out how to take unified action because we can’t figure out who the enemy is? Capitalism? Consumerism? Neo-conservatives? Religious right? (Unrepentant Marxist that I am I think it’s all about capitalism.) Arundhati Roy talks about this dilemma often in her activism—“To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible”—but hopes that we can all take on our individual, localized battles that remain connected to each other despite the power elite’s attempt to identify our common ground as the market place.

Occasionally there are signs of hope. Everyone is down in Bolivia right now at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, where President Evo Morales, who never wears a suit, said to the crowd, “Death to Capitalism!” Of course, some of his own people are concurrently demonstrating in the streets of San Cristóbal against the continued mining of silver by a Japanese corporation, the capitalist signifier of Bolivia’s colonial history, He has a tough row to hoe, figuring out how to nationalize foreign industries to benefit Bolivians while at the same time function in a global economy where capital accumulation continues to define how business is done. But apparently Bolivians have figured out who the enemy is and aren’t afraid to remind their fearless leader when they think he has forgotten. So keep wearing those brightly colored woven shirts and wool sweaters, Señor Morales, to keep our hopes close to your heart.

Self Image

I am completely schizophrenic when it comes to my self-image. I hate having my picture taken because I hate the way I look: long nose, thin mouth, chicken neck and all. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that if I were just a little better looking I wouldn’t have to worry so much about it and could focus on being a better person (just like Madonna and Angelina Jolie—not!).

Yet at the same time I find myself outraged that anyone would dare judge me on my looks and I plow ahead through the forcefulness of my personality to do what I want, say what I want, and expect results. I rarely let anyone get away with anything against what I think I can effect. If, as society has conditioned us to think, our physical appearance matters as much or more than our character, where does this chutzpa come from? I recently came across this passage in a Joanna Trollope book: “I do not long for beauty, she told herself resolutely in the glass in the hall coat stand, but I do require some significance. I am not in any way ready or prepared to be rubbed out. I do not agree—or submit—to being invisible merely because my outward self, lacking the required drama for contemporary life, gives no indication of what is going on inside.”

My mother always thought I was wonderful and could do no wrong, but my father, who was emotionally crippled, belittled me (and my mother and my two sisters) about my appearance and behavior but bragged about my supposed IQ. He insisted that somehow he’d gotten the results of the IQ tests they’d administered to my sisters and me at school and that they were grand. I knew I wasn’t particularly brainy, just that I had to do well in school to get my ticket out of Colorado Springs into some less provincial world where I’d be a “professional,” whatever that meant. In the meantime, I had to deal with a plain face sometimes broken out with acne that would never land me a spot on the cheerleading squad or a position in school government. Of course, I was always disdainful of these social networks and longed to be one of the jet setters, which is what we called the kids who were just beginning to become the potheads and day trippers of the late sixties and early seventies whom I would join in college.

Was this disdain sour grapes or was I somehow able, from a very young age, to see through the crap and know what to value? My parents helped me along this path by joining the Unitarian Church (she’d been raised an assimilated Jew, he a Methodist, and neither were believers) where LRY (liberal religious youth) turned me on to sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. And I didn’t have to wait too long after high school to see what happened to the cheerleaders and student council members who got married young, divorced young, and stayed, as the Dixie Chicks sing, “in the same zip codes where their parents live” (in other words, banal suburbia).

Of course, not many better things happened to many of the pot smoking, LSD dropping jet setters I emulated. Some over dosed, some ended up in dead end jobs, and some eventually found God. I ended up dropping out of college, never even getting a bachelor’s degree, and never becoming a “professional.”

So what did I become and how did I become so full of it? I became not so much something but an amalgam of some things: a house builder, a gardener, a writer, a partner, a mother, a community activist, a publisher, an acequia commissioner, and a buen vecino in a tiny little village in northern New Mexico. In other words, I learned how to get along with lots of kinds of people, how to sustain relationships, and how to fend for myself. It was an attempt to be whole in the postmodern world increasingly fragmented by specialized work and paying someone else to take care of your necessities. Becoming whole builds assurance, and so I acquired mine. Or at least enough to weather being relatively poor and anonymous except within a small circle of those folks I care about. I’m never going to publish a best selling novel and I’m never going to get a humanitarian award for devoting my life to a cause. But I figured out a way to live with the choices I made, which in and of themselves define my character: kind of schizophrenic, but defiantly so.

Global Domination

The day after I posted my Electoral Politics blog the local newspaper ran a column by conservative pundit Rich Lowry, in which he tells Barack Obama he should be “insulted” by getting the Nobel Peace Prize because it means he agrees with the Nobel Committee that America needs to be put in its place as a member of the world team, not its dominating leader: “The apologies for his country, the embrace of the U.N., the ridiculous talk of global disarmament, the distance from Israel and kid gloves for Iran, the slaps at American hegemony—are all the stuff of shame-faced American weakness and retrenchment, uttered by the most powerful American on the planet.” Another conservative, this time the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said that his nomination was proof that “the Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control.”

Obama wants this? Never. The “international” and domestic leftists? Yes, yes and yes! It’s hard not to read these guys with a certain amount of incredulity — do they actually believe this stuff they write — until you remember that they rule the world. George II liked to talk about invading Iraq to spread Democracy, with a capital D, to the rest of the impoverished world. Even if pundits actually use words like “hegemony,” they still cop to Bush’s excuse for this global domination: that because we’re a so-called democracy and our standard of living is the highest in the world, it’s our moral obligation to spread this largess and allow capitalism to bring everyone into the twenty-first century.

Hannah Arendt, in Imperialism, explains perfectly the real reason for our push for global domination:

"Since power is essentially only a means to an end a community based solely on power must decay in the calm of order and stability; its complete security reveals that it is built on sand. Only by acquiring more power can it guarantee the status quo; only by constantly extending its authority and only through process of power accumulation can it remain stable. Hobbes’s Commonwealth is a vacillating structure and must always provide itself with new props from outside; otherwise it would collapse overnight into the aimless, senseless chaos of the private interests from which it sprang. , , , [The] ever-present possibility of war guarantees the Commonwealth a prospect of permanence because it makes it possible for the state to increase its power at the expense of other states."

Globalization is changing the face of imperialism but not its basic function, the spread of capitalist accumulation. In his book, The New Imperialism, David Harvey talks about how imperialism has changed from nationalistic control over foreign territory (Britain in India, France in Algeria, etc.) to an economic imperialism based on production and finance (oil and Wall Street). The success of the U.S. in this new age of imperialism is what Lowry and his ilk are defending, of course. As Harvey explains it, “From the late nineteenth century onwards, the US gradually learned to mask the explicitness of territorial gains and occupations under the mask of a spaceless universalization of its own values, buried within a rhetoric that was ultimately to culminate . . . in what came to be known as ‘globalization.” Therefore, Wall Street/Treasury/IMF, all one thing, can do no wrong in opening up capital globalization, by whatever means necessary, because it is simply spreading our democratic values and standard of living to all those poor countries who resources would just be sitting there without benefit to anyone without our intervention.

What the U.S. failed to anticipate is that if financialization is the key to accumulating more power, as Arendt talks about, and if our internal and external deficits, largely held in Asia, continue to skyrocket, then we may just find our hegemony “slapped upside the head” by China. To come back to Lowry’s complaint, it makes perfect sense for us to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, to threaten to invade Iran, to refuse to reduce our nuclear arsenal, and to arm Israel to the teeth when that may be all we’ve got left: our military prowess, our “exploitative domination,” as Harvey calls it. So in our fight to the finish with China to maintain global domination we’ll just keep sending those soldiers to protect the world from “terrorism” and bring those infidels into the twenty-first century. It’s reminiscent of Marie Antoinette: let our schools continue to fail our students, let our transportation systems crumble, let the global corporations drill for oil on all those offshore shelves, and let the insurance companies make a profit from our ill health. In other words, let civil society be damned as long as those in power can continue to acquire more power.

Solution: Off with their heads!

Dental Insurance, Or the Lack Thereof

Seems like the medical industry would be quite happy for us to revert back to the days when George Washington had wooden teeth and Michael Bakunin didn’t have any. He probably ended up having some kind of teeth — I don’t know what kind — after he lost them from scurvy in the infamous Peter and Paul fortress in St. Petersburg, as he went on to marry a young woman when exiled to Siberia and enjoy a long career as an anarchist after his return to Europe. Hardly anyone’s health insurance policy covers dental, so when you go into the dentist’s office for a simple filling: $300. Need a root canal, which probably won’t work anyway and you’ll end up losing the tooth: $1,500. A tooth implant or bridge? I don’t even know because you lost me back at the $1,500 for the root canal. I just have them pulled and leave a space. So far, those spaces have been at the back of my mouth, but I’m sure the day will come when it’s one of my front teeth and I will be consigned to being either a toothless old hag or bankrupt.

When Mark had an appointment with his urologist, who, by the way, is a very nice man and a very competent doctor, I started wondering why anyone would want to be a urologist. Or a proctologist. Or even a gynecologist who gets to deliver babies as a bonus. But I know why someone wants to be a dentist: money! I recently had fillings put across the top of my three bottom teeth, worn down by wear and tear. No Novocain was administered, I was in the dental chair for half an hour tops, and bingo, I owned $575. A few customers like that every day, even with the office overhead, and you’re taking home a big bundle.

I suppose some of this dentist vitriol also comes from the fact that they hurt you — almost all the time. During one of those great root canal experiences where I ended up losing the tooth anyway, the dentist injected Novocain into a nerve that went all the way up into my cheek and had the entire side of my face tingling for months. Or they’re drilling away and suddenly hit a nerve that wasn’t deadened by the Novocain and you’re Dustin Hoffman being tortured by Lawrence Olivier. And every time they put those rubber blockers into my mouth to isolate teeth for x-rays my gag reflex makes me spit the thing out of my mouth and then they make me do it all over again.

Why isn’t dental care covered by insurance? Do they figure the rich people are just going to pay for it no matter how much it costs out of vanity, and the poor people will, after enormous pain and suffering, go to Juarez for a set of false teeth they can afford? In a time when the advertising industry has everyone convinced that the path to success requires a set of big teeth — remember those big white smiles of Hilary Clinton and Barach Obama plastered across our TV screens for months — we’ve come up with an entire category of haves and have-nots: the ones who can afford to buy the veneers and the rest of us with the crooked, slightly yellow teeth of character. Before advertising I never particularly noticed teeth. Now I see that all my friends are in the same character category as me, and it’s comforting, really. Except that none of us want to be hags.

The Olympics

It’s Olympics time again, the Winter Games in Vancouver, where we’re already experiencing the “heartbreak” of Lindsay Vonn, whose entire life has been building towards this moment when she was expected to win as many gold medals as Michael Phelps did in the Summer Games. The heartbreak being, of course, that she was injured just before the games began, that she failed to win multiple golds, and wiped out completely in several races. The list of injuries that led to this disappointment, however, is just as heartbreaking: uprooting a family, a divorce, and not speaking to her father for the last four years. But hey, if that’s what it takes to produce a
world class athlete, who am I to quibble. As these games come to an end, this post is about the previous Olympics, where there was just as much hype and heartbreak.

I was turned off to competitive sports a long time ago when I was on the YMCA swim team as a pre-adolescent. So when the Olympics roll around every four years I usually don’t bother to watch much, even — or especially — the swimming competition.
During the last summer Olympics, however, it was hard to avoid the hype about Michael Phelps and his quest for eight gold medals, more than anyone has ever won in a single Olympics game. I ended up watching him easily win several freestyle events, then swim the heart-stopping butterfly event where he was behind and won only by one-hundredth of a second, and finally swim for his eighth gold medal in the medley relay event, where he had to depend upon his three other teammates to also swim their best race. Now, at 23, he can sit back and watch the endorsements come rolling in. But what does he do with the rest of his life?

I also watched some of the gymnastic events, mostly the girls’ team competition and a few of the individual events. It’s much more difficult to watch a sport like gymnastics as opposed to swimming: the subjectivity of the judges and the opportunity for costly mistakes make it excruciating for me as a spectator and, I imagine, excruciating for a competitor to have to experience. Several times during the course of the competitions the T.V. cameraman stuck his lens in the face of some poor young woman who had just made some momentary, but irreparable, mistake that cost her a medal in her event. Her tears and anguish were on display for millions of people around the world to witness. It’s just another example of the lack of privacy any public figure must relinquish, but you feel sorry for her, nonetheless. And per usual, there were complaints that the judges unfairly awarded a medal to the host country’s Chinese competitor, despite the major error she committed in one of her individual events.
Of course these athletes, with their flag waving and anthem signing gestures of patriotism, complicity agree to participate in these games that are political games as well. They interviewed Serena and Venus Williams about coming to the Olympics despite having to rush back to the States for the U.S Open, and they delivered the expected paean to patriotism: we’re so happy to be representing our country and participating in one of the most exciting and important events in the world. What else could they say? We’d get accused by the media of being unpatriotic and selfish if we didn’t come to play so we have to do this for our careers? We have to show the Chinese that despite their dominance of gold medals, America is still the most powerful imperialistic country in the world and intends to remain as such no matter what it takes? Neither Serena nor Venus won an individual gold medal (they won in the doubles) but neither did the Chinese. Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers was also there to do his patriotic duty to himself by telling the interviewer that his team was a special team that appreciated the significance of representing your country, doing damage control for previous basketball teams of NBA superstars who were accused of not taking the games seriously enough, and damage control for his own reputation as an accused rapist and renegade.

Then there was Dara Torres, the 41-year old wonder who was participating in her fourth or fifth Olympics (not in consecutive order) who was out to prove that with millions of dollars in endorsements to pay for the state of the art training and attention it took to get her body into shape to beat 20-somethings in the 50 meter freestyle, anyone could be in the Olympics at 41. They showed pictures of trainers walking on her muscles for massage, while others hovered over her weight-lifting routines, and still others directed her Pilates, yoga, and meditation sessions. All for her eleven seconds of fame, where she came in second. She was very gracious and smiled her toothy grin, but you can bet she was devastated.

So back to what you do with your life after the gold or silver. Mark Spitz became a dentist, of all things (see the blog spot Dental Insurance, Or the Lack Thereof). Michael Phelps gets caught smoking a hookah on camera. Some of the ice skaters join the Ice Capades, a few become sports commentators, but most of them join the rest of us in obscurity, where we have to generate our own sense of self worth without the aid of the TV camera. I finally threw out all my swimming medals from when I was a kid when my own children were still kids. Max was appalled, and made me give him several golds to put in his pile of accumulated junk. Now his chess trophies line the top of the dresser in his former room, and when he comes home for xmas/hannukah this year we’re going to make him put them away somewhere so we have more room for our accumulated junk.

A postscript about the Winter Olympics. Because NBC overbid for the rights to broadcast the games and had to make as much money as possible, the frequency of commercials ruined my already lackluster attempts at watching even the interesting sports, like figure skating. After two hours of commercial bombardment during prime time at night, like most baby boomers I was already nodding out by nine, when they showed the skaters in contention for the medals, and asleep by ten (only for a couple of hours, though, as that’s all I get at one stretch these days; if they aired the show at midnight, I might have seen a few triple axels or double salchows, whatever they are). Ah well, it’s finally over, the Canadian hockey team beating the Americans. Amen.