From the UK Telegraph. Lance Armstrong.

Lance Armstrong’s confession was there all along, if you knew where and how to look. As a result, I suggested we all consider forgiving Armstrong for his past transgressions and try to move on with what cycling will become in the wake of the Lance Armstrong era, which occupied our imagination, the sports world and our culture for more than a decade.

So if Lance “comes clean” about his doping past with Oprah Winfrey, it’s a clear call for forgiveness.  Like a war of attrition in popular opinion, it’s a numbers game from there on in. One Lance hopes to win.

The numbers game

From the feedback on earlier columns on this blog, the world seems divided about 50/50 on whether to give Lance a second chance. Of course

Bloodied but apparently unbowed, Lance Armstrong rides on…

ostracizing him at this point is rather pointless. He’s already been stripped of his Tour de France titles, banned from competing in cycling and triathlons, and lost his key sponsors and chairmanship of the organization he once headed as icon, spokesperson and chairman, the Livestrong Foundation. 

National character: at war with ourselves

So it is up to us as a society to determine whether we can forgive, learn from the past and become who we are to be in the future. But we should recognize that America, at least, is a country that has long been at war with itself in what it should learn from the past, who to honor as heroes, how to treat them and why we need them.

Our sordid military past, for example, with its early conflicts over grudging representation by ragged militias and paid soldiers, our wars for possession and imperial aims against Mexico and Spain, then slaughter of native peoples in the Phillipines, where we also tortured and burned to get our way, all the way back home to genocide of native Americans on our own soil. America’s past is not a pretty sight. Have we forgotten also the Civil War, where our national character was outlined in the blood and lives of thousands, only to kick those surviving soldiers down the block for being crippled and maimed by their service to country?

American Exceptionalism

Yet we call ourselves a great nation, ignoring these and other crimes such as CIA-led overthrows of foreign governments, wars of fear and ideology in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even wars where we conducted ourselves honorably have revealed great fractions within our society, especially in ongoing racism toward American blacks and ostracizing of women. That is, until the need for labor and the war effort simply absolutely demanded support for America’s goals, however intransigent they may be. Then we excused women and blacks for their contributions, only to shunt those rights of citizenship and productivity to the back of the national conscience once war was over. It took the civil rights movement to fulfill what war could not.

Murderous ways

We can’t even account the manner in which Presidents and political leaders like JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., have been shot dead. Thousands of others are killed by guns each year, including innocent children in Newtown, Connecticut, yet the NRA continues to prostitute the word “militia” to justify free ownership of murderous weapons as a representation of freedom in America.

Here’s a hint: read up on the history of militias in America and you’ll find that they were neither trusted or appreciated, and the truth about winning wars is not found in the guns or cannons, but in the number of bodies you can throw at the enemy. Ask any soldier. The weaponry is indiscriminate. It is soldiers who are the fodder for political power and often psychopathic aims (Stalin and Hitler come to mind). The number of gun deaths in America is yet another sign that our psychopathic claims to American exceptionalism are false, yet in full force.

Hidden behind the obsession with gun rights is a fearful ideology laced with racism, lack of confidence in the American governmental system and a willingness to sacrifice thousands of lives each year as the fodder for violent natures that cannot find the way to peace other than through brutish aims.

The losses in such circumstances are so great it often takes written history years to dissect, and still often comes out with a bias in favor of who those who hold the pen, which in the end is mightier than the sword. To the “winners” go the spoils, they say.

Sports heroes

Into this massive void in consciousness rides a sports hero who seems to represent all that is good about America. Like a cowboy, from Texas even, with a chiseled jaw and a chip on his shoulder. The backstory of Lance Armstrong was so delicious America could not resist such a hero, who bordered on the miraculous, as if he was God sent to succeed.

Lance Armstrong’s bold recovery from cancer at a young age preserves hope that others can do the same. His ride to victory 7 times in the Tour de France bore all the marks of New World conquest over the Old World. Of course that nation of philosophical and existential equivocation, the French, hated Armstrong at first, while the Euro cycling world resisted his crowns with all its might. Yet the American prevailed. It’s our history in a nutshell, you see. Lance is the nut.

Nuts about doping

Yet there were hints all along that Armstrong might be cheating. He denied the truth vigorously, just as America has long denied its capricious tactics as the world’s most fearsome power, ever. Our nation spends more on its military budget than the next 17 nations of the world combined. Yet we’ve borrowed to finance our wars, bankrupting the nation as a result. We’re a nation that deceives itself into hubris with self-compliments of American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny and Under God pledges, when in fact we’re doped up on defense spending, the steroids of international success, to maintain our status in the world.

A closer look

So before we go giving Lance Armstrong the heave-ho for doing what Americans do best, which is whupping the world at any price, let us consider who else is implicated in the perverse realm of our national dream. Either we come to understand who Lance Armstrong is, and what he represents, or we go on ignoring the facts of what America is really all about. Winning at all costs.