The Lance Test

Posted on by
Reply

Lance Armstrong is someone I know. Sort of. I was at 11,000 feet riding up Independence Pass a few years ago, and he blew by me like I was standing still. I know, being passed by Lance is a privilege, but it’s a common one. Except that I was on my motor scooter.

Let’s stipulate that what Lance did was wrong. He broke the rules of the game, and he broke the rules of life. He’s been prosecuted for it, he’s confessed to it, he’s been convicted of it, he’s been shamed for it, he’s been punished for it, and he’s apologized for it. And he’s implied that he will ask for forgiveness at some point in the future, but right now he doesn’t think he’s deserving of forgiveness, so he won’t even ask.

But people still want to stone him. Now the government is suing him for “defrauding” the U.S. Postal Service, which paid a zillion bucks to sponsor him. (No word on when the government will sue the Postal Service for spending a zillion bucks of taxpayer money to sponsor a bicyclist.)

There’s even talk about government lawyers prosecuting him criminally – they want to put him in jail. Not for doping, which was not a crime, but for lying about it. Lawyers, whose job is to spin the truth, want to put a man in jail for spinning it too well.

If this were softball, we’d call the 10-run rule and go home. If this were a boxing match, we’d say there has been a technical knockout. If this were football, they’d call a foul for unnecessary roughness. In short, there’s been a lot of piling on.

I have a test for all of you angry people who love to hate Lance, for all you underachievers who build yourselves up by tearing Lance down, for all the lawyers who feel threatened by Lance encroaching on your turf of trickery, for all you overweight armchair athletes whose idea of sport is to watch on TV a game you’ve never played while spraying beer-soaked exclamations like “Tell you what! He got hit a ton!”

To all of you (and you know who you are), take this test:

1) Have you had cancer? The kind that usually kills?

2) Have you had killer cancer in your testicles?

3) Have you had a cancerous testicle cut off?

4) Did you grow up without a father around?

5) Were you a teenage phenom – an athlete literally off the charts – on whom people placed extraordinary expectations?

6) Have you undergone chemotherapy?

7) Did you compete as a Texan in a European sport against Europeans in Europe who were all on performance-enhancing drugs -after your cancerous testicle had been cut off and you’d undergone chemotherapy?

8) Have you established a foundation to help cancer patients?

9) Have you had to confess your most embarrassing secrets to millions of people on national TV?

10) Have you had to confess your most embarrassing secrets to your son and tell him, “Stop defending me”?

Bonus question: Have you ever passed a motor scooter on your bike going uphill at 11,000 feet?

If you scored 8 or above, then feel free to continue piling on Lance if it makes you feel good. If you scored 4 to 7, then some introspection is appropriate. If you scored 3 or less, then you’re out of your league. You’ve never walked a mile in Lance’s shoes, much less ridden 100,000 miles on his bike.

(For the record, I personally took the Lance test. The game of life is not yet over, but I’m in the fourth quarter, and Lance is ahead of me by a touchdown, a two-point conversion and a field goal.)

And if you’re one of those fleshy government lawyer/prosecutors with six weeks of paid vacation, ask yourself whether Lance is truly a threat to society or just a threat to your fragile underperforming squishy, emasculated self. (If a guy with just one testicle is stronger than you, after all, then how many do you have? Do the math.)

Let’s reflect a bit. Why do we as a society worship strangers on TV? Why do we idolize people we never met and know little about? Why do we deify them, then envy their status as deities, then hope for their fall and then celebrate their destruction? And then find someone else on whom to repeat the whole pointless exercise?

Here’s a different approach. If you need a god in your life (and I, for one, do), then stop looking for him on ESPN. Look instead in the local church, synagogue or mosque. Look for him in people you love. Best of all, look for him inside yourself, for indeed the kingdom is within you. Beat the cancer within you. Win the race within you. Find the charity within you. Get in the game, the real one. The one that is – I’ll say it again – within you.

If instead you insist on making gods out of humans you’ve never met because that’s easier and more entertaining for you, OK. In a free country, that’s your prerogative. But when your godly humans turn out to be more human than godly, please don’t bore us with your self-righteous sanctimony.

Published in The Aspen Times on March 21, 2013 at http://www.aspentimes.com/news/6325950-113/columns-columnsivg-apcolorado-apunitedstates

New Blood But Not Too New

Posted on by
Reply

The Aspen Times recently opined that we need “new blood” on City Council. Hmm, why might that be?

Let’s start with the council member who also is mayor. He once went to Europe on a “Sister City Tour” for which the city reimbursed him $2,400. He tweeted (how hip!) that being feted in Chamonix, Davos and other swanky resorts “feels like work.”

He likes his “work.” A lot. He’s in his third term of this “work.” Before he became the mayor, he was the previous mayor; and before he became the previous mayor, he was the mayor before that. And before he became the mayor before that, he was a Pitkin County commissioner and on the Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority (not sure what that is, but it can’t be good) Board.

And before that, he boasts, he became interested in politics at age 6. He was urinating on his enemies figuratively at an age when the rest of us were still doing it literally. He’s apparently been a politician of sorts ever since, interrupted only by a brief spell a few years ago so he could recover from a bicycle crash.

He wants to be mayor of Aspen the way Hugo Chavez wants to be president of Venezuela – for life, at least.

But the people passed a law that prohibits a mayor from staying in office from here to eternity. This term-limit law requires that once in a while the hand of graft shake a different tree.

Our precocious and hard- “working” mayor is one step ahead of the law, however. He’s scheming to run for one of the other four council seats while simultaneously endorsing for mayor the guy who currently holds that council seat. So the net effect would be for the two of them to just switch seats on the council (wink, wink).

After criticism that he’s violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, the mayor got a subordinate called “city attorney” to write a memo on city time saying it’s A-OK with him.

The mayor says the reason he has to stick around, like a wet booger on a 9-year-old, is that otherwise the “developers” (aka “vampires”) will take over. No, there aren’t any developers or vampires on council now, and none have expressed any interest. Maybe that’s because they have businesses to run. I doubt it’s because they’re busy visiting Chamonix and Davos at taxpayer expense.

Moreover, if the mayor lost his tenured “job” as the local taker-in-chief, he might lose his hall pass to taxpayer-subsidized affordable housing. Yikes!

Like the mayor, three of the other four council members are on the affordable-housing dole. It’s better than Mom’s basement because you can have sleepovers without Mom’s permission.

The council meetings are as much fun as a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. Recently they talked about how to make Aspen more “welcoming” to businesses. This is long after they banned big businesses and shortly after they demanded a $100,000 tribute to (surprise!) affordable housing from a little gallery that showed local art in an unused hallway.

One of them worried at that meeting that making Aspen more welcoming to business might result in “pop-up” businesses. Don’t you hate it when a business pops up and crashes your business’s welcoming party?

The solution, they speechified, is to add to the city website a “welcoming” page that will be created and maintained by paid “staff resources” (a commodity that is apparently not in short supply – see “city attorney” above). And the “staff resources” will “outreach” to businesses – but not to big ones, little ones or pop-up ones.

Personally, if I were a businessman on the receiving end of an “outreach” from the council boys or their sandbox subordinates, I would immediately (1) bathe in rubbing alcohol, (2) take antiviral medication and (3) flee town faster than you can say “affordable-

housing mitigation fee.”

Yes, we could use a little new blood on City Council. But not too new. This time, let’s make sure it’s from people older than 13.

Published in The Aspen Times on Feb. 21, 2013 at http://www.aspentimes.com/news/6323807-113/columns-columnsivg-apcolorado-apunitedstates

Going to the Dogs

Posted on by
Reply

All this barking, howling, yapping and snarling lately about allowing dogs into affordable housing prompted me to check out the Aspen Animal Control website at http://www.aspen

pitkin.com/Departments/Animal-Safety. It’s one of 43 different city departments, not including subdepartments and not including county ones.

(And, yes, we need every single one, especially the Global Warming Department. And the Sister City Department, where we spend tax dollars to “relationship” with six “sister” cities. And the Map Department, where you can get a map made with your tax dollars complete with a disclaimer written by the City Attorney Department saying it might not be accurate.)

The website contains a “Frequently Asked Questions” page. On that page there are no questions at all, but there are lots of answers. It’s like “Jeopardy!” where the answer is given and you have to guess the question.

The answer given to one unasked frequently asked question is “any dog off its property must be on a leash no longer than 10 feet in length.”

But this answer raises questions beyond the unasked one that it answered. First of all, who knew that the dogs of Aspen own property? Of course, if any dogs would own property, they would indeed be the ones in Aspen. Even after Bernie Madoff fleeced them, they still live pretty high on the hog. Unsurprisingly, this dog property is not affordable housing.

Come to think of it, the website doesn’t say that the property owned by these 1 percenter dogs is real estate at all. Maybe it’s alimony, Land Rovers, royalties, solar-panel tax credits, currency futures and derivatives. (If you need to ask what a derivative is, maybe that’s why you’re in affordable housing while the dogs of Aspen are on Red Mountain.)

Whether they own property or not, they are supposed to be licensed. Those that aren’t are, umm, undocumented.

They say that the cost for the license “will be $6.00 for altered dogs and $16.00 for intact dogs.”  I think “altered” ones are those that have “had a little work done,” as we say here in Glitter Gulch. “Intact” ones are, well, have you heard the expression “big dog”?

While you’re down at Animal Control getting your dog of Aspen licensed or “worked on,” or maybe just showing off your big dog’s big dog, note the statement on its website that “The Animal Safety Division will remove nuisance raccoons and skunks,” apparently in answer to the unasked frequently asked question “What kind of raccoons and skunks will Animal Control remove?”

I appreciate the government answer about removing “nuisance” raccoons and skunks from our houses, even though nobody asked the question, but now I have a follow-up question. Namely, is there any other kind? I can hear the Animal Control guy now: “Oh, yeah, buddy, you got a family of raccoons in the attic chewing up the wiring and one in the medicine cabinet eating the Viagra, but they’re not a nuisance any more than the skunk in the dryer. What do you expect in affordable housing?”

We are cautioned that, this being the government talking, they won’t be removed right away. “There must be alternative measures taken” first, which are not specified. They can’t remove nuisance animals right away because that would be like a (drum roll) – nuisance-animal cliff! First, let’s talk awhile, call one another names and then postpone it a few months. Then do that again.

What exactly would be the alternative to removing a skunk from the dryer or an ADHD raccoon family from the attic? That the resident and skunk undergo joint counseling? No, not the kind of “joint” counseling legalized in the recent election. I mean the kind where you, your husband and the skunk get together and you talk to the stinky critter – and to the skunk, too.

And why do you have to be a “citizen” to get them to remove the nasty thing (no, not the husband)? Do noncitizens have to live with raccoons and skunks? Next, we’ll be asking them to speak English (no, not the raccoons and skunks).

And what’s this about “citizens” anyway? This is Aspen, and we’re comrades, not citizens, and we love one another, doggone it, and if you ever forget it, we’ll send you to Siberia or Vail.

Animal Control boasts that “We answer all questions concerning big game in the area.” Well, not quite all. It goes on to say that if you have questions about “big game hunting or damage to real property,” they don’t answer that kind. Sorry. And there’s no offer to remove “nuisance” big game or even alter it. You got a bear in the kitchen? You’re on your own, buster. Remove or alter it yourself. But whatever you do, don’t do it until you’ve tried and documented every possible alternative measure including Ritalin and “joint” counseling.

Which brings us back to the dog ordinance. Even more puzzling than the reference to dog property is the requirement that the dogs of Aspen must be on leashes. In walking about town and even in the local stores, restaurants, gondolas, buses, theaters, chairlifts, grocery stores, bars, Learjets, synagogues and churches, one would never know.

So next time you’re sprinting up the Ute Trail, sweat pouring and lungs roaring, and you get attacked by a wild and dangerous animal that is off its Red Mountain property and has “had a little work done” on it, tie it up with all 10 feet of a leash 10 feet in length, and muzzle it if necessary to protect yourself from the danger of being bitten, clawed, followed home, slobbered on, licked, marked, flea’d or leg-humped.

Then, and only then, you can safely pet her dog.

Published in The Aspen Times on Feb. 7 at http://www.aspentimes.com/news/6321996-113/columns-columnsivg-apcolorado-apunitedstates

Wringing Out the Old Year

Posted on by
Reply

It’s time to ring in the new year and wring out the old with some reflections on the election, the world, our fair city and, obligatorily, the fiscal cliff.

First, the election. Colorado voted to legalize marijuana in contravention to federal law. Apart from the joy of telling the feds to shove it, the argument for legalization is that it’s no worse than alcohol, and we all know what a good thing alcohol is. Now we’ll be able to get drunk on vodka and high on pot brownies for the drive home.

Speaking of the feds, the re-elected president nominated a new secretary of state, a certain John Kerry, who said that the soldiers in the Vietnam War were “war criminals.” The soldiers he was talking about were the American ones.

Back when Kerry ran for president against George W. Bush, the media were so dazzled by Kerry’s perspicacious proclamations that they declared him real smart. Later analysis of their respective military IQ tests, however, suggested that neither was a rocket scientist, but Bush was probably the smarter of the two despite his Texas accent and his inability to comprehend the criminality of American soldiers.

Kerry did have the sense to marry the 74-year-old heiress to the Heinz ketchup fortune, making him the richest member of the U.S. Senate. But this ketchup money doesn’t flow easily from the bottle. The senior senator from Massachusetts moored his yacht in Rhode Island in order to avoid taxes on it in his home state.

So the Cabinet position that is America’s envoy to the world, held by Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and Henry Kissinger, will now be occupied by a boy-toy to a ketchup heiress who is not as smart as Bush and evades yacht taxes while going around saying that American soldiers are war criminals.

Here in Aspen, we voted whether to spend more (and more) to squeeze electricity out of a streamlet so small that you can wade across without getting your shins wet (or, some days, even the tops of your feet). We voted “no.” Our vote not to spend more, however, has not stopped the City Council from planning to do exactly that.

We know that the council did notice our vote because it scolded us for voting wrongly. If we keep voting this way, then I suppose the council won’t let us vote at all.

When it’s not scolding locals for refusing to spend more, the council is scolding the visitors for refusing to spend less. They should spend less on downtown condos, the council says, because such condos and their rooftop hot tubs smack of “exclusivity.” What we need downtown instead is regulated, subsidized, nonexclusive and tub-free “affordable housing.” That’s council-speak for condos paid for by taxpayers. Other taxpayers. Like the wealthy ones who won’t be allowed to live there.

Wealthy taxpayers who pay for these nonexclusive condos will be excluded from them, but the councilmen themselves won’t be. Rumor is that most of them, including the mayor, are on the subsidized housing dole.

On to the fiscal cliff. The federal government spends about a trillion dollars a year more than it receives. It’s the American way – to spend like the Greeks.

In May, our “leaders” considered what to do about that. Math being math, the only options were some combination of spending less money on expenditures (oops, I mean “investments”) and raising more money with higher taxes on everyone who makes more than the people doing the raising (because that’s “fair”).

After lots of talk, the leaders kicked the can down the road past the election. If they couldn’t agree, then certain spending cuts and tax increases would occur automatically on Jan 1. The net effect would be a small dent in the deficit.

So far, so good. But then the “economists” on CNN said the only way to keep the economy afloat (or at least submerged no deeper) is to carefully avoid denting the deficit. Any deficit dents, they warned, would be like (drum roll) – a fiscal cliff! (They would have called it a fiscal Armageddon but didn’t want anyone to think they are religious.)

Ideally, this undented deficit would go toward “good” things like solar-energy companies, union perks and laptops for the homeless. But it doesn’t really matter so long as we keep the deficit in mint condition for our children and grandchildren so they can repay it by sending the Chinese money that they might otherwise waste on school, housing and food.

Predictably, to avoid the dreaded (another drum roll) fiscal cliff, the leaders on New Year’s Eve kicked the can down the road again, this time for another two months.

So we are in a strange three-step treatment plan, you see, the first step of which is to admit that we have a spending addiction that will kill us, the second step of which is to pledge to stop at a certain date in the future, and the third step of which is to postpone that date over and over.

This will be fun while it lasts. Pass the brownies.

Published in The Aspen Times on Jan. 10, 2013 at http://www.aspentimes.com/news/6320888-113/columns-columnsivg-apcolorado-apunitedstates

Two Plus Two is Four

Posted on by
Reply

Three people – a mathematician, an engineer and a lawyer – were asked a question: “What is two plus two?”

The mathematician answered, “Four. It is exactly four.”

The engineer answered, “Well, it’s approximately four. It depends on the precision of your measurements, but it’s pretty close to four.”

The lawyer responded, “What do you want it to be?”

The question “What is two plus two?” is a proxy for a more basic question: “What is truth?” Our culture has adopted the lawyer’s relativistic view, one that is self-centered and self-serving. Truth has become a matter of perspective. My truth is as good as yours, and yours is as good as anyone else’s. Any contention that there is objective truth – that two plus two is four or something very close to it – is viewed as narrow, quaint, outdated, inconvenient, intolerant and perhaps even discriminatory because it rejects the “values” of those who would like the answer to be nine.

A couple of weeks ago, a messed-up kid with bad hair made some relativistic calculations about two plus two, and his obscene answer was to – well, let’s just say his answer stole Christmas from a little New England town.

Now (but not beforehand) they’ve labeled him “mentally ill,” as if that explains everything. In view of what he did, it’s hard to argue he wasn’t. But the reasoning is circular – he’s mentally ill because he did something heinous, and he did something heinous because he’s mentally ill.

Let’s look beyond labels and circular analysis. Consider what we as a society taught this kid and others. If Hollywood and the video-game industry don’t teach them to kill (and arguably they do), we do teach them that there is no such thing as truth. There is no such thing as right or wrong. There is no such thing as good or bad. There is no such thing as evil or grace. In short, we might not teach them to kill, but we do remove all the moral obstacles to it.

Those obstacles, we’ve decided, are simplistic, unsophisticated and insensitive. It’s bad form to go around imposing them on others – or even speaking them aloud in public. If you must be one or those people who insist that two plus two is four, then for the sake of good manners, you’re required to engage in your dirty little habit in the privacy of your church or bathroom.

It wasn’t always this way. Examples abound, from the skyrocketing incidence of illegitimate births to the frequency of mass murder. According to a University of Alabama study, there were 18 cases of attempted mass murder in the 1980s. There were 54 in the 1990s. And there were 87 in the 2000s. Don’t blame the mass-murder explosion on the gun laws. During this time, the gun-control laws grew stricter. And don’t blame it on “mental illness.” No one seriously contends that mental illness, however you choose to define it, has quintupled in the past 30 years.

No, the reason we are teetering on the edge of anarchy lies not in our insufficient gun laws and not in our insufficient mental-health treatments, but in ourselves. There was a time when people acknowledged the existence of good and evil and did so in public. There was a time when they knew what was right or wrong. And they taught their children to know it, too. Such teachings became embodied in religion. But religion did not have a monopoly on it. Secular humanists were uncomfortable with the religious connotations to the word “evil,” but they, too, taught that there was such a thing as morality and ethics and that some behavior was unacceptable.

No more. In a world where religion has become godless and the secular humanists have become simply secularists, anything goes. You’re just as good as anyone else – without regard to your behavior.

What’s important, we tell our children, is not that they pursue grace and avoid evil – that they live their lives as if two plus two is four – but that they express their “feelings,” all of which are deemed precious.

And so this kid did. Did he ever.

We are on the edge of the abyss. A first step back from it would be to admit the existence of the objective evil that has driven us there and threatens to hurl us over. The answer to the question – “What is good and what is evil?” – is not “What do you want it to be?”

Published in The Aspen Times on Dec. 27 at http://www.aspentimes.com/news/5242219-113/columns-columnsivg-apcolorado-apunitedstates