Lance Armstrong and Doping

Coming on the heels of several Major League Baseball suspensions, Lance Armstrong’s tacit admission to use of performance enhancing drugs during his spectacular cycling career has led to a massive media condemnation of cheaters.

Use of terms like “cheaters” and “cheating” appears to be favored by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which probably hired the same marketing experts who train our political candidates—experts in the use of inflammatory words to frame issues in a certain light in the public consciousness.

It’s hard to argue against the effort by professional sports organizations to do what they can to eliminate use of these steroids and hormones, which have serious health implications for the athletes later in life.  But the bitterness and acrimony towards these “cheaters” who are trying to get ahead at risk of their health strikes me as over the top.

In baseball, many of the players who have tested positive are young men from extremely poor families in Latin America who are risking everything for a chance to make enough money to help their families achieve some security.  And, it’s not as if these athletes haven’t continued to work hard to improve their natural talent.

The idea of a level playing field is a fantasy.  Most exceptional athletes had the good luck to be born with physical capabilities that permit them to excel at sports, probably including naturally high levels of testosterone.  We don’t penalize basketball players, after all, for their unfair advantage of being born tall.  Or the son of a professional athlete whose dad can afford to buy a batting cage for the backyard when the boy turns six.

What if we decided to level the playing field for college admission by prohibiting wealthy families from sending their kids to SAT prep classes or hiring consultants to work with them on their essays?

I’m not arguing against better and more frequent drug testing.  But I just don’t go along with subjecting these guys to public humiliation and shame for their bad judgment.

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Will You Support the President in 2013?

Depends who’s elected, you’re probably thinking to yourself. 

But, think about it.  Supporting a president you voted for is just getting what you want.  It doesn’t say anything about your commitment to a better future for our country.

I don’t mean to dismiss your heartfelt belief that one candidate is better than the other.  We should all do our best to understand the issues and decide who we want to support.  Then we should fight for what we believe in—speak out, work the precincts and contribute money if we can.

But the concept of a “loyal opposition” stands for the proposition that we can continue to work towards the type of government we want without demeaning the presidency and the country by attributing wickedness, stupidity or illegitimacy to the winner of the election.

When I was on executive staff of a Fortune 1000 company, the CEO had a rule.  Important decisions about the company’s direction (which product lines to pursue and which to drop, whether to restructure reporting lines of major units, etc.) would be made one of two ways: (i) exec staff consensus or (ii) CEO edict.  When exec staff was trying to reach consensus on one of these important decisions, people would fight like cats and dogs for their preferred outcome.  But the CEO had a rule:  Once the decision was made, everybody must agree not to sabotage it by complaining to their staff, delaying implementation or putting up road blocks.

I wish our American democracy had a rule like that.

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Cousin Camp 2012

Just returned from Cousin Camp Amsterdam, with a three-day finale in Paris.  Our big family of 14 adults and 8 children from 5 to 11.  So many highlights…

In Amsterdam, the block party at Toby and Hinke’s, Parents’ Night Out, Anne Frank, a sign for Grandma and Grandpa engineered by Hinke and visible from the Westerkerk tower, Nemo and the ship, a side trip to Madurodam, the wonderful canal boat trip hosted by Hinke’s parents Riky and Lambert, Vondelpark, Van Gogh and the Rijksmuseum.

In Paris, climbing the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Sainte Chappelle, cafes, Montmartre, pony rides in the Luxembourg Gardens, learning to ride the Metro and the long walk back to the hotel through the Tuileries Gardens and down the Champs Elysees, where the Arc de Triomphe was visible from our hotel.

But mainly it was about the family being together and the shared experience.  Three lost baby teeth, lessons every afternoon with G&G about the next day’s adventures, serious shopping with euros earned from online math lessons from the Kahn Academy,  all eight of them learning to say “Bonjour, Madame” or “Au revoir, Monsieur” to the desk clerks as we left the Paris hotel.

Precious memories.

Marilynne Robinson on Culture and Religion

In an age when secularism and intellectualism are twin watchtowers against the encroachment of religious values into American politics, noted writer and scholar Marilynne Robinson provides both a defense and a critique of the role of religion in modern life in When I Was a Child I Read Books.

Known primarily for her fiction—Homecoming, Gilead and Home, all critically acclaimed—she has released a series of essays on American culture, politics and religion that reflect her exceptional insight and intellect.

Robinson’s principal thesis is that modern American life has been dumbed down and diminished not only by corrosive politics, materialism and marginalization of education, but also by turning our backs on all things sacred and beautiful, “everything in any way lofty.”  She blames both the secularists and the churches for this. 

She describes religious faith as something other than “a crude, explanatory strategy that should be supplanted by science” and argues that science and religion “should not be struggling for the same piece of turf.”

“Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word ‘soul’ and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit.”

Positing that “the language of public life has lost the character of generosity and the largeness of spirit that created the best of our institutions,” she makes the case for religion as a way to disrupt the constraints of “grasping materialism.” 

 “I realized gradually that my own religion, and religion in general, could and should disrupt [these] constraints, which amount to a small and narrow definition of what human beings are and how life is to be understood.”

In describing the soul as “the masterpiece of creation,” Robinson makes a cogent case for the importance of religion, like art and music, as a path to wisdom and to understanding the beauty and mystery of life.

Commentary on "Why Women Still Can't Have It All"

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” has engendered renewed discussion and debate about the conflicting roles women try to play as business leaders and mothers.   The issues are not new, but each successive generation of women is surprised by the obstacles faced in the workplace and at home as they try to meet these all-consuming, competing demands.

Truth is, men can’t “have it all” either.   The human animal has only so many hours a day and only so much energy.  Sure, some people are better multi-taskers, some need less sleep, some have prodigious memories or masterful organizational skills.  But even those people have to make choices. 

We’ve added another third to our life expectancy over the last hundred years, but we are still expected to squeeze all the critical work into the second quarter of our lives:  establishing a career, buying a house, having babies, raising the kids, saving for retirement.  We need to find a way to spread out some of those responsibilities over a longer period, so that we can focus more of our time on raising kids during one decade, but still freely return to the workplace with a chance to succeed at a high level a decade later.  The idea that you must establish yourself professionally by the time you’re 40 or 45, when many of us will live to be a hundred, is ridiculous.

We can’t have it all, at least not simultaneously, but there are enough productive decades in our lives to enable us to focus on a career, or the children, for five or ten years, without being locked out of opportunities later on.

On Southern Fiction and IPOs

I celebrated the 4^th of July by taking one more step towards the finish line.  One Summer in Arkansas is on track to launch before the beginning of December.

While Nat did all the work to prepare our annual 4^th of July barbeque, I reviewed the last suggested changes from the copyeditor, one of the least painful steps in the process—just check “Accept Change” or “Reject Change” and Microsoft does the rest.  At this point we’re down to the classic debate about whether or not serial commas have any place in modern literature.  This is when everybody reverts to their 6^th grade personality, since that’s when we learned our grammar, and at this stage of life we’re not about to deviate from what our 6^th grade teacher taught us.  I can remember fighting the same fight in the middle of the night at many a financial printer during my life as a lawyer—a room full of entrepreneurs, lawyers, accountants and investment bankers sitting around a conference table at 2:00 a.m., eating junk food and arguing (in a 6^th grade tone of voice) about whether serial commas belong in the prospectus for the IPO hitting the market the next day. 

Some things never change.