I spent a year in Paris, and now have been back in New York for 3 months. It is not clear how quickly humans as a species can adapt to new environments. After all Sherpas do better in the Himalayas than Floridians do, Aborigines do better in the Australian bush than Eskimos do, and idiots do better in Alaskan politics than noble-laureates do. Perhaps then it is too much to ask to fully feel at home quickly in another country, or fall back into your own after being away. Paris was not hard for me though. It was like a warm bath with wine, cheese, and free health care. I find my activities in New York mirror my emotional state. In New York I am a boxer, an entrepreneur, a hectic free jazz musician and a fan of sports where a total number of points per game is greater than 2 on average. In Paris people are content in their discontent. They embrace protest because they believe that change can only occur as a society, while at the same time shrugging their shoulders at their inability to be richer than a visiting American. They do this for a number of deeply embedded historical reasons, but also for the more mundane.By individually striving for wealth they may be shortening the amount of time they can take for lunch. I wrote about this some while I was in Paris, because it was the first time I had a chance to live this kind of life, and also because it is not only opposite of my American cultural background, but different from my manically driven personality. It was refreshing. Suddenly I found myself saying that the biggest problem with my country was the delusion driven Oprahfication of it. I screamed about Americans trying to hold on to Bush era tax cuts, the Republican vilification of Obamacare, and the absurdity of the emerging Tea Party. I remain ideologically united with French society (excluding the racist Napoleonic Sarcoism of modern French politics). What is harder is to separate that type of romantic identification with a foreign culture from my own American dream, which in practice rests somewhere between my heart and my blackberry. It is difficult to be self analytical enough to see transformation and stagnation of this order in my own activities. Sometimes it takes a non political, but strangely upsetting external event to remind me of who I am.
This week I started reading up on the latest in the Lance Armstrong doping scandal. Since accusations of his use of performance drugs and blood transfusions have been in the news for 8 years or so, this has not been the first time I have discussed this with anyone. There are a few differences now though, and those differences so fully point to the dangers of individualism, of a belief in the ideal American dream , and of the search for legacy, fame and fortune that I am taking note as a warning to myself.
I am not particularly unique, even in the one thing that does differ about me than many people my age. I had cancer when I was thirty. I also thought about Lance Armstrong nearly everyday when I had cancer at 30. This was true for the obvious reasons, which during those painful moments for me were actually deeply profound. This experience may also be more common for Americans than for French people, though I realize that is an unresearched guess. The reason is that Armstrong's survival and successes didn’t just show how you can get your life back after a near death agonizing disease, it also showed that you could come back and achieve more in something than anyone ever had. It is that focus which inspired me, and I am not sure in retrospect if that type of inspiration is not as misdirected as many of the other American Dream gone wrong stories of the last several years.
For a second let’s forget the doping thing. Even if Lance honestly achieved something so incredible, it is possible that I misinterpreted what the real value of that achievement was. I could say that the achievement allowed him to become an inspiration, but that is circular logic, as it comes back to the point of not being able to answer my question at all. I could say that his 7 Tour De France victories allowed him to achieve the fame and fortune by which he raised unprecedented awareness and funding for cancer research. That argument seems honorable enough as a group, but as an individual who was going through cancer, it set expectations that may have made me want to beat the cancer, but at the same time left me no model for how to archive similar goals as the ones achieved by Lance, even if I did recover. The only thing to do was to hope that there is some special will to live that comes from hardship like cancer that makes you push harder towards previously unthinkable goals. It doesn't increase the probability of achieving them, or provide a road-map on how to to even begin. If anyone had pointed this out to me before this week I would have been strangely and naively surprised. I actually never thought of it, because in this case I chose to do something I rarely do consciously, which was to take a leap of faith. I had faith that with recovery, with hard work anything was possible. The truth of this is no more real than my annoyance with “The Secret” and Oprah's power of will approach to success. The likely hood of becoming Oprah no matter how hard you think , pray or work is near 0. The likely hood of being as much of a success in any field as Lance was in biking after having cancer is even less. I held so deeply to that delusion, which is very American, even in Paris, that I would never have noticed this one in myself. Then I started reading the new doping reports. Not only are friends, colleagues, coaches and journalists saying that he doped, and even supplied performance enhancing drugs to fellow teammates, but the tests have come back in many place to say that he was using. So conjecture and science are against my hero. There has been a Franco-American battle over this issue since the beginning. French screeners and reporters have said since 1998 that Lance was doping. The backlash from America and Lance was enormous. His second book was nearly an anti french tirade. I firmly stood by Armstrong for all of these years, saying such compassionate things to my French wife as “you are a country of cry baby sore losers who haven't produced a world class athlete in my lifetime. Jealous bastards!” Instead of hitting me, as was deserved, she simply rolled her eyes. I thought at the time it was because she didn't have a decent argument to this perfectly reasonable point I was making. (I still hold to the sore loser accusation.) It turns out that my ranting was so simplistic that she probably didn't want to bother with it. Also, my wife Marine is very psychologically sharp. She must have known about my cancer identification, and my American dreams, and knew that a fight on this would likely do more harm than good. I think she was right. Now as evidence points very much against Lance, and I am a few years removed from my own cancer I am reevaluating my take on this. The thought eats at me, because it is a revelation of two opposing things. There is the revelation that he is a cheat, and that even with this outlier of human achievement, the dream did not exist. There is also something more personal to me, acknowledgement of this shatters some of the remaining American Dream in me. Intellectually this should be a good thing. I am a rational person, and delusion is an opposite of rationality. Where it is hard is to see rather such delusion actually did help me for a long time. Is this why people still pray to dead saints? I understand this for the first time in a long time, as I recognize my own irrational religiosity of human potential. In the end the Lance Armstrong episode may put this in perspective for me. If it doesn’t maybe I will have to rely on the french sports magazine L’Equipe.
This week I started reading up on the latest in the Lance Armstrong doping scandal. Since accusations of his use of performance drugs and blood transfusions have been in the news for 8 years or so, this has not been the first time I have discussed this with anyone. There are a few differences now though, and those differences so fully point to the dangers of individualism, of a belief in the ideal American dream , and of the search for legacy, fame and fortune that I am taking note as a warning to myself.
I am not particularly unique, even in the one thing that does differ about me than many people my age. I had cancer when I was thirty. I also thought about Lance Armstrong nearly everyday when I had cancer at 30. This was true for the obvious reasons, which during those painful moments for me were actually deeply profound. This experience may also be more common for Americans than for French people, though I realize that is an unresearched guess. The reason is that Armstrong's survival and successes didn’t just show how you can get your life back after a near death agonizing disease, it also showed that you could come back and achieve more in something than anyone ever had. It is that focus which inspired me, and I am not sure in retrospect if that type of inspiration is not as misdirected as many of the other American Dream gone wrong stories of the last several years.
For a second let’s forget the doping thing. Even if Lance honestly achieved something so incredible, it is possible that I misinterpreted what the real value of that achievement was. I could say that the achievement allowed him to become an inspiration, but that is circular logic, as it comes back to the point of not being able to answer my question at all. I could say that his 7 Tour De France victories allowed him to achieve the fame and fortune by which he raised unprecedented awareness and funding for cancer research. That argument seems honorable enough as a group, but as an individual who was going through cancer, it set expectations that may have made me want to beat the cancer, but at the same time left me no model for how to archive similar goals as the ones achieved by Lance, even if I did recover. The only thing to do was to hope that there is some special will to live that comes from hardship like cancer that makes you push harder towards previously unthinkable goals. It doesn't increase the probability of achieving them, or provide a road-map on how to to even begin. If anyone had pointed this out to me before this week I would have been strangely and naively surprised. I actually never thought of it, because in this case I chose to do something I rarely do consciously, which was to take a leap of faith. I had faith that with recovery, with hard work anything was possible. The truth of this is no more real than my annoyance with “The Secret” and Oprah's power of will approach to success. The likely hood of becoming Oprah no matter how hard you think , pray or work is near 0. The likely hood of being as much of a success in any field as Lance was in biking after having cancer is even less. I held so deeply to that delusion, which is very American, even in Paris, that I would never have noticed this one in myself. Then I started reading the new doping reports. Not only are friends, colleagues, coaches and journalists saying that he doped, and even supplied performance enhancing drugs to fellow teammates, but the tests have come back in many place to say that he was using. So conjecture and science are against my hero. There has been a Franco-American battle over this issue since the beginning. French screeners and reporters have said since 1998 that Lance was doping. The backlash from America and Lance was enormous. His second book was nearly an anti french tirade. I firmly stood by Armstrong for all of these years, saying such compassionate things to my French wife as “you are a country of cry baby sore losers who haven't produced a world class athlete in my lifetime. Jealous bastards!” Instead of hitting me, as was deserved, she simply rolled her eyes. I thought at the time it was because she didn't have a decent argument to this perfectly reasonable point I was making. (I still hold to the sore loser accusation.) It turns out that my ranting was so simplistic that she probably didn't want to bother with it. Also, my wife Marine is very psychologically sharp. She must have known about my cancer identification, and my American dreams, and knew that a fight on this would likely do more harm than good. I think she was right. Now as evidence points very much against Lance, and I am a few years removed from my own cancer I am reevaluating my take on this. The thought eats at me, because it is a revelation of two opposing things. There is the revelation that he is a cheat, and that even with this outlier of human achievement, the dream did not exist. There is also something more personal to me, acknowledgement of this shatters some of the remaining American Dream in me. Intellectually this should be a good thing. I am a rational person, and delusion is an opposite of rationality. Where it is hard is to see rather such delusion actually did help me for a long time. Is this why people still pray to dead saints? I understand this for the first time in a long time, as I recognize my own irrational religiosity of human potential. In the end the Lance Armstrong episode may put this in perspective for me. If it doesn’t maybe I will have to rely on the french sports magazine L’Equipe.
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