Canseco

This is an amazingly well written and thoughtful article on steriods and baseball, which is, the author acknowledges, "the elephant in the room everyone is ignoring."

I like the home runs, but can't imagine a future of public acceptance of steriod use in professional sports. In fact, I don't want to imagine such a future.

One of the most fucked up things that this draws attention to is the entire concept of cheating. When I was young, cheaping was oftentimes rampant in school. There was a time when nearly every student in 6th grade had access to history tests and greater than 50% of students cheated on the tests. In high school the trend continued, but it kept much quieter. The entire ethos of cheating involved the odds of being caught versus the qualms with such behaviour. In college, people were accused of cheating, but in the type of classes I took, cheating was basically impossible, unless you wanted to plagerize.

I never cheated much. I remember having access to some tests in middle school, and using them basically as a study tool and remembering the answers...but this was only a couple of times. To me, it was easy enough to study and I wasn't a grade fiend - I got good, not great, grades, and didn't care or need to cheat. The most fucked up thing I can remember doing would have been going back to sections on tests when I ran out of time.

Last semester I was talking to a professor about his fear of students plagerizing and he told me several students were kicked out of school because they plagerized his final exam paper on Star Wars. I laughed. What are people thinking? Why are they in school? Why cheat on something like that? Why take the class? Why pay $2000 to steal a paper off the internet? It's so stupid.

But...and here's the big but, it seems to me that in the "real" world, cheating is REWARDED. We act shocked with these steriod allegations. We acted shocked at Martha Stewart, at Enron, but these are symptoms of largely accepted practices. In the film business, producers constantly lie and cheat on their budgets. At USC, you break the rules and you get applause.

I don't think the answer to the cheating issue is always a crackdown. In the case of USC, think it ought to be the opposite - the loosening of rules. At USC, with all the shooting rules and restrictions, one is almost forced to "cheat." If you follow all the rules, you get fucked in the ass, thinking about bureacratic obstacles for everything. In school, from a young age, I think we should simply use an honor code. If someone wants to cheat - let them. We should eliminate this attitude towards cheaters that they must be caught, or else we'll get screwed...that simply leads to people thinking they need to cheat to keep up with the Jones'.

With respect to steriods, it becomes a health issue...like wearing safety belts. No steriods because it'll cause you harm down the line. With respect to money - we need to protect people from hustling one another. The simply way to do it, is double the penalties for those who get caught. If Martha Stewart screws smaller shareholders out of money from access to privileged information - she pays them back, double. We have actuaries who can figure it out.

I dunno, those are my thoughts.