THE SOPHISTICATED ART OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

Barry Bonds, and his plausible reason for using performance-enhancing drugs, I think, is the appropriate ending for this essay.  We will get to this in due time.

There are sociological and psychological points to tend to before getting to Bonds’ dilemma; a dilemma tethered to the new America’s obsession with fame without substance and achievement without merit. 

I am the dot maker, and it is up to you to connect these dots and color them in once the appropriate connections are finished.  Shameless self-promotion, Andy Warhol, reality TV, Donald Trump, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, the United States Congress and others will be part of this connect-the-dots essay to get to Barry Bonds.  It is all connected.  They are all connected.  The butterfly flapping its wings in the Rain Forest setting off the chain of events leading to a typhoon in the Philippines eight days later kind of connected.  Get out your Number 2 pencils and crayons and let’s get busy.

We live in an age of shameless self-promotion; an age where self-promotion is no longer a self-conscious attempt at fame, but is instead treated as art form.  We live in an age where universities and seminars disregard product or talent in favor of teaching the individual how to market the individual.  There are classes and self-help books available to anyone who wants to learn to develop and nurture ambition and make it work for them in the marketplace.  People come to these seminars and classes without any tangible aptitudes, but leave with the idea that they can choose any profession and simply “make it happen.” 

The business marketplace is saturated with these ambitious individuals who have no business being in the business they are in.  Thousands of lawsuits are filed each day in this country claiming legal remedy due to ineptitude, and in many cases, the lawyers representing each side are ambitious types who would be better suited as dry-cleaner managers or video store clerks than lawyers.  But along the way, these people learned about ambition and self-promotion and we now have a messy society of ambitious hacks mismanaging 401(K) accounts, misdiagnosing patients, failing to educate our young, providing incompetent customer service, force feeding us junk entertainment, and other assorted examples of professional ineffectiveness.  

Blind ambition coupled with talent can make us queasy, but blind ambition without talent should force us to the foot of the toilet in stomach-turning revolt.  I’m afraid this isn’t the case.  Not only are we becoming more accepting of the #### ambitious, we’re aspiring to be the #### ambitious. 

In the 1990s, the reality show genre reared its ugly little head promising to fulfill Andy Warhol’s prediction that we will all be famous for 15 minutes.  MTV offered the Real World, and taught Americans you can gain fame by being a second-rate determined cartoonist with a romance Jones, or as an unbathed skateboarder with an abrasive, Borderline Personality.

Author David Eggers, who wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, devoted nearly 60 pages of the book to his ill-fated attempt to get on The Real World San Francisco.  Shamelessly plugging the book around the country, it never dawned on Eggers that his book’s success relied more on a quirky layout and snappy title than it did on literary merit.

Survivor, billing itself as the original reality TV show, taught Americans how to survive the silly little game by cowardly maneuvering to eliminate the person who possesses brains and talent thus paving the way for an #### ambitious to win the game.  The original winner, Richard Hatch, the human dictionary entry for conniving cheat, and who shamelessly won favor in the pseudo competition by streaking, was busted years later for tax evasion.  Unfortunately, the networks did not give us the pilot for his prison stay and name it Survivor: San Quentin.  That might have been must see TV.

The Apprentice, Donald Trump’s version of reality TV, promises victory to the person who can scheme without conscience, or promote without substance.  The Apprentice is viewed as serious drama by millions of people in this country, but people fail to see the irony of the show and that irony is The Donald himself.  Trump inherited billions of dollars and lost most of it, but because of his shameless self-promotion Trump held on to his fame and a fraction of ownership interest in various real estate ventures. People regard him as a “Tower of Power,” when in reality; he is a “Shack of Hack.” 

American Idol promises a recording contract to the man or woman who can sing pop songs to, initially, a panel of three entertainment lightweights who give their opinions on the performance of each before turning it over to the votes of cell-phone America.  The panel consists of a former Laker Girl who uses contrived controversy to self-promote; a pop singer using weight loss methods to self-promote; and a music industry failure and consummate mommy’s boy employing abrasive commentary cloaked in stolen wit to self-promote. 

A person can wife swap, hire a super nanny, go on a worldwide road-trip, attempt to lose weight, choose a husband, ballroom dance, eat disgusting food, or get a makeover on national television to gain notoriety.  It is instant fame without skill or preparation or talent. 

Blame the ambitious without talent, blame those who hire them, blame those who further promote the shameless self-promotion of the #### ambitious, but blame us for allowing it to happen.  Without the drug, there is no user; but without the user, there is no market for the drug…which brings us to drugs, and specifically, performance-enhancing drugs which have helped certain athletes break records and chase records by illegitimate means.

Imagine you could hop in your car, drive down to Tijuana and purchase a hand cream that would make you a better writer, or a scalp tonic that would make you much better at your profession without having to put in additional hours at your craft.  The cream or tonic is of course, illegal, but it is quite easily purchased.  The drug promises incredible short-term gains, but there is evidence that it will cause severe health problems later in life.  Would you do it?  As evidenced by our fascination with fame and the availability of instant fame, the odds are that millions and millions of people would use a cream or a tonic to improve their occupational performance.  The steroid question is really a fable, as much as it is a question, a little fable that goes something like this:

The man used a cream, to capture his dream.

The dream promised fame and the knowing of his name.

But with the promise of fame came the risk of scorn and shame. 

The man weighed his chances, and loved adoring glances.

So he took the cream and fulfilled his dream.

Many years later the man he got caught,

and pondered the worth of the fame he had sought.

Moral: Weigh a consequence before taking a serious chance.

Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris’ single-season home run record in 1998. McGwire, during his “Summer of Media and Fan Love,” used his son as a prop to show Americans he can break the single-season home run record and out father any man in the country.  His shameless self-promotion and “aw shucks” persona made us believe he was one of us and all about us as he cranked home runs out of every park in the land.  His most ingenious move - a move that would make any Reality TV Show contestant proud – was to display Androstenedion, a since banned substance, in his locker, to deflect any rumors of his steroid use. 

Jose Canseco, a self-admitted steroid junky, and self-proclaimed shameless self-promotion junky, published his book, Juiced, in 2005, in part, to put himself back into the public eye, and under the guise of shining the light on Major League Baseball’s cockroaches.  Canseco admitted to Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes that steroids made him a Major League caliber baseball player.  The controversial book led to a Congressional hearing about steroid use in baseball.  Congress members, owing their very existence to shameless self-promotion, subpoenaed McGwire.  When questioned directly about his steroid use, McGwire continually avoided answering questions advising the panel to “consider the source.”  Congress did consider the source, and that was why McGwire was sitting in front of our elected officials not answering the questions.  

McGwire’s shameless self-promotion was so polished and accepted over the years that he got away with running the show in front of Congress.  He tearfully began the inquest by saying: “Asking me or any other player to answer questions about who took steroids in front of television cameras will not solve the problem. If a player answers ‘No,’ he simply will not be believed; if he answers ‘Yes,’ he risks public scorn and endless government investigations.” During the hearing, McGwire repeatedly responded to questions regarding his own steroid use with the line, “I’m not here to talk about the past.” McGwire also stated, “My lawyers have advised me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family, and myself.”  When asked if he was asserting his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, McGwire once again responded: “I’m not here to talk about the past. I’m here to be positive about this subject.” 

Congress, the media and fans let McGwire, the master of self-promotion and positive PR on and off the field during his playing days, off the hook. 

If Barry Bonds assumed McGwire’s position, he would end up assuming the position. 

During the course of his career, Bonds consistently went out of his way to not conduct his professional business with a briefcase full of shameless self-promotion.  His business was baseball and not self-serving PR.  Bonds, to the contrary, deliberately created an unlikable, de####able persona continually at odds with the media and fans alike.  Bonds’ acts of disregard and disdain for everyone not Barry Bonds made him a target of hate by the media and the public.  The all out prosecution of Bonds is owed to his salty kiss-off attitude and has absolutely nothing to do with race.  

In defense of Bonds, it wasn’t until he witnessed the false achievement and unabashed personal promotion of the master himself, Mark McGwire, that he went to BALCO for help.  According to the book Game of Shadows, Bonds began using steroids only after witnessing McGwire’s run at Maris’ record.  Convinced McGwire was juicing, he began injecting himself with Winstol in 1998.  Bonds, however, didn’t stop with Winstol.  He escalated his usage to include, among others, a steroid designed to improve the muscle quality of cattle. 

Two ambitious San Francisco Chronicle writers who believe their talent exceeds that of the little Bay Area paper wrote Book of Shadows.  The authors, Mark Fainura-Wada (draw your own conclusion about the hyphenated two-name deal) and Lance Williams, felt they could make better lives for themselves by stretching their series of articles for the Chronicle into a book.  The book goes beyond their investigation into BALCO providing snap-shots of various athletes who used BALCO performance-enhancers, and then focuses solely on Barry Bonds.

Fainura-Wada and Williams, in a stroke of Reality TV-like genius, and in effort to promote and sell their product by the easiest possible means, chose the enemy of the people and one of the least popular athletes in recent American sports history to gain an instant agreeable audience.  Choosing Bonds as subject is no different than choosing to write a book about Iran’s nuclear program in favor of say Brazil’s, to muster up quick and biased support through hate. 

Chasing the steroid-fueled McGwire as motive does not constitute a vindication of Barry Bonds, nor does it justify his use of banned substances to set long-standing baseball records.  What an understanding of his motive does do however, is compel his critics to understand that the players preceding Bonds who used steroids to better their careers are equally culpable and should be made to stand alongside him, answer the same questions and face equal public embarrassment.  Bonds rejected shameless self-promotion and instead fostered an attitude of supreme arrogance.  But, his surly, selfish public ways should not make him Major League Baseball’s fall guy.   

There still may be hope that Bonds will get with the program albeit twenty years too late.  This past spring, Bonds, in the spirit of the new American Dream, stars in his own reality television show.