Have the Mighty Really Fallen?
The convergence of the Petraeus and Armstrong scandals is interesting to me not as a question of how could these heroes have let us down but one of why they were considered heroes in the first place. To me they were never heroes. Here's why.
Petraeus gained his outsized reputation as a military genius of counterinsurgency strategy quite simply because W needed to deflect attention away from himself and his responsibility for the Iraq War, which by that time that time had revealed itself to be a deception and catastrophe of the highest order. W said, in essence, that he was ceding commander-in-chief status to the incredible savior Petraeus--who would turn everything around and get us out of the mountain of crap we had created. The media was happy to play along. What a story! But it was never true. No one is that smart, nor any single individual that important to ventures of this complexity and scale. And by most measures "the surge" didn't even succeed.
Lance Armstrong was famous primarily because he is thought to have "beaten" cancer. No one really cares much about cycling, so it had to be that. The thing is, people don't beat cancer. Some survive and some don't. It's wise to take whatever steps you can to put yourself in a position to do as well as you can, but to attribute survival of cancer to someone's efforts is just wrong. But, again, we like the idea of the superhero, and the media is happy to dish it up. Armstrong was still touting this line this past week. He was right to be "ruthless" in beating cancer, he said, but wrong to be ruthless in beating his opponents. OK, fine. Whatever.
Petraeus gained his outsized reputation as a military genius of counterinsurgency strategy quite simply because W needed to deflect attention away from himself and his responsibility for the Iraq War, which by that time that time had revealed itself to be a deception and catastrophe of the highest order. W said, in essence, that he was ceding commander-in-chief status to the incredible savior Petraeus--who would turn everything around and get us out of the mountain of crap we had created. The media was happy to play along. What a story! But it was never true. No one is that smart, nor any single individual that important to ventures of this complexity and scale. And by most measures "the surge" didn't even succeed.
Lance Armstrong was famous primarily because he is thought to have "beaten" cancer. No one really cares much about cycling, so it had to be that. The thing is, people don't beat cancer. Some survive and some don't. It's wise to take whatever steps you can to put yourself in a position to do as well as you can, but to attribute survival of cancer to someone's efforts is just wrong. But, again, we like the idea of the superhero, and the media is happy to dish it up. Armstrong was still touting this line this past week. He was right to be "ruthless" in beating cancer, he said, but wrong to be ruthless in beating his opponents. OK, fine. Whatever.
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