The "war on drugs" has advanced its front lines beyond the trenches of the inner-city streets to the far more treacherous arena of professional sports. Keep your head down, soldier. Don't want it taken off by a fucking baseball.
Politicians have taken a much-needed vacation from our little skirmish in the Middle East to enlist in this battle. A "Senate Subcommittee on Steroids" has been created, and dozens of expert witnesses wearing athletic supporters, helmets, and pinstripes are lining the aisles awaiting their turn to contribute strategic advice to their country's battle plan. Alas, perhaps they've been asked to leave their headgear at home. And that's a real shame. I might have actually turned on C-SPAN for once if I knew I got to see a guy in a hockey mask and ice skates lumbering past a bunch of suits and scuffing up the Senate floor.
We are, of course, still afraid for the children. This time, though, our fear is not directed towards drug-pushing super-villains who miraculously find a way to keep their deeds permanently undetectable to parents. This time, the object of our fear is the man wielding a far more brutal and effective weapon in the war on drugs: the baseball bat. True, no one has yet gone so far as to say that José Canseco threatened to beat his underage fans with a bat unless they used steroids. But the implication is clear: parents' hopeless ineffectiveness against the unyielding intellectual force of the professional athlete will result in an epidemic on a scale approaching the annual sales of Big League Chew. If watching a baseball game really has the hypnotic capabilities that politicians are saying it has, then it's baseball we should be banning, not steroids.
But, hell. Baseball is as American as apple pie and congressional hearings for side-stepping our own legal system. If private organizations like Major League Baseball don't "choose" to "deal with the problem" "voluntarily", then it's "up to government" to "step in" and step on everyone's rights. And it's all for the goddamn children.
