A Whole New Ball Game

By Keith Boykin, in pop culture·sports
Thursday, June 5 2003, 11:13AM

Sammy Sosa, Martha Stewart, and Jayson Blair provide convenient foils for Americans to express their lack of faith in our institutions. When baseball, homemaking and the New York Times come under suspicion, what else is next?

Last month, America (or at least a small part of it that reads the papers) was shocked by the news that reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated dozens of articles he wrote for the prestigious New York Times. The Times's reputation as the the paper of record was soiled.

Earlier this week, domestic diva Martha Stewart was indicted on perjury and insider trading charges related to her controversial sale of ImClone shares before the stock tumbled. Martha Stewart's reputation will never be the same.

Now comes word that baseball's homerun king Sammy Sosa used a corked bat this week in a game with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Sosa was ejected from the game, and fans are already questioning whether his reputation will ever be the same.

What's going on here? Surely, Blair, Stewart and Sosa are not the first Americans to cheat. They're not even the first in their fields to cheat. Remember Pete Rose? Americans lie and cheat all the time. So why is this a big deal now? Why them?

Identity politics might find it curious that the three most celebrated cheaters this year are a single woman and two men of color. In truth, white men do more big time lying and cheating than women and people of color do, if only because white men control more of the power in the country.

Certainly, white men are not beyond reproach. The people who ran Enron into the ground were mostly white men. The Catholic priests who abused their authority and their young consorts were mostly white men. And the ex-president who found himself impeached by the Republican-controlled Congress was himself a white man, notwithstanding Toni Morrison's claim to the contrary.

Race and gender may have played a role in the vilification of Stewart, Sosa and Blair, but it's not the only answer to what's going on.

If you can't trust business, baseball, the Catholic Church or the New York Times, who can you trust? Enter George Bush.

Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War and Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal revealed the truth to Americans that presidents lie too. In the 1970s, the New York Times's disclosure of the Pentagon Papers and Woodward and Bernstein's Washington Post coverage of Watergate tilted the balance of trust away from the White House and toward the media.

George Bush has tried to repair the credibility of the presidency after years of scandal created by his GOP cohorts hungry for Bill Clinton's blood. But Bush himself will soon come under history's scrutiny when investigators reveal how he lied to the American people to start an unjust and unnecessary war in Iraq.

Why is there so much lying and cheating going on?

"We've all done it at one point or another," Rabbi Raphael Kanter told the New Bedford Standard Times newspaper recently. "If you say you haven't, you're either not human or a liar," he said.

Maybe that's the answer. Maybe our own shortcomings should remind us not to be so critical of famous cheaters and liars. But isn't that part of the fun? At some level, don't we enjoy watching the mighty fall from glory? Didn't the Republicans gloat when Bill Clinton confessed his sins? Aren't the comedians gleeful that Martha Stewart has fallen from grace?

At times, I think we are a bit too critical when celebrities do wrong. At other times, I think the rich and famous should be held to a higher standard. I guess it depends on the context.

It's not a great rule, but I think this is how I process it. If you're trying to do good with your life, I'm more likely to forgive you when you do bad. That's why, I think, so many African Americans were willing to forgive Bill Clinton.

On the other hand, if you're just trying to get ahead, then I'm not as sympathetic when you get caught cheating. That seems to be the problem with Martha Stewart.

It's a difficult distinction, but it reminds me that none of us is perfect.