GONE TODAY, HAIR TOMORROW

I heard a fascinating interview on Diane Rehm’s chat show this week. Diane was interviewing Ray Kurzweil, who was publicizing his new book “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”. Based on the interview alone (plus the dust jacket, which I read at Barnes &Noble today) I can say that Kurzweil is one of the great optimists I have ever encountered. Among other pending exploits, he expects modern science to cure cancer, arrest and reverse the aging process, and empower the elimination of poverty. Big deal, right? To some degree we all expect science to work some miracle cures in the future, just as it cured polio and landed us on the moon in the past. What makes Kurzweil’s optimism so breathtaking is that he says these changes will occur in the next 15 to 20 years.

All of these developments are part of what Kurzweil refers to as “the singularity”. If Kurzweil fails at everything else he can always sell that term, “the singularity”, to Hollywood; I can already see Keanu Reeves co-starring with Jodie Foster in shiny silver singlets in “Singularity: the Major Motion Picture”. But for now Kurzweil’s singularity is a non-fiction term, albeit a sexy one, in that branch of thought known loosely as futurism. While the term singularity evokes the mystical-alien/human-union-sex scene in the pool in Cocoon, if I am interpreting it correctly it is another word for cyborg, among whose ranks numbers the decidedly less sexy Robocop (although we are left to wonder if Robocop’s, ahem, masculinity is intact). Whatever term you choose, Kurzweil is talking about the merger of human and machine. And Kurzweil’s merger is not metaphor, he’s not talking about the ubiquitous strolling teenager with cell phone cupped to ear. In Kurzweil’s vision we will have the mystical-union-sex from Cocoon, but instead of having it with aliens we’ll be having it with our laptops. The singular in singularity means that my Toshiba and I will be one Singular entity.

Kurzweil’s optimism regarding humanity’s future relationship with machines is in stark contrast to the script adhered to strictly by Hollywood. Both the original Terminator and Matrix films portray human and machine’s future as adversarial, with humanity in a war for its very survival. Hollywood makes billions playing off of our fears and anxieties, and the Terminator and Matrix films are no exception in their respective riffs on our growing reliance upon and vulnerability to our machines. But Kurzweil’s task as a futurist is not to scare the pants off us, but to predict the future as accurately as possible. Kurzweil’s outrageous optimism is singularly American; Only an American could have written this book, and that fact is ultimately more reliable than anything Kurzweil has predicted for the future. Kurzweil’s vision of the future may or may not come to pass, but the fact that he has such a vision, and that his vision is broadcast unabashedly through our mainstream media, is exactly why Lance Armstrong is the most important American alive today.

Lance Armstrong is the past and he is the future, at least as we live them both in the present in America. Here is all you need to know about Lance Armstrong’s biography to know why he is such a potent figure on the American landscape: 1) He had testicular cancer, which almost claimed his life. 2) He recovered from that cancer to not only ride again professionally as a cyclist, but to become the greatest cyclist of all time, winning an unprecedented 7 consecutive Tour De France championships. 3) A cloud of suspicion hangs over his accomplishments, as seemingly the entire French media is out to prove that Lance Armstrong cheated, by way of performance enhancing doping, to win France’s beloved bike race over and over.
That he pissed off the French in winning all those races is an added bonus for Armstrong’s US popularity, but I maintain that the three elements listed above are what really account for Armstrong’s central place in the American psyche. For those three elements, conjoined in the body and triumph of Armstrong, inject Armstrong into the very space that Kurzweil clears with the ferocity of his optimism.
Armstrong’s well publicized battle with testicular cancer grounds him precisely in the past that Kurzweil sees for us. Per Kurzweil, cancer, along with myriad diseases and the aging process itself, will be erased by a stroke of technology’s delete key. The one certainty that grounds all of human existence, mortality, will be expunged from the human storyline. Armstrong’s victory over cancer, then, makes him a link to our pending human past. That he overcame testicular cancer, a disease which by attacking the reproductive organs strikes directly at humanity’s heretofore only concrete means of transcending mortality, makes Armstrong’s defeat of cancer weightier still. In American iconography, Armstrong faced down mortality’s henchman at high noon, and proved quicker on the draw.

To understand Armstrong’s connection with Kurzweil’s human future we must tread rockier, more controversial ground. I want to begin with the disclaimer that I do not pretend knowledge of Armstrong’s guilt or innocence regarding performance enhancing doping (my opinion, which of course is just that, an opinion, is that the controversy is too murky for me to have a strong opinion one way or another; Armstrong’s consistent dominant results after a bout of nearly fatal cancer do raise one’s eyebrows, but the overzealous pursuit of Armstrong by what feels like the majority of the French population, and their thus far piddling results, tip the scales slightly back in Armstrong’s favor-but then again, I too am an American). And like the ultimate validity of Kurzweil’s predictions, the truth about Armstrong’s doping innocence or guilt is beside the point I am making here. Whether the accusations against Armstrong are true or not, the cloud of suspicion that envelops Armstrong is real.

It is the vaporous nature of this cloud of suspicion that is the secret fuel for Armstrong’s overwhelming popularity in America. Remember, Armstrong plays a sport with a negligible following in America. For comparison’s sake, American Greg Lemond won three Tour De France crowns in the 1980’s, including an Armstrong-esque inspiring win after being accidentally shot in the back on a hunting trip by his brother-in-law (talk about living symbolism; NFL football games on Thanksgiving Day exist for the sole purpose of preventing in-law shootings, “accidental” or otherwise; retiring to game, couch, and six-pack has saved countless lives). And Greg Lemond’s name carries about as much cultural currency as Jan-Michael Vincent (he of “Airwolf” fame; oh how I love helicopters).

So there is more going on here than meets the eye with this Lance Armstrong & America lovefest thing. Armstrong overcame cancer and won a few bike races, but somehow he’s shagging Sheryl Crowe(can I still say shagging, or is that too Austin Powers?). Rockers date actors, not jocks. Just ask Michael Phelps, he won six gold medals, a number only one count less than Armstrong’s seven Tour wins, in a sport with at least some visibility in America, and who has he been seen snogging in public? Nobody you or I have ever heard of. And don’t tell me it’s because of the cancer. Remember Jon Kruk, the fat first baseman/outfielder for the Phillies ’93 pennant team? He overcame testicular cancer and I don’t see Nora Jones all hugged up on him. Sheryl Crowe should be dating the new Bond guy, not Lance Armstrong. But somehow, there Armstrong was at half-time in Dallas on Thanksgiving Day, watching his significant other Ms. Crowe do the half-time performance for all of us half passed out on our couches avoiding our in-laws, right where the camera could catch him.

Americans are too tactful to ever publicly proclaim that we love Lance Armstrong so much precisely because of, and absolutely not in spite of, the cloud of suspicion that hangs over his Tour victories. In our heart of hearts Americans have absolutely no problem with improved performance via science, be it on the sporting field or in the bedroom (which brings up another looming sporting figure, one Rafael Palmeiro, who tested positive for performance improving steroids and appeared in advertisements for performance improving Viagra, but the task of unpacking all that is for another day). Clouds of suspicion are just fine by us, an ever more literal minded American public. Until we see some CSI-style, irrefutable DNA-based evidence, we are all more than happy to enjoy the show. For evidence of this one need look no further than the bloated home run sluggers of turn-of-the-millennium era baseball. The steroid abuse of that era was obvious to the naked eye. But that did not stop the ratings parade, and the ad nauseam lionization of McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, and company. America could not get enough, as long as it was just a cloud of suspicion hanging over baseball. Once the steroids testing program was implemented, and the courtroom-style evidence began to roll in, America was forced to turn off the show, like a husband re-stashing the porn when he hears his wife pull up in the driveway at the end of girls’ night out. We are a moral, upstanding people after all, and we in no way support cheating of any kind.

At least that’s what we have to say when called out on the carpet. But our actions prior to the public unveiling of the steroids scandal tell us more about what we actually think and feel about scientifically improving human performance. Lance Armstrong’s cloud of suspicion remains intact, at least until the day the French tag some uncontestable forensic data on him. Until then, America will continue to love Lance under the cover of his cloud of suspicion. Under that cover what we are really in love with is the idea of perfecting ourselves, an idea voiced under the guise of futurism by Kurzweil. Lance Armstrong, because we do not have certainty whether he used performance enhancing drugs or not, is the ideal container for America’s hopes for the future, for a time when we are liberated from our very mortality . Should it ever be proven that Armstrong was a doper, than his usefulness for the American psyche will have passed, and he will shrink from our consciousness as rapidly as Sammy Sosa’s power numbers in the era of steroids testing. If it is somehow conclusively shown that Armstrong never doped, his cultural importance will likewise fade, though not as drastically, as he will still be cast, only in the much smaller part of aging sports hero (cynically, I also believe that his ability to date A-List rockers rests on his current cultural cache-for his and Crowe’s sake I hope I am wrong about that).

Armstrong’s significance is time-limited nevertheless. For the game that America is currently playing, that of publicly decrying the use of performance enhancing drugs (a public cry voiced symbolically by the US Congress’ investigation into steroids in professional sports; There is still no better barometer of what we can get away with admitting in public as the American political system) while secretly pinning our hopes for immortality on the science that delivers those drugs, is one that can not last. Whether Kurzweil’s timeline is accurate, pandora’s box is already open, and Americans will soon be able to pop a pill to hit a homerun in the ballpark with as much freedom as they now pop them to hit one in the bedroom. Our old ideas of cheating, along with the entire playbook of ethics that applied to a world bounded on all sides by human mortality, will soon be out of date, if they are not already. Mortality may never disappear, but whether it takes 20 years or 200, it will come to mean something altogether different and will need a new set of ethics to guide humanity as we navigate the changes. So at some point Lance Armstrong will probably get to go back to being a champion cyclist who overcame cancer, but maybe by then there won’t be any cancer. Somehow, I have my doubts, but I was born way back in 1974.

I will close with one final observation about the Lance Armstrong phenomenon. It struck me when I was trying to come up with something to say about the yellow “Live Strong” Armstrong armbands that were briefly all the rage. I remembered that the arm band fad that had preceded Armstrong’s was none other than the “WWJD” armband. The WWJD stands for What Would Jesus Do, as most of us all know by now. One figure famous for his relationship to mortality and immortality segued into another, right on our wrists. Interesting, don’t you think?