Column:

A-Rod, Phelps and Batman show flaws

By Charles Austin

Published Feb. 16, 2009

From a young age, we teach morality through pop culture. Whether it's "Dora the Explorer," "Batman" or "Fight Club," there are deliberate moral aspects in almost every movie we see and book we read. And, obviously, the political climate of the real world is mirrored by our popular culture as well. James Bond villains were usually Russians during the Cold War, but more recent films feature North Koreans and terrorist organizations. "Dora the Explorer" was crafted around the turn of the millennium when Mexican assimilation into American culture became a prominent issue. Last year, Nick Jr. introduced "Ni Hao, Kai-Lan," a Dora-type program that teaches children Chinese language and culture, officially heralding China's emergence as an important world player.

But at the same time, we love to catch celebrities lying, cheating and stealing, not only because it's entertaining but also because it teaches us a lesson. More than anything, Martha Stewart's five-month prison sentence in 2004 showed us bad things happen to people who break the law and not just Wall Street bureaucrats, but eccentric TV personalities too. When former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned under accusations of perjury in 2007, his public humiliation was incentive for us to tell the truth in our own lives, so we don't meet with his fate.

Celebrities' wrongdoings help to serve as a moral barometer for the rest of the country. But what happens when the celebrities we admire in fiction are despicable in their real lives? Apparently, not much.

In the last few weeks alone, we've heard baseball player Alex Rodriguez took steroids, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps smoked pot and artist Shepard Fairey's Obama "HOPE" poster infringed on Associated Press copyrights. But even if all these allegations are true, the impact on public opinion will be negligible.

Fairey's "HOPE" poster is already iconic. Phelps will always be remembered as a world-class athlete and A-Rod is one of this generation's baseball greats, even if he used steroids.

In fact, for more than a century, baseball has balanced itself precariously as a symbol of the triumphant American spirit as well as a hotbed of corruption. Whether it's been decades-long gambling problems that culminated with the infamous 1919 World Series or cocaine abuse in the 1980s that implicated everyone from Keith Hernandez to the Pittsburgh Pirates' mascot, scandal is a part of baseball's lifeblood. Everybody, including Pete Rose, Willie Mays, Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds and A-Rod have gambled or taken drugs, yet they're all heroes and household names.

It could be argued it's dangerous to have these people as our role models and maybe it would be. But we've learned to separate A-Rod the baseball great and A-Rod the regular guy. The regular guy sometimes makes unethical decisions, such as taking steroids, but the baseball great is the youngest player to ever hit 500 home runs. The baseball great is a fictional character, but that's understood.

This might sound like cognitive dissonance, but it's not a bad thing. It would be unreasonable to expect people to be as perfect as fictional characters. We understand nobody's perfect. We applaud the way people ought to be and detest the way they actually are. This is why we can still admire Batman's unwavering morality in "The Dark Knight," but we deplore Christian Bale for his angry tirade on the set of "Terminator Salvation." We know he has flaws even if his characters don't. And when we separate the beauty of baseball from its grim realities, it's a tacit admission that even though life is imperfect, our fiction doesn't have to be.