Give Papa an Asterisk

So much attention has been focused in recent months on a number of athletes who – fearing that their career statistics would only be remembered by a few trivia-crazed fans at a Vegas card convention – decided to elevate the level of their performances by taking various illegitimate substances.

Marion Jones, Floyd Landis, Dana Stubblefield and Barry Bonds are just some of the prominent athletes whose names have been tarnished — to say nothing of the sports in which they participated — by charges of using performance-enhancing substances.

Each has been deservedly berated and lambasted by a sporting public which through the years has developed a “guilty until proven innocent” cynicism towards successful professional and Olympic athletes.

Nevertheless, we would be remiss if we were to limit the scope of our disillusionment solely to those who make their living by throwing a ball or peddling a bicycle and overlook others whose impact on our culture has far more significant repercussions.

Take, for example, some of the great literary talents who have written the works which form the established canon. It is common knowledge, but not so commonly discussed, that William Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway all partook wholeheartedly in the use of a myriad of stimulants to assist them in the creative process.

We must now, for the sake of the students, aspiring writers and other devotees of these so-called “great men of literature”, reexamine what has heretofore been considered the pinnacle of creative output.

In the same way it has been determined that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa would have been lucky to have batted 20 homers in a season were it not for steroids, we should also dissect what some literary works would have looked liked had the creative minds behind them not availed themselves of performance-enhancing substances with such gusto.

For example, had it not been for the use of mild-altering substances, then Rene Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” would have been written as “Dude, I, like, just had this wildest idea.”

If Shakespeare had not been under the influence of a pint too many of ale, then high school students around the world would see the beginning of Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be, That is the question”, .the most famous line in all of English literature, as “There’s something I have been meaning to ask you, but it escapes me at the moment.”

The last line of the well-known work by poet Dylan Thomas’, a performance-enhancing abuser extraordinaire if ever there was one, “Do Not Go Gently into the Good Night” would no doubt have read something like this: “It’s no problem if you decide to leave the lights on.”

Other giants of modern writing must also be held under the microscope to ascertain whether their masterpieces were not in fact ameliorated by dabbling in drink. Could Mark Twain have reached the outer limits of man’s imagination, as he did in “Huckleberry Finn”, without a bottle of bourbon at the ready.

Would the witticisms of Oscar Wilde have achieved their dagger-like sharpness without the occasional drop of absinthe? Could Hemingway have so masterfully encapsulated the voice of an era had he not imbibed copious quantities of jungle juice?

Naturally, we shouldn’t stop with the printed word. Paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali would in all likelihood be confused with those of Leroy Neiman and Red Skelton were it not for their suspected partaking in multiple substances.

In the oratorical realm, the famous speeches of Winston Churchill would be on a par with those of George W. Bush had the war-time prime minister not kept his stocks of brandy fully stored.

We’ll discuss music another day.