Mark McGwire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ferdinand Magellan

Oh yippie, Mark McGwire admitted to using steroids.  Personally, as a Chicago Cubs fans, I always hated the guy since he played for our rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals, and could care less about the revelation that was blatantly obvious to everybody.  But news is news, and McGwire obviously wants to fix his tarnished legacy, so more power to him.

The bright spot of this whole thing, has been a few bloggers ability to get creative with the situation; most notably Jonah Goldwater at The Faster Times, and his article, “Why Mark McGwire’s Apology Would Not Have Fooled Sartre“. Not only is it a great article, but it also has a shot from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

“For Sartre, the self is created- and so defined- by the choices and actions it performs. To imagine, as McGwire does, that his self could be removed from his actual life is to imagine a boundary between who he is and what he has done. It is to suppose the self is something that exists- and is defined- independently of, and prior to, choices that are made, and actions that are taken. For Sartre, this a false abstraction, a metaphysical mistake.”

Over at one of my favorite sport blogs, The Lawn Chair Boys, McGwire is compared to Ferdinand Magellan.

“While McGwire believed the earth to be flat a map, he made like Ferdinand Magellan and circumnavigated the base paths 583 times by way of crushing baseballs over fences, and maybe it was the way those baseballs disappeared over the horizon that made him think lines of morality could be crossed to the roaring sound of applause.”