That photo. You know right away which one. The one of swimming
star Michael Phelps sucking on a tube known popularly as a “bong”
at a party at the University of South Carolina. Published in a
British tabloid, the photo has made more passes around the world
than the last space shuttle. Well, almost. One local newscast for
a major network in the District of Columbia explained as the
week-of-Phelps began that it couldn’t show the photo because of
copyright protection! It was being shown around the world and on
all the other network locals. And perhaps on some asteroids.
Something else was inchoate about the coverage. Anchors more
often than not sort of winked at the story, and/or at one
another. Their dismissive take on it was confirmed in print when
the Washington Post’s superior sportswriter Sally
Jenkins
tried her hand in the Tuesday edition. She filled her
narration of Phelps’s mistake with personal asides; e.g., “not
that I would ever make such a staggering misstep myself.” She
cites a study in one magazine claiming 42 percent of Americans
have at one time or another gotten “sweetly baked on hay.” (The
magazine’s phrase or, more likely, Sally’s)? She recounts
Phelps’s arrest for drunk driving following his triumph in Athens
in 2004. “What did we think he was going to binge on this time,”
she asks, “after winning an all-time-record eight medals in
Beijing? Triscuits?”
The Jenkins defense insists America’s swim boy shouldn’t face the
loss of his hundred million dollar endorsements, declaring all he
did was behave in an “uncalculated way and suffer the bad luck to
be photographed doing it.”
The backers of legalizing marijuana for medical and/or
recreational use must feel encouraged by such a general media
wink. It is blurred, however, by another Post
article by sportswriter Michael Wilbon, who responds to Sally
by name. One of his graphs “Everybody does it, so it must be
okay. (No, Sally, all of us haven’t done it, and didn’t do it in
college, either.) Wilbon takes Phelps to task. He quotes the
Jenkins lead in her column: Is anybody surprised that Phelps
dived headfirst into the bong water?
In addition to siding with propriety, Wilbon has won over some
grammarians, if there are any left, by his proper use of the past
tense of “dive.” Sally had written Phelps “dove
headfirst into the bong water.”
Law enforcement officials in South Carolina say the locals are
reviewing the case, with a view to filing charges against Phelps
who was so publicly breaking the law. Considering the media
reaction, whoever files had better be able to hold his breath.
There is this that stands aside and alone. Drug Enforcement
officials, doctors among them, tell us that hard addicts captured
by heroin and/or cocaine almost uniformly got their drug
introduction via marijuana. Or should I say “hay”?
