Micheal Phelps is the world champion swimmer who wiped out the rest of the mere mortals at last summer’s Olympics in Beijing, garnering eight gold medals. He was recently photographed at a private party taking a hit off of a bong. A righteous flurry of anti-marijuana hysteria ensued and he was subsequently dropped from his multi-million dollar contract with Kellogg’s, despite the fact that he had previously been arrested on a drunk driving charge. They seem to think being drunk and driving is ok, but taking a bong rip is not. He has mended his drunken ways and has gone on to be the champion of the world.
Therefore, he is a HERO. Give the dude a fucking break already. He was relaxing with a harmless plant. And he is the best swimmer in the world. And stoned. Top that.
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* Much to the disappointment of copy editor, blogger, and left-wing extremist Tom at the thebadrash, I will continue to call this series Hero or Criminal for the sake of consistency — even though “villain” is the antonym I ought to be using.
I’d have thought that “criminal” is both an accepted antonym and, by adding an extra layer of judgement, a more expressive one than “villain”. If Uncle Tom read more genuinely radical literature, he’d know that your dichotomy is right there in his Cabin: “One young man, of whom a missionary has told us, twice re-captured, and suffering shameful stripes for his heroism, had escaped again; and, in a letter which we heard read, tells his friends that he is going back a third time, that he may, at last, bring away his sister. My good sir, is this man a hero or a criminal? Would not you do as much for your sister? And can you blame him?”
Actually, I like the Hero/Criminal dichotomy: it has grown on me. Though I don’t agree that ‘criminal’ is always the better antonym. In purely pantomimic terms (like when it’s used by the Beach Boys), ‘villain’ does its job well. That said, aren’t villain and criminal more or less synonymous anyway?
That’s a welcome complication, particularly if one enjoys the fallacy of {etymology = meaning}. Villains were originally immoral rustics, while I think of crime as being a notion born of cities.