Fortunately for America Tony Soprano has not yet modeled Under-Armour. Here there is but a sheet between his manboobs and all of us.

The congruencies between Bonds and Soprano came into focus this past week through the return of The Sopranos for a sixth season amidst the bedlam surrounding the publication of what has been hailed as definitive proof that Barry Bonds used steroids. The significance of these cultural events on a distinct level cannot be ignored, but combined they paint a fuller picture of the dichotomies and challenges that ensnare the American mind at the dawn of the 21^st century.

In earlier times it was the American dream to achieve success through the sheer dent of perseverance, hard work, and self-reliance. Now Americans have been taught that fulfillment comes not through internal reliance but through external assistance. Tony Soprano treats himself with a virtual cocktail of depression medications while Barry Bonds treated himself to a cocktail of steroids. Each man sought out the warm embrace of a more complete life via the ensnaring reach of the American pharmaceutical industry. It is a jarring coincidence that the same year that brought Tony Soprano to our television screens also led Barry Bonds to begin his dalliance with performance enhancing substances. Is it any coincidence that these two men of superlative accomplishment (if one accepts that being a mob boss is the equivalent of being a boss in most respects) feel the same degree of compulsion to better themselves through the use of pharmaceuticals as ordinary, less successful Americans? In the end, aren’t we and they, just trying to be something better than we truly are.

21^st Century normalcy.

Each man has, in a sense, become a reflection of the fullness of American life. If America is truly the land of bounty and excess, both Soprano and Bonds personify this with bodies that seem almost strained to capacity. Tony Soprano through his eating excesses Bonds through his weight-lifting excesses. In the first episode of the Sopranos sixth season the scale in Tony’s bedroom can barely register his weight and metaphorically, American society in the 21^st century can barely register the scope of activity, experience, and expectation that surrounds each waking moment. Each man’s challenging embrace of the possibilities of 21^st century opportunity offers them the same strain and uncertainties shared by countless Americans in their daily lives. In their struggle to reach the fullness of American life, each man is us, and we are them.

Finally, each man is also surrounded by the meditative peace of water. Tony Soprano often sits around his pool outside his palatial mansion watching ducks or contemplatively examining the stillness of a New Jersey pool in winter. Barry Bonds seeks with every ounce of his being to deposit one home run after another into the cool recesses of McCovey Cove just over the right field wall of Pac Bell Park.

   

Yet, even for all their similarities America has embraced Tony Soprano for all of his failings and strivings to be better than he is, and thus far seems inclined to kick Barry Bonds to the proverbial curb and pursue him throughout the baseball record book until his name is not garlanded among the stars of baseball, but rather with the astericks of eternally unanswered questions. I think this will ultimately change because the personal battles of one’s own soul have moved from the interior monologue to the exterior arena of the American countryside. In so doing, the faults and errors of 21^st century America have become the parlor game of a society of similarly flawed fellow Americans. The Bible memorably states, “Judge not lest ye be judged;” in 21^st century America after a long enough time we stop judging because there is someone else, a newer star come to earth, to distract our attention from both the failings of others and our own. Eventually we’re able to forget almost any failing because something else draws our attention more.

In A League of Their Own, Tom Hanks, playing a women’s baseball coach in the midst of World War II, memorably stated, “There’s no crying in baseball.” Now, at the dawn of 2006 we can definitively say this, there is lying in baseball. But why should this come as any surprise to our fan consciousness? The 21^st century has already taught us, as if we’d ever forgotten, that there is lying in business and politics and marriage and school in war and in peace. So too with baseball and the New Jersey mob. What these prior examples teach us, is that we are an eternally forgiving country, a place where the largest lie on earth ultimately can lead to the reelection of a President. We are all forgivers, we Americans of the 21^st century, and maybe, ultimately, this is what saves us all from battles with our own personal failings. After all nothing says 21^st century America better than forgiveness by forgetfulness.