Bear Tooth - Texas 4000 - Cleo and the Shadowlands

Before the movie - Cleo 5 to 7 - a group of young men and women from Austin, Texas passed around a mic, and told us why they had joined the Texas 4000 bike trip from Austin to Anchorage.

It's a fund raiser for the American Cancer Society and each rider, we were told, raised at least $4000 in pledges, which comes to $160,000 for all 40 of them.


This is all a good thing, but as they spoke about why they had joined this bike ride, I couldn't help but whisper sarcastic comments into J's ear before suppressing my contrarian thoughts.

Then there was a preview for the movie Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter Thomposon which glorified his cuttingly blunt, political reporting. "He was not afraid to express himself in sometimes shocking ways" says Jimmy Carter. "He captured certain truths about human perversity" says Tim Crouse,the author of Boys on the Bus.

Cleo From 5 to 7 turned out to be a black and white (except for the opening scene) 1962 French film about a beautiful hypochondriac from 5 to 7pm awaiting word from her doctor on her cancer diagnosis.. This is NOT a film I would have picked for a cancer fighting fundraiser.

So, I thought about my blog and Hunter Thompson - a man I have little admiration for as a person, but I can't help but acknowledge that sometimes the severely dysfunctional are the ones who can see hypocrisy and truth much more clearly than others, and I do admire the ability to see and write truths.

Then we watched Shadowlands, a much richer film than Cleo, that portrays a CS Lewis who also can't say what's on his mind for most of the movie. And that's when I decided I couldn't NOT say what I was thinking.

So, here are my blasphemous thoughts on the bikers. As the mic passed from hand to hand, people basically said, in various levels of articulation, that they were inspired to join this long ride because of [fill in family member, friend] who [survived, is fighting, lost to] cancer. And thinking about their personal cancer victims kept them pedaling 4000 miles.

I know they've been on the road for a couple of months, this is the end of the trip, and they've been paraded out in front of crowds to recite this mantra hundreds of times. But I wanted just one person to sound real, just one person to say something like:

I did this because I wanted to come to Alaska.
I did this because otherwise I would have had to work for the summer.
I did this because I'm crazy and this seemed like a really crazy thing to do.

I wanted someone to be real, to not robotically fill the stereotypical role of do-gooder who modestly says I did it all for the Gipper. These are flesh and blood young men and women in their early 20s or so who've pedaled 4000 miles. I'm sure they had some rousing times, interesting adventures, but in tonight's performance all passion was bleached out.

I can just hear some of you gasping - how can he say something nasty about these kids who gave up their summer to raise money to fight cancer?

I know these kids did a good thing, I'm sure they inspired people - and yes I too have people close to me who are cancer survivors and victims and I know that malignant neoplasms are the leading cause of death in Alaska [I posted the stats just this week] and raising money to find ways to fight it are important.

I also know that fighting cancer costs lots of money and funding it through bike rides rather than through a national commitment to spend more, carefully monitored money on cancer research than on killing and maiming people in the Middle East is really a giant joke. According to the National Cancer Institute the US spent about
$1.4 billion on cancer research in 2007. According to Wikipedia we spend about $12 billion per month or about
$144 billion per year on the Iraq war.

I propose to Congress that they appropriate $1.4 billion for the Iraq war next year and suggest to President Bush that he can organize bike rides and bake sales to fund the rest of the expenses next year after he's out of the White House.

If you think that sounds preposterous, why don't you think funding cancer research through bike rides is a joke too?

It's also true that by passively playing our roles as consumers, like these kids played their roles as dedicated fundraisers in the theater tonight, of chemical products that have polluted our air, water, land, and bodies, we have contributed, in part, to the high levels of cancer in the world today.

I don't deny that riding bikes to Alaska is work, but these kids didn't 'give up' their summer, they had a great adventure they'll never forget. I also understand it is one way, maybe the best way, that this group of college students and alum, could make their contribution. And I'm sure the ride gave them lots of time to think. I hope they had the information available to think about how cancer is caused, how the dismantling of regulatory agencies and the exporting of manufacturing to countries with minimal environmental protections all play a role in our high cancer rates. I don't want to diminish the value of their contributions. If forty riders raised $4000 each, that comes to $160,000. And I'm a strong believer in the idea that many small contributions add up to real money.

But if they had spent half the time they spent riding, becoming experts on cancer - the science, the economics, and the politics, and not just the personal drama - I think they would be a lot more powerful advocates of change than they are now, and this summer would not fade into a memory of a great adventure in which they raised enough to pay the annual average salary of two pharmaceutical drug reps.

Hunter and Jack (CS), was this post ok?