Sizing up the Boston Marathon grifting circus
It's instructive to view most of the players more as hapless functionaries than as conscious malignancies
All major public productions these days are tainted by insincere social activism. All big-city marathons are major public productions. Therefore, all big-city marathons these days are tainted by insincere social activism.
Anyone familiar with Alison Desir knew in advance of the Boston Marathon that she would find a reason to call the entire race, and city of Boston, racist, inventing one if necessary, thereby continuing her pre-race antics. This is what she does and all she does, and her racist mania is more pronounced than ever now that she's had a book out for a couple of months. It's an obnoxious and brazenly destructive campaign, but every pampered prep-school lamebrain with an advanced Ivy League degree has to earn a living somehow (viz. David Roche, who's either unraveling or openly taunting me with his recent writing, or has perhaps fallen under my unwitting darkly magical influence).
Regarding the coverage of the “racist” event at mile 21, I included this screen shot in a post I made a week ago. A reader noticed that the article ran in the U.K. version of Runner’s World, not the U.S. version, something that requires looking at individual URLs to determine (it was not always this way). From what I have gathered, not only is there no coordination between the U.S. and overseas versions, but the various offices in the United States aren’t in synchrony, either. I assume this is driven by the need to get something live and clickable on the Web prevailing over concerns about editorial quality.
Last week, I made an earnest effort to appreciate the concerns of people legitimately convinced by the footage that the Newton Police were behaving with targeted aggression toward spectators of color. I didn't see it, but as a veteran of watching Boston Marathons in person as far back as 1988 and as recently as 2018, I can appreciate how different the race is for spectators.
When I last ran the Boston Marathon in 2003, it was possible for spectators to get into the roadway at a designated spot and, say, hand a buddy a bottle of Hawaiian Punch. When I watched from the 24-mile mark in 2015, two years after the bombings, this had changed drastically. Anyone who looked ready to jump or otherwise evade a barrier was getting hard stares from men and women in uniform. And not only is this their job, but Bostonians have long memories when it comes to being fucked with. Things are still raw in Beantown law-enforcement corners.
It's sad, but in the world we inhabit, people just can't interact with athletes on the field of play in major marathons any more smoothly than they can with their favorite Red Sox right-fielder. And this really does apply equally to everyone.
Next, the assortment of runners who competed in the “nonbinary” division were also enacting a grift. Since literally anyone can enter this division, it is strictly an exhibition for exhibitionists.
The aspect of the "nonbinary” division I choose to focus on now is not to much its illegitimacy as the strange combination of attention-seeking and sensitivity its participants manifest.
One common Wokish trope is the desire, even demand, from “marginalized” groups that its members Be Seen or Feel Seen. This is an explicit invitation to be gawked at.
After the “nonbinary” results from Boston were in, a few wags on Twitter pointed out that the top seven finishers were all males, fancy that, ha-ha-ha. Such salvos compelled some nonbinary and trans people to tweet responses along the lines of “Why do you care?” and “How does this affect you anyway?”
These are simply not realistic enjoinders. No one on Earth can expressly invite attention for something that looks undeniably weird and then expect nothing but approving observations. Especially when the societal faction to which they belong is renewed for bullying and cancellation tactics.
This inability to acknowledge that submitting ideas for public consumption, especially as a paid member of the corporate media, is pervasive throughout society and is distinctly generational. Foe example, I can obviously understand why Roche and his cultists don't like what I write about them, but I refuse to become used to the norm they seek, i.e., that someone can take money for writing and coaching and remain off-limits to criticism, and that everyone who disagrees with even a single “social justice” point or strategy while swallowing the rest is a far-right hater.
I've ripped Roche for his writing, the incoherent physiobabble forming most of that writing, his deleting of tweets, and his reported poaching of other coaches’ clients. I've also gone after them for largely gratuitous or petty things like being, and appealing to, dingbats of known, presumed, or desired class privilege. (Given Megan Roche's association with the diabolical Aspen Institute, a topic worth exploring separately, thus is not without greater relevance.)
I have not learned that I am wrong about any of this. Instead, I've been told I'm a malevolent actor for even expressing it, and that anyone who links to them is equally worthy of derision. These are not dialectic standards I am willing to accept—especially given the picture created if one places my output side-by-side with that of the “get boosted, mask up, stay home, or die” and “the fatter the better” and “trans people just want to be left alone” and “Biden will restore order to America” and “BLM is an agent of positive change” and “free Shelby” and “Nike sucks, except for its dirty athletes and killer shoes” agitators (these categories of course sharing significant but incomplete overlap).
The last bit of Boston Marathon grifting worth mentioning isn't insincerity rooted in behavior at the event itself, but insincerity exposed by the act of attending it.
People like Trail Runner editor Zoe Rom, who attended but did not run the marathon, have been known to insist that global society is in or fast approaching a climate crisis. Not a problem: a crisis, alternately termed an emergency. Anyone who believes this really has no business flying across the country just to watch a footrace, even on assignment.
Rom herself produced a neat work-around for this conflict: Individual action doesn't matter until the system is changed by dint of plaintive yammering.
This encapsulates the kind of sham activism runners—especially gregarious trail runners, who tend to come from well-off families—are fond of: Don't do anything yourself to disincentive the system, just yell at some of the richest people alive to revamp the global economy unprovoked so that people have to change.
Of course, Rom and others inclined to pass the responsibility for individual action upstream can easily find appropriate scapegoats:
Most of the momentum for this bullshit is supplied by NPCs—people who either mean well or are at least oblivious to the scope of Wokish ills—being drawn in goofy directions by the exhortations of a few high-visibility stinkbirds whose expulsion from the scene would benefit the ecosystem tremendously.
For example, even Erin Strout, who is in fact shrewish and vindictive, has expelled most of her idiocy not out of malice but out of genuine confusion. On Twitter, she's in the thrall of every corporate hack “journalist” on offer. She's the kind of incurious knucklehead who really believes that Matt Taibbi is a liar and that the U.S. intelligence community isn't censoring and spying on Americans, including her gnarly and gnomish self. I haven't checked, but she probably believes this is a nothingburger too:
People who choose to write or create podcasts or videos about running as a career have to make money. It's not easy, unless you're a highly seeded ass-brandisher or cleavage-demon, in which case the running aspect of your Instagram account is strictly procedural. So on this basis, I don't begrudge people for seizing on popular topics and rolling with the usual logically dubious premises of the day.
But by the same token, this is all a glorious mess, and if my own hapless niche happens to be banging away at these enervating insanities, I have my reasons for pushing forward, too. I prefer to describe the rocks and turds falling on everyone’s head rather than stand around idly hoping not to be crushed by the crapstorm.
